Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

It was strange to be in that house on his own. With clumsy hands he fumbled shyly through the drawers of Billie’s night-things, not good at deciding which were suitable; Kate had warned he’d find improbable quantities of clothes. The cat came complaining around his feet and he fed it. Consulting Kate’s list, he took pleasure in her bold spiky black italic writing. Also while he was there he ran hot water and found bleach and cleaned up the blood in the bathroom as best he could. He was mysteriously happy while he did all this. He was sorry for the old lady, and for the troubled days he knew lay ahead for Kate, but he also felt, among Kate’s things here, that she came close in a new intimacy. He took in the old house as he never properly did when she was home, peeking into the absurd vast pompous bedroom at the front, probably not changed since the place was built, murky because all its blinds were down. Not wanting to pry inside, he stood in the doorway to Kate’s own room and took in her desk with its computer and open books, the scatter of her shoes and clothes, the paintings stacked against the walls, the piles of papers and journals everywhere, the duvet in its brilliant red-and-gold cover thrown back where Kate had leaped out of bed: all the mess and drama and colour of her life.

He rang home to tell them what had happened, warn that he would be late.

— But how were you there? asked Jamie. — How did you know? What time was this?

— I was passing. I saw the ambulance. Is Suzie back?

— D’you want to speak to her?

— No. Just to know.

Of course there would be so many complications: he hadn’t begun to think of the consequences, if Kate would have him, for his children. No doubt at first there would be all their suspicion and resentment to contend with; but he was not afraid.

BILLIE DIDN’T HAVE another stroke within twenty-four hours, but she never spoke again; she lived for three weeks in the hospital. Kate spent most of every day there (although Carol tried to persuade her to let her take turns) so that it became her world: its routines were her element, the nurses were her allies or her enemies, even her dreams at home in Firenze were suffused with its noises and smells, its clattering trolley-pharmacopoeia. Billie’s transfers from ward to ward, each with its own culture and atmosphere to be learned, were convulsions. Kate brought in books, old books from her childhood and youth that she’d read over and over; she sat beside Billie’s bed absorbed in them, lost, rousing with a shudder when she had to return to the burden of moving and speaking and being herself. The hospital was both a visionary space — from the upper floors at night a vast ship, lit up, sailing out into blackness — and a real place she walked about in, knowing her way, heels tapping loud in the bright labyrinthine corridors. She had never felt herself so taken up inside the common machinery of living and dying, its momentum like a hum from great engines below.

Billie in those three weeks after the first stroke had some movement on her left side: convulsively sometimes she gripped Kate’s hand, sometimes she seemed to be rehearsing fingerings on the bed sheet. She could swallow, although she could only drink with help from a cup with a spout, and had to be fed liquidised foods with a spoon. She didn’t want anything. She lay on her back, slipping between sleep and waking; her immobility, her high prow of a nose, seemed carved out of some ancient denser material than flesh, yellowed and smoothed with wear. She dribbled and groaned while she slept, and once or twice, awake, she made effortful noises; Kate, encouraging her, saw a familiar convulsion of distaste twitch the still mask of her mother’s face. The whole thing was too awfully ugly: Billie repudiated it, she hated ugly things. Girls with paper sheets of drawings — a cup of tea, a sad face, a happy face, a toothbrush — came and sat at her bedside, encouraging her to point, to communicate: only Billie’s eyes were eloquent. She was such a good patient, she made no trouble, she lay in her pretty nightdresses among her flowers and cards with her angel-hair combed and plaited (Kate plaited it). She wasn’t, for example, like one dreadful old woman who cried and fought and shouted for her mother and at night for hours on end rubbed her feet fiercely noisily together; whose visitors — meek husband and daughter of no doubt once-meek wife — dropped their eyes in shame. Nor like Kate, who, when she wasn’t sunk in her book, sometimes complained, protested that the nurses condescended to Billie, questioned whether the doctors were doing enough.

One afternoon Kate went for a coffee downstairs in the hospital foyer, and while she drank it Billie died. She tried to recall afterwards what she had been thinking about while she drank her coffee. The foyer had been refurbished in the last few years. It had been once an austere antechamber to terrors, painted in institutional colours, smelling of disinfectant; bandaged and disfigured patients, in her memory, were wheeled to the WRVS counter by their visitors for tea and sandwiches. Now it was like a mall, with a bookshop, shops for flowers and gifts, an outlet of one of the coffee chains. Kate thought it was more ghoulish. No doubt there were statistics to prove that the sick were more likely to recover if they were encouraged by well-known brand names. She had bought a Times Literary Supplement , astonishingly available, and had read an article in it reviewing a book on Milosz; she had thought about the late Pope, whom Milosz had lunched with, and about a film she had seen of the Pope losing his temper with demonstrators protesting against the persecution of radical priests in El Salvador. Then she went back up to the ward, and when she got there the curtains were drawn around Billie’s bed: no big fuss, only the one nurse, Sarah, was standing inside at Billie’s pillow, and Kate knew Billie must be gone because Sarah wasn’t holding her hand but just standing there.

— I’m sorry, Sarah said. — Sometimes it seems as if they just wait for the relatives to leave, wanting to slip away by themselves.

Sarah was one of the nurses Kate liked, half-Turkish, dark-haired, soft-bodied, with a crisp quick mind and intolerant politics: she hugged Kate against her large elastic breasts and Kate yielded to the embrace, although she didn’t cry. She felt bereft — not quite of Billie, yet, but of these weeks of her illness, the medical ceremonial, its importance. An hour later she was leaving the hospital. She said she would come back the next day for her mother’s things. It was dusk, and windless: the fountain outside was still turned on. In an area laid out with benches and trees, and a reedy pond with ducks, shadowy figures were moving and speaking, smoking; she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Briskly staff and visitors passed one another, moving up and down the covered walkway from the car park: through windows they could see into a lit-up swimming pool where someone in goggles and a swimming cap strove effortfully through blue water reflected choppily against white tiles.

Sarah had asked Kate if she was all right, if she had someone to go to; impatiently she had said it didn’t matter. Now she stopped short before the crossing to the car park, and had no idea where her car was, or which floor she’d left it on. Day after day she’d driven here, paying a fortune in tickets: now all the days were one day and she had no picture whatsoever of an arrival. She imagined herself searching for her little Citroën on floor after floor of the monstrous building, unpeopled, hollow, stinking of oil, only resonant with the roar of engines, its darkness criss-crossed with headlights descending round and round the ramps. Something appalling surely lay in wait in there. Then she couldn’t remember what colour the Citroën was anyway. She thought, not figuratively: I am in hell. She also realised that she hadn’t ought to drive anyway, in this state. In her bag she found the mobile David Roberts had given to her on that first day when Billie was admitted, showing her how to use it, telling her to call him any time of day or night she needed him. She hadn’t called him; in the evenings he had rung her at home for news. But in the evenings she had had so many calls.