Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

Kate pulled her head away from clumsy boy fingers, although later when Billie asked Jamie to play the piano she saw that the fingers weren’t so bad, despite what the scything and the rowing might have seemed to mean: the hands were long and fluent, with good movement, and he had the broad-stubbed finger-ends that promise intelligence of execution rather than elegance. He played appallingly, though: his style was execrable and he stumbled, blushing, through the easy pieces he professed to know. He hadn’t ever got very far, he said, he had given up years ago. He had only very reluctantly — shoulders hunched in expectation of humiliation — agreed to play for them, because Billie persisted beyond what was quite sane in pleading with him, and Kate, wanting to get on with her book, couldn’t be bothered to intervene. He could have left, couldn’t he, if he hadn’t wanted to make a fool of himself? Jamie confessed that he hadn’t ever had a real piano to practise on, only one of those electric keyboards. Kate watched pity and purpose light up in her mother like lamps; patiently Billie propped herself behind Jamie, crooked as she was, working his shoulders until they dropped and his arms fell into the right line.

— Put your hands over the keys. Not like that: imagine you are holding oranges: curved, curved. Now play: just this simplest little exercise, listen. ‘Climbing a Stair’. Keep those fingers curved. Weight down, drop your wrists, on the first note; lift off, lift the wrists — only lift, not staccato — on the third. Curved. All the way up. There: now do you hear? That’s better, isn’t it? Try this one: ‘Opening the Door’.

After this, whenever Jamie called, Billie made him work with her at the piano for at least an hour, teaching him through little games as if he was seven or eight years old. Billie’s old competence roused from murky depths when she was teaching him, she was incisive and exacting; even if she thought he was a child, she insisted he play his easy pieces and exercises to the highest standard, as she had done in the old days when she gave lessons and ran her Suzuki classes. Kate listened to Jamie stumbling, stalling, trying in vain for the same simple thing over and over. She thought it was good for him to struggle and fail: he had the sleepy indolence of clever boys for whom everything has been too easy. He read a lot — he’d read already much more than his father — but unsystematically, with huge gaps in his knowledge which he imagined he could supply with guessing and intuition.

Jamie’s presence in the house began to bother Kate obscurely. Sometimes she turned him away when he called; but then Billie asked where he was, the lessons made her so happy.

— Why aren’t you with your friends? Kate frowned. — Don’t you have friends?

— I do have friends, Jamie reassured her, — but I’d rather be here.

— Why?

— Everything here is different. You’re not like anybody else.

— How would you know? You don’t know anybody.

He went cycling out to the countryside at Cefn Onn, behind the new estate where he lived with his family, and brought back for Kate a great bouquet of wild flowers stuffed under his sweatshirt; when he pushed them at her they were half wilted, and she scratched herself on something, drawing blood.

— Isn’t it May blossom? she said. — Don’t you know not to bring that in the house? It means bad luck. Take it away. I don’t want it in here.

The first weekend Suzie went camping with Menna, the weather wasn’t very good. A fortnight later, the forecast was better, and she told David they were going again, to the same place, a site in a meadow beside a river beyond the Hay Bluff. David was surprised to find himself indifferent this time. He was busy; he hardly looked up from his computer when he heard the old Bedford van arrive on Saturday morning (its puttering filthy exhaust more polluting, surely, than anything they could make up for with their puritanical veganism). Suzie stood in the door of his study to say goodbye, hesitant as if he might want an explanation for her defection again, so soon; but he didn’t, he had work to do, he kissed her quickly.

He had spent most of his week out of Cardiff, coming home very late; he was monitoring an outbreak of meningitis in one of the valleys towns where a fifteen-year-old girl had died and a couple of others were ill. It was difficult to trace all the friends the dead girl had had close contact with: the night before she was taken into hospital, she had been driven around, up and down the mountains in the dark from one house to another, in the crowded back of someone’s beat-up car; they had been drinking and taking amphetamines, she had complained of feeling ill. David tried to imagine this teenage life, this careless jumbled contact, like fox cubs nuzzling and tussling together in a den; when he was their age he had kept himself scrupulously apart. He didn’t know what Jamie did when he went out at night. He telephoned Kate Flynn and asked if she wanted to come with him to see a film at Chapter Arts Centre. There was a Bergman season on; he wasn’t sure it was his kind of thing, but he thought it might be hers.

Virgin Spring rocked him with its violence. He disguised his shock from Kate as they made their way out with the seven or eight other members of the audience from the small studio cinema; nothing could surprise her, she had seen everything before. He avoided someone he knew from the hospital, not wanting to have to talk shop. They stopped in Chapter bar to have a beer, and David drank something heavy and cold and sweet that Kate recommended.

— My wife’s taken our children and gone off with the hippies, he told her, — in a van painted with psychedelic flowers. Probably they’re drawing up their astral charts at this very moment, somewhere in the Black Mountains.

Kate leaned her chin on her hand bristling with rings to listen. — Just like that: without warning?

— The signs have been there for a while. The dream catcher over the bed, candles everywhere, marijuana in an old tobacco tin, a copy of Kahlil Gibran in the toilet.

— That’s bad, sighed Kate. — Kahlil Gibran in the toilet. Sometimes it’s the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam . It can lead to the Desiderata beside the front door.

The beer went straight to his head. He told her about his meningitis outbreak.

— You have the power of life and death, she said, as if she was reading it in his face.

— I’m afraid not.

— No, no, you do. Isn’t that an extraordinary thing? Because of what you decide, individuals live or die.

— It’s a system; I apply it. Nothing in the least heroic, although the system’s very admirable.

— It makes what I’ve done seem a kind of dream, a mistake. A life lost in books. What an abyss of difference, between your usefulness and mine. How did I choose it: this play-life? I should have been a nurse. We carelessly make one choice after another and our lives pile up.

He laughed at her. — I don’t think you’d have made a good nurse, I’m afraid to say.

— You mean I’d have been useless. Too selfish, indolent, disobedient.

— Not for those reasons. But why are you denigrating your real expertise? You don’t really think that books and music are only play.

— Oh, if I was really any good at the violin, or if I was a real scholar. Are you happy?

— Happy? I don’t know.

— You see yourself as instrumental, Kate said. — Your outer life is given form by structures larger than yourself, the inner life is left alone. There’s a kind of bitter-sweet glamour in that. It makes men very attractive at this point of life you’ve reached, with youth behind them.

— Surely it could apply to women just as well, these days?