Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

Kate hadn’t touched her whisky: she dipped the edges of the beer mats in little pools of spilled beer. They were both leaning with their chins in their hands, elbows on the table, heads close together, the conversation an intimate rumble kept from everyone around. She imagined people thinking she was an aunt with her nephew.

— I want it to be as if this thing hadn’t happened, she said. — That’s what I came to ask you for. Not as a figure of speech, but actually: I want it to disappear.

— What are you talking about?

— It’s possible, trust me. I used to think what you probably think: that everything we do endures, has consequences. But really, bits can disappear. We decide what happened and what didn’t. Whole pieces of our selves float off, they aren’t kept anywhere.

— No.

— There are reasons for me asking you this, complications. I will tell you what they are. Also, by the way, you have to promise me not to do anything silly.

He was uncomprehending for a moment. — You mean, that I won’t kill myself?

— But I think you’re more like your grandmother than your mother. She’s an endurer.

— She did find some of my mother’s poems, I meant to tell you. She had them all cut out, in a scrapbook.

— Oh: are they any good?

— I don’t know. Yellowed: clipped out on pieces of yellowed newspaper.

— Poems do yellow.

— I haven’t found a way of getting into them yet. It’s like a code: I don’t know what anything stands for.

— Will you try, acting just as if all this hadn’t happened?

Blearily, he rubbed his face. — It’s not possible. But I’ll think about it, on one condition.

— What’s that?

— That you let me come back to the house, now.

— Come back to the house? Is that a euphemism? Because I just couldn’t.

— Just for another half an hour, to talk to you. Not with all these people watching. Then I’ll do what you ask. I’ll try.

— All right. We’ll go back to the house. An hour. Can you walk straight? It’s windy outside.

— It’ll sober me up. You haven’t drunk your whisky.

— I don’t want it.

David watched a young silver birch, still with its full skirt of yellow leaves, blown sideways by the wind outside his office window. The sky was mostly heavily grey, but the straining dancing leaves and long whips of twigs were dazzlingly black against a swell of light. With every strong burst of wind the leaves were dragged inside out, clouds of them were carried off. Joanne of the administrative staff sat with her back to the window, but turned nervously around every so often to look; she was collating for David the results of a questionnaire sent round to health authorities. She confided that she hated the wind; she didn’t mind the rain, but if it was windy at night she could never sleep. David, though, was exhilarated by the contrast between the purposeful peace within, the steady light and subdued thudding of their keyboards, and the ecstatic scene outside: impossible to know if it was assault or pleasuring. At four, an hour before he had meant to finish, he got up from his desk. It was time to insist, with Kate. The violence of his feelings reassured him: he had never been so forceful in love before. He was pleased to surprise Joanne, uncharacteristically leaving their work unfinished.

He drove the route that was beginning to be familiar as his own, up to Firenze; Kate wasn’t expecting him, he hadn’t said he’d call. The trees in the park were rowdy, the wind blew dark gusts of birds and leaves indistinguishably into the road in the last light. When he parked in the side street opposite the gate, then crossed to the house, David was surprised to see the front door standing a few inches open. He hesitated, pushed at it and went inside: the wind’s ceasing in his ears was like a drop into a different element. He breathed the musty air of the porch; no one had put the lights on in the house, but he thought he heard voices somewhere. In the dark he blundered, stepping into the hall, but not noisily; he opened his mouth to call, but couldn’t bring himself to break the hush, and closed his mouth again. A note sounded on the piano, and then a different one: not as if someone was going to play, but as if they touched the keys with their thoughts elsewhere, punctuating a conversation. Under David’s feet little squares of black and white tile stirred where they had come loose from the floor.

The murmuring voices didn’t resolve, as he drew nearer, into chat: he had thought it might be his sister visiting. Perhaps it was consolation of a mourning daughter that he listened to, straining his attention, stricken with dismay at himself (he had never eavesdropped in his life). Or could these be intruders, leaving the door so sinisterly open behind them; ought he to surprise them and chase them off? He had said to Kate that she was careless, that she needed mortise locks on the doors, if not an alarm. But the exchange was too soulful for thieves, the voices were too rich with feeling, they ran in his mind like a score, he followed their rise and fall, their rests. There was no doubt, as he grew used to them: some male voice mingled with Kate’s. And if anything, it was she who was consoling, the other who complained and pleaded. David knew he had no right to be here. Then out of the not-quite-decipherable music a phrase detached itself with emphasis, as if whoever spoke it drew at that point further off from Kate. He also struck another, lower, note on the piano.

— I know who it is, the voice said. — Don’t think I don’t know who it is.

Kate didn’t answer, but she must have moved because David heard her heels loud on the parquet, and then a lamp clicked on inside the room. The configuration of everything loomed out of the darkness, and David was appalled to find himself half crouched near the open drawing-room door. He fled, knocking into something on his way: an umbrella stand. Who these days had an umbrella stand? Idiotically, he had time for the thought that there were probably umbrellas in it that hadn’t been opened in the rain for thirty years. He heard Kate’s voice then distinctly, raised to a new sharpness out of its murmuring.

— Who was that?

Someone replied, but he didn’t wait to hear.

He waited outside in the car: he couldn’t have said how long he waited, nor what he was waiting for. But by the time Firenze’s front door banged shut — out of sight, behind the turn in the drive where the house was hidden by the monkey-puzzle tree — he knew who he was expecting to come out. He thought he might have seen, when the light in the drawing room came on, a crumpled khaki jacket thrown untidily down, sleeves half inside out as usual, onto the oak chest in Kate’s hall: its familiarity so unconsidered that at first it had hardly seemed to mean anything. Anyway, hadn’t he heard the voice?

It was dark: but Jamie, exiting between the brick gateposts, the jacket slung over one shoulder, saw him waiting in the light from the street lamp. He hesitated, but not as if the sight of his father was a surprise; then he crossed over to the car. David stayed sitting in the driver’s seat; Jamie came close and leaned against the car heavily on his side — one arm tensed against the car bonnet, the other against its roof, as if he wanted to push it over — staring down through the windscreen. If Jamie had made any gesture for him to do it, David would have wound the window down: instead they contemplated one another through the glass. The boy was distressed: David didn’t know what emotion he showed himself, he had an idea that they reflected one another, that whatever he saw on Jamie’s face was his own feeling — only Jamie’s hair was blown about by the wind whereas inside the car everything was stale and still. Then Jamie pulled himself upright away from the car and walked off.