Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

— I’m trying to introduce elements of the twenty-first century, Kate said, — but this house chews up my post-modernisms and spits them out as Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

— This isn’t half of your stuff. What have you done with it? You haven’t just left it for your tenants to destroy?

Putting on red lipstick at the long cheval glass, Kate blotted her lips together and shook her head. — I loaded everything I could into the car, put the rest in the small spare room, and locked it.

— When we rented that house in Kilburn in our third year, we broke into the locked room. We read their letters and went through their things and invented lives for them and wore their clothes.

— We were awful. I’d never have let my flat to anyone like us. I asked for very boring; judging by our one short meeting, I think I got it.

— What are you going to do all day here? How will you stand it? Have you got a project, something you’re working on?

— A project. What an uncharming idea. You sound like my Head of Department. Kate changed her shoes, swapping high heels for very high ones, square-toed, black and green with green leather bows, chosen from jumbled rows of astonishing shoes inside a cupboard. — By the way, I hate your conspiracy with Max. Don’t you dare talk to him about me.

Carol took no notice. — This is going to be very hard work, you know. Billie’s going to get worse.

— Don’t lecture me. There’s money. I’ll pay for help.

— And you should have stuck with Max. He’s such a lovely chap.

— As if you didn’t understand that that’s precisely why I haven’t ‘stuck with him’. Stuck with him! Weren’t you a feminist once?

— But now you’re sorry. Don’t try to pretend to me that you’re not sometimes panicky, having burned your boats: and all of them. Not only Max, now. The job and the flat and London.

Kate wrapped herself in her big black-and-white coat, which went on like a cape, fastening with huge black buttons diagonally. — It’s quite a conflagration, my boats.

— Don’t be clever. It’s not a metaphor. You talked about having children with him at one point.

— That was rubbish. I was off my head.

— Soon it will be too late.

— Good God, Carol. Are you actually broody on my behalf? How indecent! Have your own bloody babies. Soon it will be too late for you, too.

— Oh, I’m an old workhorse. I’ll die in harness.

— Even workhorses have reproductive parts, you know. While we’re belabouring these figures of speech.

Carol lay down abruptly on her back on Kate’s bed in her smart suit that was already wrinkled; her feet in their flat brown shoes stuck out over the end. The Habitat silky bronze bedcover was double-bed sized; its excess tumbled across the floor.

— And now you’re sulking. Kate frowned down at her.

— Truly I’m not. I just suddenly thought how delicious it would be to close my eyes. I’ll only be a moment.

Kate moved round the room as quietly as she could in those shoes, picking up her bag, finding her keys, spraying perfume. Carol had always been able to do this. She had fallen asleep often at school, once lying along the wooden lockers where they kept their gym kit; she had slept in a train luggage rack when they were Inter-railing; she had gone out at Kate’s dinner parties, or beside her in the theatre. She would only be absent for a few minutes; then her rather pale blue eyes would pop wide open again, and behind them immediately whatever was vigilant and responsible would resume its watch. Freezing even in her thick coat, Kate picked up a corner of the silky bedcover and dropped it tenderly across her friend.

David walked down from where he worked for the Department of Public Health, in Cathays Park, to the Millennium Centre in the Bay; the evening’s cold was iron hard, moonless and still. Muffled in his camel overcoat and scarf, he strode out in a tension that was partly protective of his core of heat and partly excited expectation of the music he was going to hear: the WNO were doing Handel’s Jephtha . He only knew it from recordings; he was looking forward with a leap of pleasure to hearing it in the dignity of live performance. White lights were strung in the tracery of winter trees in front of the museum with its pillared portico; the pale mass of buildings in the civic centre — museum, law courts, university, the Welsh Office, the central police station — was the only place that ever made him feel in the least colonised, because he thought that the old administrative buildings in Delhi or Ottawa must look like these did at night, dreaming in melancholy hauteur. Beside the long road that linked the city centre and the Bay, not meant for pedestrians, black water winked in Alexandra Dock, so that the city seemed suddenly afloat on a black sea, unmoored from its daytime self. He didn’t care what people thought about the new Millennium Centre in the Bay, all the arguments about its architecture, its curved armadillo-back; he knew he was rather easily impressed visually, not caring enough, impatient to get to what was inside. He imagined his love of music sometimes as caverns underground in him, immense and studded with crystal and inaccessible from the surface.

Suzie was meeting him in the foyer; she was bringing her car — the new one they’d had to buy after her accident — so they could drive back together. He always bought two tickets for the opera or for concerts, but usually he took his mother or his sister; Suzie had never wanted to come before. He stopped inside the doors to look for her in the current of sociability, people coming in from the cold, leaving their things at the cloakroom, buying programmes; he saw her with her back turned, looking for him, her rough honey-blonde hair caught inside the collar of her black coat, her hands pushed down — out of nervousness he guessed, knowing her — into its pockets. When she felt out of place she stood with her shoulders hunched and awkward, and her head tilted defiantly; she challenged the crowd who took no notice of her, flowing around where she waited, or only sending in her direction the ordinary interested glances because she was young and attractive. Catching sight of her, he remembered to wonder why, after all the years of her being cheerfully not in the least interested in his music, Suzie had wanted to come to this. There had been a little distance between them, these past few weeks; perhaps this was her gesture of conciliation.

When he touched her arm from behind Suzie turned on him in relief and accusation. — It lasts three hours, she exclaimed. — I overheard someone saying so. You didn’t warn me.

— You didn’t ask.

He kissed her cheek; she had put on make-up, pink stuff on her skin, and perfume.

— This really isn’t my kind of thing.

— You haven’t heard it yet!

— I mean all this, she said, looking around her, smiling edgily.

David tried to see what Suzie saw in the opera crowd. It was surely all innocently pleasantly provincial enough, the noisy greetings and the stuffy dressing-up; it was hardly Covent Garden. There were funny old wrinkled couples with bags of sweets, and students from the Welsh College of Music and Drama. But Suzie took offence easily, if she ever imagined she scented pretension.

— Let’s put our coats in the cloakroom. Then we can go and order drinks for the intervals.

— Three hours! Suzie said. — I’m going to need a drink.

— I’m glad you came, he said encouragingly, in the queue for programmes. — I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

— I thought I ought to see what you got up to. If it’s so marvellous.

— It is marvellous.

— I’ve never been to an opera in my life.

— Strictly speaking, of course, this isn’t one. It’s an oratorio.