Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

But she could never really have driven all the way back to London. She couldn’t have faced the nightmare of traffic again. Also, there was nothing to go back to. Anyway, now she’d seen her sleeping, she couldn’t quite bear to think of Billie waking up alone, to an empty house.

David knew something was wrong as soon as he saw Suzie. He had noticed as he parked on the drive that her car was missing, but he’d only thought she must be running Hannah to ballet class, or to a sleepover, or taking Joel swimming; he didn’t always remember the busy running-order of the children’s arrangements. He was late, he had left a message on the phone to say he was staying on in the office to finish a paper for a Health Protection Conference the next day. Through the lit window as he came round the side of the house he could see his family in the kitchen eating pizza, and it did occur to him then that it was late for them to be having supper. They didn’t see him, in the dark outside. They lived in a raw new estate at the growing tip of the city where it met the motorway that circled the periphery; beyond them there was only a golf course, and then the grounds of an old house which were open to the public, and then fields. David paused before he opened the back door, enjoying being alone in the humming dark that was always nervous with the noise from the motorway: not a roar, but a thin murmur of movement and speed that somehow sucked substance and permanence from everything it reached. David didn’t mind this, he even felt it as a kind of lightness.

— Where’ve you left the car? he asked while he wiped his feet on the doormat.

Suzie was putting something in the microwave, she didn’t turn round.

— Smashed up, said Hannah relishingly. She was standing up at the table to eat her pizza, and had a piece of tomato on her chin. She liked crisis. Joel, who didn’t, sat absorbed in some game with his Beanie Babies.

— You’re joking.

— I was involved in an accident, said Suzie calmly. — On my way home from the in-service day at the Gwent teachers’ centre. But I’m all right. The car in front of me hit a lorry pulling out. No one was hurt, amazingly enough. But the car’s a write-off.

— Good God, said David. — Why didn’t you call me?

Suzie shrugged. — I was OK. There was no need.

But he knew as she turned round that she wasn’t OK. Usually Suzie was sturdy and steady; she had a wholesome closed muzzle of a face that made him think of a fox, with its sandy colouring and the fine fair down that showed in a certain light. She was tall and lean and big-boned, her broad shoulders set defiantly against challenge; only now something was jangled loose in her as if she’d touched a live wire, and her hair had dried in a dark mat that clung to her head. It frightened him to see her blue eyes startled open.

— Actually, Suzie said, busy cutting up Joel’s pizza, — I called Giulia.

Giulia was Suzie’s headmistress at Ladysmith School, and her friend.

— It was easier for her to come out from the school and bring me home, once I’d given my statement to the police. Then she insisted on taking me for a check-up at the hospital. Jamie was picking the kids up anyway, because I’d thought I might be late. And I was fine, they said. Just a bit shaken up.

— I wish you’d called me.

She tried to smile at him. When she put Joel’s plate down on the table he saw that her hands were shaking. — Never mind, she said. — It doesn’t matter now.

David made her describe to him exactly where the accident took place; he wanted to understand why this lorry had pulled out so carelessly, so outrageously into the traffic. Suzie couldn’t remember things precisely. She said it had all happened very fast. He imagined the chaos, the rain, the scorch of horror that had brushed close.

— Where’s Jamie? he said angrily. — Why isn’t he helping?

Jamie was David’s seventeen-year-old son from his first marriage.

— Call him. Ask him if he wants pizza.

— You shouldn’t be standing here doing all this. Why don’t you go and lie down? I’ll take over. I’ll bring you a cup of tea, or a drink.

— I’d rather be busy, really.

Jamie was in his bedroom in the attic space. He lay on his back on the bed, smoking, and he didn’t even turn his head as David lifted the trapdoor and climbed through; the room was thick with the rank smell of dope. A familiar sensation of impotence seized David; he didn’t know how to talk to this boy, or how to know what his thoughts were, or how to forbid what ought to be forbidden him. Jamie didn’t rage or fight, he simply ignored whatever they told him: don’t pull the ladders up into the attic after you, don’t smoke, don’t smoke in the house, don’t stay out at night without letting us know where you are. When they tried to be outraged he smiled as though he was embarrassed for them. David opened the skylight to let out the smell.

— Suzie asks, do you want pizza?

— Is she OK now? Jamie said. — I’m sorry about the swan.

— What swan?

— Hasn’t she told you? The one that came down on her car.

— On her car? What are you talking about?

He thought the boy might be befuddled with dope.

Jamie sat up on his elbow. He was wearing some sort of torn vest; he shook back the thick copper-brown hair that he chopped off with scissors himself at shoulder-length. Something in the wide face, with its faint adolescent rash over the thickening cheekbones, distinctive thick creases under the eyes, and black brows like quick pencil strokes, stirred and pained David, who was not used to thinking of men as beautiful; the boy was like his mother (which was not reassuring). Jamie’s brown feet at the end of the bed were bare and huge, with dirty soles and coarse sinewy knobbled toes; they had transformed out of soft child-feet in some instant while David wasn’t looking.

— A swan came down and hit her car, made her swerve into the fast lane.

— She didn’t tell me it was a swan. Perhaps she didn’t want to upset the children.

— It must have hit power lines. Then it bounced against the side of a lorry and onto the bonnet of her car.

The picture was vivid to David for a moment: melodramatic, not Suzie’s kind of thing at all. — Knowing what Hannah’s like, he said. — She’d be more upset about a swan than if people had been hurt.

— They rang home from the hospital. Giulia was with her.

David was flooded with irritation again. Sometimes recently when he and Suzie disagreed — over whether they should consider sending Hannah to Howells, the private girls’ school, for instance — Suzie quoted at him Giulia’s opinions, Giulia’s wisdom; she didn’t know she was doing it, or that he minded. Giulia was against private education, she involved herself headlong in all the ragbag of social problems the pupils at her school presented, she paid out of her own pocket the taxi fare for a family of Roma children who travelled to the school every day from across the city. David liked her but he thought she acted impulsively, with a dangerous idealism. Sometimes when he came home he found the house empty and all of them round at Giulia’s. Or Giulia and Suzie would be sitting drinking wine at his kitchen table, talking animatedly and rashly, the way women did, so that he felt shut out from their fun.

The children reacted in the aftermath of the accident. Hannah thumped through her keyboard practice with hot cheeks and swelled with surplus emotion, weeping extravagantly when Suzie told her off for tickling Joel, who hated it. Joel lay mute and still in his bath, then shivered in his Spiderman pyjamas and refused to get into bed, because he caught sight of the moon through his bedroom window. He had been afraid of the moon when he was a baby. When David came downstairs after reading their stories he found Suzie standing in the kitchen over a sink full of winter branches she had cut in the garden to take into school for her January table: bedraggled yellow jasmine and gnarled apple tree and silver birch thickening and reddening already with buds. Her hair was wet again and she seemed to give out into the centrally heated air the cold breath of the rain-soaked garden. She pretended to be busy, tying up the branches with twine. Her hands were big and unbeautiful: skilled at cutting out with infant scissors, tying laces, rubbing magic cream into grazed knees.