Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— Anyway, I have made a terrible mistake, she confessed. — Only not that one. I’ll tell you tomorrow.

She and Billie visited the Wallace Collection the next day; they drank tea and Billie ate cake (Bakewell tart with lavender sauce) in the glassed-in central courtyard. In all the rooms Kate met herself reflected in the rococo slender-framed Louis Quinze mirrors, a dark spirit haunting among the blissful nymphs of the paintings: tarnished, concentrated, bitter. She bought a postcard, a girl in a pink satin dress, roses at her waist and in the round bosom pushed high by her corsets, watched by her lapdog, carving her lover’s initials on a tree: it filled Kate with desolation. Billie talked to all the attendants, a charming old lady made happy by art. They took taxis everywhere, Kate was rich with cash, she paid out notes off a fat wad in her purse. To go out to Max’s that evening she dressed severely all in black, pinned back her hair tight to her head, only painted her mouth red, left her face bleak, wore her dark glasses again; if Sherie had to see her in this state, then she owed it to herself at least to make a drama out of it. When they arrived in Max’s Highbury flat, the tall windows were open to the refreshed summer night, Jill Scott was on the Bang & Olufsen, and there were the usual heaps of new novels and journals on the coffee table whose top was glass an inch thick, semi-clear like Glacier Mints, the base a precious twisted piece of an old elm. In the States before he moved to England Max had worked on two lucrative contracts on Madison Avenue.

Sherie, coming out from the kitchen in a pretty apron, flinched visibly at how ferocious Kate looked. Kate was sorry, and tried to be nice to her, exclaiming at the delicious food even if she couldn’t eat much of it, asking how her writing was going, making an effort not to gossip with Max about friends Sherie didn’t know.

— You must be working out, Kate said to her. — You look so fit! I’m so unfit. I don’t do any exercise. What will become of me? It’ll be such a tragic waste, I’ll die young. Or is it already too late for me to die young?

Sherie sat stiffly and was not seduced, her round face pale with unbelief. Unfortunately Billie, enjoying herself, chose to be garrulous on the subject of Kate’s unusual giftedness: if Max and Kate had been on their own with her, this would have seemed simply funny. Nervously Kate got out her cigarettes; the others hadn’t finished their crème brûlée.

— Actually, would you mind smoking on the balcony? Sherie said.

— All by myself? Kate made a mouth of mock sorrow.

Max was gallant, wan, propitiatory. — I’ll come out with you. Shall I?

— You go, said Sherie, stacking up the plates briskly without scraping them. — I’ll stay and look after Billie.

Outside Kate and Max leaned on the wrought iron side by side, looking through the moonless dark at stately trees flirting their leaves in yellow patches of illumination from the street lamps; the rain had raised rank smells from the pavement. The warm thick night was full of movement, her cigarette smoke blowing heavily around them.

— I wish you’d be nicer, he said. — I wish you and Sherie could get on.

— As a matter of interest, I really was trying my best this evening. Obviously not good enough. You’ve forgotten that I’m really not very nice.

He sighed. — Well, I’m enough of an idiot, then, to like you.

She remembered what it had been like to yield to Max and have him look after her, she smelled his two-showers-a-day cleanness, his Acqua di Parma aftershave, his lawn shirt: invitations to peace, to pleasantness, to play.

— Oh Max: I’ve made such an awful mistake.

— It must be awful, for you to think it is. Is it to do with the good doctor?

— Yes. No. Yes.

— Tell me about it.

She opened her mouth obediently to tell him: and then shut it again.

— But maybe not. I can’t.

He turned his blurred face to her — they stood outside the broad panes of light that fell from the windows — whistling low and admiringly. — Uh-oh. Katie’s actually done something she’s too ashamed to tell. Are we talking wrong side of the law here? Penal sentence?

— Don’t make fun of me, Max. I’m feeling bad enough.

— Katie? He was apologetic: offered himself, patient and neutral, bending down his tall height to extinguish the difference between them. — You can tell me anything, you know that. If you need to talk. You don’t look well. You look awful.

— I know I can. She touched her hand, the last end of cigarette a stump between her fingers, lightly on the back of his. — But, maybe this one ought to be my secret: I’m not sure I can find the words. Anyway, perhaps I quite like the idea of having a secret from you. From everybody.

— I’m sure you’ve got so many.

— No: no. She weighed judiciously. — Actually this is the first one for a long time. Not all that much happens to me these days, you know.

— I’m devoured by curiosity, about the secret.

— Don’t be. I think it has no consequences, it doesn’t count: don’t think about it.

— Like the white bear.

— Hmm?

— You know: if someone says, don’t think about the white bear. Then every time you try not to, you do. Isn’t that Tolstoy?

— This isn’t even a full-grown bear, she said. — It’s just a cub.

The next day Kate left Billie with Max at his office (‘she won’t be any trouble’) and went shopping in all her old favourite places. Max had said — she reminded him — that she looked awful; he must support her then, in recovering herself. She promised she would eat lunch, and did. She pleaded with her hairdresser, begged him to fit in an appointment to cut her hair: she paid him extra on top of how expensive he already was. She didn’t think about the white bear. She watched herself emerge out of bleakly bedraggled beginnings in the salon mirror, gossiping with Antony: she hadn’t been beautiful ever, but perhaps she was not too bad yet. The dramatic hollows and sharp points, crowded in the narrow face, could still be intriguing and seductive, hadn’t yet absolutely failed. She bought new shoes, although she’d told herself they were the one thing she really didn’t need. When she had thought she was finished and was looking out for a taxi, laden already with bags, they claimed her incontrovertibly from a shop window: dark pink soft leather trimmed in black, decorated with a black suede rose, impossibly totteringly high.

David awoke sweating from nightmares. They weren’t about avian flu or terrorist attacks or any of the things he was supposed to worry about at work. He was in a group of people conversing intently, whose words were somehow not audible to him except as blunt needles jabbing under his skin; or he was submerged in complex and frantic plots, carrying messages between people he’d never heard of.

— Are you leaving me? he had asked Suzie one evening, confronting her in the study where she was undressing for bed. — Is this marriage breaking up? Are you having a relationship with someone else?

— Please don’t come near me, she said, pulling her nightdress over her head with hasty hands, hiding herself: it didn’t seem to mean anything between them now that he’d seen her naked in her extremity, giving birth to their children.

— You have to talk to me, for Christ’s sake. Tell me what’s happening.

She wouldn’t look at him, she shrank away. — Please, she said. — Wait. I don’t know. I can’t talk about it yet. Don’t shout: the others will hear.

— Do you think they don’t know?

David hated it particularly that Jamie was a witness to the collapse in his marriage: he couldn’t meet the boy’s eyes, he winced at his physical presence in a room, as if Jamie had absorbed and was contemptuous of every twist in his father’s humiliation. When David lay awake in the small hours, Jamie’s quiet movements around the house agitated him as if they were his own fears, preventing him from sleeping; when he heard Jamie leave on one of his night bike rides to God knows where, he had to get out of bed and come downstairs to check he hadn’t left the house perilously wide open behind him. In fact the doors were always safely closed, Jamie was perfectly sensible about these things, even if he did leave his dirty dishes heaped in the sink. Evie asked David if he didn’t think there was something wrong with Jamie. He spent such long hours shut up alone in his room, not even playing his music. Surely, whatever he said, he couldn’t be reading books for all that time?