Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

— You shouldn’t be going into school tomorrow.

— I want to, she said heavily without looking at him. — I’m really all right.

— I’ll give you a lift in, then.

— There’s no need. Menna’s picking me up. The new teacher, covering our maternity leave.

He expected her to tell him then what had really happened on the motorway, but she didn’t speak. They went to bed after David had watched Newsnight ; he lay trying to pick up the threads in the article on veterinary medicine he was supposed to be reading, listening to where water was sluicing noisily somewhere outside from a gutter blocked with leaves. Suzie was sorting piles of clean washing and putting them away. She was tidy and house-proud: the children had clean clothes every day, the airing cupboard was piled high with ironed sheets and towels. Even though the house when they bought it four years ago had been newly decorated, Suzie had redone every room since then. Her little touches were everywhere: curtain tie-backs, friezes pasted on the wallpaper, bowls of potpourri, carved acorn light-pulls, dishes of glass pebbles, thriving house plants. The children’s toys were tidied away each evening into labelled storage boxes. The only place Suzie hadn’t reached was Jamie’s attic: Jamie had said calmly once that he would leave home if ever she touched anything in there, and Suzie had agreed that if he wanted to live in a pit then who was she to interfere. All the transactions between these two had used to flare with violence, even though Suzie had looked after Jamie since he was small: things had been better recently. So the attic was bare and painted white without rugs or a blind on the skylight, and Jamie stacked his books in piles against the walls and kept his clothes in heaps and slept in dirty sheets he changed himself every few months.

Suzie finished putting things away and began to undress for her shower; she fumbled out of her clothes with her shoulder blades hunched as if she was uncomfortably aware of being watched. Usually she was blithely indifferent; the readiness with which she stripped had shocked him when they first slept together.

— Why didn’t you tell me about the swan? he asked, looking at her over the top of his reading glasses while she was smothered inside her T-shirt. When she pulled off the shirt, her hair still stiff with rain stuck up in a ruff around her face, as if she was roused against him.

— How did you know?

— You told Jamie.

— Did I? I don’t remember.

She sat down in her underwear on the end of the bed, hugging her arms around her chest, her long back bent, her near-nakedness private as a child’s.

— I’m sorry, he said. — I don’t mean to make you talk about it if it upsets you. All that matters is that you’re not hurt.

— You won’t like it, Suzie said.

— What won’t I like?

— What I felt I saw.

— Tell me. How could I mind?

She lifted her eyes; her face was cloudy with the effort of thought.

— When this thing came hurtling down out of the sky at me I thought it was Francesca.

— Oh, for God’s sake.

Francesca was David’s first wife, Jamie’s mother; Suzie had never known her. She had killed herself by jumping out of a window when Jamie was three, after leaving David and going to live on the ninth floor in a high-rise council block.

— I hadn’t been thinking about her. I never think about her. Then: thump, on my bonnet. Intuitively I just knew, it was her.

— That’s ridiculous.

— You see: I knew you’d hate it.

David took off his reading glasses and folded them. — I don’t feel anything about it except that it doesn’t mean anything. The mind throws up all kinds of rubbish when you’re in shock.

— She wasn’t rubbish.

He was patient, turning his eyes away. — I didn’t mean her, needless to say. I just meant, your making any kind of association between that and what happened to you today.

— We never talk about her.

He shrugged. — Why would we? What could there be to say, after all this time?

— You can’t imagine the force of the blow when it hit me, how heavily it fell: the whole car leaped, it leaped. Surely too heavy for a swan. And then everything went dark. I hadn’t time to think of any rational explanation.

— But now you know what the rational explanation was.

— Yes, I suppose so.

Irritation squeezed David like a fist: he had chosen Suzie just because she was sensible.

— You know so, he said absolutely.

— Yes. Suzie stood up, to go into the bathroom and take her shower.

— Did you talk about any of this stuff to Giulia?

She shook her head. — No, not to anyone.

And then, when she had showered and they had put out the bedside lights, Suzie fell easily asleep in spite of everything: on her side with her back to him and her knees drawn up, breathing lightly through her nose, radiating clean heat scented with whatever shampoo she’d used. David lay aridly awake. Long afterwards he heard Jamie dropping down from his trapdoor like a cat, prowling the house, helping himself to food in the kitchen, letting himself out at the front door with his bike; he cycled for hours at night and then slept half the day, probably missing classes at college. David tried to imagine how it would feel, to sleep and wake when you wanted to, to choose your life without thinking of anybody else, not to be broken in to the hard frame of adult necessity.

David and Suzie had first met in Regent’s Park. Neither of them had ever been there before or after that day, so it remained a bright free space in their imagination: sunlit stately walks, vistas down aisles of tall flowers, fountains splashing. David, who was working at that time at Guy’s, had had a free morning: he was wheeling Jamie in his pushchair. Suzie was in the second year of her teacher training at Goldsmiths, she was skipping lectures. Jamie was really too old for the pushchair, but he refused to walk anywhere: he would sit in it with his knees up almost to his chin, leaning keenly forward, weaving his old rag of yellow blanket into its ritual knot between his fingers, sucking its corner wrapped around his thumb, frowning out at the world from behind its safety. That morning in the park he hurt himself — probably he trailed his foot and David ran over it, that was always happening. Suzie was a tall fair girl in a sleeveless flowered dress, passing: David had only resented at first that she was witness to his shame, his helplessness, the screaming child. That year after Francesca’s death was the worst year of his life.

Suzie was eating an ice cream. She hesitated and looked at Jamie.

— Would he like some?

David had lifted him out of the pushchair and put him on a park bench to look at his foot (which was only bruised); Suzie sat down on the bench and held the ice-cream cone tentatively out.

— If you want it, she said, — you have to stop crying and come onto my knee.

Jamie had looked at her suspiciously, but then to David’s surprise climbed onto her lap; he wasn’t a child who cuddled easily, but he allowed himself to be hugged against her chest in return for licks of ice cream; his sobs subsided. Suzie’s freckled arms around him were awkward as if she wasn’t used to little children.

— I’m afraid he’ll make you sticky.

— I don’t care. This is only an old thing.

When David said then that her dress was pretty he was only politely anxious for it, he didn’t take much notice of women’s clothes; but Suzie misinterpreted. She’d only stopped in the first place, she told him afterwards, because she thought he was attractive.

— Where’s his mum? she asked, appraising David frankly.

That little scene, the child calmed and surrendered on her lap, hadn’t really been at all representative of what was to follow. Suzie had found mothering Jamie fraught and difficult, Jamie had not easily allowed her close. But in that decisive hour, Suzie’s uncomplicated openness had seemed to David like a door out of the dark maze of his troubles.