Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

— Black bags! You’d need a landfill site.

— Or house clearance. Just let them have the lot.

— You’re brave, Katie. Are you sure? There’s a whole history intact here. You won’t regret letting it go, later?

— Later! Later, I’ll be dead.

Kate tried to hide herself from Max; she went before he came to Vidal Sassoon, she used her brightest lipstick, she chose dresses and skirts that hung concealingly across the slight convexity that might be there (that shape was fashionable, luckily: flaring slightly under the bust, falling loose over the waist). Sometimes she thought she was deluding herself; other times her stomach seemed hard and round under her hand, swollen like a nut, not soft as she had expected. She was beginning to feel less ill. She hadn’t seen anyone about her problem yet, pretending to herself that if she didn’t take any steps in either direction, she was safe: whatever that meant. She hadn’t even done a pregnancy test. She and Max went to the opera — Ann had tickets, someone had dropped out from her party — and to the cinema; apparently Sherie had given him leave, for three days he was Kate’s. Kate kept up until the end of the last night a performance of her most volubly and outrageously sociable self. They talked about Billie and she was weepy, serene, reconciled. Max’s intimate observation of her prickled on her skin (who else knew her so well?); he was almost but not entirely convinced that everything was, miraculously, all right. Tactful, he didn’t ask after her amours.

Home from the Arts Centre after the film, he drew the curtains at the windows in the library and asked Kate — crouching over the new-lit gas fire, rubbing at her knuckles yellow with cold — if she wanted coffee. Not coffee, no. She meant to sound lightly considering, not crabbed and nauseous. Max stopped on his way to the door — freshly fair, eager and long, his big camel overcoat hanging open, Paul Smith lilac-and-yellow scarf dangling — to take her in: she looked no doubt witch-like, she knew how her skin was showing her moods transparently. Max might marvel over the thickness of history in this old dark den of hers, but he couldn’t have lived in it; wherever Max went he couldn’t help shining his tasteful civilising light. She forced herself to her feet, trying to deflect him by smiling, ferociously. Just hot water, perhaps. She’d found herself lately enjoying a cup of hot water at this time of night. Just one of the little cups he’d find on the draining board, with rosebuds and a gold rim. It didn’t taste good out of anything else.

— Katie! he exclaimed. — My God! You’re pregnant!

Illuminated, he was all wondering generosity, bounding over to scrutinise more closely. — I knew there was something: against the light of the fire, it showed. All along, I’ve sensed a difference: but this, I’ll admit, didn’t occur to me. Aren’t you? Last night at the opera — it’s funny — I kept noticing your breasts in that gorgeous dress you were wearing, but didn’t think to wonder why.

He put out his hand to touch: palm curved ready to fit in homage over the little mound that pushed out — she glanced and saw it — through the loose but clingy silk of her top. She pounced — like a rat, she imagined — and seized him by the wrist, holding him off.

— Don’t dare, Max! Don’t you dare touch me.

— But aren’t I right?

— You’re talking shit as usual, she said.

He twisted his wrist forgivingly out of her grip. — I am right. It’s OK. Don’t be mad at me. No one else would have noticed in a million years: it’s almost nothing.

— It’s nothing.

— No it’s not. Don’t you think I know you? Is it bad news? Are you sorry?

— Whatever you think you saw, you saw nothing.

She gripped his upper arms tightly in both her hands, pressing her nails in, standing up tensed on her toes in her effort to hurt him as much as he could; he persisted in smiling, as if he couldn’t help thinking of happy events.

— Does anyone else know? Have you told your nice doctor man about it yet? I suppose it’s his.

She pushed him away hard and caught him off balance so that he stumbled back against the black marble fireplace, slipped, hit his shoulder and cursed, nursing it tenderly; then she subsided again in front of the fire. Max jackknifed his long length down onto the hearthrug beside her, hugging his knees.

— I’m sorry, she said.

— No, I’m sorry. It isn’t any of my business.

— Isn’t it implausible, though? Me, of all people.

Cautiously, he expressed the feeling he said he’d always had, that pregnant she’d be splendid.

— But whatever you think you know, dear Max, please promise me, for my sake, for ever and ever, that you know nothing.

He was impressed. — Of course I promise. Didn’t you think that I could be trusted?

She nodded contritely, patted his knee-top.

— So what are you going to do, then?

It became more definite for Kate as she explained. — I’m going to have it in America. It’s going to have an American father.

Max considered that (he might once have hoped to be her baby’s American father); in his clear-skinned face his feelings showed in nervous tiny movements of muscle. — That’s why, in the future, I mustn’t have known that you were pregnant now.

— You see? If I really am, anyway. Because you know, I haven’t seen anyone about it.

— Are you happy, Katie?

— Oh: how can you think it? Quite apart from Billie — who to my surprise I miss every minute of every hour — if you knew half the mess I was in. But I won’t tell you, so don’t ask.

— I wish you would.

— It’s so odd having to make plans. I’m used to thinking of my life as metaphor: now, this intrusion of real things, schemes and dates and months and concealments. The march of facts, from which I can’t extract myself: contingency.

— It has a kind of grandeur.

— Grandeur? You smooth-talking copywriter. Oh well, I’ll try to cling to grandeur in bad moments, from now on.

She never got around to cancelling Buckets and Mops, so from time to time they showed up just when she’d forgotten to expect them. Kate liked Alison. Faced with the mythical scale of the mess in Firenze she had never panicked or abdicated; all the time she’d been coming (from long before Kate moved home), the rooms they lived in, at least, had seemed to shine almost as they must have done in the days when there were maids, even if behind those surfaces chaos waited. She was Kate’s age and had four children, the youngest fourteen; she cleaned one day a week to help eke out her student loan while she finished her degree course in occupational therapy (she also did bags of other people’s ironing). Her hair was black and wirily curled, her skin was cold milky coffee with pale freckles; her mother was from the valleys and her father was from the docks, her grandfather a sailor from Sierra Leone.

When Alison arrived one day, in those last weeks, Kate had just unearthed from the wardrobe in the master bedroom a chocolate box heavy with whatever was inside, held shut with rubber bands so perished that they shrivelled into dry strings as Kate touched them. The picture on the top was of a woman in high heels and a white robe edged in fur, popping into her mouth a chocolate from another box just the same. She looked across it at Alison beseechingly.

— Photographs, Alison said. — That’s what people keep in chocolate boxes.

— I won’t know anyone. We’re not that sort of family. I wish I hadn’t found it. I was always relieved there weren’t any.

— Go on, it’ll be interesting. Won’t there be pictures of you and Billie?

— I don’t know. Those are all in albums somewhere. Sit with me, will you, please, while I open it? It makes me nervous.