Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— You know, dear, Billie said thoughtfully after a few days, — it’s very hot for porridge.

Kate had hardly noticed the blazing weather. Carol said how lucky Kate was at least in Billie’s good nature, that senility usually brought changes of personality, resentment and aggression. Sometimes Kate could hardly remember what her mother had been when she was adult and in command: she had to focus on particular moments, Billie waiting with her neat little shopping basket at the school gates, Billie giving herself into the hands of the hairdressers while Kate stood looking on, having her hair coloured, brown honey, for all those years before she gave in to white. She had been compliant always; but with an inward resistance like a stubborn sweetness, a secret of superiority, that made her gently deplore other people’s lives not led in the same light of beauty and taste as hers. This princess-air used to drive Kate to distraction. Now the reality of that resistance was dissolved away, leaving only its shape behind; Billie watched all kinds of awful programmes on the television, and particularly loved the advertisements.

Kate bought batteries for the clocks; she sorted her bookshelves, she tried to work on her translation. She hammered nails into her walls to hang pictures; she spent all day in her pyjamas without getting dressed and didn’t wash her hair. The balance of her attention always swung like this between her self and her surroundings: when she was at her physical best, dressing well, she could live in a mess; when she despaired of herself and her clothes, she lavished care on her room and her possessions, paid bills and took broken objects in for repair. At least the sleeping pills made a fog in her head so that she didn’t have to feel anything very sharply. She didn’t answer the front-door bell. She told herself that if she and Jamie never saw one another again, then what had happened wouldn’t exist, she could prevent it from having existed, it needn’t ruin everything. Sometimes Billie answered the door; twice she let Jamie in. Kate heard his voice while she was upstairs in her room puzzling in leaden doubt between different ways of expressing the nuances of mastery and subservience in Tsarist Russia. Awareness of him in the rooms below was only physical, like a cramp; she refused to think differently about him because of one moment’s stupid error of judgement. Billie, labouring, climbed up the stairs.

— That boy is here, she said. — What is his name?

— Ask him what he wants, said Kate. — Tell him I won’t come down, I’m busy with this.

— Oh, we mustn’t interrupt your work, darling. Has he come for his lesson?

— Mummy: how can I concentrate?

Billie stood hesitating, then tiptoed down again. After a while Kate heard Jamie at the piano, playing his scales, trying and failing, stumbling, going back to the beginning and starting all over again. While she was listening to this she couldn’t do a thing, she couldn’t think, she sat with her stomach muscles painfully squeezed (she hadn’t eaten anything much for days, apart from crackers and apples and tea), pressing her hands over her face until her rings left marks. It was a kind of torture, waiting for him to play a wrong note and then hearing it: but it wouldn’t drag her downstairs, she would endure. After all, she was the grown-up, she was the one on guard against blunders happening. At last Billie let him go, or he wandered of his own accord into the hall: she guessed that he stood longing to come and find her but also dreading it. She kept still, afraid that if he heard her make any ordinary movement he’d be somehow encouraged, and come up. Apart from anything else, her hair was scraped back in an elastic band, she was wearing her glasses and old ghastly stretch pyjamas, her face looked bruised and sallow as it always did when she was in one of her states, when she wasn’t eating. She owed it to Jamie at least that he shouldn’t see he’d embraced a death’s head, an old woman. Eventually she heard him give up and go.

The second time he came, Kate locked her bedroom door. He knocked at it, and called her name twice; she stayed motionless on her bed, not answering, hugging her knees tightly. Then she knew that if she stayed living like this something would break; so she took Billie to London. They went to the Bloomsbury hotel where they used to stay in the old days, before Kate left home, when they had tickets for London concerts or theatre; she was surprised when she telephoned to find it still existed. On the train she wore dark glasses, with a scarf wrapped round her hair and her summer mac buttoned up: luckily the hot weather had broken.

— Wouldn’t Mother have loved this? said Billie, looking eagerly out from the train window at the countryside cut across by swathes of rain, watery gleams.

— I wouldn’t know, said Kate. — I didn’t know Mother.

— She spoke five languages. Her French was exquisite. They meant her for a high school teacher.

— We could always go back, if you liked: I mean Lithuania. We could look for our roots: people do these days.

— Oh dear, I don’t think so. She touched Kate’s hand consolingly as if Kate might not know what had happened there. — I don’t think there’d be anything left for us. I never liked the children’s books my aunts and uncles sent, the pictures were too frightening, I thought of it as a primitive place. But Mother loved the books, she pined for it. After they came here, she never had her health.

— That’s because old Sam was strong as an ox, wouldn’t leave her alone.

When Kate talked like that, Billie pretended not to hear.

They had to make a fuss at the hotel, to change their room to one on the first floor, so that Billie didn’t have to climb too many stairs. Kate told herself she’d done the right thing, getting away from the old house, leaving behind her disasters. She began to calculate how long their money would last if they led a hotel life here as people did in old novels, blessedly irresponsible, not having to worry about leaks in the roof or throwing out sour milk; they weren’t very solid calculations, she wasn’t really sure how much money was left, she had never quite got round to searching through Billie’s papers and making the necessary calls to find out exactly. Their room was plain and high, painted white, with an austere handsome marble fireplace, a window overlooking the street where taxis splashed past in the wet, and a framed photograph of lions in the Serengeti; partitioned from next door, the elaborate plaster coving sliced through abruptly. The television was small and black-and-white, with a twisted coat-hanger stuck in for an aerial. It rained all that first day, so that they couldn’t go anywhere until the evening, when they found an Italian restaurant round the corner; Kate ate a third of a plate of pasta and then smoked, Billie polished off three courses, finishing with a glass of something sticky and yellow. Back at their room Kate telephoned Max, while Billie, with every appearance of deep interest, watched through a fog of interference a police drama already halfway through.

— Max, I’ve run away, I’m here in London.

— Katie? Whereabouts: ‘here’?

— Something dreadful has happened.

— I thought everything was going so well.

— Because you’ve no idea.

— Where are you? What’s happened? D’you want to come round?

— I can’t tell you now: I’m not alone.

— Oh, Katie: I hope you haven’t made a terrible mistake.

— We’re too tired to come tonight. We’re in our pyjamas already. We’ll come tomorrow evening.

— I’m not at all convinced it’s the best thing, us meeting him.

— Not him, silly: it’s Billie I’m here with.

— Ah. That’s OK, I think: I’ll just check with Sherie.