Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

Kate had let her London flat and given up her job (or at least taken a year’s unpaid leave); she was coming home to look after her mother, who was eighty-three and growing forgetful. Anyway, she was bored with her life teaching in London, she was ready for a change, she didn’t want to grow old doing the same thing over and over. She drove in at the gravelled side entrance, turned off the engine, and sat in the silence, letting the howl and roar of the crazy motorway drain away, thinking that at least she would never ever have to drive again. The dents in the Citroën didn’t matter; she would just give it away. Expecting Billie to come hurrying down to welcome her, she waited in the car with the door open, smoking the cigarette she had been thirsting for: an intimately known suburban peace sifted down onto her through the dark. The falling rain was blotted up overhead by the tall monkey-puzzle tree or pattered onto the evergreen bushes. Below on the lake an invisible duck blundered splashily. A cold perfume of pines and bitter garden mulch seemed to her like the smell of the past itself. She unfastened the door to Sim’s basket and let him come out to claw on her lap and make question marks against her face with his tail. He knew where he was; Kate had always brought him when she came home for weekends. She had only got the car in the first place because it was too complicated to take Sim on the train.

Billie didn’t come down. When she had finished her cigarette Kate tucked the cat under her arm and climbed the steps to the front door, which jutted from the side of the house in a long porch with stained-glass windows where once they had grown house plants. She didn’t need her key; the door was slightly open, although everything was dark inside. She went through into the hall and put on the light. The hall was wood-panelled and baronial and the one weak light bulb was screwed into a monstrous bronze fitting like an upside-down cauldron with sockets for four, suspended ever since Kate could remember by chains from the ceiling.

— Billie? Kate called. — Where are you? I’ve come home! I’m home to stay!

She kept Sim under her arm as she looked in all the dark rooms, though he meowed and struggled to go down, kicking with strong back legs. He was a pure black cat with a small hard head that seemed to stand for the particular density of his cat-will.

— Mummy? Where are you?

Hanging on to Sim she climbed up the wide panelled staircase that rose at the back of the hall and was always lit in patches of colour by a street lamp shining through the stained-glass window on the landing: girls balancing water jugs gracefully on their shoulders gossiped around an ancient shaduf . Billie had taken recently to sleeping in a different bedroom every night, although she never slept now in the big front one, and she swore that she didn’t sleep in Kate’s. Kate found her in a little room at the back where they used to store the spare chairs which Billie put out downstairs when she gave one of her concerts. The bed was made up correctly with striped sheets and a pillowcase and blankets, but Billie lay on top under one of the ancient dirty silk eiderdowns they hadn’t used for years. She was sleeping absolutely tranquilly, not as if she had paused for an afternoon nap but as if it was bedtime; she was in her nightdress, even though it was only six o’clock in the evening, a glass of water and her pot of face cream on the bedside table. Yet Kate had telephoned at lunchtime before she left to remind Billie she was coming. She had expected tea when she arrived, or at least the gas fire and the television on.

She let Sim go and sat for a while with her mother in the dim light from the landing, feeling the cold rise up numbingly through her feet and legs even though she was still wrapped in her thick black-and-white check winter coat. Billie slept like an angel. That was just what Kate thought she looked like, lying there: an old angel, with her pink skin so fine that the perfect shape of her skull showed through, her deep melancholy eye-cavities, the nose that leaped in its lean strong arc from her face (Kate had inherited the nose). Her snow-white hair spread across the pillow, unbound from the neat French pleat she could still make in a few quick motions of her hands; perhaps she would remember how to do that when she had forgotten everything else. She always slept on her back, like nobody else Kate had ever known, like a child; her mouth had sunk open and she dribbled and snored lightly. She didn’t have much of a chin; angels might not. Kate was overwhelmed with doubt, finding herself temporarily alone in her new life. She quite liked the idea of tying on an apron and putting everything to rights, making this a home again, cooking little nourishing dishes for her mother, tending new house plants in the porch. But she couldn’t genuinely imagine it. She didn’t have much of a track record for domesticity. Closing Billie’s door behind her and treading quietly so as not to wake her, she went back down into the hall and picked up the phone. It was the same old fat brown dial-phone they had had in the 1970s, before Kate left home to go to university.

— Max? she said.

She really shouldn’t be phoning Max. For four years Max had been desperate with love for Kate; when he finally understood that he couldn’t possess with certainty even enough of her to preserve his dignity, he had saved himself and found a sweet girl instead to have babies with. All this change was new enough for the babies not to exist yet except as an idea; and Kate hadn’t been good at learning to adapt.

— Katie, this really isn’t a good time, Max said.

His soft American voice that had sometimes made her sick — too compliant, too delighted — seemed to Kate at that moment to promise everything desirably metropolitan: good wine in big glasses, deep designer sofas, conversations about articles in the London Review of Books , expensive gadgets from the right shops.

— I’ve made a terrible mistake.

— I warned you. Where are you?

— I’m here, I’m home. She’s forgotten I was coming, she’s just gone to bed, she’s fast asleep, she’s lost all sense of day and night. Max, what will happen to me if I stay here? You know me; I have enough trouble myself, keeping night apart from day. And she’d left the front door wide open. I’m just going to turn round and head straight back. She’ll never even know I’ve been here, will she? She probably won’t even know that I promised to come. Do you think they’ll give me my job back at the Department?

— Aren’t the tenants moving into your flat tomorrow?

— I’ll call for the keys first thing in the morning. I’ll compensate them. I’ll make a scene. I’ll tell them Billie’s dead.

— Katie, you can’t do that.

She could tell from the way he measured his voice that Sherie was in the room with him; or listening from the kitchen, where she would be cooking up some supper out of the River Cafe recipe book. Max wouldn’t ever pretend that he wasn’t talking to Kate; but he would want to express at the same time to Sherie his regret, his reservation.

Kate banged the phone down, scornful that he had been so easily trammelled. Trammelled was a word, wasn’t it? It ought to be.

She hadn’t even told him about the swan.

She studied the hall. It was at least clean, as far as she could see in the weak light; that meant someone from Buckets and Mops was coming in three times a week as arranged. Perhaps the Buckets and Mops lady had made up all the beds, too, for Billie to sleep in. As yet the only sign of Kate’s arrival in the house, apart from Sim, was her handbag, which she had put down on the oak chest before she went upstairs: very soft dark brown leather, roomy, Italian, with a tortoiseshell clasp. She felt tenderness towards her sophisticated professional self, who had known how to choose such a fine unconventional bag, how to carry it off strikingly. That self surely couldn’t come back and live in this crazy place, this nowhere. Wales, for God’s sake. At that moment Sim stalked out from the passage to the kitchen. She scooped him up and snatched the bag and shut the front door behind her and forced Sim back into his travelling basket; he spat in his outrage, and cursed her in cat language. Then she lit another cigarette, climbed into the driving seat and smoked it.