Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

Kate made them both tea then couldn’t drink hers; it steamed on the kitchen table while she tugged at the box lid. The box was crammed with photographs; when the lid came unstuck they cascaded out over the table and onto the floor. Rescuing them, Alison marvelled.

— Look, here’s Billie! Isn’t it? Just a girl — doesn’t she look lovely? Look at that outfit! And the hat!

Bracing herself, Kate squinted at it warily from a distance. — And my grandparents. I never knew them. I have seen pictures of them, of course: although not these.

— They’re so elegant!

— That’s probably the same hotel in Nice where Billie took me when I was a teenager. It really might be: the palms, that stone pineapple thing at the bottom of the steps. If I imagine purgatory, there’s always a string trio playing light classics.

The photos came in no order: Billie was a girl, dreamily poignant in a profile portrait (her nose slightly modified?); then a suspicious child in a garden (Firenze?), white-blonde, holding a toy monkey by the ear; then a laughing young woman in Pierrette costume in a crowd of others — gypsies, pirates, clowns — one with a guitar. Billie opened herself eagerly to the camera; her melancholy mother, stoutish, with little gold-rimmed glasses, bore it patiently. On a few occasions Sam Lebowicz, ironic, allowed his likeness to be captured: showing not a sign of his barrow-boy origins, zestfully well dressed as his womenfolk, with a clean-shaven lean face and the high-knuckled cheekbones that you might have attributed to a violinist or a doctor; he only betrayed his business preoccupations (what mess would his people manage to get into, while he submitted to this leisure?) in a right foot, crossed suavely over his other knee, blurred where he quivered it too restlessly. One photograph was of Firenze: disappointing as somehow old photographs of buildings always are, looking hardly different to how it was now except for the lake road empty of cars; the house bleached and withdrawn under shallow light as if it was just a facade. A flag was flying from Sam’s turret: what flag, for goodness’ sake? No matter how closely they peered, they couldn’t make it out.

Under that layer of familiar faces, the box was full of strangers: muddled together, studio portraits from before the first war and snapshots of picnics and parties from the twenties and thirties. A woman with her hair bobbed and little white teeth showing in her smile posed at an upright piano; a boy with a freckled snub-nose had his face licked by a dog, its paws on his shoulders; a middle-aged couple in fur collars strode towards the camera down some broad tree-lined street, in a sunshine that sprang strong shadows. Alison puzzled out the photographer’s address, embossed in the bottom right-hand corner, for an unsmiling family group, eight children gazing forwards with huge eyes in mouse-sharp faces, the flashbulb making their parents look staggered, at how excessively they had brought forth and multiplied.

— Sierakowski Street? Alison suggested. — Wilenska Street, this other one. Poland?

— Vilnius, perhaps. In Lithuania, where my grandparents came from. This could be my grandmother in this one, as a girl. But then, so could this one. I suppose they brought some pictures over with them; the others must have been sent afterwards, in letters. They’ll be my grandmother’s family, not my grandfather’s: he made his way up, he came from nowhere, he had nobody.

— You must know who some of these are.

— They all died. Jews, in the war. So I never did know.

— Oh, I see.

— I’m exaggerating slightly. A great-uncle and — aunt, my grandmother’s brother and sister, did go to South Africa in the twenties. I believe there are still some of us there. Also, sons of Billie’s first cousin went to America, for what was meant to be a short trip, just before war broke out. They stayed; she kept in touch with them for years. I don’t know which ones they are, the ones that got away. Billie never showed me these, she didn’t like talking about all this. As if she was ashamed.

Alison picked up a few of the photographs and looked at them again, with a different attentiveness. Then, reverently, carefully, she pushed them into a heap in the middle of the table. — What will you do with them?

— I don’t know, Kate said. — Shall I take them with me? Do they belong to me?

— I don’t know.

Kate walked through the park on her way home from seeing her solicitor. Its first section was unfenced, a long grassed recreation ground marked out in white lines, and with goalposts; a path and a little tamed brook followed along its far edge, beside the road. In the city’s lapse, the sky was hugely empty: looking across, big houses on the opposite side (more dilapidated, over there) seemed remote and flat as toys. The path’s tarmac was hillocked and cracked by the roots of a long row of towering beeches, planted between the path and the open space; magpies on too-thin dipping twigs did balancing acts with their tails; the cold was a grey-white miasma, although it was not mist, everything was starkly visible. Intermittent between the trees to her left, she was aware of groups of boys, or young men, playing something — rugby? football? — informally in the frozen mud, scratch sides, not in strip, not even full complement. How could they? At the very idea Kate shuddered, drew deeper in under the cashmere stole wrapped up to her nose, so that she breathed her own warm exhalation. Their shouts nonetheless, blunted by the cold, were poetry in the attenuated afternoon; the pounding of their boots on resonant turf reached her as vibrations coming up through the path; they seemed to thud willingly into one another, perhaps for warmth, subsiding in winded grunts (rugby, then): she felt herself by contrast cocooned in cold inside her warm clothes, separate.

In her black-and-white coat, she must have flickered distinctively between the trees, if anyone was watching. A gang of boys in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts were playing football; they weren’t very good, mucking about and joking, their language blue. You knew this was a whim and not a practice. One figure detached itself to stare at her: she didn’t stop, but he must have seen her turn her head, looking back at him. For long seconds he stared; of course anyone knowing her would recognise her, in that coat. His friends noticed, glanced over, weren’t interested (too old! — even at this distance), and cursed: get on the fucking ball! Kate carried on without faltering; she had to look back at the path so that she didn’t trip over the tree roots. It did seem possible that it was Jamie. He must have played football sometimes, in another life, with other boys.

When she looked back, she wasn’t even sure which one had stared; they were all running again now. Two of them were in black T-shirts; both, from this distance, had Jamie’s young grace and long hair. It could have been either of them. She hurried, looking at her watch (the park gates closed soon) into the second section of the park, with bowling green and tennis courts, the brook meandering under a mossy bridge like a stage set from an old operetta; she dropped onto one of the benches in memory of somebody or other who had loved this place. An intimate stirring and ticking sounded from all around and seemed like a subtle sign, a message for her, before she understood what it was: the first warning raindrops falling on shrubby evergreen groundcover. She ought to go. Could that really have been Jamie? She might have only imagined it. She could have begun to think she had imagined the whole thing, everything that had happened to her here, if it hadn’t been for the child planted inside her. The reality of the child was vivid for the first time, distinct as a ghost from the future approaching on the path, scrutinising her frowningly out of unknown eyes. It would be a girl, surely. She was bound to have a daughter.