Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

Jane’s eyes now, alert in her rather shockingly fallen face, registered Kate’s entrance benignly blankly, all her focus on the loved boy opposite. Her hunched shoulders and bent back (she’d always had a tall woman’s bad posture), straining forward, expressed the intensity with which she took him in. The bell above the café door clanged behind Kate and Jamie looked round anxiously, waved to her. She wouldn’t forgive him for springing this occasion on her; it was like his indifference to decorum. He was regretting it already, she could tell.

— Granny, do you remember Kate?

Jane Bell stared kindly enough, but she didn’t: how could she have seen that sour half-born girl, anyway, in a middle-aged woman? She put out a big loose-skinned freckled hand.

— One of Jamie’s teachers?

— I would have liked to teach him, Kate said. — He’s supposed to be very clever.

— He is. It’s all right, you know, for me to boast about him: it’s allowed to grandparents. He’s done very well in his A levels.

— So I hear.

— She’s Francesca’s friend, Granny. And Carol’s: they were all at UCL together.

— Oh, Kate Flynn! said Jane, remembering at once and not squeamish at the opening of the past. — Of course. As you came through the door some familiarity did nudge me, but at my age I’m assailed by those all the time, I’ve learned to take no notice.

— I wanted you to see her, Jamie said. — To see if you remembered.

— Well, I do now. His grandmother smiled, at him: she too had that mouth with its loose louche lower lip.

— We’ve been doing some extra reading together, Kate said.

— He’s a nice boy, said Jane when he went to buy coffees.

Kate was bland. — He is.

— My heart’s treasure. At first because of Francesca; but actually it’s just him, we rub along, he and I. You’ve struck up contact through Carol, I suppose? I’m glad you’ve given him extra help. The college wasn’t very good: I offered to pay, but David’s delicate. One hates the private system, but what to do? I had the idea from Carol, though, that you were teaching in London somewhere.

Kate explained lightly, holding as much of herself as possible back from notice. In the other woman’s face, its white skin dramatically puffy and marked as if out of a grand carelessness, she saw a puzzle of adjustment: Jane could not have expected her daughter’s contemporaries to have stayed twenty-six, but she was obviously disconcerted, picking up Kate’s life, not to feel that it was still all ahead of her. Kate had a chilly vision of herself on the slope down from summits that had hardly happened.

— Is David all right? she asked Jane, while Jamie was paying at the counter. — Carol was worrying about him. Things seemed to be difficult at home.

— I’m not staying there. I always stay with Bryn and Betty, the dears: we took to one another, in spite of everything. I do hope nothing’s wrong at David’s: I thought this time he’d chosen the right girl.

— He ought to be happy.

— Yes. Though possibly happiness is not his strong suit: he’s rather in earnest, isn’t he?

Bringing their coffees, Jamie asked his grandmother if she had ever seen Kate’s house: she didn’t think so. Kate guessed he was at a loss quite what to do with his two women now he’d brought them together; he must when he planned it have wanted to test his secret, by having it touch something in his other life. Fatally, he couldn’t stop himself describing the rooms of the house, so that scenes that had taken place in there seemed to float horribly between them at the table: to deflect him Kate talked about her grandparents, the migration from the East, the haberdashery shops, the house built for a dynasty.

— We have a turret even. I always feel, for lookout: my grandfather couldn’t believe he’d really got away.

— Did you know your grandparents?

Kate shook her head. — We’re hardly a family at all. We’ve heard distant rumours of one another. I’ve seen photographs. My father died young, so I never knew him. There’s only Billie and me: not enough to count, really. We’re just two individuals powerfully attached. What about your family?

— God, they procreate, they’re a tribe: awful in its own way. I have seven grandchildren. But you should go back, visit Vilnius. Such an interesting place.

— Oh: have you been there? I’m not sure there would be much left for me to connect with.

— She’s been everywhere, Jamie said.

— I think Jamie ought to travel, Jane said. — Don’t you? Only now mysteriously he wants to stay on here. I know he’s busy writing something.

— There’s a lot going for Cardiff, Kate said in a hurry. — Asian immigration mixing with the descendants of the coal miners. You can walk out to a concert. Everywhere, living in these provincial cities, you meet people you know; there’s one good café in town everybody goes to. In the suburbs, the last vestiges of the old tranquillised routine.

— Not provincial strictly, Jamie said. — It’s a capital.

— Time for a change is all I meant, said Jane.

They walked afterwards through the park, because Jane suggested it, to see Kate’s house from the outside. Kate didn’t know what desperate defence she might have mounted, if Jane had proposed coming in; but really Jane wanted her grandson to herself for the time she had left, and pretended to consult regretfully the big man’s watch, on an expandable metal bracelet, that she kept in her jeans. Jamie didn’t walk between them, carried ahead by his irrepressible young stride, looking back, walking backwards sometimes, hands in pockets, uneasy now he’d brought them together, until they were apart again. Faced with Firenze — looking in the soft late-summer light reflected off the water more like a clumsy memory of Venice — Jane seemed struck enough, after all, to want to linger for last minutes. She suggested ice cream; after a moment’s flicker when Jamie, knowing Kate too well, expected her to refuse (on the grounds of whale-oil), he went obligingly off to wait in the queue at the van. Jane and Kate side by side at the railings looked out over the lake to the dreamy blue prospect: two men in a flat boat were busy forking up into heaps, off the surface of the water, the algae that grew in grotesque abundance now because of the phosphates in washing powder (Jamie had told Kate this). A miniature rattling conveyor belt carried the green heaps to the other end of the boat where the stuff was piled high.

Jane turned to look at her. — He’s rather smitten with you, she said. — I think it’s you he’s staying for.

Kate in one second’s plummeting dismay under her scrutiny had time to calculate that Jane hadn’t guessed everything.

She smiled back. — It makes me feel ancient. If flattered.

— I wondered if you’d noticed.

— Noticing is what one’s supposed to be good at, by forty-three. Of course it all makes me rather wish I was eighteen again.

— And what will you do?

— Do? Nothing. I mean, I’ll encourage him if you like to go away, to travel or to go to university or something. That’s what should happen: but it’s not my business.

— We mustn’t hurry him, into whatever it is he’s going to be. I trust him, don’t you? That it will be something good.

— I don’t want to interfere.

— You don’t want him to know that you’ve noticed. But be kind, anyway, letting him down. I think you’ve been good for him. His father and Suzie are kind people, but I wonder if they recognise what they’ve got.

— I’ll be very careful. Don’t worry. He really is a special boy. And I’m very fond of his father. We’ve known one another since we were children.

— Here he comes, warned Jane. — I suppose we’ll have to eat these horrible things.