Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— Why did Francesca choose him, do you think? Of all the ones who were queuing up to get inside her silk knickers?

Carol stared quickly at the real Kate not reflected. — What made you think of her, all of a sudden?

— Perhaps because we’re looking like the ugly sisters. That’s how she used to make me feel. That rope of pale hair of hers, and the long nose and close-together eyes: I suppose it had all taken centuries of breeding. Do you remember how she talked?

— I can’t. Carol was pained to realise she’d forgotten.

— Nasal, fastidious. As if she was picking a slow path among the mistakes that other people might have made. Not that she was clever: clever was another mistake.

— David wasn’t queuing up, I suppose; perhaps that was what interested her. He didn’t really notice her until she set to work, attracting his attention.

— She thought he was a fortress, she thought he was deep and still, and that she would be healed if she could lose herself in him. Do you remember how she used to parade him round with her, after they were first together? Petting him, talking about him as if he wasn’t there?

— He was just starting as Senior House Officer.

— Her talk must have been a torment to him, don’t you think? Wasn’t he one of those young men ashamed of letting anything out from inside?

Carol was thinking about Francesca. — How sad it was, she said, sitting down abruptly on the bed, on top of all the clothes. The smell of baking cake was spreading through the house. — It’s the saddest thing that’s happened in my life, really.

She lay down and closed her eyes, as if to dream about it, and fell immediately asleep.

Kate Flynn sent the Robertses an invitation to a musical evening: Suzie pinned it on the noticeboard in the kitchen among all the other notes from school and swimming club, the photo of Hannah winning the sack race, Joel’s drawings of bird-people with hawk-faces and wings in place of arms. On its stiff plain cream card, Kate’s spiky black italics written in fountain pen seemed a sign of stern difficulty, and neither David nor Suzie mentioned the card’s arrival or discussed whether they would go. Eventually David’s mother brought up the subject, sitting at the kitchen table when David came in one evening, late from work. Suzie was cooking at the stove amid steam and a clattering of pans: David’s awareness these days went obliquely at once to his wife when he came into the house, so that he could know how their quarrel stood. The fish pie and carrots and frozen peas were a performance for his mother, not to deceive her but to appease her. Jamie was laying the table carefully, even putting out bread and paper napkins; he was better at charming and courting Betty than David had ever been. Betty’s quiet domestic ideal was substantial in any room she was in, so that none of them while she was there could move without edging past it; even though she often came these days to escape from Bryn, to complain how he didn’t have enough to do, how he followed her round the house, pestering her over the tiny details of shopping and tidying.

— I didn’t know you were in touch with Kate Flynn, Betty said, seeing the invitation. — Poor thing. You know she’s come home to look after her mother?

— David is in touch, said Suzie. — I don’t really know her. We’ve bumped into one another once or twice.

— Carol worries about her. She thinks she’s taken on too much. I must say that of all people I wouldn’t have expected it of Kate: she didn’t used to treat her mother very well. Of course you remember, David, Mrs Flynn used to teach Carol the piano.

— I know them, Jamie said unexpectedly, pausing with his hands full of knives and forks as if he might have added something more.

— You’re bound to have come across them at Carol’s, Betty said. — Carol and Kate have been friends, not for ever, but from when they were in the third year, in the same class at Howells. Have you been to their house, Suzie? You ought to go to the musical thing, just to see it. It’s an extraordinary old place, a bit of Cardiff history. The grandfather must have had a lot of money, but I should think they’ve spent most of it by now. Carol says they haven’t changed anything in there, they could open it up as a museum.

— I’ve been there, Jamie said. — I’d like to live like that.

Suzie was amiable, draining vegetables. — What, in an old ruin? That would suit you.

— Like what? said David. — How’ve you been there?

— They live as if they’d just been dropped onto earth from outer space. As if all the boring stuff didn’t matter.

Suzie only laughed at him now but she and Jamie had fought once, literally, pulling hair and scratching faces, over his refusal to tidy his room. Their truce wrong-footed David, after all the years he had dedicated himself to looking out for his impossible son (Jamie wouldn’t eat off coloured plates, he wouldn’t go to bed in his own room, he wouldn’t socialise with other children). No one would think, looking at the grown boy, coolly self-sufficient, that the child had taken such an effort of love.

— I expect they had servants once, said Betty. — To do all the boring stuff.

— Will we go? Suzie asked, from where her face was hidden behind the oven door. — To this musical evening?

— Do you want to? David hadn’t been to the Flynns’ for a while; he’d held off as if he imagined Kate was disappointed in him somehow. He didn’t want Suzie looking round at the dilapidated old rooms, making a story out of them for her girlfriends; he felt protectively that Firenze belonged to him, he couldn’t bear it spoiled. And yet if she said she wanted to come, how could he not take it as an encouragement, when things were poised so uneasily between them?

— All right, she said carefully. — I’m curious, I suppose. Probably I’ll regret it, I’ll get stuck talking to someone with a beard and a collection of early instruments.

David didn’t know why Suzie was sleeping downstairs (she’d moved out of Joel’s room onto the spare bed in the study); she wouldn’t speak about it. She had once even put her hand over his mouth when he tried to ask her, shaking her head to warn him off, pushing him away from her with her fist against his chest: not unkindly but urgently, as if someone was watching them and she was under a vow of non-communication, although they were all alone.

Kate looked brilliant in a dress of some sort of flimsy transparent black stuff that came halfway down her calves, embroidered with green and gold beads; she wore tall green shoes and dramatic glass jewellery like pantomime emeralds. For some reason when David had pictured the evening in advance he had imagined it — tenderly — as rather subdued and old-fashioned: a few of Billie’s old friends from the other houses around the lake, Kate’s string quartet, perhaps a couple of Carol’s colleagues. He knew as soon as he and Suzie got out of the car, from the hubbub of voices and the lights blazing, that he’d been stupidly mistaken. How could he have forgotten Kate’s teenage parties that had had to be crazier than everybody else’s, and where the police had invariably been called? They climbed the zigzag path and saw through the lit uncurtained dining-room windows the long table spread with fashionable food (Kate must have had a caterer); Billie’s old friends, propped chatting animatedly on their sticks and frames, were having the time of their lives in a press of animated interested strangers, dressed up and wound up, making party talk. There were children, too — surprising in this house — weaving their unnoticed paths among the adults. David’s mood withered: he remembered that he hated parties.

The front door stood open, the porch was full of lights and flowers: a dark-haired woman he recognised as Billie’s babysitter offered to take their coats upstairs. Borne into the hall on a tide of hostess-importance — she almost seemed to have an entourage — Kate kissed them and welcomed them enthusiastically; the next moment there was someone arriving outside on the street, dropped by a taxi, and she was carried past them down the steps to greet a tall thin fair young American. They were shyly helpless in her wake, David wondering how he had ever thought himself Kate’s intimate.