Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

She stopped someone passing, a young man in a boxy grey coat with a scarf wrapped over his mouth. Perhaps it was cold: Kate hadn’t noticed. She gave him the phone and asked him to help her dial the number written on a crumpled piece of paper she fished from her pocket; David had put his number into the phone but he had also written it down for her, guessing she might not know how to access it. It occurred to her that Jamie might well answer the phone, or Suzie: but they didn’t.

— Wait there, David said. — Just wait exactly where you are.

It seemed as if she waited for an hour beside the crossing while people passed, some looking curiously at her; the road was only an internal road running round inside the hospital, but it was busy at this time of the evening. She watched groups of pedestrians accumulate at the red crossing sign, then spill over when it turned green and the cars stopped: she forgot that all these individuals were separately purposeful and imagined them only as a flow moved along by the changes of lights. Eventually she forgot what she was waiting for: when David did come (he said he had only taken fifteen minutes), he had to leave his car at the kerb, indicators flashing, and cross to where she stood, collect her, lead her over, see her into the passenger seat of his big warm comfortable car (she only knew then how cold she’d been before).

— I can’t go home, she said, as soon as he pulled out into the flow of traffic. — I can’t go back to the house, not tonight.

— Of course not, he said. — Come to my place.

— I don’t know. Who will be there?

— No one. I have it all to myself. Suzie’s taken the kids away for the weekend.

— Oh, is it the weekend? What about Jamie?

Probably he was surprised she even remembered the name of his older son.

— At his grandmother’s: Francesca’s mother’s. Her seventy-fifth.

— I don’t know.

She closed her eyes. Nothing mattered.

Kate had never been to David’s home. They came to where the city dissolved at its edges into the surrounding dark; when they got out of the car she heard the drone of traffic on a fast road nearby, hurrying elsewhere. The house was a box among others just the same, arranged around a little curving cul-de-sac in a pretence of organic accumulation, the raw new gardens hardly grown. David steered her indoors, kicking aside with his foot children’s junk littered everywhere — trainers, school bags, toys: he didn’t want to frighten her off, she thought, didn’t want her to take in the thickness of his life apart from her, his belonging to these others. The place was a mess: even she, who was not domesticated, could recognise it. It was strange to be seeing his taste for the first time (or if not his taste, then at least what he was satisfied to live with): pink carpet, blowsy flowered faux-Victorian wallpaper, gold-framed school photographs. Kate felt her own discrimination humbled, she was stricken with envy of a life so innocent of style.

— I really just need to sleep, she said. Solicitously he eased her free of her heavy coat. — I’m so tired. I haven’t slept properly for weeks.

— Won’t you let me make you a drink? A hot drink? Or an alcoholic one? Brandy? It might do you good.

— No, really. I think I’d just be sick.

She accepted his offer of sleeping tablets though; then he took her upstairs to his own room — it must be his, his clothes were lying about everywhere, a drying rail hung with his socks was against a radiator. He turned on a wall-light over the double bed; to close the curtains across the window he had to undo tie-backs, then pull a cord (how touchingly well trained he was).

— I’ll find you something to put on, he said. — Suzie’s got pyjamas somewhere.

— No: I’ll be fine like this, if I take off my shoes, take out my contact lenses. I haven’t even got the strength to get undressed. I’ll just lie in my clothes under the duvet. It is a duvet?

— This sort of cover thing we take off first; and those top pillows are only ornamental. Give them to me, I’ll put them on the chair.

— Ornamental pillows!

— Are they horrible? he wondered.

— Not horrible. Only I am.

Kate with fumbling fingers couldn’t undo the tiny buckle on the strap of her shoes; he crouched with concentration and did it for her, and she imagined him helping his daughter put on her shoes for school in the morning.

— I don’t know if it’s the right moment, he said. — I hope it’s not clumsy of me: but I wanted to say that there was no chance really that Billie would ever have got back to what she was before. You won’t feel it now, but really this probably was the best thing. That’s a brute of a doctor’s opinion.

Kate nodded. — I know it. Of course I know it.

— Of course you do.

— And that, this way, I’m free.

— You are free.

She lay down under the duvet and closed her eyes.

— Would you like the light out?

— No, leave it on please. I feel too afraid of the dark.

She knew through her closed lids that, lingering, he stared down; taking in the surprise of her there, between his sheets.

— Will you stay with me? she asked. — I don’t want to be alone.

Perceptibly he hesitated over what she meant, then sat heavily down, not wanting to mistake, on her side of the bed. — Of course I will. When she put her hand out to him, he took it eagerly in both of his; she lost herself in the cool hollow of his grip. He brushed the bristle of her rings with his blunt finger-ends, as if he was reading Braille.

— Don’t you want to take these off? Aren’t they too heavy?

When she didn’t answer he pulled at the rings one by one, twisting them off, dropping them with a chink on the glass top of the bedside cabinet, until her hand was naked inside his (apart from one old silver ring that was too tight, from her teenage years). For a few long minutes — before the sleeping tablets and her exhaustion and shock kicked in, obliterating everything — longing for him surged in her, as if her spirit craned out of her body towards his. But she didn’t make a move. Neither of them, under the circumstances, made a move.

When she woke it was morning. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept all through the night. David, also in his clothes — he had at least taken off his jacket — was under the duvet beside her, with his back turned. As soon as she started to get out of bed to find the bathroom, he sat up anxiously.

— So, she said, — we finally slept together.

He wasn’t the type to find that funny, and blinked at her, bemused, creases from his pillow pressed into his cheek; roused if not out of sleep then out of some deep trance of reverie.

— Did you mind? I didn’t want to leave you alone, but it got cold, I kept nodding off.

— Don’t be silly. It’s your bed anyway.

His hair was stuck up comically behind one ear: he had let it grow rather long recently, so that it was less stiff and neat. Kate used the en suite bathroom, closing the door discreetly. She washed her face, borrowed a toothbrush, smoothed at her crumpled clothes, stared at herself short-sightedly — horrible, probably — in the mirror where Suzie his wife must have looked a thousand times. She used Suzie’s soap too, and noted her shower gel. It was strange, not to have to go to the hospital. The shape bereavement would take was unknown to her as yet, she felt she only circled it in trepidation; it waited like a new place for her to move inside. This morning she had a sense of the completed arc of her mother’s whole life that was almost visionary and exulting, relieved: but no doubt that would not be the last of it.

David had put on his shoes, sitting on the side of his bed, though he hadn’t flattened his hair; when she came out from the bathroom he stood up urgently. Putting on her rings, fastening her watch, she held him at bay, never looking quite at him: without her lenses he was blurred anyway.