Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— Oh, I know. Women are so duplicitous. When men make houses, we’re very glad to scurry inside them, to keep warm.

When Carol retired to the kitchen to make the required assortment of coffees and herb teas, the arrangement around the table broke up in relief; Colin and Angharad sank into the sofa at the other end of the room and the sounds of their mild conversation rose over its back. Carol turned up the music (Elvis Costello still, unbelievably, after all these years). Only Kate and David stayed in their places, separated by the ruins of the meal: collapsed cake, smeared plates, empty glasses.

— All those centuries of struggle, he said reproachfully. — Women campaigning for their rights. To vote, for instance.

— Well, I don’t vote, said Kate. — It was wasted on me.

— You’re not serious?

— Haven’t ever. Never even registered. Darling Billie does, for all she’s seriously senile. God knows who she votes for: Natural Law Party, perhaps? Or Plaid Cymru. Something from fairyland.

— You’re not serious. I’m no good, I know, at being playful.

— It started in the old days: I was a Trotskyite then, and no party was revolutionary enough.

— Now?

— Maybe the same thing. Or its opposite: no party is conservative enough. No party is interesting enough, anyway.

— Kate. It was as if he made a huge effort, although he only leaned forward across the table. He was wearing a dark blue shirt, unironed, with the sleeves rolled up; she noticed the dark hair on his brown forearms. — I wish we weren’t quarrelling. I’m not really that interested in voting either.

She put down her unlit cigarette and lighter heavily on the tablecloth, still without looking in his face. — Are we quarrelling?

— I don’t know. Are we? But I would always like to be frank with you.

— That’s usually bad news. That’s usually when people are going to say something horrible.

— Nothing horrible.

— Then it makes me feel sad. Because I’m not the sort of person people want to be frank with.

— Aren’t you? Well, perhaps me neither. Don’t feel sad.

Abruptly Kate stood up, scooping her things into her bag. — Actually I have to go. I promised my Billie-sitter.

David stood up too, in consternation. — But you’ve hardly been here an hour. Surely they’ll be all right for a bit longer.

She picked up some silly kid gloves that had been part of her dressed-up look. She had found them in a drawer in Firenze and they had made her too hot on the way over. Bending over them, she struggled to do up the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on the inside of the wrists. — I shouldn’t have come out in the first place.

— I’ll give you a lift.

— No, really, I’d rather walk. Carol: do you hear? I’m going. For what it’s worth, she said to David, flinging her wrap over one shoulder, — I can’t bear to quarrel with you either. We are good friends, aren’t we?

Kate gave David her hand, snatched it back, scrabbled off the glove, and gave him her bare fingers, in token of her sincerity; he grasped them hard. Carol came out from the kitchen protesting, wiping a mug with a tea towel. No one but them would have noticed anything happening.

ON THE FIRST day of the new school term, Giulia telephoned just as David came through the door from work.

— Is Suzie there? she said.

— I don’t think so.

— She hasn’t been in today. Do you know what’s up?

— Hasn’t been in?

— Hasn’t even rung, all day. I mean, I know she’s been going through a bit of a time recently, but I’ve had a whole class without their teacher, on the first day of term, with a new pupil intake and two new members of staff. I could have done without it. Is she ill? David?

The lights were all pointlessly on in the kitchen, even though it was still bright day outside. On the counters there was a mess of chocolate milk and scrapings from burned toast; the margarine tub had been ravaged, its lid was on the floor, greasy side down.

— I did speak to her last night, he said. — She wasn’t here, she called: she was making sure Jamie could pick the kids up. I didn’t ask where she was calling from.

— Listen, I’m sorry.

— It didn’t occur to me she wouldn’t be at school today.

— David, if there’s anything that we can do to help. Do you mean she’s actually walked out?

— She hasn’t said so. But I suppose she’s just done it.

Giulia sighed helplessly.

— What about the other girl? David asked. — Menna?

— Oh, she’s finished here. It was only a maternity leave, she finished in the summer. Do you think that’s where Suzie is?

— I don’t know.

— She’s bound to be in touch.

— I’ll let you know.

In the snug they had drawn the curtains against the daylight. The television capered weakly, the children hardly looked up as he peered in; Jamie was extended longways on the sofa, Hannah sitting under his raised knees, Joel at his head, with an arm thrown carelessly across his big brother’s chest; like somnambulants they gazed at the screen. David too felt as if, in spite of the sunshine, only one small swinging lamp of his consciousness was alight in a huge inert darkness. He put sausages to cook under the grill, opened tins of baked beans, cut his hand on the sharp edge of one of them, leaked surprising thin wet blood onto the bread. There wasn’t enough bread for them all, and when he looked into the freezer there wasn’t any left in there either. Hannah at some point planted herself, pouting, in the kitchen doorway and asked where Mummy was.

— Not here, he said shortly.

— Doesn’t she even live in this house any more or something?

— Don’t ask me.

Later, he thought, he would address all this with the children properly and as his better self. Little jets of fat shot out from the sausages and blazed up under the grill.

— Only I’ve got bottom problems, Hannah said, — that you can’t deal with.

He was wearily solicitous, putting down his fork. — I’m a doctor, remember? I’m sure I can help.

— Don’t worry, she said gloomily, stumping off upstairs. — I’ll be just fine.

He picked up his fork again. After a fairly long while she stumped down, and he forgot to ask if that meant her problems were over. They had their food in front of the telly; he sat with them to eat through his heavy plateful, although afterwards he couldn’t remember what he’d watched; he imagined the fatty food dissolving sourly in his stomach, sending spurts of acid into his oesophagus, squeezing his heart. He piled up the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Instead of talking to the children properly, he left Jamie in charge and drove out to the place in Splott where he had dropped Suzie off earlier that summer, after Kate Flynn’s party; miraculously he knew the way, didn’t make a single wrong turn, as if the little cottage in its close-nestled row behind overgrown gardens had lurked waiting for him all the time beneath his conscious thoughts. Shapes were silhouetted in the dusk-light against a clear sky like an eye stretched wide just before it shut; he could see that the wildness of the gardens, which he had remembered dense with foliage as miniature forests, only consisted in fact of broken sofas, concrete, buddleia, a fallen wall, a garage sunk under its weight of ivy. The fanlight above the front door through which Suzie had disappeared shone feebly yellow, as last time.

Children still played out in the streets round here, as if they’d seen through the taming effects of PlayStation: a gang circled on bikes, shouting to one another, two boys to a bike, the front one standing to pedal, the one behind with his legs splayed wide; wheeling past they turned their heads, taking what might have been a sinister interest in him. He got out of the car and locked it behind him, scowling at the boys; then strode up the path, pushing through dense bristling shrubs that blocked his way. Of course there wasn’t a straightforward front-door bell, only a sellotaped-on note that said absurdly ‘Knock three times’: so he hammered with his fist, then both fists. When the door yielded and Neil stood warily, holding it half open, David pushed forward across the threshold.