Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— I’ve got a busy day ahead, she said. — What time is it? Strangely, now it’s over, there are all sorts of things I have to do. I think I’ll leave my car in the hospital car park for ever: I can’t afford to pay the ticket. You know, Billie and I never talked — isn’t that awful? — about whether she wanted a Jewish funeral or not. Well, we talked, but she never decided. They were so beastly to her, you know, when she married my father. What shall I do? I’d better ask her friends. I said to her that I did want a Jewish one, for the drama, the rending of the garments: remember that, won’t you, if I go first? There’s no one else to remember for me now. Or, if that lot won’t have me, then at least the resurrection and the life and so on. No humanist namby-pamby, please: everyone choosing the wrong poems and reading out bits of their own creative writing. How grim would that be?

She picked up her shoes and swung them by the straps, looking round for somewhere to sit and put them on; seizing her by the arms, he tried to look into her face.

— Kate, I have to tell you what I feel. I know there couldn’t be a worse time.

— Oh no: don’t tell me, please, not now! Not today.

— You can see my marriage has fallen apart. You were going to say to the ambulance men that day that I was your brother. Is that what you really want?

She rocked on her stockinged feet in her distress, pulling away from him: it was almost a scuffle. — I don’t want you to make me decide this.

— Isn’t it possible, he persisted doggedly, — that I could be something else?

— I don’t know.

— After last night I feel it, I feel that it’s possible.

— Anything’s possible . Aren’t we the generation that decided nothing — nothing of this sort — was impossible?

— So what’s that you’re saying? I’m stupid, I know, but I have to be very clear. Yes or no?

— I don’t know. Wait. Yes, maybe.

— All right, he said, subsiding, unsatisfied, not trying — as she half expected, half wanted him to do — to kiss her. — That’ll do for the moment.

— All right, she said. — Wait. Yes, maybe. We’ll see. Why not?

And he let her go.

Days later — how many, she couldn’t count — Kate met Jamie in a pub one afternoon. She arrived wearing dark glasses, a dark scarf wrapped round her hair: outward signs of the state she was in. Her mother’s funeral (Jewish after all) had been unexpectedly terrifying; she felt panic and a cold excitement at her liberation, her future as unknowable as if it was a blank. All through Billie’s illness and since she’d died, Kate had forbidden Jamie to come near her: when he had turned up once at the door she had not let him in. His father, instead, had spent a couple of evenings at Firenze when Suzie was home with the children, helping Kate sort practicalities, mostly to do with Billie’s money. (‘I don’t suppose you ever paid tax,’ he had said with concern, ‘on all these large sums she made over to you?’)

David was the model of restraint, he held off as she had made him understand he must, waiting for her word. She did not let him see the noisy grief she gave in to a few times because it seemed disproportionate to the quiet fact of Billie’s death, he might have thought she was putting it on. At work David was helping to oversee the preparations for vaccine development, in case of an influenza pandemic.

— There isn’t a vaccine yet, of course, because there isn’t a virus. But there are things we can do to be ready to make it.

— Will we all die? Kate asked with curiosity.

— Don’t be silly. We don’t even know for sure if it will happen, although it probably will. If it does, there will be some increased mortality.

—‘Some increased mortality’. The way you say that. We will be in your hands.

— Not just mine, luckily.

All the time David was in her house Kate had known that Jamie might turn up; meeting him at the pub, she almost invited discovery (it was a place that she knew Carol liked, for instance). That was her bargain with hope, in exchange for what she’d done: she wouldn’t confess, but she wouldn’t make any effort to conceal it either. The pub at two o’clock bled coloured light from its windows into the windy corner where two long terraces, blowing with litter, bleakly met. Jamie was already halfway down his pint because she was late; she was probably late enough for it to be his second one. Pausing at the pub door — dramatically, wound in her black scarf: people stared — she took him in before he saw her. If she hadn’t known different things about him, he might have been a boy among the others in here, rowdy and joshing at their table, drinking to get drunk, comradely competitive. As he waited, for all his visibly anxious expectancy, he even cast an eye up at the sport (rugby?) showing on a big screen high on the wall. Seeing her, he rose responsibly to his feet: tall, intent, hair pushed behind his ears, straight nose skewed poignantly off-centre. She wound between the backs crowded round tables laden with glasses and bottles, towards where he’d kept a seat for her in a corner.

He loomed over her clumsily; forbidden to touch her, he didn’t know what to do with his hands. — I’ve really wanted to see you.

— Will you buy me a drink, now I’m here? Have you got money?

He jangled coins in the pocket of his crumpled khaki zip-up jacket, setting off for the bar, forgetting at first to ask her what she wanted.

— You really have to sort out, she said when he brought her whisky, — what subject you want to do at university. You have to get your applications in, for next year.

He wondered. — That was what you wanted to talk about?

— After the awful mess I’ve made, I owe you one useful thing at least: some good career advice.

He stared into his beer. — That’s all?

— That’s the mistake I made at your age — thinking that all that really mattered was the personal stuff. If you’re not careful, you build your life around smoke.

— It’s the rest that’s smoke.

— Anyway, this — between us — doesn’t even count as personal life. It was just an accident that happened. Talking of smoke, I’ve given up. At the hospital I couldn’t, and since, I haven’t wanted to. Isn’t that incredible, after all these years?

— You’ve brought me here to get rid of me, he said. — I knew I shouldn’t come. I wanted to meet you at the house, not in this crowd.

— It couldn’t make any difference wherever we met.

He gulped at his beer and grew visibly drunker, his focus thickening. — I know you better than you think I do.

— You know one of the worst things about me that there is to know.

Dents of embittered concentration appeared in his cheeks. — Is that what you think it was? Didn’t you like it at all, then?

— If you’re fishing for me to tell you how good you are, that women will love you.

— I don’t want other women.

— You just don’t know yet that you do.

— You don’t know how I feel.

— Well, that’s true. Because of our age difference, do you think, or because I haven’t tried? Would you like more beer?

— No. This is my fourth. If you’re interested, I have decided on a course to apply to. In Edinburgh.

— Edinburgh! That’s a good idea. I can imagine you acquiring the necessary northern sceptical rigour.

— To do Classics, with Arabic.

Kate had to think about it. — You see: you are exceptional. Of course that’s the right thing, a brilliant mix. You can go into the Foreign Office. You’ll be an ambassador.

— Don’t exaggerate, he said.

— Think how you’d have grown to hate my exaggerating, over time.

— I can’t.