Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— I’ve never asked.

— Some sort of tuberculosis: of the spine? He was a violinist, he’d come over from Ireland to play for an orchestra here in Cardiff, that’s how they met. Isn’t it romantic; isn’t it poignant? You can imagine, Billie went out to all the concerts in those days: her mother and father were dead, she was a rich woman, she lived here all alone, she was nearly forty. Kate says she thinks he only married her for her money, and that he drank and slept around. But then you know what Kate’s like.

— She’s not romantic.

— Or it’s just another kind of romance, isn’t it?

David looking for Suzie — thinking they could leave with their honour intact now the music was over — met Max in the dining room, eagerly friendly, glasses glinting, making bobbing dives into the various dishes — heaped up couscous salad, pink rolls of cold beef — from his great height, like a heron fishing.

— What a fantastic evening! Like being inside a Chekhov story. The lake, this amazing old house, people gathered to make music, all the generations socialising together. I want to come down here and live like this. So civilised!

David thought that Max’s account of the party wasn’t like any Chekhov he’d read. Kate had recently lent him her translations of some of the stories; the characters mostly seemed to grind unhappily against one another, locked in misunderstanding. Kate told him they were funny but he didn’t see it.

— Are you a colleague of Kate’s at Queen Mary’s?

— Just an old friend. Not smart enough to be an academic. I work for English Heritage.

When David said he was looking for Suzie, Max put down his plate in concerned helpfulness, as if he would start a search. — She’s been around, she was in here earlier.

Recrossing the hall, David bumped into her coming out from the downstairs lavatory, the one he knew from his other visits to the house: at the end of a tiled passage, with a long wooden seat like a hinged shelf.

— It has a cistern on the wall and a chain hanging down, exclaimed Suzie in wonder. — I’ve never used one like that before. You can buy them in reproduction now, I know: but they’re terribly expensive.

Their coats regained, their farewells left cowardly unmade (when they’d peeped round a door, Kate had been too deep for interruption in some group joke), absolved of public performance, they were suddenly uneasily thrown together in the car; aware of the near-audible ticking of thought. The engine starting up was a relief. Always on such occasions, without ever having discussed it, they used the car in the archaic configuration: David in the driving seat and Suzie the passenger. Used to the convention, apart from the first glass of fizzy wine, he had only helped himself to water; she could have had several more glasses of wine if she had wanted to bolster herself, but she struck him as bleakly cold sober.

— It wasn’t too bad? he hoped, not really believing it.

Instead of talking to him she exhaled as if she was getting rid of something, and threw her head back, staring up through the dark at the felt lining of the tin roof.

— Will you let me out? she said then, as they drove alongside the lake, which sent its pale signal flashing like a code between the passing trees.

— Let you out?

— Not here. I’ll give you directions.

He pulled up in the middle of the empty road. — What?

— Just drop me off somewhere. I’ll get a taxi back later. I’m not ready to come home yet.

Baffled, he held his hands spread in the air above the steering wheel. — It wasn’t that bad.

— You don’t know.

He had to drive off again: it wasn’t late enough for there to be no traffic.

— Well, perhaps it was that bad: I hate parties anyway. You’re supposed to be the sociable one.

— Between the time the music stopped and when we left, said Suzie, — what’s that? Three-quarters of an hour? forty minutes? In all that time nobody spoke a word to me. I didn’t speak a word to anybody. I just moved around from room to room as if I was always on my way somewhere else. Then I went into the toilet and stayed there for as long as I dared, only I was afraid there’d be a queue and someone would come rattling at the door.

— But you have to make an effort. You can’t expect people who don’t know you to talk to you when you’re hurrying past them. You have to go up and talk to them. They weren’t being unfriendly as such.

— You’re right, of course, I know that. Only I got in a state where I couldn’t.

— And now you want to be by yourself for a bit.

She looked at him; her directness was only equivocal because he couldn’t return it, he had to watch the road. — Not by myself. With my friends.

Her face was impossible to read, anyway; when he did glance over its point was overridden by the shifting street lights, car lights, the muddying orange city illumination.

— Turn left here, go back down the park. They live in Splott: it isn’t too far.

Dumbly, he drove where she told him to go, down past where the park became a wide-open recreation ground, through Roath and onto Newport Road, then over the Beresford Road railway bridge. He knew most of the streets they drove through even if he didn’t know their names; but they pulled up eventually in front of an improbable little row of cottages he’d never noticed before. He couldn’t make them out very well in the dark: they might have been built for railway workers, and were probably older than most of the surrounding late-Victorian development. Behind the huddle of their overgrown front gardens they seemed to promise a cosier secrecy than the austere long terraces with their doors opening more or less straight onto the street.

— This is it, said Suzie. — I’ll see you later: but don’t wait up.

His reluctance wasn’t exactly passionate jealousy. Perhaps it ought to be: but he couldn’t really believe, however opaque Suzie’s behaviour had been in these last weeks and months, that she could have instructed him so calmly to drop her off at this house if she was planning to meet some lover inside it. Anyway, he presumed the house was Menna’s, where she lived with her boyfriend, so the lover wasn’t a practical idea. But whatever did Suzie imagine justified her stubborn refusal to explain herself to him, to give him a word, even, or a clue? Why couldn’t she learn, as other people did, the grace to carry off a party like this one they’d been to? No one required her to enjoy it. Well, so he was free, again: she pressed his freedom on him.

— Can’t I come in with you?

— No, she said, and put a hand on his arm, as if postponing something, promising something else for some other time.

He watched her pick her way up a path whose faint paleness was blurred by overgrowing shrubs and then lost in the thick overhang of shadows from the house; he knew she turned to look at him once because he made out the weak blob of her face. Then another car, lights glaring, came up behind him and he had to move. He drove round the block to come past the house again, and paused with the engine running, peering into the garden. There was no sign of habitation to be made out beyond the shrubs, apart from the dim gleam in a glass fanlight above the front door. But Suzie in her white trouser suit was vanished, swallowed presumably inside.

The party did not do Kate any good. Some of her friends stayed on afterwards, filling up for the weekend the empty bedrooms, feasting on party leftovers round the dining-room table, taking their wine over to the park in afternoon sunshine to sprawl like a Watteau fête champêtre on the grass, in the flickering shade under the trees, while the children some of these friends had brought played ball or pestered for ice cream. As long as her friends were with her she could pretend to herself that it had worked, that she had been restored — by the jokes, the confessions, the touching and kissing, her own rather showy performance of ironising contentment — to what Carol called her ‘old self’.