Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

— And what’s that when it’s at home?

All day long David had been aware of Handel waiting for him at the end of it, spacious, public, subtle music; now he began to fear that anxiety over Suzie was going to distract him from his precious opportunity. When they had ordered their drinks for the interval, they stood over a first gin in the bar, behind one of the giant letters cut out of the facade that curved like a ship’s prow, spelling on the outside in Welsh and English some lines of poetry he couldn’t remember. She was wearing her white trouser suit and a silky blue top; searching for something to talk about, they resorted to the children, rehearsing the parts of a cheerfully married couple for the benefit of anyone watching. Suzie was more animated when she remembered to tell him about the new teacher they had at work, filling in for a maternity leave.

— It’s eerie, Suzie said. — She says she has second sight. She was sitting beside me in the staffroom, we were having coffee, she gripped my arm and said, ‘I’m sorry but I can just see this so intensely, I have to tell you.’ She seemed to know all these things about me that she couldn’t possibly have found out. She knew about my mother losing my grandmother’s ring in the sand, all those years ago. I’ve never told anyone about that at school. She knew what my mother was like. She said, ‘That’s the sort of thing she always does, she’s careless with precious things. Careless with you and your sister, too.’ I mean, how did she know I had a sister?

— They have tricks, David said. — They draw these things out of you, without you noticing. It’s all fakery, of course.

— She knew about that accident. Not exactly. But about me being afraid of something like a white bird, falling.

— You probably talked to Giulia about it. I’m not sure I’d want someone who believed all that stuff teaching my children.

— Oh, don’t be so solemn. What harm could it do?

— So what did she see in your future?

She was vague then, as if she didn’t want to tell him. — I don’t know, the useful stuff. Change.

They quarrelled at the second interval. David found the tray with their numbered ticket on it, two more gins and a bottle of tonic.

— I hate it, Suzie said, loud enough to twitch a few backs nearby. A swell of the crowd coming out from the auditorium washed them too close up against one another. — It’s horrible.

He poured out the tonic, distributing it carefully between the two glasses.

— I’m sorry you’re not enjoying it.

— It’s not the music.

— How can it be ‘not the music’? The music is what it is.

— For all I can tell, the music may be very brilliant.

— I’m sorry you can’t tell. It really is.

— But you’re all sitting there, enjoying yourselves — yes, mmm, very interesting, very nice orchestration there, very effective counterpoint — listening to a man who’s taking seriously a God who asks him to kill his daughter. I mean I’m sorry. Am I the only one who thinks this is pretty sick? We have kids coming to school covered with bruises and so on. Isn’t it the same thing?

The blue silky stuff of her top settled around her breasts, the light on it changing as she breathed fast; David straightened his back in his determination not to care that everyone around them was listening. If she didn’t know the answer, then there was no point.

— And we’re supposed to sympathise with his dilemma! ‘A father’s bleeding heart’! It’s disgusting. If this is high civilisation and all that.

She took a gulp of her gin very fast and some of it trickled down her chin.

— You’re bringing some very twenty-first-century assumptions to bear on an eighteenth-century work.

— I’m afraid I’m a very twenty-first-century kind of person. Don’t think I don’t know how it’s going to end. I don’t even need to look in the programme. He’s going to decide to go ahead with the sacrifice and then angels are going to appear from heaven at the last moment and make everything all right.

— That’s about the sum of it.

— I don’t think I can bear to sit through that. I’ve had enough.

He was cold with disappointment in her. — OK.

— How will you get home, if I take the car?

— Walk. Or taxi. It isn’t a problem.

— Kate Flynn’s here, did you see? Carol’s friend.

— I didn’t see.

— Sitting a few rows ahead of us. She might give you a lift. Or I’ll stay if you want me to.

— Absolutely not.

They stood awkwardly while she finished her drink; he fished in his jacket pocket for her cloakroom tag.

— Why did you come? he asked. — What did you want it to be?

She shook her head as if he couldn’t understand. — Something else. I really did want to like it, honestly. Something uplifting and different. But I should have known.

He thought he might feel relieved when she was gone; but his heart was dancing with rage, and he only felt conspicuous. He might as well have left too; there was no chance of enjoying the rest of the oratorio after what had happened. He went back before the bell to sit inside. Just before the lights dimmed for the third act he did catch sight of Kate Flynn, in the stalls five or six rows ahead of him, reading her programme. He hadn’t seen her for a while — a year or more, perhaps. He was surprised how immediately recognisable she was even from behind, without seeing her face: the head as straight and alert on its long neck as if it was held up by a wire; big earrings dangling from under the short bob of her hair. He remembered that Kate had always, even in her teens, had two pure white locks in her thick black hair, one growing from her temple and one on her nape, she used to be teased for it; he wasn’t sure he could see them from this distance. Kate was two or three years older than him: his sister Carol’s age.

She seemed to be sitting alone; there was an empty seat beside her but no one came to fill it. That idea soothed him as the lights went down. It was the best way: it was fallacious to imagine that these experiences could be shared. All through the last act, through Jephtha’s visionary aria, ‘Waft her, angels’, this sense of himself and others in the audience listening together but in their separateness sustained him. Actually it didn’t matter that Suzie had gone home, that she didn’t care for the things he cared for. It freed him up. It would have been worse, say, if she had enthused over Jephtha and then come back the next week and said she liked Madame Butterfly or La Bohème just as much. Suzie was wrong, she was surely wrong. The music, pushing open the almost abstract words, did not express the complacency of authority but its effort and its pain.

When it was over and the audience were making their way out, David found himself waiting, while people pushed past, for Kate to catch up with him. Wrapped in some sort of dark shawl embroidered with flowers, thrown back over one shoulder, she was looking carefully for the steps under her feet; but her expression was rapt, she was still absorbed in the music.

— Kate! Kate Flynn!

The urgency with which he hailed her might have surprised her; they had never been intimate, in fact, they’d never in their adult selves completely outgrown that arrangement in which he was her friend’s kid brother, to be tolerated. She seemed pleased enough to see him.

— David!

She stopped and put out both her hands, causing a hiatus in the flow of people; he took them with a warmth he hadn’t known he felt. She did still have that white lock, swept back from her narrow intellectual-looking face with its finely emphatic nose and slanting black eyes.

— Are you here with Carol? I know she comes with you.