Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

She fell asleep herself, eventually, in her clothes, on the chaise longue: and woke to find Jamie standing a few feet away in the lamplight.

— The front door was open, he said.

— Was it?

— So I came in, although I hadn’t meant to. Are you still angry?

She didn’t lift her head to adjust her new apprehension of him, which had fear in it for the first time: he wasn’t exactly as she had been imagining him, or refusing to imagine. Even in the interval since she’d last seen him — was that two weeks ago? three weeks? — his presence had gathered density: he loomed, to her sideways perspective, her head still snuggled on the cushion, differently deliberate, taller, his hair pushed behind his ears as if for concentration, hands in his pockets, his roundish boyish face newly sharpened and marked, the creases under his eyes more deeply squeezed. She hardly knew him: he wasn’t what she remembered, he was more important. Of course if he was worth anything, he would be changed by what had happened.

— No, not angry. Careless of me, leaving the door open.

— I wanted to ask if we could go back to how we were before: me calling round, not too often; us just talking. Would that be possible?

— Is that what we did? She sat up, stretching with her arms above her head; she was wearing one of her new dresses, maroon, slippery, tight across her breasts. — Is that what you want?

He brought his hands out of his pockets and opened them. — Anyone could have come in, you know.

— You mean: and forced themselves upon me? That’s already happened once, hasn’t it?

He stared at the floor.

— It’s all right. She put out her hand towards his. Forgiven. You didn’t exactly force.

— I thought you’d be angry: you said never to come again.

He wouldn’t touch even her hand.

— Did I say never? Well, I didn’t mean ‘never’; not actually ‘not ever’.

— Oh. Humbly he nodded. — I didn’t know.

— You did: you see, you’re here. Anyway, perhaps I did mean never, when I said it.

— It’s been terrible, he confessed. — Thinking you meant it, and that I’d completely fucked up.

— So, is that what you want then, to be just friends?

— I don’t want to lose that.

— We weren’t very good friends, really. Not my idea of good friends. You’re too young to be my friend, exactly.

He exhaled noisily. Kate stood up — shoelessly short again, like last time — and fitted herself closely against his boy’s warm shape, inside his arms that closed around her raggedly, timidly; she pretended to herself that the difference in their mass — his overwhelming hers, making her tiny — blotted out other asymmetries. She pushed away his hair from his forehead with both her hands to smile up at him, framing his face; his eyes under their curved hooding bluish lids stared back, unreadable. Out of her adult experience, she was in command; she mustn’t let him know how powerful his reserves of youth were. She took him upstairs into the master bedroom; Billie wouldn’t come looking for them, she superstitiously never went in there. Kate had thought of that bed beforehand, but hadn’t made it up with sheets in case she tempted bad luck, so they made love tangled in damp dusty scratchy blankets and a silk counterpane, naked on the old sour-smelling striped flock mattress. Under reaching fingers at some point Kate found unexpectedly the polished hard convexities of the carved headboard, its cornucopia of spilled fruit. She had pulled up the blinds, and their shoulders and his long back were silvered sometimes by moonlight: the moon was huge, full, operatic, reflected in the lake. Jamie was somewhat better at it all this time, with her help, although so shy, and making touching efforts of concentration; she gratified him with little noises of pleasure. Her own naked, sexual self surprised her, exposed again; it had been buried recently under such rubble of complications.

— This has to be our secret, she made clear. — This isn’t a relationship, in the daytime. I have to trust you that no one will ever, ever know that this has happened, even after I’m dead.

— You won’t be dead, he said reassuringly, as if he could promise that.

EVIE’S GOING HADN’T been discussed; and then was suddenly precipitated in a flurry of calls on her mobile, which she took hurrying out of the room, then murmuring subduedly, jackknifed on her heels on the patio or in the hall, crouched over nursing her words as if they were dragged out of her in painful cramps. Then, after all, she wasn’t going back to whoever it was she spoke to for those long sessions (Suzie said, ‘another one of her all-too-married men’), but was flying out instead to spend a week with their parents in Spain.

— You must be mad, said Suzie shortly. — I’d rather spend a week in a police cell. In fact that’s probably where you’ll end up. Don’t get involved in any of their scams, don’t bring anything back for them in your suitcase. Don’t lend them any money.

— It’ll be Spain, said Evie. — I can just toast mindlessly on the beach, can’t I?

— It’ll be too hot to go out of doors.

— I want to make a new start.

— I suppose those have always been their speciality.

— They’re getting older, you know, Evie said apologetically.

Suzie drove down with the children to the Gower chalet: it was the first week of the school holidays, and she and David had talked about the possibility of his going with them, catching the train back in time for work on Monday, as politely as if they were seriously considering it. Hours after the others had left, he looked up from his e-mails in the study and saw that Evie, finished packing, had gone to smoke at the bottom of the garden; she observed the house rules exaggeratedly scrupulously, though David didn’t care about smoking as he used to. A clematis that Suzie had planted and then neglected drooped against the rawly new larch fencing; Evie on the bench with her head tilted back among its leaves waved up at the house; Jamie must have hailed her from his skylight. It was a muffled grey evening, with a warm wind stirring up in fits and starts; the garden roses glowed garishly and the brown soil, brought in for the beds when the houses were built, was parched around their roots. David wandered out to sit with Evie, stopped her grinding out her half-smoked cigarette.

— I ought to turn the hose on this lot, he reflected without much interest.

She looked at him kindly with her blue used crinkled eyes, and he thought she might say something about his marriage, but she didn’t. Perhaps she was afraid of her younger sister: Suzie’s bright contemptuous glance flashed sometimes these days with a glint that made David think of a sword or a gun. She made her entrances and exits as if, all the time she was home, she had to be braced heroically, enduring something difficult. He had to try hard to remember all those ordinary years when they had seemed to be coexisting affectionately enough. Evie’s attention was drawn up again to Jamie’s skylight, open wide, and his head framed in it, leaning on his arms: he must be standing on a chair. David wondered what you could see from up there.

— Such a nice kid, Evie said. — Jamie. Remember when he had that awful duck he took everywhere, he wouldn’t let it go into the wash.

— Called Groggy. David had forgotten. — Smelled groggy too.

— Poor little thing: I mean, what he was like then.

— Yes.

— You were very patient with him. Now, he’s gorgeous. You don’t often mention his mother. How could she do what she did? Jamie wasn’t actually there, in that flat, at the time?

— No. She’d left him at her mother’s. She was supposed to be feeling better: going to a friend’s party. Who knows when she changed her mind? Actually, the flat was full of her clothes all over the place. She was always untidy, especially when she was depressed. But it looked as if she might have been trying things on, thinking of going out.