Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— I can see why you’re drawn to Russia, he said. — There’s so much depth to the culture.

She shuddered. — Depths to drown in. The place terrifies me. My family aren’t from Russia, you know. From Lithuania; quite another thing. My grandparents spoke Polish and Yiddish.

Kate wondered if Jamie had told David that they had met and talked about Francesca; it seemed likely that the boy would keep it as his secret. She didn’t know what David’s reaction might be to her having discussed his dead wife with their son; anyway, she didn’t want David’s family, any of them, tangled in the talk between them, binding them fatally in a pattern of friendly above-board intercourse which would end in her being invited round to their place every year for Christmas drinks. She didn’t know whether David told Suzie that they were going to these concerts together, or told her how often he was calling in at Firenze; he had definitely phoned Kate from work, not from home, to ask if she wanted to come with him to the Reardon Smith. Sometimes when she was with him, instead of feeling happy, she was filled with the sensation of having made a terrible mistake, not in falling for David, but in how she had lived her whole life before it happened, all her efforts not to be banal. The right way to live, the good way, had been invisible to her: now she was locked out of it, peering in through its windows. She set David tests, to find out what he thought their relationship was: today she thought perhaps something would show up when he drove her home after the concert, where Carol was sitting with Billie. (Carol was a brick, she had moved into Firenze while Kate was away.)

In the event, when David had stopped the car he looked at his watch and sighed: he didn’t even have time to come inside. He asked Kate to give his apologies to Carol: he and Suzie were taking the children out to lunch with friends. He was always failing Kate’s tests: on the other hand, he never failed them quite catastrophically enough, so that Kate could always excuse him (he sighed, after all, when he looked at his watch). She had told Max all about him when she was in London: how she didn’t know whether he was shy and conventional, or simply unmoved. She had managed to prise Max away for at least one lunchtime from Sherie. For all his generous interest, Max had still seemed to feel some pain at the idea of her passion for someone else: Kate when she noticed it was sorry, and changed the subject. She had kissed him when they parted: he had had to stoop down for her to do it, from such a thin, blond height.

The Citroën was making alarming noises, and the cellist in his disappointed way offered to take Kate in his car to the big Tesco supermarket on Western Avenue, because he needed some shopping himself. She couldn’t afford to turn down such an opportunity, although she wanted nothing less than to know the contents of his lonely supermarket basket. The bits of shopping they had to do were dwarfed by the booming gigantism of the place: it was for oversized families, trolleys heaped high with spoils, a couple of dresses or a pair of shoes or a plasma television topping off the bumper packs of oven chips and the seventeen varieties of French cheese. Defiantly, so that her basket wouldn’t look anything like the cellist’s, she filled it with flowers and fizzy wine and chocolates for Billie, who would be delighted. Actually it turned out that the cellist was a bit of a gourmet, buying duck-liver pâté and bottles of green peppercorns and walnut oil.

Then she met Suzie Roberts in the poultry aisle. Kate saw Suzie first, but too late to pretend she hadn’t and hurry away. Suzie was bending over the organic chickens, the little yellow free-range corn-fed ones that had had happy lives. She was wearing cut-off pink jeans and a short white cotton vest that showed her freckled tanned belly; Kate imagined they were both shivering and goose-fleshed in the emanations from the chill cabinet. Suzie wasn’t wearing any make-up. The children were beautiful: the girl with David’s deep eyelids and conker-brown hair chopped off at her shoulders, swinging like corn-silk; the little boy with his mother’s fairness and white lashes. The girl daydreamed, pivoting on one foot, and the boy attended conscientiously to his mother’s choosing: this chicken or that one? Suzie let the boy decide; solemnly he pointed out his favourite with a finger, and then checked quickly against his mother’s expression, to see if he’d done well. Suzie squeezed his shoulders and pressed her cheek against his, sun-flushed flawed adult skin against his perfect childish creaminess. From where she crouched down slightly to her little son, she looked up and saw Kate watching beside the turkey portions.

Of course there wasn’t anything between Suzie and Kate: nothing had happened, except in Kate’s thoughts, that might not have been shown to the world in broad daylight. But it was possible that Suzie knew that David her husband phoned Kate from work sometimes (although nothing could have been more innocent than those short businesslike calls); and she surely knew they had been to concerts together. David’s daughter lifted her dreaming lids and inspected Kate frankly. It was too late not to say anything.

— Kate Flynn, isn’t it? Do you remember we met at Carol’s? I’m David’s wife.

Kate had forgotten Suzie’s voice: husky and steady, with traces of an accent, not Welsh, more Essex. Suzie didn’t put out her hand to shake, but tightened it on the boy, and even touched the girl’s shoulder lightly with her other hand, as if she presented them as a collective.

— Of course I remember, Kate said. — I’m surprised we haven’t bumped into one another before. I’ve moved back here to look after my mother.

— Yes, I heard. How is she?

— Doing very well, thank you.

— David said you’re both music-lovers.

— My mother and I?

— You and him.

— Oh well, we both come from musical families. Doesn’t Bryn Roberts sing? He looks as if he ought to sing. I believe my mother taught David piano once — I mean long long ago, in the Stone Age. Or was that Carol?

— It’s nice, that he has someone to go to the concerts with. I expect he told you that I’m no good at his kind of music.

— I suppose with children it’s hard to get babysitters.

— We’ve got Jamie, Suzie said. — My stepson.

— Of course, said Kate. — I’d forgotten about him.

They managed to move past one another, smiling and pretending they were in a hurry. Hardly noticing whether she put anything useful in her basket, Kate hurried to find the cellist and make him take her home; but he was only halfway through his list, and fussily determined to get every ingredient for some fancy dish he was cooking up to eat all by himself. In every aisle Kate walked down while she waited for him, she seemed to meet Suzie and her children walking up, so that they had to acknowledge one another.

At home Kate unpacked the shopping carefully. She made Billie a sandwich and coffee, gave her the chocolates, put the television on, put the flowers in the sink, and then said she needed to lie down for half an hour. Billie turned on her a bland, chewing, acquiescent face, then went back to the advertisements. Half an hour or three hours, she wouldn’t notice; all the clocks in the house had been left to run down long before Kate came home, the ones that wanted winding and the ones that wanted batteries; only Kate’s watch now ever showed the real time. She retreated to her bedroom and lit a cigarette, pulling the curtains shut across the day that was anyway muffled with grey cloud against any sign of the sun. She kicked off her shoes and lay on her bed, smoking and giving herself up to hollowness, staring at the Pied Piper in the nursery frieze who loomed with his jaunty uplifted beckoning trumpet through the purple paint, in such promise of adventure and pleasure. How could she have imagined for one moment that she mattered except as an occasional Sunday-morning friend to this David whose other life was so actual, so unalterably good-looking, so substantially made flesh? She must have thought he was a man with a paper life to screw up and throw away, like some of the people she knew in London. She had screwed up her own professional life as if it didn’t matter, and stepped outside it into where she was no one.