Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

BILLIE WAS BAKING: over her dress she had tied an old-fashioned apron, frilled, with heart-shaped gingham pockets outlined in red piping. She looked absolutely competent, turning a hand whisk, beating egg whites into a froth. Kate was frowning into a book, sitting upright at the big table with its white enamel top. The kitchen smelled strongly of something like marmalade.

Carol had called in on her way home from work.

— Billie, you look so pretty, she said. — You remind me of a waitress in a Danish pastry shop.

— Do you know, said Kate, — there are carrier bags full of her clothes in every room upstairs? Lots of them not worn yet, with the price tags still on, which I try not to read.

— We had such lovely times in the old days, Billie reminisced, — shopping for outfits together. Didn’t we, Kate?

— Long after she stopped paying the gas bills or calling the plumber in, she must have gone on visiting Howells and David Morgan, trying things on, having all the assistants running round after the sweet old lady.

— She is sweet.

— Everything suits her, everything fits: but the trouble is it’s all white and pink and pale yellow. She just forgot to buy the other stuff, the black and the brown, the sensible part. She looks every day as if she’s dressed for a wedding. Talking of plumbers, that heating engineer’s in the house somewhere. He’s bullied me into buying a new boiler. We were having to heat our water in saucepans. Go and spy on him, tell me if you think he’s any good, or if you think I should make a scene and demand my money back.

— I knew you’d have to see sense and get a new one sooner or later. What is Billie cooking?

Even in her vagueness Billie didn’t forget to be winning, tilting her face to one side, pursing her mouth, looking at the whites in her bowl as if she was surprised to find them there. — What am I cooking, Kate?

— Cake, said Kate shortly.

— Oh yes, cake. Her face cleared. — My mother’s cake: orange and almond, very moist. You’ll love it.

— But look at the size of me! What are you thinking of, tempting me with cake?

— Darling, it’s good for you.

Billie’s pretty clothes were stained and spotted with dropped food (‘And they’re all dry-clean only,’ Kate moaned), but her hair was immaculate in its perfect pleat, sensuous as snow.

— How I wish I could do my hair like this, Carol said, kissing it, sniffing the dry-leaf faint odour of Billie’s scalp.

— I’ll teach you, sweetheart. Easy-peasy.

— With my old straw? You’re joking. Anyway, what would I look like with my hair pulled back? She showed them, baring her teeth and growling. — Pretty scary, huh?

— Billie’s making cake because she thinks I don’t feed her properly.

Billie was distressed. — Is that what I said?

— I’m with Billie, you’re an awful cook. It’s because you don’t like eating.

— Oh it’s true, when she was a baby she was so fussy. She wouldn’t have the breast milk, she wouldn’t have the Ostermilk. When she was a little girl, she lived on bread and butter: cut so thin, only I could do it right. Swallowed down like medicine, in tiny pieces.

— I have to sit here for anything involving machinery or heat. Or for when she forgets what she’s making.

Carol took the lid off a pan. — Are these oranges really supposed to be boiled?

— So it says in the recipe. Put the kettle on, make tea, stop stalking up and down. You’re making me nervous.

Carol emptied the teapot in the garden, tea and leaves an amber arc against rain-soaked grass and foliage brilliant in sunshine. Kate shivered, hunching her shoulders under her jumper.

— It’s a lovely day out there.

— Don’t want to know.

— I came to ask you how the conference went.

Kate didn’t smile or look away from her book. — It went fine.

— They liked your paper?

— They adored it.

— Meet many people you knew?

Kate scowled and put the book down. — Your solicitude is showing, she said. — You know, like a bra strap or a droopy petticoat.

Penitently, Carol measured out spoons of tea into the pot.

— You’re bored, she said to Kate later, upstairs, when the cake — exotic, made from beating the boiled oranges to a mush and mixing them with ground almonds and eggs — was in the oven, and Billie was resting in front of the television, and the boiler-man was paid off. — You’re not happy. I told you how it would be. We have to think about respite care for Billie, at the very least. Why don’t you try and find some work down here?

— Look, said Kate. — D’you see what I mean? Bagfuls of clothes, not even unpacked. Cupboards full.

In a back bedroom, dust motes swam indolently in a thick bronze light; they explored in the bags, pulling out dainty tops and skirts and dresses, throwing them on the bed (untidy as if Billie might have slept in it recently), agitating the dust to frenzy so that Carol began to wheeze, finding a little dusky-rose-coloured cashmere pullover to like, a sleeveless broderie anglaise top. Kate stripped off her jumper and unbuttoned her shirt; she didn’t wear a bra. Her skinny nakedness was always frank as a curt statement; meagre palm-scoops of breast, big chocolate-brown nipples, a narrow ribcage the same silky brown as the skin of her face and hands. Carol imagined how her friend’s body would age by diminution, shrinking and concentrating, while her own would blow up and dilute; their bodies didn’t show much ageing, yet, only their faces and hands gave signs of it, like first flares of yellow in green summer trees. Kate tried a silky dress with a Peter Pan collar and a pattern of tea roses.

— I hate to think of you stuck here all day every day, doing nothing with that brilliant brain of yours.

— It never was brilliant. Anyway, who keeps these books, to see who’s used themselves wisely and who’s wasted?

Carol felt smothered inside her T-shirt and gasped her way out of it, turning her back to Kate because she didn’t want to see their different flesh too cruelly juxtaposed.

— As a matter of fact, I’m fine. I’m going to give a musical party: isn’t that a good sign? Max has said he’ll come down, and a few other friends from London. I may invite your brother. Try this one on, it’s summery.

— My brother? David? Oh, Suzie did say that you’d met him at a concert.

— She’s a bore. I suppose I’ll have to invite her too.

— Suzie’s not a bore.

— And she sleeps around.

— Kate, be ashamed of yourself. Wherever did you get that idea?

— David told me.

— I just don’t believe you.

— Or I intuit it in the gaps between the bits he tells me. And you can smell it on her anyway: one of those feral women, short on words, itching to leap into bed.

— That’s not funny, said Carol. — You’ve got a horrible imagination. What are you up to; what’s all this about my brother? You’re not developing some sort of thing about him?

— I know I’m getting very provincial, but I’m not quite that bad yet. I think I can do a bit better than your brother. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a really decent salt-of-the-earth type. He’s the type you’d be grateful for in an emergency, when the more interesting and attractive ones were falling apart or saving themselves.

Carol was mollified. — I didn’t think he was your sort. She grimaced at herself in the mirror, in a chintzy cotton dress too short and too tight. — And Wales isn’t a province by the way, it’s another country.

Kate preened beside her. — I could never wear anything this optimistic.

— I look like an armchair whose loose covers have shrunk in the wash.