Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— Do you want to go around them now? Lift up the rope and I’ll slip under.

— Do you think we might? What fun!

— Don’t be silly, Jamie, said Kate. — There’d be a scene with the hire-man shouting at us: and outside our own front door. You forget we’re elderly and respectable.

— You’re not.

— Don’t you think we’re respectable?

— Not elderly.

But obediently he pulled with one oar to turn the boat, then rowed back to the other end again, gliding so lightly that his passengers felt themselves suspended in the silver light reflected from the water.

— How do you get on with your stepmother? Kate asked.

— All right, now. We used to have a hard time.

— That’s traditional, with stepmothers. Leaving you in the woods to starve, throwing you down wells. It’s all in the literature. You were the cunning child, dropping little stones so that you could always find your way back home.

— She really wasn’t wicked. I was awful, I think. I woke up ten times a night asking for drinks, and I only ate crackers and tinned tomato soup. We quite like each other now.

— Where does she come from? How did she and David meet?

— She has an insane family. Her parents do a magic show for children, they’re working in Spain at the moment, for the expats: hopeless with money, Suzie’s always having to bail them out. There’s a brother who’s done time for credit-card fraud and a sister who chooses the wrong sort of men and turns up at our house with bruises and black eyes. God knows how they met. We don’t talk about real things at home.

Jamie with panache made the boat skim through the narrow channel between the clock tower with its tiny locked red door and the steep stone bank under the promenade, where passers-by leaned over to be made serene by the vista of lake and blue-distant wooded hills; their passage set rocking the surface mess of duck feathers and bread and ice-lolly wrappers. Kate asked Jamie as they disembarked — Billie locked rigid from sitting — if he knew anything about computers. He said he only knew the usual stuff, but Kate thought that was bound to be more than she did: when they got back to the house and while Billie was unbending in the heat of the gas fire burning pale in the bright daylight, she took him upstairs to show him where the iMac Max had bought with her still sat in its chaos of wires on the table in her bedroom.

— Could you make this work?

— You mean, just put it together and plug it in?

— Exactly.

He laughed because it was so easy.

— Is this your bedroom? he asked, when she came up ten minutes later to see how he was getting on, and found the screen humming. — It isn’t like an ordinary bedroom.

— It’s an idiotic room. It’s a child’s bedroom, made for the charming kind of child I never was. I haven’t made up my mind yet how to live here as myself. What is an ordinary bedroom like, anyway?

— Oh, you know, fitted wardrobes and carpet and all that.

— Fitted wardrobes. They sound awful. Do you have those?

— I kept them out. Suzie tried to force them on me but I wouldn’t let her.

— You know I was born in this house, Kate said. — Not in this room. I’ll show you where. It’s probably the opposite kind of room to fitted wardrobes.

She sat Sim on her shoulders: he was jealous of Jamie, and wouldn’t leave her alone with him. Mostly the door to the master bedroom was kept shut; occasionally she sent Buckets and Mops in with a duster. It was shaded as it always had been with the old blinds pulled down: they were so moth-eaten that this afternoon the gloom was peppered with tiny beams and pricks of sunlight. Mirrors glinted like dark pools, over the dressing table which stood with its back to a side window, and in the door of the frowning massive carved-mahogany wardrobe, all naiads and fruit and sheaves to match the bed with its spilled cornucopia. Maids had once cleaned the mahogany, or so Billie reminisced, with rags wrung out in vinegar and boiling water. Kate couldn’t remember anyone ever sleeping in here: her grandparents had been dead for years before she was born. Always the same smells — mothballs and wool carpets, and something sweet like old-fashioned face powder — had hung unchanging in the close air, only fading and mingling over decades, and yielding now to a sour damp; the rain must be coming in somewhere here, too. The room ran almost the whole length of the house; one end was arranged as a sort of boudoir, with a sofa covered in red silk faded to pink, and a writing desk.

Jamie took a few shy steps inside.

— What an amazing room.

— What was my grandfather Sam thinking of? How many tribes of children did he dream of engendering in that bed? What had he seen in Vilnius that made him want this: don’t you think, it’s a poor little Jewish boy putting down his barrow on a winter’s night and peering through lit windows? He really did have a barrow, I believe, although it sounds like poetic licence.

— Are you Jewish? he said.

— Not really. Not really Jewish, not really Welsh, not really Irish (that’s my father). Not at all English.

Kate crossed to the windows and pulled at the blinds; the mechanisms jerked and choked and gave out puffs of dust as they rolled up. Outside the three floor-length windows was a long enclosed wrought-iron balcony overlooking the lake, whose silver had healed itself seamlessly behind their intrusion: there were no more boats out, the swans were in possession. This was the best room in Firenze. When Kate imagined doing the whole house up, modernising it, making it a place where she could have a real life, she always planned to turn this room into her own bedroom and sitting room. The day after she made her plans, though, the labour and banality of actually carrying them out would fill her with ennui. And perhaps there wasn’t the money for it anyway.

— Poor grandfather Sam. Actually there wasn’t much engendering. For all the dynastic fantasy of that bed head, it’s been a thin little, weak little female line, trickling to a halt with me, running away into the ground for ever. They only had Billie. My grandmother had miscarriages; Billie was a late miracle, after they’d given up hope. Doesn’t she look slightly unearthly, against nature? She was born in this room, we both were. She only ever had me: I was late as well. I suppose we were conceived in this bed, both of us. And my grandparents both died in here, not knowing that there would be any grandchildren. My father also died in here: the interloper. Better they never knew about him. So we’ve shut it up: too much momentousness, too cumbersome for daily use.

They stood squinting slightly at one another in the low late-afternoon light, filtered and made pearly through windows that hadn’t been cleaned for years; with the blinds thrown up, the room behind them leaped into bleaker distinctness, made more strange by the invasive present: the wallpaper torn, the carpet stained, great hulks of furniture marooned.

— I love it that you’ve left it, said Jamie. — No one else would do that. Granny Bell has an old house but she’s always changing it, it’s always up to date.

— I haven’t lived in this house for twenty-five years. When I was a teenager it made me sick: I used to nag Billie to change everything, to buy everything new. Now I haven’t got the energy, though it still makes me sick sometimes.

— Why do you have that white lock in your hair?

— Sorrow, of course. For my wasted life.

— Really?

He put out a hand to touch: Sim batted at him with a paw, claws unretracted.

— No, silly, it’s heredity. There’s another one at the back, growing on the nape. I have them from my father apparently, though they don’t show in any of his photographs. I suppose mine are going to be lost, now, as the rest turns to white as well.