Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

Sometimes Jamie must have slept too; but mostly when Kate did come awake, like swimming up from deep water, she found he was watching over her. Then in her sleepy state she would slide languidly into making love again, yielding to it as an extension of dreaming. Probably Jamie made up for his wakefulness, sleeping all day at home: he had nothing else to do. What had happened was a revelation for him — moored against him, she was his new continent. She could remember first discovering at his age, hidden inside ordinary life, the bliss of sex, running counter to everything else experience was teaching, the bustling commonsensical entropic drive. Jamie really wasn’t doing anything else in his life apart from his relation with her: she was impressed, although she took care not to show it. No wonder his father worried about him. He had friends he liked, but she guessed that he didn’t tell them much about himself: he said they didn’t share his tastes in books and films, that mostly what they did together was drugs; they listened to music, they went dancing at certain (superior) clubs in town. ‘We joke about things,’ he said. ‘Already, we’re reminiscing together over our school-days.’ He made music on a computer (what he called music, not her kind) with one of them, the ginger-haired boy she’d met.

She asked who he’d had sex with before her, and made him tell her in detail about the two girls his own age, both at parties, neither time very successful or satisfying. What were their names? she wanted to know. What did they look like? How do you get on with them now? What about the one I met in the café? Did you ever have any homosexual experiences? He had a pent-up articulacy, unpractised, bookish; obediently he told her everything. She was pleased with his irony, forgiving himself his inexperience without angst, but keen to leave it behind.

— I’ll bet lots of the girls like you, she said. — You’re just the type. With your private life only showing in little clues and signs, just enough for someone to make a cult of. Cruelly indifferent, just because you’re not trying to be. Your lovely wide child’s face: thick curdy skin, like a hero in a fairy tale, gleaming in expectancy, waiting to be marked. When you’re a man it will be a moody face, d’you know that? People close to you will watch it nervously.

— Curdy? he wondered, smiling into her face close to his, stroking her skin with his finger.

— Curds and whey. Creamy. It’s a thing nobody eats any more, we only know about it from nursery rhymes. I would have liked you desperately, if you’d been in my sixth-form class. I would have done everything, awfully, misguidedly, to catch your attention and impress you, and you’d have been disgusted at my showing off, embarrassed for me.

— It’s rubbish, he said. — I would have liked you. I would have known. But I’m glad you’re not a girl.

— They’re awful, aren’t they?

He frowned, perplexed how to answer; but only pleasurably. He didn’t wish she talked less in bed: some men had. — Not awful. But perhaps: chaotic.

— You see? How cruel you would have been? Chaotic: that was it, exactly.

— How many lovers have you had? he asked her once, shyly.

— After a certain point one stops counting. It wouldn’t be dignified.

Another time he asked, in a pause in their lovemaking: —What do you think of me?

— Think of you? I don’t think I’m thinking exactly, at this moment.

— No, but. When you do think, what do you think?

— Well: try to imagine how ignorant you seem to me.

— Oh. He was disconcerted.

— It’s not reproach; just a way of describing the deserts of distance between us. I don’t only mean things in books, although I do mean those.

— And I suppose by the time I catch up with you, you’ll know more: you’ll always be ahead.

Kate laughed. — It doesn’t work like that. By the time you catch up with me I’ll be an old woman.

She always made him go before it was light because it was tolerable somehow — even touching — to watch him dressing in the almost-dark, belting his jeans and tying up his trainers with unconscious grace; in the daylight she couldn’t have borne it.

— When can I come back? he asked before he left: flatly, humbly, so she knew that in between times he only waited. — Tonight?

— Not tonight, she said. — I’m busy. Not tomorrow. Thursday, maybe. Come in the evening and play the piano: Billie misses you. Then we’ll see.

— Thursday. OK.

Left alone that first morning, seeing the welter of blankets knotted with the counterpane, she had been afraid that Buckets and Mops would guess more than she wanted them to know about what had happened, when they came to clean; in the dawn light, wrapped in her kimono, she stripped old Sam’s bed down to the striped lumpy mattress and made it up again properly, the cat winding obstructively around her feet or jumping into the sheets as she spread them. In the airing cupboard there were tall piles of clean white linen sheets, smoothly ironed from the laundry, the laundry mark written with indelible ink in every corner; shaking them out she saw that they were full of holes, or worn thin as tissue in places. They smelled of bitter damp; the smell of semen, that she was aware of when she spread out the blankets, seemed clean and youthful by contrast. When she was a teenager, that new male smell had been associated proudly for her with triumphs of initiation; in her adult relationships she seemed to have forgotten to notice it. In those promiscuous teenage years Kate had set herself an appalling kind of game, to try to have sex in every room in Firenze. She’d run out of interest in the game, or never achieved it anyway, before she went off to university and different quests. Certainly she couldn’t remember ever making love in Sam’s master bedroom before; perhaps she’d held it off for last, because the room seemed daunting, haunted.

Somehow, on the bicycle trip that was meant to be an occasion for David’s healing his estrangement from his son, Bryn invited himself along. David was incandescently angry with his father for about an hour on the evening before they set out, but Bryn didn’t even realise that he minded; he brought round maps and sat planning with them at the kitchen table in transparent boyish enjoyment. In his cycling helmet Bryn looked — Jamie said — like an ancient Celt, long white hair sticking out all round; under his ungainly too-short shorts, zipped tight round the out-thrust belly, the huge knees and ropey calves made his light racing bike comically insubstantial in contrast. They had reduced the distances they planned to cover for Bryn’s sake, and as it turned out David was grateful; Jamie seemed to idle effortlessly while the two of them laboured and sweated. Freewheeling downhill, Bryn bellowed out Welsh hymns or extracts from the Bach oratorio he was rehearsing with his choir, and Jamie joined in with loud hootings; on the long uphills Bryn and David got off and walked, while Jamie, standing up on his pedals, legs pumping in a low gear, strove all the way to the top.

A tiny window of perfect weather had opened for them, between too hot and too wet; the freshest and best of the summer was past but David liked the lush, fagged, despoiled late season. The hedgerows, machine-cut, showed a coarse stubble of broken stalks; the cruder flowers thrived, escapes of rapeseed blazed from the hillside, frothy rank slews of rosebay willowherb or Himalayan balsam flourished on waste ground or in mud. A small red deer scrambled, ungainly in its fear, up a steep bank; a fox glanced back in contempt over a gingery-fierce shoulder; they swerved, hitting the stink before they saw it, round a rotting badger corpse. With sagging wings and drooping undercarriage a hawk uplifted from a post so that its updraught seemed to cut David’s cheek; plunging from dry heights into the hollow beside a river, submersion in its cool ripe dung smell was ecstatic.