Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— Sherie couldn’t make it, the American was apologising to Kate: they came inside clinging together, Kate even in her high shoes having to tilt her head to see up to his height, he bending over her, youthful and easy, taking off his gold-rimmed glasses to wipe them. — You look great, Katie. At least I think you do: can’t see a thing.

— Sherie’s always so busy, Kate sympathised. — We’ll have to make do with you all by yourself.

— She’s got a deadline, writing something for Guardian Weekend.

— David, Suzie, this is Max. We’re privileged that he’s prised himself away: Max is very domesticated these days.

— Do you have children then? smiled Suzie, hopeful of some earthy common ground.

— They’d like children, Kate said.

— We don’t have children, Max said firmly, frowning at Kate.

Suzie shrank, Kate waved them towards the drinks and then carried Max off to meet someone; for ten minutes after they’d taken glasses of something with bubbles from a girl with a tray David and Suzie were stranded foolishly together in a corner of the drawing room, searching for anything to say. Suzie asked whether it was champagne and David said he didn’t know, he couldn’t honestly tell the difference between that and fizzy wine. The French windows were pushed open onto the garden and couples were moving about out there in the close grey evening; the chopped-off grass lying on the lawn smelled heavily sweet, and coloured lanterns, still pale in the late daylight, hung in the trees. Children were taking turns to roll down a sharp slope at the far end of the garden, into the fence. David had an instinct that if he and Suzie once went outside they’d be lost, they’d never be able to join in the party; after strolling round pretending to smell the roses they’d have simply to make a humiliated escape through some back gate or over a wall. They looked around them instead with exaggerated interest and talked about the house: filled up with life like this it didn’t look so much eccentric as privileged. The screen-partition between the drawing room and the library had been pushed back to make one vast space running the whole length of the back of the building; David had never properly noticed the chandeliers before, because when he visited Kate had only switched on the lamps. Suzie took in the grandeur: white dints came in her cheeks where her jaw tensed in resistance to it.

Max the American seemed to know plenty of people, which suggested that lots of the guests were Kate’s friends from London. They were striking in ways which David thought of as belonging to the metropolis: a girl with a feathered cap, bird-face and bright vermilion lipstick; a small middle-aged man, light on his feet, with face expressively lined and a heavy Central European accent; a beautiful fat woman in a sari exposing satiny folds of bare midriff. They might have been simply the kind of Cardiff people David never met. Kate was continually tearing herself away from one group to bestow herself upon another: she waved plaintively at David and Suzie once, as if she yearned to arrive with them but couldn’t yet. David would have gone out of kindness to talk with Billie, except that where she sat like diminutive royalty in a tall velvet chair she was surrounded by admirers, so that his own claim on her memory seemed recent and shallow. Then Carol was suddenly in the room — late, loud, fearless — dressed in navy blue cut low on her freckled bosom.

— We waited for you! Kate complained. — We couldn’t start anything without you.

— But I had to get my glad rags on! You wouldn’t have wanted me all sweaty and dirt-streaked, honestly.

— Sweaty and dirt-streaked? I thought you were supposed to be running the Housing Association, not building the houses yourself.

David and Suzie were weakly grateful that Carol crossed the room to them through all the other claims on her sociability; Suzie hung on to her in relief.

— This is an awful party, Carol. I don’t know anybody here.

Carol’s arm was round her straight away. — Darling, you know me! Won’t I do? Come on, let me introduce you to everyone. David can look after himself.

David obediently circulated. And after all he did know a few people: the viola player from Kate’s quartet (friend of a friend in the music department at the university), a consultant on the Public Health Committee who lived somewhere along the lake, a woman who knew Betty from the Cardiff Amnesty group (the musical evening was to raise money for Amnesty). He had a fragment of an interesting argument with Carol at one point, over problems with Assembly health policy (she was always ebulliently positive about the whole devolution thing, he wasn’t); by then it was time, anyway, for the music. They sat for the performance in chairs arranged around the baby grand at one end of the long room. David looked anxiously for Suzie and couldn’t find her at first; then when it was too late to offer to change places he saw she was standing propped alone in the doorway, tall in her white trouser suit, with a remote artificial smile, and a shy flush across her cheeks that made her eyes glint as if they were watering. When David looked round for her again in the applause at the end of the first piece she was gone.

The playing wasn’t, of course, brilliant — there were some mistakes, the intonation was occasionally off, there was one false start to a movement in the Haydn (the cellist bungled it) — but the music touched him nonetheless with calm: he never knew how knotted his tension was until music undid it. Kate led the quartet in what attack it had. Her technique wasn’t perfect but she was brave and made a warm strong sound; he took pleasure in her confidence, her lifted authoritative head, her swaying back, the ferocity with which she dipped to turn the pages; he forgot to wonder why she hadn’t showed herself his friend this evening. Sometimes it seemed to him that her gaze rested on him while she played; not seeing him, only absorbed in private concentration. Returned to themselves at the end of each piece — after Haydn, Schubert — the quartet turned laughing eyes on one another, admiring their safe arrival, triumphant and diminished because it was over. As an encore Billie joined them on the piano for one movement from the ‘Trout’; the notes unfolded obediently from her blind hands with an eerie shallow deadpan like a musical box wound up, not unaffecting.

David afterwards joined the crowd bringing Billie their compliments. She shone with dignified modesty, apologising for her old fingers, making perfect sense until urgently she put her hand on someone’s arm.

— Is Michael here anywhere? Where’s Michael? I wonder what he thought.

None of them intimates, they looked around blankly but hopefully for Michael, they asked for him: Carol was quickly there, squeezing Billie’s hand, cuddling her shoulders.

— Michael would have thought you were wonderful. He really would. What a shame he couldn’t be here to hear you two play together.

— Oh, isn’t he here? Billie was disappointed but not overthrown. — Such a gifted musician. I trust his judgement implicitly. Does he know Kate? Of course, he must know Kate, mustn’t he? She smiled puzzling into Carol’s face as if there were some conundrum there to tease out, an irritating blockage in possibility which must come clear if she persisted stubbornly enough.

— She was asking for Kate’s father, Carol explained to David later with tears in her eyes, stricken by the music, or the old lady’s mistake; her tears always burdened her brother, he had longed for her sake, when he was a boy, for her to learn to conceal them.

— Oh: is her father Michael?

— Just as if he were in the crowd here somewhere. She’s never done that before, I don’t think; she’s been muddled, but not actually lost forty years. The father died a few months after Kate was born, you know: in the bed upstairs.