Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— So what’s Jamie up to? she asked, effortfully cheerful. — Are you off to college?

— Perhaps, Jamie said. — I might take a year out. I’m thinking about it.

— You know the fees go up next year, said David, insisting on a point he’d already made several times over, as he came out from the living room where he had been helping Hannah with her homework. — Make sure you’ve secured your place before you defer, don’t leave it too late.

His son gave him a look whose mask-like tragic contempt was surely disproportionate to the offence.

— And you ought to wear your cycling helmet.

— Hiya, David, said Evie.

Jamie took the stairs two at a time, they heard the crash of the attic ladder pulled down, then pulled up after him. Later he’d come foraging in the kitchen, after they’d cleared up supper.

David kissed Evie absent-mindedly. — Did Suzie know you were coming? She didn’t say anything.

— Isn’t she here?

— Out.

— She’s always out, said Hannah. — She’s gone mad, about her new friends.

— Actually I didn’t tell her, Evie said. — It was on an impulse.

Suzie and Evie had that disconcerting sibling resemblance, alike enough — in height and shape and the rough idea of the face — to be mistaken for one another in anyone’s peripheral vision: so that David would walk into a room and think Suzie was standing there until Evie moved (or spoke: her voice was throatier). There was always an instant of shock before adjustment: everything about Evie seemed more exposed, the eyes bigger and more startled, the lines deeper-incised, the mouth fuller (Suzie said Botoxed). They dressed in the same casual clothes: only Evie’s things were skimpier, tighter, lower cut (also, she had a ring in her navel). One night David walked into the bathroom and didn’t see for a long minute, while he searched for Calpol for Joel in the medicine cupboard, that it was Evie soaking, with only her head — fortunately for their embarrassment — visible above the mass of foam.

— There isn’t any lock, she apologised.

— It’s so the children can’t lock themselves in.

— No worries.

— I can’t believe I didn’t look: sorry.

— Don’t be silly. Find whatever it was you wanted.

That surprise seemed to bring about a new intimacy between the two of them: easy-familial and not sexual. No one asked how long Evie was staying. Whenever she came she had an air of escaping just ahead of some damage or danger on her tail, men or money. She and her daughter Cara, the same age as Jamie, had stayed for weeks at a time during various catastrophes; Suzie was seen by her family as the one who had lifted herself out of their patterns of bad luck. This time Evie told David evasive stories about a job she had left, an insurance office and a boss she’d been involved with; and about Cara, who had gone to live with her father recently after some row whose outlines were unclear.

Evie must have seen Suzie’s bed made up in the study, she was bound to notice that Suzie was out almost every evening (‘doing yoga’, she explained perfunctorily, or ‘with her singing group’). Menna and Neil had got the use of some chalet in the Gower Peninsula for the summer, and Suzie was there almost every weekend, on her own or with the children. The children loved the chalet and the beach and the sea: they were uneasy that David didn’t come with them. They nagged him, they tried to bribe him with odorous carriers full of seaweed and crab-bits and stones which had been special when they were wet; he told them he had too much work to do.

— Why don’t you go? Evie asked, scrupulously casually, not to be seen to be prying.

— I really have been busy.

— And they’re not your kind of crowd?

— Perhaps not.

Evie went out with Suzie’s new friends a couple of times, but she confided to David that they made her feel a hundred years old, and she couldn’t join in the singing: she said she hadn’t known that Suzie had such a lovely voice. He didn’t ask for more details. At home Evie slipped into a domestic role, shopping for the family and cooking (she was a better cook than Suzie). She even cleaned the house, not badly, although she didn’t have Suzie’s perfectionism; the rooms were heaped with piles of ironing, the vacuum cleaner was left wherever she’d last used it. Suzie couldn’t complain, she’d stopped doing anything in the house herself. Suzie always kept Evie at a sceptical, brittle distance when she visited. Sometimes when Evie and David found themselves watching the news companionably, he suffered from an eerie hallucination that Suzie had left a surrogate to keep him quiet while she went wandering, like shape-changing trickery in a fairy story. He didn’t know whether Evie had asked Suzie what was going on in her marriage, or whether if she had Suzie would have confessed to her, or put her off.

One weekend when Suzie was away he took Hannah and Joel to call on Kate Flynn. Marshalling the children up the zigzag path, he thought that bringing them would make a difference in his relationship with Kate, and was shyly proud of their unflawed transparent skin, of the plaits he’d made — not very well — in Hannah’s hair, of their awed demeanour in the shadow of the big house, with its turret like something from a children’s picture book. He thought that Kate was bound to like them; meeting them, she would know him more completely. When no one answered the bell even after David rang three or four times (they put their ears to the flaking paint and heard it sound improbably far off), Joel was visibly relieved not to have to believe his father had friends who lived in such a place.

Hannah spotted the play park with swings and slides and an ice-cream van, madly crowded in the summer heat. For an hour he pushed Joel on the swings and watched while they slid. They kicked around a football on the grass, then flopped in the shade under one of the great trees; David, on his back with his eyes closed, felt the earth turn and his life passing. It struck him that he was always vulnerable, lying down: he needed to meet life on his feet, upright. They tried Firenze again before they got into the car to drive home, but this time he didn’t really expect an answer. The children anyway by now were overheated, and sulking because he wouldn’t buy them soft drinks from the van (they’d had ice cream).

— Mummy lets us have Coke, Hannah complained, easily indignant. — She says, what harm can it do, in the long run?

Kate wasn’t sleeping. She had to go to the doctor for more pills, performing competent and un-addicted in order to be rewarded with a prescription. The ones she got in Billie’s name, from a different doctor — not for Billie, who didn’t need them, who slept like a baby — were much easier. The doctor said she must try to establish regular times for going to bed and getting up: she thought he was right. She found light bulbs in an under-stairs cupboard, got out the stepladders, and replaced all the ones that weren’t working, even in the rooms they didn’t use: if the lights exposed stained wallpaper and furniture jumbled meaninglessly together, she turned them off quickly and went on finding her way in the dimness, with the blinds drawn down. She washed the hall floor with a mop and hot soapy water; the whisky smell, however, persisted, she couldn’t get rid of it, it made her sick for days. She tried for a while getting up at seven and cooking porridge for Billie (she couldn’t eat anything herself at that hour). Billie slept on her back, her eyes were never screwed up or squinting in sleep; her huge lids swung wide open when Kate shook her, and showed the flash of her dreams escaping. She clung onto the bedclothes, and had to be coaxed into putting on her dressing-gown with promises of syrup on her porridge.