Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

CAROL ROBERTS CALLED one morning to see how Kate was getting on. She and Kate had been to school together, and then to University College London; that was all long ago. Out of the gang that had been friends together then, perhaps Carol had changed least: she was still shy in personal relations, brusque, graceless, generous; she still had her coarse straw-yellow curls, although they were darkening and silvering, which suited her strong square physique and red complexion better. Carol had been working back in Wales for years, for one of the big housing associations, of which she was now the Director. She would be borrowing the time to see Kate out of her unimaginably busy life, in which she was no doubt resourceful and formidable, and about which she never complained, though occasionally she groaned and lay flat on her back on the floor with sheer weariness, or told hooting outraged stories about Assembly Members, or pleaded for huge slugs of gin in her tonic.

She parked her car by the lake, then walked up the steep zigzag path through the rockery as she always did, for old times’ sake, because once she and Kate had played here, pretending to be in the French Resistance, or revolutionaries escaping from the state police. They had not made friends until they were thirteen or fourteen, but Kate was a fantasist, prolonging imaginary games long after they were supposed be left behind. At the top of the zigzag she peered through windows into the empty dining room, then pushed round the side of the house through the overgrown laurels and escallonia, waiting at the front door without ringing the bell; music floated from indoors. Carol was practical but also afflicted with strong sentiment. A violin and a piano were playing something nineteenth century, written to be haunting in its sweet slightness, and to suggest the lost past. Carol had been coming to this house for ever. These last few years Kate had come home often for weekends, and when she did Carol had always visited; she had visited when Billie was alone here, too, insisting that she didn’t do it out of kindness but because she genuinely liked her friend’s mother. She said she thought of Billie as a character out of the sort of novel she wasn’t subtle enough to read (Carol had done Sociology at university; Kate had done Slavic Languages). Kate said the novel was getting to be Finnegans Wake .

— God, you’re in tears, Kate exclaimed when she opened the door; the music had finished and Carol had pressed the bell, which chimed rustily a long way off (for the attention of the maids there hadn’t been for fifty years).

— Aren’t I an idiot? Carol said. — It was hearing you play.

— Were we that bad? Billie, do you hear? We were so awful we made Carol cry. You look smart: I suppose those are your work clothes. I’m rather in awe of you in a suit. There’s a touch of alderman about it on you, you know. Or dowager. Dowager alderman.

— Are you all right? Is it really the truth that you’ve given up your job and let your flat? Max phoned me.

— I’ll tell you what: I’m almost crying with cold. The central heating’s playing up and the man says naturally that we need a new boiler, and I refuse to believe there isn’t something he could do to fix this one. So we’re at an impasse. Keep your coat on, I would.

Billie was sitting at the baby grand in the drawing room at the back of the house, in a dress patterned with blue cornflowers and a white cardigan. The gas fire was turned up high and the room seemed impossibly hot to Carol.

— Mummy; it’s Carol.

— Oh, how nice, said Billie, smiling serenely, turning round from the piano with her hands still poised over the notes; her pink skin hadn’t wrinkled but had turned matte and soft with age. She had taught piano to Carol once long ago and very little of it had stayed except that the hands above the keys must be shaped as though holding oranges. — Dear Carol. It’s such a long time since we’ve seen Carol. Isn’t it?

Carol kissed Billie, peeled off her mac and her jacket. Her face flared up with heat; she resigned herself to feeling, in the presence of these two diminutive tiny-boned women, as she always had, as if she was made of some coarser grade of flesh than theirs; Kate’s face with its shadowed sculpted hollows and long Nefertiti eyes seemed finely complicated where Carol’s was straightforward. Kate was dressed in her usual bemusing layers, maroon and green and cream, suggesting the kind of London shops Carol wouldn’t dare go into, although she wasn’t afraid of any other kind of authority; the cuffs of Kate’s black lacy cardigan were pulled over her hands as if she was cold and the tip of her nose was red. Carol dropped onto the chair that was as far from the fire as possible; the panes of the French windows that ran the length of the room were actually steaming up. The winter-dead wisteria that fell like a curtain from the roof of the open veranda at the back of the house blocked out the light, so that they needed the lamps switched on in the middle of the day.

— We’re only playing to keep warm, said Kate. — We have to go out soon. Buckets and Mops are coming and if we’re lazing around the place doing nothing while they clean our lavatories and wash our floors it might foment revolutionary discontent. We walk in the park and then we drive down to have coffee and do our shopping. I swore I wouldn’t ever drive after I came home, so Billie does it for me, it’s a treat for her. And when we come back our lavatories are clean, and B and M have taken their money and left us enigmatic little notes. Don’t you think it’s the life?

— Billie’s never passed a test. Does she have a licence? Billie, you mustn’t let Kate make you drive.

— Darling, it’s easy-peasy, Billie reassured her. — It’s great fun. We don’t go on any big roads.

— Carol has to fuss. There’s a tradition of public service in her family. Don’t take any notice. Shall we play it again? Only you’re not to criticise. We’re both very rusty. Or to cry. That’s just as off-putting.

Carol gave herself up to admiration. Her own fingers in the old days of holding oranges over the piano had only ever seemed, for all Billie’s patience, too thick and too fumbling. Kate, swaying in time, with her violin tucked under her chin at the music stand, her thick bob of black hair thrown back, was a figure of romantic higher discipline and finer sensibility. And Billie showed no signs yet of forgetting how to play. Carol herself had said to Kate that it must be good for her mother to keep practising the skills she had, stretching to her capacity. The music moved Carol deeply but she didn’t discriminate, couldn’t remember a tune the minute after it was over, couldn’t tell Haydn from Schubert or Mahler from Debussy. In weak moments when she was alone she was likely to find herself humming some awful scrap of a pop song as if it meant everything to her.

When they had finished — glamorous the flourish of accomplishment with which musicians re-entered the lesser atmosphere — Kate took Carol upstairs, to talk to her while she put on her coat.

— Do your wee-wee, Mummy, she called over her shoulder on the way up. — Otherwise you’re bound to need one while we’re out.

Billie cheerfully agreed.

Kate’s bedroom was the same long one she had had always; at one end a little panelled bay with a window seat hung over the back garden, and diamond-paned casement windows suggested captive maidens looking out for rescue. The room had last been decorated when Kate was a domineering teenager given a free hand, so the walls were faded purple, scarred with Blu Tak and the shapes of old posters: all around the room, above the picture rail, the ghosts of a nursery frieze showed through the paint, the Pied Piper and Rumpelstiltskin and princes slashing through thickets of thorn. Now it was newly crowded with Kate’s accumulations brought from London: books spilling out of the bookshelves and piled against the wall, clothes hanging from the knobs of the wardrobe and on the back of the door, her computer not set up yet on the big ink-stained desk where she had once worked for her A levels, a vast brightly coloured Chinese paper kite, a steel standard lamp with white glass globes. Framed prints from a Paula Rego exhibition and of Kertesz photographs and a Rachel Whiteread house were propped against a wall along with other art Carol recognised from the London flat.