Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

This must all do him good, David thought. He had been deluded, imagining he could have ever had any place in this life of Kate’s. Her friends were the clever, stylish kind of people he couldn’t possibly have kept up with, didn’t even like. Fortified, he carried back his mother’s sherry and his orange juice (he was driving) to where Betty, queen in her own circle, had meanwhile beckoned across an old friend of his father’s, a retired gynae consultant who’d worked for years up at the Heath. David and he stood talking shop until the bell went. These men of his father’s generation had so recently ridden the great system under their planted feet, breasting hospital corridors as if waves parted for them: now they were out of the thick of things and all their perspectives had slipped off the point. Their prevailing note, retired, needless to say, was triumphant gloom at every change. (Also: ‘public health is nobody’s favourite’, the consultant said jocularly.) Protective of the man’s dignity, David conceded concerns as far as he could without telling any untruth; he was glad when he could subside again beside Betty into the expectancy of the tuning up. He thought the story of The Marriage of Figaro was silly, an inferior pretext for the sublime music; often he shut his eyes while he was listening. As soon as he shut them, images of Kate and her friends intruded.

The set for the last act was the least elaborate. Swathes and swags of fabric, dimly green-lit, were the night-time garden; there was a bench, there was a door, presumably into some grotto or summer house, through which the Count was trying to coax the veiled woman he believed was Susanna. David opened his eyes: he could bear this lightness and vagueness of suggestion better. For the last act, they were right, there must be concentration, the enchantment narrowing to the tiny indefinite space between the lovers. On the bench Figaro and the woman who seemed to be the Countess kissed and cuddled, driving the Count into a frenzy. David found himself drawn in, despite himself, to the familiar twists and turns of misapprehension; the secrets, concealments, longings, devices, trickery, notes fastened with a pin; the promise of joys. Where else did the music come from? The women in their disguises flitted with rustling skirts between the bemused men, their masters. When it was over and the characters hurried away out of the back of the set, hand in hand in pairs as if they escaped into the unseen dark garden, he was bereft. Coming back to take the applause, they were only singers and actors. David’s throat was constricted so painfully with sorrow that he couldn’t swallow, feeling himself shut out and left behind.

Kate wasn’t left with nothing. It was more complicated than that.

One morning, a few days after her last talk with Jamie, when she was still hoping David might ring her, she woke up in all the mess of the unsorted house and knew something she had been trying not to know for weeks. She had been vomiting in the mornings, she had felt horribly ill, her periods had stopped, her breasts had swollen, she had not wanted to smoke; she had refused to connect these things, or she had told herself they were her signs of shock, at Billie’s death, at all the turmoil in her life. But it had begun before Billie’s illness, before her stay at the Parrog: how many months, then? It seemed such a stupid accident. Apart from anything else, she was too old, wasn’t she, for this? She lay in her bed, in rumpled stale sheets, listening to the cat prowling hungrily in and out of the empty rooms, batting doors open with a disdainful paw. The central heating rumbled into action at the time appointed, then shut down again hours later. The phone didn’t ring.

This was her punishment, for living as if life was a playtime, to be made up as you go along. This was sent to smite her, she was smitten — in the Old Testament sense, not the courtship one — by a low blow: to the body of course, where one was always, always weak. She thought of her mother, finding out she was pregnant when she, too, was over forty and must not have expected it: her husband much younger and already sick, fighting her in his rages, drinking, staying out with other women until he could hardly drag himself home to be nursed. Among all the detritus in the house, Kate had never found anything to do with babies: wasn’t that odd? Two had been born here — and her grandmother was supposed to have had all those miscarriages and stillbirths before Billie — but there were no cots or prams or baby clothes, though everything else had been kept, the bikes and school exercise books and tennis racquets from their childhoods. It was as if the babies in this house had been born walking and talking.

Of course, there was no reason for Kate to go through with this (although, how many months was it, already?). She didn’t really think she would go through with it. She didn’t move, though, from her bed, to telephone her doctor in London who would have been so understanding (he had been understanding once before). Late, late in the afternoon she got up, when the room was dark enough for her to dress without having to catch anything but the palest scrap of her body reflected in the mirrors; scrambling out of her too-skimpy nightdress (she had taken one of the pink silk ones from Sam’s store), the night intruding through the window was like gooseflesh on her shoulders. Bent over with cramps and nausea she crept to the shop ten minutes’ walk away, tucked in a little sixties brick row out of sight of the dignity of the lake, and bought food for herself: fruit and milk and wholemeal bread and a tin of sardines (when she got home she couldn’t bring herself to eat the sardines, so she gave them to Sim). Probably, anyway, this wouldn’t last: she hadn’t looked after herself, her body wouldn’t hold on with any tenacity to what was planted in it, this wasn’t the sort of thing she was good at. Something would go wrong. Every time she used the bathroom she expected to find blood.

Max came to stay, to help her pack the place up: although he wasn’t all that much use, yielding too easily to the stories in everything, marvelling excitedly, pulling out more and more boxes and bundles from the backs of cupboards. Kate at first stood over him impatiently; then left him to it, went to read her book. She could imagine him spilling out to friends with his charming boy’s eagerness, over dinner cooked by Sherie, the story of the fantastic old place: untouched, full of the hoarded treasures of lost lives. She thought of how strenuously David would have cleared out everything for her, wordless, relieved to see the back of the old rot: but that thought winded her like a blow. Mostly she was good, she was good, she didn’t allow herself to think of David. She mustn’t think of how he hated her, she mustn’t open the lid on all that. Blind, she made herself stare at the words of her novel.

Max phoned people he knew who were collectors and dealers, and piled up in the porch a few particular things to take away — some Clarice Cliff, an old pearwood knife box that might have come from Lithuania, that horror of a brass light fitting that had always hung from the hall ceiling, other bits and pieces. Kate knew she would be scrupulously paid for these — overpaid, for anything Max kept for himself — although she didn’t care. She swore she didn’t want any of it, she would be glad to be rid of it all; even the knife box, which he had thought she might feel tender for, in case it came out of her family’s deep past. The volume of belongings left behind didn’t seem in the least diminished by what Max had taken out: they wandered round the rooms together, demoralised.

— It reproduces itself when I’m not looking. Like gold into straw. It’s like one of those houses in fairy tales where there’s always more food on the table, however much you eat. I think I’ll just have to start sticking all this into black bags.