Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

Kate stared through the windscreen and gave nothing away. Spats of autumnal rain forced Carol to put the wipers on and they squeaked awfully, so that it was impossible to talk; she always had old cars, and never bothered to fix the bits and pieces that went wrong. When it wasn’t raining Carol spoke about work, about pressure the Housing Association was under to sell off valuable property in Cardiff city centre and build cheaply further out. The trees were still thickly leaved but at their tips they were turning colour; long grass at the side of the motorway was bleached silvery beige, lying in swathes where it had been blown. They drove through the bruised industrial aftermath along the South Wales coast: once-blighted bare brown hillsides, pressing close down on Port Talbot, were austerely resurgent; on the flat coastal plain there was still enough business for smoking chimneys, desolate proliferations of pipes, functional yards bleakly unpeopled. Sun flashed briefly, wetly, on the windows of the decent houses on the hillside that had been the steelworkers’ (the pay hadn’t been bad, in the last decades); now you couldn’t get any kind of a price for them. Kate snuggled deeper into her black-and-white checked coat, not because she hated it but because it didn’t interest her. Carol had always felt differently. She had suffered as a child, conscientiously, when they wound up the car windows against the smell, driving through here to the Parrog for family holidays. She had been taken once, aged eight or nine, to the steelworks in Cardiff her grandfather had part-owned and managed; the molten fire tipping, the sweating intent dirty men, had impressed themselves with indelible power, a high mark of importance life might never reach again.

They struck off north and climbed into green hills: there was a lull in the need for the wipers. Kate, looking about her more curiously, said she hadn’t been to the countryside for years, and that it was just what she needed; she was looking forward to dedicating herself to her work. — Such a simplification: this clean space with nothing in it.

— There isn’t nothing in it, Kate. It’s a little seaside town: a mix of locals, with their austere old codes, and incoming spiritual types. Sacred sites and all that are clustered pretty thickly round about. The two species cross paths at the butcher’s, who’s very good, Welsh-speaking: organic meat. Our house is at the edge of town, on the quay.

— I shan’t be going to the butcher, anyway.

— You haven’t turned vegetarian? You don’t eat enough as it is.

— Just queasy: I’ve gone off it. My life at home is such a mess, I think it’s made me sick: no wonder I can’t get down to anything. Here, I will be able to pretend I’m in old Russia, Russia before Napoleon.

— It’s not quite that archaic down here, you know.

— I’m working on a part where he describes the old landowner’s rages. He’s a lovable good-hearted old man, but when he’s angry with one of his daughters he beats them all with a stick, pulls his wife across the floor by her hair, they have to run out into the woods and stay there in the cold overnight.

— Doesn’t sound all that lovable.

— Autres temps, autres moeurs.

— You can telephone me any time you’ve had enough and need rescuing.

— I only long, you know, to be pulled round by my hair.

By the time they drew up outside the house, conversation had been swamped again with the shriek of the infernal wipers: through veils of rain it looked uncompromisingly a square stone box. For some time, climbing down to the west coast, having driven up from the south and cut off the corner of Wales, they’d had their sight of the sea: for Carol the first glimpse always commanded a reflex of childish worship. Today it was grey and crawled dirtily with white-capped waves. When the engine had died and Carol had wrestled with her recalcitrant handbrake, they unbent themselves stiffly into the downpour. The front door swung open on an unwelcoming cold, as if the place slipped out of possession between visits. They dripped in the hall.

— You mustn’t be disappointed. In a minute, when I’ve got the stove lit and the kettle on, you’ll see.

Kate shivered and stood uselessly while Carol busied round, making the place come to life, slipping naturally inside her mother’s routines. When they drank tea Kate was still in her coat, she wouldn’t take it off.

— I would write at this table, Carol suggested. — If I were you. It’s the warmest place. I used to do my school work on it.

The wood of the big table was worn to velvety whiteness with scrubbing and bleaching.

— I remember you coming here, in your holidays.

— Every holiday. Or if not, we pined. Our grandparents, Mum’s parents, were still alive then. We thrived on it: in fact it was a kind of passion with us. And now there are David’s children.

— Show me round. Tell me what you do in all the different rooms: where everyone sleeps.

Carol had not expected Kate to be so interested in the beloved old place, but took her willingly up and down stairs, the pink roses almost faded from her grandmother’s grey carpet, into the bare high rooms with their disproportionately generous windows. It was like a dolls’ house in its spare symmetry; you half expected the whole front to swing away on hinges. In her own bedroom at the back — it had been Betty’s when she was a girl, and looked out onto a little ferny black cliff — she noticed, looking freshly through Kate’s eyes, the picture she had made thirty years ago, out of shells from the seashore pressed into Polyfilla.

— Billie had no idea, Kate commented, — what to do for family holidays. Do you remember that she used to take me to Nice? Because her own parents had taken her there. We stayed in a hotel, up until I was fourteen, fifteen: the other guests were ancient, mummified with wealth. I used to read myself into a stupor. I never met any other children; not that I would have wanted to.

— Your going there seemed to me glamorously strange, at the time.

— Strange, it was.

They crossed the landing to the front of the house.

— Mum and Dad sleep in here if they come: or Suzie and David.

Rain obliterated light at the window, pictures were pits of deeper darkness on the pale walls, the double bed loomed; the room’s emptiness was filled with the rushing noise of water, cocooning them inside. — Imagine being married, Kate said.

— Married? That’s an old-fashioned thought.

— Without it though, won’t we be insubstantial?

— Speak for yourself. With it, anyone could be, anyway. And you’ve been a couple, over and over: Max and Tommy and Fergus and what’s-his-name, in Chicago. It’s me that ought to be insubstantial. Look at me! Substance!

— But being a couple over and over isn’t the same thing. I’d like to have been broken up and remade, by something bigger than me. An institution, not a person. Changed out of what I am.

— That’s rubbish. You’d have hated it.

— Anyway, now it’s too late.

— Kate: you talk as if we’re a hundred! Who knows what could happen?

— Too late for me. I can imagine you in one of those enlightened marriages of middle age, taking up t’ai chi together, barge holidays in the Norfolk Broads.

Carol, used to her, hardly flinched, was only mildly reproachful. — How did you manage to make that sound so dreary? For all you know it might be the height of what I long for.

Kate wrote by hand in a notebook, in her gloves, sitting in the living room at the desk where Carol said Betty’s mother had paid her bills and written letters to her old school friends. Betty’s father had been an auctioneer and a farm agent. Kate wrapped herself in her coat and in blankets; she made hot-water bottles for her feet. She had forgotten to put coke in the Rayburn the first night, after Carol left: it went out while she was asleep and in the morning she couldn’t relight it. She brought the electric heaters downstairs from the bedrooms and put them all on. At night — she slept in Carol’s room — she made more hot-water bottles and wore all her clothes; she heaped up duvets borrowed from the other beds. She couldn’t take a bath; she boiled water in the kettle for her wash in the morning. The cold did strange things to her mind, sharpening it sometimes almost to the point of delirium, so that she seemed to be able to see through the Russian words to the writer on the other side, as if the page was only a glass between them; sensuously she disinterred lanky, jointed English sentences from out of the compacted density of Russian.