Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— And what do you make of this Menna? he asked, regretting it as soon as he had spoken. — She and Suzie seem to be great friends all of a sudden.

— Do you mind it? Giulia’s open attention was expertly kind.

— It’s not personal. Just all the fakery: the fortune telling, the old hippie bus, the ankle bracelet. Suzie used to be more impatient with that New-Agey stuff than I was.

— It doesn’t do any harm, does it? They’ve only gone camping. And I quite liked the ankle bracelet. I was thinking of getting one. Am I too old? I daren’t ask the girls, I know what they’ll say.

— Of course it doesn’t do any harm. Only Suzie surprises me, that she can’t see through it.

— There’s more to some of that old nonsense than you and I would like to think. My grandmother — a horrible old woman — had second sight, I swear it. She used to have a certain dream — always of water — the night before any accident happened in the family.

David could only look blankly then, embarrassed for Giulia: what was one supposed to say, confronted with the cherished superstitions of one’s friends? His own rationalism was so complete, penetrating all his instincts, that he felt any unreason almost as a mistake of taste as well as judgement, shaming and silly.

Jamie had taken to calling in at Firenze. The first time he came, after their meeting at the café, Kate was painting Billie’s toenails in the middle of the afternoon. He persisted at the front door, which she answered holding the pot of cherry-red varnish, her own fingers splayed because she was drying them.

— I told you everything about Francesca, she said. — There’s nothing else.

— I was going to offer to help. I wondered if you needed anything. I could sit with your mother. I could cut your grass.

She sighed and let him follow her into the drawing room, where Billie was waiting with her bare feet up on the sofa. Kate took them on her lap and began painting again, bending low over the gnarled old toes in concentration. Billie was still vain enough to enjoy asking for a size three in the shoe shops, but her feet were swollen and purplish, and she suffered with bunions so that Kate had sometimes to cut her shoes away.

— Forgive our dreadful manners, Billie smiled graciously at Jamie. — How very rude of us.

He sat on the edge of a chair, blushing, staring round everywhere but at the nail-painting. — It’s kind of you to let me in.

— Who is he? Billie asked loudly, but Kate pretended not to hear.

— I love this house, he said. — What an amazing place.

— See the grass. Kate signed to him to look out of the French windows. — Not so lovely. You’d need a scythe.

— There is a scythe, offered Billie unexpectedly. — In one of the outhouses.

— It will be blunt. If it’s there at all. She’s probably remembering something from half a century ago.

— I’ll sharpen it, Jamie said. — If it exists.

Reluctantly, when she had finished Billie’s nails, Kate found keys and opened the outhouses where she hadn’t looked for years. Cobwebs were thick as filthy rags on all the accumulated rubbish: ladders, paint pots, her old stereo player from the seventies, a pedal sewing machine, a birdcage, bicycles, a workbench with jamjars full of nails rusted into one mass. Jamie wondered and exclaimed — look at this, it’s an antique! — but Kate refused to be interested. Then, when they’d found the scythe, and he had decided it wasn’t too rusty, sharpening it on a whetstone he’d also found, the afternoon was altered by the rhythmic swish of Jamie at work on the lawn: Kate opened the French windows and the room was filled with the perfume of the cut grass. The weather was close and grey. After some experimentation he found the right measured swing to make the grass fall cleanly; he took his shirt off and his face ran with sweat. Kate was exasperated by the careless young power in his brown back and shoulders and couldn’t concentrate on her book. It was Billie’s suggestion when he’d been working for an hour or so that they should make him tea; Kate brought out a table and chairs onto the veranda, carefully because the wood was rotten in places. Sim, displaced from the lap he was allowed on while she was reading, wound cabbalistic patterns round her feet.

— It’s a good scythe, Jamie said to Billie, the rosebud teacup improbable in his fingers swollen hot and red from the work. He had already swallowed a pint of water at the kitchen sink.

— My father bought it. Although he was a businessman, he knew about the importance of working with good tools, he would only ever buy the best. Once, our property here stretched all the way up the hill, you know. When Kate was a child she used to play in our own little wood. All the trees are gone now except for our apple trees and that great beech behind the flats.

— Billie thinks sometimes she’s a White Russian exile. A princess probably; there were so many princesses. I’m sure she blames the Bolsheviks for our reduced circumstances.

— I don’t think anything of the sort, Kate.

— I taught with a few White Russians when I first started — the last of them, they must have been in their nineties at least — and they were much, much, madder than Billie. But we do have to remind ourselves sometimes that our money came from haberdashery. Stockings for the miners’ wives.

— What’s haberdashery? Jamie asked. — What’s a White Russian?

— Oh, said Kate. — Don’t you know anything? I thought you were supposed to be a clever boy. Anyway, I’m regretting letting you cut the lawn now. I think it looked better with the grass long. That grass was beautiful, it blew in the wind, it was blond like hair, the sound it made was like the sea. Now what does it look like? Stubbled and ugly, a poor cropped head.

Jamie was crestfallen until Kate laughed at him and gave him a cigarette.

— Don’t take any notice of my daughter, dear, said Billie. — She’s such a tease.

She asked Kate again later, — Who is he? How do we know him?

Kate would only tell her his name was Jamie: she didn’t want to risk some connection sparking suddenly, and Billie spilling out to David, if he ever came, with admiration for his handsome son. Jamie squatted with his back to the veranda, squinting at his labours, and smoked at least with proper grown-up insouciance. It was the first thing you ever learned to do like a grown-up: Kate could remember practising in her bedroom, in front of the mirror.

The next time Jamie turned up he took them for a row on the lake. Kate was busy, she didn’t want to come out, she had a paper to write for a conference she’d been invited to; Jamie insisted that Billie had told him she longed to go. It was a nightmare getting Billie into the boat, anyway: she hesitated in brittle indecision on the brink, prodding with her stick and grappling Kate’s arm, until the boat-hire man and Jamie lifted and swung her in between them. There was only one other boat out: it was a Tuesday afternoon. The sunlight was hazy yellow and the water white-pale; the dipping oars puckered a milky skin then dripped with light; bread bobbed in the thick unrolling of their wake near the shore, where people overfed the ducks. Jamie rounded the clock tower and then they moved to the sound of the small splash of the oars down the lake to where the islands at the other end were cut off by orange floats on a nylon rope.

— Shouldn’t you be at school? Kate said.

— It’s exam time. We don’t have normal lessons.

— Then you should be revising.

He smiled at her, heaving backwards.

— Isn’t this heavenly? said Billie, sitting very upright, gripping the side of the boat, looking round with that expression of hers as though she was witnessing wonders. — You used to be able to row around these islands. And we got off and picnicked. We made a fire once and picnicked at night. Someone brought a guitar and we sang.