Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— She liked you, reassured Jamie later, in the evening of that same day.

Billie was at the piano: her Schubert Impromptus covered his talk with Kate, where they stood stiffly opposed, sideways on to their reflections in the tall mirror over the black marble fireplace, as if in an uneasy crowd. The sweetness of the music, though, made Kate furious; she had grown careless recently over what her mother witnessed, thinking it made no difference. She wanted to shake Jamie, except that she wouldn’t touch him; her voice was intimately incensed.

— I’ve only allowed you to come in because I am so angry with you. It’s for the last time. This is over. You’ve gone too far. What did you think you were up to?

She saw what a difference she had made to him already, in their few weeks; he didn’t flinch, he resisted like a rock under her onslaught, casting his eyes down to lick the rim of his cigarette paper (he could roll up between his fingers, with no surface to lean on: she’d loved boys for less than that, when she was eighteen).

— It didn’t matter, he said steadily. — She wasn’t going to guess: but even if she had. She’s broad-minded, she’s open to all sorts of things.

— Broad-minded! Do you have any idea? If you’d been a man, if she’d been your wife, I’d have faced it out: but your grandmother!

— She’s not a grandmother, really. She’s somebody.

— Worse! And, she did guess half of it: only your stupid infatuation, thank God.

— You’re being quite conventional. I thought you weren’t afraid of anything.

— What kind of idiot do you take me for?

He cast around for a lighter.

— Jamie! To force his attention she slapped him hard, smartly, on the cheek, knocking him off balance; Billie at the piano faltered. She raised her arm to smack him again harder, so he caught her by both wrists, frowning, hurting her slightly; her red handprint dawned on his skin.

— Carry on playing, Mummy! Jamie’s going in a minute anyway.

Creakily, Schubert restarted.

— Don’t, don’t, he encouraged Kate tenderly in an undertone, close to her ear, coaxing her, talking round a child in a tantrum. — Don’t fight. Don’t let’s fight. I’m sorry, if I was wrong.

When he surrounded her she couldn’t see him whole, and the music after all, with her eyes hidden, imposed itself: its pleasures intricate as honeycomb.

— I rolled this one for you, he softly said.

She yielded but lit it — the lighter turned up in his pocket — drawing off and staring away from him nonetheless, in case he thought he’d won. He rolled up for himself, too, and smoked: they watched each other’s reflections smoking in the mirror.

— And what is this writing she says you’re doing? What kind of writing?

He hesitated for the first time. — I wished she hadn’t mentioned that.

— You see? What trouble we’re in? Where anything ordinary we do is dangerous. You can’t write about this, I forbid you to. Is it a novel?

— No. At least, I don’t think so. Do you want to read it? I don’t know whether I’m ready to show you.

— Absolutely not. Never. I want you to destroy it, because I’m so afraid someone will find it. What if you died, say? Anyway it will be the most awful rubbish, you know, when you come back to look at it later.

That last idea was too much for him, he deeply inhaled. — Was that the real kind of never, or the other kind?

— I don’t ever read anything, as it happens, written after 1930.

He took that in as well. — Well, I won’t be like you.

— God forbid.

— Let me stay, he said, subtly, so that Billie couldn’t hear.

— No. You’re joking. I said it’s finished between us.

In the lamplight his completed adult face — long full cheeks under hard knots of bone, luxuriant mouth, eyes hooded — could seem sealed powerfully over his childhood; she had to be careful not to show how he impressed her, how relieved she was when his naivety spilled out, making his features mobile with feeling again.

— Billie, anyway, is going to be awake all night; she slept for hours this afternoon, on my bed.

— I’ll wait all night. I don’t care however long.

— Not tonight. Come on Friday, perhaps.

— Friday? he sighed. — That’s too far off.

— Friday, perhaps.

David gathered himself in a great effort of concentration upon the children, his younger children. Suzie in those weeks came and went: she wouldn’t talk to him beyond practicalities, and wasn’t very interested in those. She slept, when she slept at home, downstairs. He thought sometimes she seemed intoxicated: short of breath, incoherent, hectic, looking at the children as if she couldn’t see them; he couldn’t tell if this effect was psychological, or whether her new friends were plying her with magic mushrooms or cactus or pills. She seemed to manage, most days, Ladysmith; he presumed that she talked for long hours with Giulia afterwards because when he met Giulia he felt her pregnant with sympathetic knowledge of him, which he held off. What happened to Suzie only touched him remotely now; it had begun to seem improbable that they had lived close together for all those years. He judged her coldly. Their arrangement, living apart in the same house, ought to have felt eccentric; robustly they adapted and got used to it.

One evening, leaving Jamie to babysit, they drove over together to walk in the nearby parkland, open to the public; David had said they ought to discuss things. The old house had burned down in a fire years ago, there was nothing left of it but a shell with blind windows, but the rhododendrons flowered every spring, frogs and fish bred in a weedy pond. David and Suzie sat side by side on the grass at the top of a long sloping field where at the weekend families picnicked and played cricket and flew kites; midweek, they had it to themselves. David kept an eye on his watch, afraid they would miss the locking of the gates. Even as he worried about this, he was carried away by a rage that seemed to blow into him from nowhere across the open space. He began shouting loudly at Suzie, that what made him angry about what had happened was that she was making a stupid person’s mistake, confusing some silly sex fantasy or whatever it was, for a real thing. He wouldn’t have minded if she had fallen in love, or was going through any sort of crisis: but only if she could talk about it to him, like a grown-up. Like intelligent people do. This came out so clearly formulated that David realised he must have been working it all out to himself at home, over and over. His whole body shook with passion as the words flooded out of him. Suzie lay back on the grass.

— You hate me, she said. — You really hate me. Underneath it all. How can you say those things? ‘You wouldn’t have minded’. Is that what you really mean? It’s you who’s stupid. You don’t understand anything. You’re suffocating me.

— You’re the one who’s caused all of this mess, showing off, making a fool of yourself. How dare you blame me?

She rolled over so that her face was buried against the ground and her voice was muffled.

— You don’t know what it’s like, she said. — You don’t know what I feel.

She was wearing some kind of thin print skirt: he could see through it to her curved buttocks and brief knickers. Without knowing he was going to do it, he lifted her skirt and smacked her hard with the full weight of his hand across the back of her thighs; astonished, she scrambled to her knees and pounded with her fists at his shoulders and chest. For a few strange minutes they scuffled together viciously: at one point she tangled her fingers in his hair as tightly as she could and tugged hard at it; he slapped her again, on the face this time, she scratched his neck. A dog-walker emerged from the trees at the bottom of the field and looked up towards them, then retreated; he might have thought they were making love, but in fact their fighting instinct for those minutes seemed pure and unsexual. As soon as David realised Suzie was crying he stopped in dismay. They got to their feet and brushed themselves off shamefacedly; she found a tissue in her bag for both their tears. On the way back to the car Suzie hugged her arms round herself, clenching her shoulders tightly; once or twice he touched her on the elbow to steer her onto the right path. Afterwards, because they never talked about it, he found it hard to believe that this scene had actually taken place. It didn’t seem to make any difference to the way they lived together.