Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

David prudently, luckily, whatever the others had advised, had booked them in advance into pubs where they could eat and sleep; these turned out to be packed full and turning away holidaymakers, who cast regretful desiring looks around the calculatedly enticing oaky nooks, flagged floors, red-shaded lamps, wall-displays of old farming implements; the cooking aromas were more likely to be boeuf bourgignon or Thai chicken than lobscouse. After their physical exertions they succumbed in the evenings to an exhaustion that felt to David sensually velvety, unlike the parched one that came from long days in the office; they ate and drank greedily. David didn’t know what, if they’d been alone, he and Jamie would have found to talk about for all those hours. Bryn — replete, expansive, delighted to be out of the house, triumphant at his proved cycling potency — ranged round a roomy, archaic masculinity, in his accent resonant as a bell: they talked rugby, politics, medicine until they were felled by sleep. Bryn was moderate Old Labour with Plaid sympathies; David was cautiously Liberal Democrat. Jamie said he didn’t know what his politics were: smiling evasively, with his hair hanging into his face, he drew signs on the table in the beer that he had slopped. Bryn courted his wayward grandson more assiduously than he had ever made up to the steady son who picked his way in Bryn’s oversize footsteps.

— At your age shouldn’t you be wanting to change the world?

— I’d be useless at it.

— We never stopped to ask if we’d be any good at it, we just wanted to defeat capitalism.

— I don’t like capitalism all that much.

— But it looks as if it’s here to stay, said David.

Theatrically Bryn put his head in his hands. — We’ll have to start the revolution, then, without you two.

Suzie (who had been all in favour of the holiday) had told David not to go on about what Jamie was going to do next; Bryn enquired so tenderly that Jamie didn’t mind it, in that best flirtatious manner he had reserved for the lady patients who adored him, looking coyly over the top of his glasses brought out for reading the menu.

— I can’t make up my mind whether to go to university.

— Whether to go? said David, dismayed. — I thought you just weren’t sure which subject to take.

— He doesn’t care for our kind of hard empirical knowledge. He’s going to be a poet, don’t you think? ‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’?

— Who says ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’?

— Don’t they teach you anything at school these days? It’s Shelley. He’s probably gone out of fashion, like revolution.

— Anyway, I’ve never written any poetry.

— I used to write poetry, said Bryn.

— What kind of poetry, Grandpa?

— Lugubrious, probably.

— Jamie, are you seriously thinking that you might not go?

— It’s different in arts subjects. I could take out a year or two — you know, just messing about — and still get back in if I wanted to.

— Messing about?

— He means, supplied Bryn, — messing about the world. That’s what they all do.

— Or here. I could get a job.

David was taken aback. — I thought you were so eager to get away from here. What kind of job? You’d soon be bored.

— I might not be.

— Results come out next week, said Bryn, who couldn’t resist being interested in the competition. — He’ll do well, I suppose?

— I don’t know, said Jamie. — I can hardly remember what I wrote. It seems like I did them in another life.

The window draped in net curtains was cut into the two-foot thickness of wall (the place must be very old); beyond it the light descended through a scale of brilliant blues. A restless force radiated off the boy that was not merely the stored heat of the day; every so often he jumped up to go outside without explanation. No doubt he was smoking (his clothes smelled of it when he came back in), or he might have been trying to get a signal on his mobile, to make a call out from the obliterating folds of the valley. They understood that he was consumed by the exulting moment of his youth, driving him up the hills in those exertions where he couldn’t tell himself apart from his labouring body. How could he care, what happened next?

On their last evening they all drank too much; Bryn waxed confessional about his marriage, tempestuously monogamous for forty-five years, still — David wasn’t sure he wanted to know this — sexual. David clammed up about his two, both failures he felt sure now, disasters: although even as he gave them mentally up he thought how much he liked women, how he preferred their company, yearned for it, missed it. He remembered also how when he’d first brought Francesca home to meet his parents she’d come climbing (still in her besotted phase) into his bed in the middle of the night, and he’d been made quite impotent by the idea of his father on the other side of the wall. Bryn was buying them all whiskies as well as beer. Jamie wouldn’t be drawn by his grandfather’s teasing, he wouldn’t say if he had a girlfriend; then somehow those two ended up at the pool table, Jamie winning easily, loser buying the next round. After the whisky David had to be sick (for the second time in a few weeks: he’d been sick on Suzie’s birthday too, he who never drank too much); he sat on his bed in the strange room with his head in his hands. Jamie brought him a pint glass of water.

— Drink this, Dad. You’ll feel better for it in the morning.

He touched him on the shoulder. David felt the strong warmth of his son’s hand through his shirt and his skin’s clammy reaction to the alcohol; it was so comforting that he was embarrassed to feel tears pricking into his eyes, although Jamie couldn’t see them. They shared a room; Jamie still slept as he always had done, on his belly with his arms flung out, his head pushed half under his pillow.

Jamie and Kate took Billie walking in the park, in all the crowds. The flower beds had been planted up with blocks of astonishing shocking-pink, lemon-yellow, vermilion; the lake was jammed with boats; there were wilting queues in the play area for the slides and the swings; rapacious garden enthusiasts carried nail scissors surreptitiously in their pockets, for cuttings.

— Fair-weather park lovers, Kate said. — They should be here when we are, when it’s miserable and wet leaves are blowing about, and everything growing has died or gone underground.

Billie in her pretty cornflower dress looked around her surprised, but ready to be enchanted. — We do live here, darling, don’t we? she said doubtfully. — This is our park?

— Mummy: you’ve never lived anywhere else.

Kate wouldn’t buy Billie ice creams from the van, she said they were made of whale-oil. A gaggle of Muslim girls photographing each other in a triangle of shade between three trees — some in headscarves, some without, one in a baseball cap — gave off almost a hum, like bees, of steady energetic pleasant chatter; one, hurrying away, checked her face hastily (perfect) in a tiny mirror. Billie wanted to sit down to rest: as they entered the rose garden to find a bench, a girl coming out had a creamy-orange rose against her hair, above her ear.

— Of course you looked at her, Kate said, as soon as they were as alone as was possible, keeping Billie in sight, inspecting the beds where the bare soil was grim between the grizzled old leggy rose-bushes, for all their blooming.

Jamie was amiably blank. — At who?

— Whom. The girl with the rose.

— Oh: I suppose she’d picked it here. She shouldn’t have, do you mean?

— People will think you’re my son, Kate said. — Or my nephew. I might be your mother’s sister, keeping an eye on you, childless myself, slightly forbidding. Do you mind?