Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

By the time he drew up on the road opposite Firenze, the dark had lifted enough for him to see through the railings into the locked-up park: each bush, still thickly leaved but wintry-numb, was doused in its own cap of grey mist; it lay three-foot deep like dirty wool along the grass and on the lake, the tall trees standing disdainfully out of it. Unpeopled, the park seemed alive to itself. He mustn’t wake them in Firenze just yet; he had an idea they didn’t get up early. Kate was home from west Wales, David knew, because Suzie had told him how they had met down at the Parrog, and how she had driven Kate back to Cardiff to save Carol a trip. He hadn’t liked the idea of the two of them hobnobbing together (they had drunk his mother’s sherry, Suzie said), or Suzie’s air of suppressed excitement, telling him how she had swum and Kate had watched.

If he hadn’t been such an idiot he would have understood from the beginning why he had always wanted to have Kate to himself, dreading dissipating their relationship by introducing her inside his family life. Sitting in the car, feeling the cold creep up from his feet once the engine died, he could remember again how it had felt in his dream to reach inside Kate’s clothes, his fingers closing in that warm dark around a fluttering live thing. Was it a metaphor or a simile? He tried to remember from school English lessons. And was it a metaphor for sex or for love? Flooded with revelation at how these twisted together, he was too restless to sit. He left the car and took a walk around the lake — only the promenade across the bottom end was locked — rousing the Canada and barnacle geese still huddled, holding back from the shrouded water, on the trodden bank dark with droppings. Honking, they bustled and shifted. Swans sublimely turned their heads to look at him. Last year’s young ones, though they were fully white, still had necks ungainly stiff, not bent yet to adult sensual poise.

He met runners breasting the mist, absorbed in their own panting, and an early dog-walker, averting her eyes from her half-visible dog squatting to make hot urine in the early cold. Then the grey fume began to thin and they were all beached in the ordinary eye of the day; visibility unspectacularly gathered, delivering the familiar city. The islands that seemed from the promenade to belong to a dream distance weren’t really far; sooner than he expected David was crossing behind them, at the end of the lake, through a scrubby little patch of wood in a crescent of suburban houses, some showing signs of morning awakening, lights on, steam billowing from gas water-heaters, a murmur of radio. David’s joy was not susceptible to these deflations. I could wake her now, he thought. Other people are about. It would not be ridiculous to wake Kate now.

He made his way down the other side of the lake and then around the far side of the park to where it was partitioned by a road, and he could cut back. Traffic was busying and had lost its glamour. He imagined the locked park, circling it, as if it contained his fate. Inside there, unknowable yet, was what was going to happen next; in the time that ticked away on his watch the park would be opened up, a difference might be made to everything through his act, whatever it was going to be. Of course Kate might not answer the door. He could still imagine having to get into his car and drive to work as if nothing had changed. As he made his way back up along the last stretch to Firenze, an ambulance passed him, not using its siren in the momentarily empty road; it turned into Kate’s street. It didn’t occur to David at first that it could have anything to do with him. When he himself turned that corner away from the park-side road, he saw that the ambulance was stopped where the Firenze drive began between its two brick gateposts, one with its polished red stone knob missing: the black gates were permanently pushed back, grown into the grass and weeds. Two ambulance men stood at Firenze’s front door; David broke into a run. ‘Not Kate, not Kate,’ he bargained as he ran. ‘Not yet.’

Of course it wasn’t for Kate. As the ambulance men turned to watch him approach he saw through the glass windows of the porch that she also came running: the door swung open. She had pulled on some skirt and sweater that didn’t match, her hair was scraped back in an elastic band, she was wearing her glasses: he knew the look of an emergency. She flung one bewildered glance at him past the ambulance men.

— Yes, come inside, come in, she’s upstairs. She’s awake, she’s looking at me, but she can’t talk. What does that mean? Is she concussed? She’s hit her head, blood everywhere. I thought I shouldn’t move her. David’s all right, he belongs here: he’s a doctor, anyway.

In her panic Kate was clumsily assertive, fell back upon the hauteur of her upbringing. He could imagine how she might not be liked: it made him protective. Tactfully he explained himself to the ambulance men. They were professionally steadying and charming, their solid tread in the hall and on the stairs filled up the wild private space of disaster. David had never been upstairs in this house before: at the top of the flight was a stained-glass window, girls carrying water jugs in some Old Testament scene, suspended oblivious above crude hurrying intrusion. Kate’s story, tumbling out, hadn’t settled yet into the pattern it would acquire by the time she’d repeated it over and over: she had woken, heard a crash, found her mother on the bathroom floor.

There was a step down into the bathroom, and the old lady was lying, diminutive as a child, on her side on the lino: her face was drained and yellow, her hair was soaked in blood. Probably she had managed somehow to hit her head as she fell on the side of the ancient claw-foot bath. Kate had covered her with a blanket: she was alive, her eyes were open and conveyed somehow apology for her indignity, as well as fearful confusion. She seemed to see Kate, who crouched down again beside her where she must have sat waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Kate told her mother everything would be all right now, help had come. The men bent over Billie; David held back, they knew what they were doing. One of them was a talker, with a small tight face like a jockey and soothing hands; as he had been trained he explained everything he was doing to the old lady, whether or not she could hear him. There was nothing, he seemed to tell her, bringing the unknown out of the dark, that he and his companion hadn’t seen. Once he called her ‘Billie darling’. David was alert for any condescension, or signs of the tedium of routine, but he couldn’t fault them.

While they manipulated Billie onto the stretcher Kate stood out of the way and grabbed at David for support. He put his arm round her, held her tight, felt how she quaked. She remembered to puzzle at him: —How are you here, anyway?

— I was coming to see you.

— But it’s the crack of dawn.

— I walked round the park, so as not to wake you too early. Now I wish I hadn’t. I could have been here.

— What’s going to happen?

— They’ll take her into A & E, do lots of tests, find out if she’s broken anything, why she fell. Shall I come with you?

— But you’ll need to be at work.

— I’ll phone in.

— All right. Come in the ambulance with me. I’m terrified of that. I’ll tell them you’re my brother.

— I’ll follow in the car, he said. — I don’t want to be your brother.

It turned out, as David had expected from the moment he saw her, that Billie had had a stroke. Probably that had caused her fall rather than the other way around; in the fall she had fractured her hip. The cut on her temple was only minor, although she had some nasty bruising. David saw she was admitted under the neurosurgeon he most trusted; she was put in intensive care, sedated, given an anti-clotting agent, monitored. They explained to Kate that what mattered for Billie’s prognosis was what happened in the next twenty-four hours; she needed to be prepared for the possibility of a second stroke. David sat with Kate. In the afternoon he drove to Firenze to pick up a few necessary items; Kate said that if Billie came round she would want to be surrounded by her own possessions.