Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— Oh, that’s awful. I’ve done that same thing, tearing clothes off and on in front of the mirror, and nothing’s right. I mean, not the same thing, of course. But it is a kind of despair, I do understand it.

— And after all she was wearing her dressing-gown.

She made her voice small. — You mean when she died?

— Fell from a sort of tiny balcony, where people dried their washing. On the ninth floor.

— It couldn’t have been an accident?

— Oh no. The wall was up to here. He showed with his hand. — Quite safe for the child. For anyone. Pierced through, so that you could see out.

When he came home after dropping Evie off at the coach station, David went in search of his son: unusually the attic stairs were down. The chair was still where Jamie must have been standing on it to look out (perhaps he often did that), but he was at his desk, working on the old Mac Classic he’d had from Granny Bell years ago, when she’d replaced it. David had offered to buy him a new computer and arrange for Internet access up here, but Jamie didn’t want it. The little postcard-size black-and-white screen glowed in the gathering dusk, humming with importance, making grey the austere mess of the room, where the boy’s possessions were thrown around carelessly as if to show they didn’t have enough weight, yet, to tie him to the spot. Nothing was pinned on the sloping walls. David sat down on Jamie’s bed. He didn’t ask what he was working on, now that all his exams and school work were over — too many of his conversations with this son recently had seemed to be interrogations. Jamie stopped tapping keys and closed a document.

— I was wondering about that cycling trip, David said.

In the winter — David making an effort he had failed to live up to since — they had desultorily discussed going off together for a few days in the Beacons; David had a bike, newer and smarter than Jamie’s, shamefully less used.

— What, now? Jamie was puzzled rather than hostile.

— I could take a few days off work next week. I could do with a break.

The boy’s face was obscure in the shadows. David could still be taken aback by the bulk and broad shoulders of this child whose once-smallness, limbs tiny and perfect and quick, he could still imagine under his hands.

— I don’t know, said Jamie warily. — It’s not a good time for me.

— No?

David might have protested that Jamie — extraordinarily, surely — wasn’t doing anything whatsoever, not preparing for the college place he hadn’t applied for, not working to earn money.

— I’m kind of tied up here just at the moment, Jamie said.

David was relieved anyway: he was unfit, he wasn’t on form, probably he’d never have been able to keep up with his son on a bike. — Never mind then. It wasn’t important, just a thought.

— Though I suppose a bike trip might be OK: if it was just for a couple of days.

— Only if you were keen.

— I’ll think about it, shall I?

— Do you still have that duck?

— Duck?

— Groggy. Evie reminded me about it.

Jamie, obviously remembering it for the first time in years, looked around for a moment vaguely, as if his old toy might really be in one of his heaps of things. — I should think Suzie burned it, he said, but without rancour. — Wasn’t it a health hazard?

— You know, you should invite your friends round, David said.

Jamie was blank.

— We’d like it if you brought them here. Or girlfriend, if there is one.

— There isn’t one.

David guessed that Jamie reddened, though the light was so bad that he couldn’t be sure of it, and he felt remorse for embarrassing him all the way down the folding stairs: descent was noisy and comical, heads gliding out of sight through the trapdoor in stages. Jamie managed his exits in style, throwing himself in a twisting movement, one hand on the stair, from the third step, landing bent kneed with a single more or less muffled thump (the children were strictly forbidden to imitate this). Safe on the landing David paused, until he heard the typing resume. Jamie’s childhood diaries — the last a beloved five-year one with a gold padlock, only kept up for three — had once been given to his father to read; David had searched them in vain for signs of whatever inward misalignment had driven the little boy’s troubled outward life, his tantrums and obsessions. The diaries had been all hope and light: ‘We went to the park, it was good. We fed the ducks, it was a nice day. We came to Grany’s and I had chips.’ Now — David’s honour was impeccable in such matters, he was incapable of reading anyone else’s letters even left lying on a table, or looking in their opened e-mails — he would never know what his son had to write about.

He was surprised that he had told Evie about the clothes thrown all over Francesca’s flat: the picture was mostly one he warded off successfully (he didn’t think he’d ever told Suzie about it, and certainly not Jamie). That flat had been a bleakly ugly place, and while Francesca was still alive, for the months she lived there, he had blamed her in his thoughts (at that point they had hardly talked, they met to hand Jamie over) because she hadn’t made any effort to superimpose her own taste over the previous tenants’ dreadful brown and orange paint; it had seemed part of her wilfulness, her dramatised performance of suffering. When she was dead he thought he should have guessed what she would do, that the brown and orange paint had been a sign of it; which hadn’t made him any less angry. He and her mother together had had to empty the place out, sorting Francesca’s things from Jamie’s clothes and toys: he would have done it by himself, but Jane Bell insisted. She had chosen certain things of her daughter’s to keep, the rest they put into sacks for the charity shops. She had not broken down once all that day, that was the sort of woman she was; although she told him afterwards that it had taken seven years before she was ever surprised by happiness again, after Francesca’s death. ‘The funny thing was,’ she had said, ‘that although I knew she had meant to do it, I became terrified of accidents happening, to the other people I loved. I couldn’t not mind, that they weren’t safe. I mean, as nobody’s safe, that’s all.’

Without Jane Bell, in the time before Suzie moved in with him, David couldn’t ever have managed Jamie’s childcare while carrying on working for his Part One exams, and then as Senior Registrar. She was someone he admired uncomplicatedly; he didn’t see her more because he was afraid he bored her. He went out and watered the garden with the hosepipe in the dark. If he had been asked a few months ago, he would have said he was in essence a family man, bound up in those other lives overlapped with his; now he didn’t love his children any less, but felt his connection to them less permanent. His attention was newly drawn to those parts of himself that had been shrouded in abeyance, in the strong ordinary daylight of family fuss.

Kate found that after she had made love with Jamie she could fall asleep, without pills; not into her usual shallow nerve-racked half-doze, but an abandoned deep repose, voluptuous, full of dreams. One of the dreams — or an imagining that she had of herself curled up against him which drifted into a dream — was that his body lying on its side was a sheltering continent, the curve of it a great bay in which she was moored, hardly rocking on the sea-swell, safe. Once she was fastened there she could let herself fall down and away inside the strong ring of his arms, his breathing against her hair. Even that first night she’d slept, under the scratchy blankets. It was quite absurd, she thought, that out of all possible couplings this one — which also harrowed her with guilt, and seemed the most awful mistake — made her the gift of this peace. Max after all was so nice, everyone had approved of Max, she had approved of him herself; but distinctly she remembered that she had always had to jump up from his bed at a certain point as if it was intolerable, gritty or itching, or the sheets too rumpled; she had had to put on her dressing-gown, and find her cigarettes, and talk, or read her book. Often she fell asleep long after Max did, in one of his expensive Swedish posture chairs, with her feet tucked up under her.