Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— I’ve seen photographs, of course.

— The photographs don’t do her justice; she looks awkward, because she was self-conscious, whereas in real life she flowed. That was her grace, the flowing deliberate way she did things. In those days I was a radical feminist, or so I thought; Francesca was bored by the politics everyone else was going mad over, she wrote poetry. Do you have her poems? She had things apparently in the TLS : that was later. I don’t know whether they were any good.

— I didn’t know she wrote poems.

— You have her mouth, by the way.

— My grandmother says that.

— It’s very subtle; it changes everything straightforward you have from your father.

— Did you like her?

— I admired her. She was Carol’s friend really. They lived together in the second year, in an amazing flat in Kensington, with marble fireplaces and bits of the ceiling fallen in, like a ruined palace. Francesca used to hold court in party dresses she bought from the junk shops. Carol and she were always falling out.

— Carol never told me that.

Kate was penitent. — I’m remembering, you know, an irresponsible time. We were none of us very kind: we were too clever, in competition to be the cleverest, struggling to block out some sort of shape of adult life for ourselves. Carol was always the kindest. We were all sad, as you are when you’re young. We all went to bed for days at a time with misery, and mostly it came more or less all right afterwards. We didn’t die, anyway. I don’t know why Francesca did what she did later. I lost touch with her, I only saw her once, twice, in the years after she married your father, and had you.

— Why did she used to fall out with Carol?

— Carol’s so reasonable. Francesca would make a fuss about ordering something special in a café, then leave most of it on her plate. She claimed to be allergic to all sorts of things: tea, cats, soap, God knows what. She had favouritisms and then she dropped people, and Carol had to lie to fend them off, pretend at the front door that she wasn’t in when they could hear her laughing upstairs. But then all that was also just what Carol liked. You know, stout and watertight and sensible is drawn to fragile, flawed, pretty as hell.

— I suppose so.

— I’ve been too frank, haven’t I?

— It’s what I wanted to know. I’m interested.

— Was that your girlfriend: the pretty dark one? In here with you that day?

— Not really, Jamie said; not at all brutally, but as if it was an effort for a moment to remember who she was talking about.

— Poor thing. ‘Not really.’ If she could hear you: wouldn’t it break her heart?

He was surprised. — I don’t think it’s like that between us, honestly.

Talking about the old days at UCL made Kate anything but nostalgic; actually, despite what everybody said about youth, most of her past made her shudder in sheer disgust, and relief that she didn’t have to live it over again.

Kate and David left his car in Park Place and were chased by a sudden shower into the foyer of the Reardon Smith, behind the museum; she held her umbrella up over both of them, he stooped his head, and of necessity as they dashed she gripped his arm. It was exactly the kind of intimate manoeuvre she’d never been able to manage with Max, who was six foot four and had to have an umbrella of his own. Inside David bought tickets for the recital while she shook the rain off the umbrella, then he stood back to let her go first through the door into the gorgeous little 1920s lecture theatre, all subdued polished wood and white pillars and red plush, where the BBC Radio 3 man was already mumbling to himself and his listeners in his upstairs corner. They were hardly damp; Kate took off her jacket anyway, and put her hand on David’s sleeve, to make sure. David held out the programme for them both to read. They were falling into a pattern of friendship that had been before Kate came back to live in Cardiff exactly her idea of the sort of thing that would evolve in a place like this, between grown-up cultured people. He picked her up at the house and they went to concerts together; he called in on her unannounced to talk about books, on his way home from work, or at weekends. (He had told her when he was halfway through Madame Bovary that he was interested in the medical stuff but that Emma irritated him; he thought she deserved, for her petty selfishness and credulity, all the disappointment and doom that he sensed was coming.)

They glanced at each other with eyebrows raised when some people clapped in the wrong place. After the slow movement in the Schubert E flat trio, which for God’s sake she had heard a thousand thousand times and even played, Kate found she had tears spilling out of her eyes and running down her cheeks, and had to fumble surreptitiously in her bag for a tissue to wipe them away, hoping her nose wouldn’t be red; as they filed out with the rest of the audience to have their free coffee in the museum, he held her lightly by the top of her arm, possibly simply holding her back to let somebody past, but also possibly out of comradely recognition of her emotion. All this was very poignant. But even Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter , Kate thought, wasn’t satisfied with just this; and that was before 1968. I’ll die, she thought, if more doesn’t happen. They didn’t wait with the crowd in the museum restaurant downstairs but went up to the nicer place you could get coffee in the pillared airy foyer under the dome.

David met people he knew; he introduced Kate — without, of course, any shadow of a hesitation — and stood talking with them, his mac over his arm, while she went to queue at the counter behind the little tables; to claim their free coffee she had to signal to him for their concert tickets in his pocket. She had never felt so domesticated; she was pleased with the chance to watch David as his public, responsible self: straight-backed, watchful, courteous. She had been in London for a few days, seeing people and arranging for some new translation work; from there this pleasantly genial, drearily dressed crowd might look like nobody worth knowing. But these were real people, getting on with substantial things, guarding their privacy as if it was worth something. At least everyone wasn’t glancing around for something better happening somewhere else. David knew a man who taught music at the university (they had been at school together); Kate in her shallowness would not have given his meek beard and Marks & Spencer trousers, worn too short, a second glance. Talking with his friend — about music, of course, not gossip — David was animated and forgot where he was; she saw the hawk-flash of his authority from under the heavy lids he hid behind. He was tanned from his seaside holiday in west Wales.

They sat down at a table under a huge Frank Brangwyn oil painting of the trenches in the First World War: their awareness in the midst of chatting snagged occasionally on some bloody horror.

— So tell me, she said, hanging her jacket on the back of her chair, giving him her smiling attention, — what have you been doing at work since you got back?

David smiled warily. — You wouldn’t be interested.

— No: go on, I really am.

— I’ve been revising our immunisation guide for parents in line with new policy, and trying to get on with this report on the funding implications of the reorganisation.

— That all sounds so. solid. What are the funding implications?

He laughed. — Even I’m bored by the idea of going into that. Why don’t you tell me how you got on? Are they keen on your idea for this new translation?

Kate put on a face of despair and gave an exaggerated account of the struggle she’d had to persuade them to be interested. — Who wants to read the Russians nowadays? she said gloomily. — In the Cold War it was all so glamorous, everyone loves a bit of suffering under totalitarian oppression. Now we’re sick of it, the eternal moaning and groaning. What’s the matter with them? Why can’t they just get on with it like everybody else?