Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— I have to speak to my wife.

Neil didn’t move from where he blocked the way. — She’s not here.

— Suzie! David bellowed past him. — Suzanne!

A female shape moved into the shadows where a door opened at the end of the hall (which was lit only by a dim bulb in a pink shade). Too slight for Suzie; he made out the pale oval of Menna’s face. — You don’t have any right to come bursting in here, she enunciated in cold condemnation; the South Walian in him discriminated vindictively against her adenoidal North Wales accent. David had never been in a fight in his whole life: he knew that he wouldn’t have a chance against Neil if it actually came to that. Neil was short and slim but wiry, he laboured all day out of doors, everything about him suggested the alert force of the capable male, kept decently in reserve. David pushed past him clumsily nonetheless: the little narrow hall, dreadfully wallpapered, with pinned-up shawls and posters, was just as he would have imagined it, even down to its smell of dirty landlord’s carpet overlaid with incense.

— Neil, said Menna. — Let him, if he wants to. We’ve got nothing to hide.

— You can take our word for it, mate, said Neil, not offensively. — She isn’t here. We haven’t seen her for a week.

David was sure immediately that they were telling the truth. Yet in a parade of angry expectation he had to storm about, searching, slamming open all the doors of the secretive little house; he even ran noisily upstairs, blundered into a bathroom whose walls were stencilled with flowers, switched on blaring central bulbs in two little den-bedrooms made for lamplight, draped with patchwork, scarves and beads, reflected in mirrors. More dignified than he was, they didn’t even follow him: Menna made a sign to Neil. Everywhere in the house was surprisingly neat, in its junk-shop way. Whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t here. Eventually he came to rest in their kitchen, breathing heavily, drooping, propped with his knuckles resting on the little table where they had been eating when he came pounding at their door: their soup, which looked like lentils, was getting cold in green pottery bowls (he remembered what he’d cooked for the children and felt reproached). He considered upsetting the soup bowls wildly onto the floor, but didn’t do it.

— Then where is she?

— If I did know I wouldn’t tell you, Menna said. — But to simplify matters, as it happens, I don’t. She must have been at Ladysmith today: why don’t you ask them? We haven’t seen her for a week. She doesn’t live here, you know: she’s just a friend. We don’t insist on knowing her whereabouts.

— Then is there someone else?

— Someone else? She mocked. — I don’t know what you mean.

— She didn’t turn up at school today.

Menna shrugged, but not without curiosity. — We’re not her keepers. Clearly you imagine you are.

— I’m the father of her children, he said. — If she’s gone, I only want to know it.

— If she’s gone, Menna said, — I’m not surprised.

— What rubbish has she been telling you? What half-baked idea do you think you have, about our life?

The following evening Suzie rang him in the middle of the after-supper clearing-up (pasta, with sauce out of a jar).

— David, how dare you?

— How dare I what? he said dully: even passion seemed to have reduced itself to drudgery. He had an apron tied around his waist; he had had a difficult day at work, too, and would be up until after midnight with bits and pieces he had to finish on the computer.

— Go round and make a scene at my friends’ house.

— Oh that. So they did know where you were.

— No, I happened to phone them, they told me you’d been there: said you crashed around the house as if I was hidden in it somewhere. They thought it was just funny, but I was embarrassed for you.

— So where are you?

— I’m at Evie’s, for the moment.

— All I want to know, he said, — is what to tell the kids. We’d better start to talk to them about it. We need to meet, to put this separation on a proper footing. And you ought to talk to Giulia, unless you’re throwing over your job along with everything else.

— I don’t know if it’s a separation. Don’t talk to them yet.

— As far as I can see: you’ve separated from us.

— David: give me a bit more time? I’m not sure. And I have talked to Giulia. I’m going to go back to Ladysmith next week.

— The children keep asking when you will be home.

— I know. Don’t make me feel worse.

— Why not?

— I suppose I do see that you’ve got no reason not to.

— What happened? he said. — Everything seemed to be all right. What was the matter?

Her silence was substantial. — Wait, she made audible, at the end of a long effort. — Wait, please.

After he put the phone down he returned to scraping plates and filling the dishwasher. At one point when he nudged the full rubbish bin out of his way with his foot, it tipped over, spilling out eggshells and bean tins and muck onto the floor. Then he kicked with all his weight at the door of the cupboard under the sink, so that his foot went right through its flimsy tongue-and-groove panelling, splintering it. The children and Jamie came running from the snug and stared at the hole.

Kate settled down to her translating work. She tried to imagine this as the new shape of her days, sitting down every morning at her childhood desk with her books spread around her, turning on her computer. Perhaps the time had come for her to live more quietly. She felt as if she had shut a door behind her, anyway, on all her years teaching and researching at Queen Mary; she should have left earlier, before she grew so tired of it. There was no going back inside that world. While she worked she was gathering ideas for her introduction: she wanted to write about the particular qualities of Russian nineteenth-century pastoral, suggesting significant contrasts with Mickiewicz and the Polish tradition. Perhaps she should think more about that kind of writing, for the future. It wouldn’t be bad, to try and make a bit of a name for herself in some kind of literary journalism.

While she was working one day Jamie telephoned, to ask what she was doing in the afternoon.

— Impossible, I’m afraid, she said with the briskness she had adopted for all her relations with him that weren’t tender or sensual: it helped her demonstrate, for her honour, that they weren’t a real couple, connected in the ordinary atmosphere. — I’m taking Billie round for tea with a friend of hers.

— Then come out to the café to meet me while she’s there.

— I’m working. By myself, at home.

— Come to the café, please. There’s a reason.

Through Jamie’s boyishness and shyness she felt his force uneasily sometimes: he would become a man who expected his suggestions to be taken up. When Kate arrived at the café he was sitting with his back to the door, chatting across the table with a bent tall woman, her long aged face naked of make-up; a grizzled rope of dyed-red hair was pinned round above her brows, defiantly stylish in disregard of fashion, like her bright and clashingly red wool poncho. It only took Kate quick moments to recognise — in spite of a twenty-year gap since they’d last met — Francesca’s mother. Kate hadn’t gone to Francesca’s funeral, hadn’t been in London at the time (dragged transatlantic by a hectic affair with a Chicago professor), hadn’t known about the death even until Carol told her in a letter. Her last memory of Jane Bell was from graduation, when the gang had gone out to eat after the ceremony with parents disconcertingly along. Billie with her hair up, in her little Hardy Amies suit (older, always, than the other parents), had been a porcelain doll beside ugly flamboyant Jane, who smoked cigarillos and used the word ‘fuck’ loudly (not only for swearing but, more shocking, meaning sexual intercourse). Even in pink crumpled denim, hair home-cropped and dyed carrot-colour, bead earrings dangling, Jane had assumed possession of the restaurant and the waiters had deferred to her. She had taken Billie under her wing (London in those days made Billie shy), and Kate had resented Francesca for it. Francesca’s flame had burned sulkily around her mother’s brightness. Perhaps Billie and Jane commiserated over the times they’d had, bringing up difficult daughters.