Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

DAVID ARRIVED HOME from work one evening to find a two-man mountain tent, orange, in the back garden. Suzie got up from where she was kneeling to hammer in tent pegs, wiping her hands on her jeans, smiling in a way that was somehow strained and challenging.

— I borrowed it from Giulia’s girls, she said. — What do you think?

— It’s all right. Holes in the lawn. What’s it for?

— I thought I might take the kids camping: if the weather’s fine. With Neil and Menna; they go away nearly every weekend. I had to make sure I knew how to put it up. It’s years since I had a tent.

— You seem to have managed OK.

— Actually Jamie had to come down and rescue me.

David didn’t in the least want to go camping: the idea of its play-inconveniences had never appealed to him, he wasn’t the type renewed by close contact with the earth. He was taken aback nonetheless by Suzie’s presumption that he wouldn’t come.

— I know you’ve got work to do, she said, conciliatory. — I thought we could leave you to get on with it in peace.

The children were in ecstasy over the tent. They wanted to sleep in it that night, in the garden; Suzie said that they could if Jamie would stay out with them. Hannah zipped up the front and sat inside in the hot orange light with her phone, telling her friends about it; Joel brought down his Beanie Babies. But Jamie had disappeared with his bike, and he didn’t come back. Avoiding David’s eye apologetically, Suzie fetched her pyjamas from under the pillow in their bedroom; they all three undressed and got into their sleeping bags while it was still light enough for them to see. David worked in his study and then watched Newsnight ; every so often he was surprised by the looming outside the window of the tent’s alien faint fluorescence, and remembered his breathing, dreaming family afloat in it. He heard Jamie come home late; they met once in the kitchen, where David was getting a glass of water and Jamie was shovelling in his usual overflowing night-time bowl of cereal head down, hair falling in his face, book propped inches in front of him on the table to keep conversation out. David supposed that his son was revising for his exams, which began in a couple of weeks, although there was not much evidence of it. Whenever he had tried to play the part of the concerned parent as he felt he ought to do (hadn’t Bryn when David was doing his A levels all those years ago even checked topics off against his revision list?), Jamie’s teachers had met him with an amused reassurance that made him feel foolish. Jamie would sail through, they said. He couldn’t fail to do well. Arts subjects anyway, David told himself, were so different to the sciences.

Before he went to bed, David stood outside the back door to check the deep chill in the garden now that the sun was long gone: he worried about them in the tent. He carried out a spare duvet and fiddled with the tent flaps, peering through; in the light from the kitchen he could just make out their huddled shapes, Suzie lifting her head to stare at him. Inside the tent the air was sweetly frowsty as a mouse nest.

— I brought another duvet, he said. — I worried you wouldn’t be warm enough.

Suzie didn’t answer for a few more moments, as though she couldn’t find her way out of her sleep. — We’re fine, she said eventually, still blurry. — We don’t need it. But thank you.

On Friday evening Menna and her boyfriend drove up to collect the campers in a shabby old Bedford Dormobile van, painted with giant flowers in some unsuitable paint that was flaking off. David wanted to ask, is it safe, is it MOTed, have you checked the tyres?; but he bit down the words, kept his hands in his pockets, knowing his disapproval made him prim, fussing while his wife was carried off by gypsies. He saw perfectly through Menna’s contemptuous black-button eyes, ringed round with black kohl pencil, what she made of where they lived: the shallow-rooted, expensive little brick-built estate with its pointless cottage porches, its raw gardens newly scratched on the red earth. The boyfriend was amiable and competent, he had a ponytail and hard brown hands (apparently he worked for the Parks Department, on a project conserving the old Cardiff cemeteries). He stowed Suzie’s tent and luggage neatly in the back of the van and hoisted the children inside. Their noisy exit — the children at least turned and waved — hollowed out the evening; David could still hear the drone of the motorway when he went inside, as if the walls of his house had lost their solidity. He stood at the kitchen window, looking over their garden with its new-planted trees, past the green folds of the golf course and the clotted evening shadows of the old estate behind its wall, where the rhododendrons would be in flower now, to where the first line of hills swelled in the north: intently he listened to the crunching of cars on the gravel drives, doors banging, mealtime pots and pans, an insect slamming into the window, cats padding along the tops of fences.

On the way back from Sainsbury’s the next morning (Suzie had left him a list), David called in at Giulia’s. He had been afraid that Giulia’s face would close regretfully when she saw him, but he was enveloped immediately in her capacious interest and clouds of the flowery perfume she wore. She was in her dressing-gown, with cream patted on her cheeks.

— I’m so glad it’s you: I meant to invite you round, I know you’re on your own. What kind of weather have the campers got? It’s not brilliant, but at least not raining. How’s Jamie? Come on in, you’re my excuse for coffee. It’s a dreadful mess in here as usual: nobody’s cleared the breakfast things. Larry’s escaped into the studio. You wouldn’t think it but honestly we’ve been up for hours: why doesn’t the morning ever get started?

Giulia and Larry lived in the big dilapidated house Larry had inherited from his aunt along with the dance studio; while they were talking the thump of feet and snatches of disco music drifted from where Larry was taking classes next door. There were always visitors at Giulia’s, drinking coffee or something stronger, eating pasta when Larry cooked it: family, staff from Ladysmith, the girls’ teenage friends, a brain-damaged neighbour in a wheelchair, refugees from every kind of crisis. David wondered if he counted as one of those. Sometimes when he and Suzie were invited for drinks a very thin old lady, another of Larry’s aunts perhaps, would be perched on a tall stool in the corner, taking in everything, prompting in brittle bursts of Italian when the guests needed their glasses refilled. Giulia put the coffee on and went upstairs to change; the girls, with tight golden skin and tight clothes and hair the same dark blonde as hers, erupted with loud bird-chatter into the dining room where David sat at the table with the crumbs and eggshells, not minding that he couldn’t answer their questions. When were they going to go and feed the horse? Was Larry going to take them into town when he’d finished? Did anyone think this navel piercing was festering? Giulia, hurrying down, tying back her hair, apologised that the coffee was poisonous: only Larry could make it decently and he was never there.

— I’m so angry, she said. — One of my asylum-seeker families was deported yesterday: Sudanese. Do you know how they do it? They pick up the children and threaten to take them into care unless the parents proceed to the airport. Do you think that’s civilised?

David really didn’t, and in fact he’d done some public health work recently for the Refugee Council; they conferred for a while. The girls melted away, uninterested. Giulia wanted to work out some strategy with the Council so that she and her school governors could prevent this happening at Ladysmith again; David didn’t think it would be possible.