Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

But when they went it made things even worse. Her old self anyway had been a precarious entity: now it was seized for a few days, not by a depression as she might have expected, but by a mania that burned her up. She was possessed all the time by the idea of David. Passion, she thought, must have seized wealthy women like this — like cramps or fits — in the old days, when an abyss yawned in the hours between breakfast and dressing for dinner, with nothing to fill them but reading novels and gazing in the mirror, imagining things, gasping and moaning all alone. Work ought to be the cure: Kate tried to get on with her translation, but either she stared at it stupidly or her thoughts raced as if she was speeding. Whatever semblance of order she had begun to establish in her life in the house with Billie disintegrated; they sometimes didn’t get up until the afternoon, and she never knew what time it was when they went to bed because she had lost her watch somewhere over the party weekend. Jamie had connected her DVD player to the television; she rented old black-and-white Hollywood films which she and Billie watched in drugged absorption, sometimes two or three times over, Billie forgetting each time what was going to happen. Only the arrival of Buckets and Mops on their appointed days gave any kind of shape to time passing.

Kate picked up the telephone, dialled David’s number, put it down again. She had wanted at the party to see past this fixation that she had surely, after all, erected for herself: she had wanted to expose, by positioning him alongside her cleverer lively friends, how dull, how ponderous and inconsequent he was. Obligingly when she had asked Max what he thought, he had said that David seemed like the kind of fellow who’d set your bone straight if you broke your arm.

— He isn’t that kind of doctor, Kate said dully. — Or is that supposed to be some weird kind of sexual clue?

— I just mean he seemed like a nice man who’d be good at his job, but that I don’t quite see what it is you’re so hung up on.

— It’s precisely the aspect of it you can’t see, that makes it fatal. What do you think he thinks about me?

She dreaded herself, asking.

Max was cautious. — Possibly, he seemed a little uxorious.

— Uxorious? Oh, crap, Max, thanks for that.

She had seen for herself how David looked round everywhere for his wife when he was sitting waiting for the music, and again while he was applauding at the end of the first piece. She had thought he and Suzie couldn’t wait to get away from the party together, they had hated it, they would have escaped sooner if they’d known how to, only they were too innocently, decently polite. She was haunted by David’s kind slight bewilderment at her treatment of him, her betrayal of their friendship. She groaned aloud, remembering how once when she played a false note his shoulders had contracted wincingly as if she drew the bow across his nerves; she imagined the scene sometimes, although she knew this was exaggerating, as if he had been the only one genuinely hearing the music, among all the other blank, bored, pretending faces.

For several nights while Kate paced the house — her reading glasses propped abandoned on her open book in a pool of lamplight, Billie put to bed upstairs — police helicopters came hovering over the streets outside. You never knew what they were looking for, or whether they actually caught anybody; the agitating loud turmoil of their rotors came and went sometimes for what felt like hours. They seemed a visitation from a different world: Kate thought how, up here in the peace beside the lake, she was getting used to being privileged and set apart, like being forgotten. In London this wasn’t seriously possible anywhere: her nice first-floor flat, for instance, in a Georgian square with an enclosed residents’ garden, was two minutes’ necessary walk, on her way to the tube, from the bleak roaring Walworth Road with its metal-shuttered shops and minimarts plastered with fluorescent posters, selling stolen goods. Carol said the daily reminder of trouble was at least an inoculation against fear; that was why she preferred to live quixotically among her tenants in Adamsdown, even if it meant noise and scenes often, and difficulties with the dominatrix with samurai swords who lived upstairs. She said, goodness knows what hallucinations of danger and siege people are subject to, if they live anywhere too beautiful and too sequestered.

One night, late, the Firenze doorbell jerked in the passage to the kitchen with its usual weakly expiring clatter. Absent-mindedly, even though it was an impossible time for anyone to call who didn’t have urgent or terrible news, Kate made her way in the dark through the little entrance vestibule with its empty shelves that still smelled sometimes of the bitter-peppery ghosts of past geraniums. When she pulled the door open a blast of warm night forced its way inside: importunate, humming with summer.

— Oh, Jamie, no, she said. — It’s too late, I’m on my way to bed.

This wasn’t true, but there was every reason for him to believe it; the house was in darkness behind her, she was reading, she had been pouring herself whisky in the kitchen. She couldn’t see his face: he was an outline, shamblingly youthful, hunched over his bike, smelling of booze and dope, his voice arriving out of the dense centre of shadows. For the first time she noticed that he spoke with a Cardiff accent; or perhaps he forgot, because he couldn’t see her, to make the adjustment between voices middle-class children learn to make according to the company they’re keeping. That accent, with its oblique flattened teasing, had moved and seduced her when she was a little posh girl at Howells.

— I need to talk to you, he said. — I’ve finished my exams.

— Seriously, you came to tell me that?

— I’ve been out with my friends. But everything I had to say, I wanted to say to you. So I cycled round for a long time and then I came here.

— Come back tomorrow.

Jamie persisted, not moving, as if tomorrow was unthinkably another era; she made out in bulky silhouette against the fainter dark some top tied by its sleeves around his shoulders: he loomed especially large because she’d kicked off her heels earlier and was barefoot in the warmed grit of the floor. Resistance was insubstantial against his invisibly exerted pressure; reluctantly Kate permitted him to thud his bike across the threshold and prop it against the shelves of empty flowerpots. He followed her into the kitchen, breathing heavily: he must have been cycling fast and long. A forty-watt light bulb under the old plain white shade dispensed its gloom into the room’s farthest corners; it turned Jamie’s usually cream-coloured skin — as he paced round the room’s perimeter not seeing anything — crumpled and grey, gave him blue hollows under his eyes, showed up that his hair wasn’t clean and hung lank across his forehead. She knew how horribly, if he looked like this, the light must expose her: she took grim satisfaction in it. She poured him whisky — she had no idea what he drank but surely he drank lots, he was a young person, she had read about their drinking in the newspapers — and sat down at the kitchen table whose white enamel looked at that moment better suited to vivisection than to sociability. He drank the whisky down in thirsty swallows.

— So how did they go? she obliged him without much interest.

— How did what go?

— The exams, stupid, that you came to tell me about.

— Oh: that wasn’t that I came for. They went OK. I’m thinking maybe I should do Economics, to really understand how everything works. Only I should take a year off before I go to university anyway.

— You’re lacking in vocation, it occurs to me.