Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

David went on sitting there. He knew as if he could see it that Kate waited for him inside the house: she walked around between the rooms, she put all the lights on. One by one windows sprang into brilliance behind the thrashing trees, first downstairs, then upstairs: stained glass flickered like cartoon jewels through agitated foliage. He fantasised that he heard snatches of Kate’s violin. Once he had an idea that she came to the front door and looked out for him; even took steps down the drive to where she could see him, stood there hugging her arms in something wrapped round her shoulders, thin dress blowing. But the garden was dark and he couldn’t be sure. He heard the wind groaning along the lake, and then at some point an eruption of honking geese, wings cracking like shots, splashing noisily into the invisible water: as if this was David’s signal, he started the engine.

On his way home something happened. Naturally he wasn’t attending as conscientiously as usual to his driving. There was traffic, it was the winter evening rush hour. The streets were strung already with Christmas lights, and bright shopfronts swam in a blur of the rain that began to be spattered in angry fistfuls across the windscreen. For minutes he peered stupidly, forgetting that he could turn on his wipers. It took him half an hour to get through the thick crawl of cars, woven with crossing pedestrians, on the main roads: released at last into residential streets, he perhaps pressed down his foot too hard on the accelerator, leaping forwards. At the same moment, in a sudden squall of the weather, a white shape in violent movement broke out in front of him from nowhere, or from between two parked cars. He stamped on his brake and swerved, and the car slewed screeching sideways; but surely too late. He must have struck something: the blow seemed to resonate in the bodywork, his heart thumped out of his chest as if he’d been hit himself. He had, in an immense effort, not been thinking of anything: into that willed blankness had burst his fate. He seemed to recognise it, as he threw himself out of the car door to see what he had done, ready for the worst: his fate, that had waited for him in hiding, but whose familiar form he at once knew.

He found nothing. Only an empty street panted, reeled, recovered, closed over what it had shown him. Whatever had seemed white and alive, did not exist; perhaps the sheet of sodden filthy newspaper under his wheels had been his phantom, inflated by the wind into a moment’s lifelikeness. He felt so sick that he had to pull in at the side of the road and rest his head against his arms on the steering wheel. For some time he couldn’t drive on.

When at last he let himself in at the side door, his children were sitting painting at the kitchen table. Their tranquillity seemed uncanny after the storm outside: their absorbed breathing, the stroke of their marks on big sheets of sugar paper, the chink of their brushes in jamjars of clouding water. The tip of Hannah’s tongue stuck out in concentration; unnoticing, Joel sucked his brush, so that his lips were blue. Gazing, to take it truly in, at the china dish piled with tangerines — Suzie must have put it out for them to paint — they seemed themselves deliberate as a composition.

— Is Mummy here?

They blinked at him, surfacing reluctantly.

— Having a shower, Joel frowned.

He took the stairs two at a time. Suzie had begun to tidy up; the mess that had waited on the landing to be sorted into different bedrooms had been put away. She was not showering: she had run herself a bath perfumed with something, she was floating in it by candlelight, her body showing vaguely pink through the foamy water, her knees an island. Little candles on saucers were burning at intervals all round the edges of the tub and on the windowsill. David put down the lid of the toilet seat, for somewhere to sit; Suzie hardly stirred the water, only turning her head to look at him.

— Are you going to be cross?

— Cross?

— About the candles. Aren’t they dangerous?

He sighed. — Am I so dreary?

— That wasn’t what I meant. I’m sure they really are dangerous, only I’m being very careful. But I just wanted to relax. I want to have a nice weekend at home, with you and the kids. David? Are you all right?

— Is Jamie back?

— Back, and gone again, with a bag. He said he was going to Granny Bell’s. I didn’t know they had anything arranged. You two haven’t had a row? David, you’re not all right, are you?

He felt himself unreal, as if there were no words for what had happened to him. — I nearly crashed the car on the way home: I thought I saw something.

Suzie stood up in the bath then, water sluicing off her breasts and her thighs; they were still pointed plump girl-breasts, even after two children. She pulled a towel off the heated rail and stepped out; rubbing at her hair to dry it she stood carelessly naked in front of him.

— I’m not really all right, he said.

— I knew another woman had been in the bathroom, said Suzie. — Not in this one, in the en suite. I could smell her perfume: and she’d used my soap. But it’s OK. I don’t want you to tell me anything about it. We’ll leave it like that, shall we? I won’t tell you anything either, about me. We won’t tell. It’ll be better for us, really.

She bent down over him where he sat, wrapping the towel round both of them for a moment, squeezing him in tightly, printing her heated body wetly against his clothes.

CLIMBING THE ZIGZAG path from the road beside the lake, Carol paused at the top not because she was out of breath — she could still tramp twenty miles in the Beacons without noticing it — but to take the place in, because it might be for a last time. In the wintry gardens and the park beyond, the vitality of shrubs and trees was sunk to the root; stiff twigs were silvered, dark clods of earth veneered, in cold sunlight. Footsteps — schoolchildren not dawdling home, the walkers of dogs in little dog-coats — rang iron-hard on the pavements. They had been promised a hard winter; now something in the collective mood, Carol imagined, embraced its austerities. Kate was selling Firenze; she had had an offer already and although it was well below the asking price — the estate agents urged her to wait until after Christmas when the market would improve — she seemed in an unholy hurry to close the deal and be rid of it. Carol was burdened with strong attachments to places as well as people. Robustly pragmatic in her working life, she quailed at the idea of the loss of this fantastical silly house. The purchaser would of course — whatever else to do with it? — convert it into luxury flats: that had happened already to other big houses nearby. (In her professional self, she ought to have wanted to move in several homeless families.) The precious past slipped away in solidities: individual deaths were less visible than the disappearances of fringed blinds at windows, of evening glimpses into rooms where paintings were hung from a picture rail, of summer striped awnings to protect front doors. Firenze had been a last link, not only to her own past.

Kate was supposed to be clearing out, but when Carol came round to help, nothing ever seemed to have moved on: there were a few boxes in the hall, but those were mostly the things Kate had brought down from London anyway, a year ago. Sometimes Carol found her in one of the rooms they hadn’t used for decades: the breakfast room, or the room Billie had always called the office, or one of the spare bedrooms. These were dismal with neglect, even if Buckets and Mops had occasionally dusted: in damp corners, papers rotted; woodworm had eaten out of the furniture into the floorboards; carpets smelled where the roof had leaked upstairs. Kate pulled things out from cupboards and drawers, she lost herself in them — roused with a shudder at Carol’s arrival, once, from a cache of her parents’ letters — then recoiled or grew bored, and left everything heaped on a bed or in the middle of the floor: china tea-sets, tarnished silver cutlery and a menorah, armfuls of damp sheet music, tomes in Hebrew with pages tissue-paper thin and frontispiece lithographs of venerable rabbinical scholars, certificates from the 1920’s thanking Kate’s grandmother for her donations to Zionist causes, white damask tablecloths spotted with rust, her father’s violin with all its gut strings snapped and waving.