Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

He shook his head. — Alone.

— Shame. I haven’t seen Carol in a while. I’m alone too. I had a ticket for my mother but she changed her mind.

— Perhaps we could have a drink?

She gave him a quickly reassessing look. — Here?

— If you like, here. The bar’s open downstairs, isn’t it? Or anywhere.

— Why not? We could catch up.

David was all of a sudden reckless, as if Suzie’s leaving him scalding with justified indignation had handed him a new freedom to go after what he wanted. He wanted a friend; he was imagining a companionship like cool air, a mingling of intelligences. He had been afraid of Kate’s intelligence once. She had seemed sophisticated and sarcastic when he was a studious tongue-tied boy studying sciences at school.

— Why don’t you come back to the house? Kate said as they made their way downstairs in the press of people. — I ought really to check on my mother, although I hope she’s asleep in bed. I’ve got a bottle of Glenmorangie that needs drinking.

— The house being?

— The old house. The same old place. I’ve come back to live: didn’t Carol tell you?

— She might have mentioned it: but I didn’t take in that it was permanent. I know your mother hasn’t been well.

— Her health is fine, only she’s losing her marbles. After I’d got her dressed up in all her finery this evening she suddenly made her mind up there was something on the television she had to watch. Something she’d seen the first part of and couldn’t bear to miss finding out what happened. I looked in the Radio Times and there wasn’t anything, of course, but she wouldn’t be persuaded.

— I’m sorry, David said. — I always liked your mother.

— You will still like her. She’s awfully charming even in her disarray. But she’ll be in bed when we get there, I hope.

They shared a taxi to Kate’s old home beside the lake. David expected his pleasure in having made his bold gesture of friendship to subside, but it didn’t. He had only been to the house a few times, in his youth, but he remembered everything vividly; when Kate opened the door with her key and led him through the imitation-baronial hall into the long drawing room, he saw that it had hardly changed. It had been the grandest house he knew; he had thought of it when he was a boy, with a mixture of awe and unease, almost as a palace, with its tower and its long verandas at front and back, and its stained glass. The decoration in the drawing room had been old-fashioned even in the seventies: some kind of light silvery wallpaper, a chandelier, watercolours and still lifes hanging from the picture rail, a baby grand piano, huge stuffed armchairs, dainty occasional tables. The paper was shabby now, there were brown damp stains in one corner, and the carpet had faded to blankness; the armchairs sagged with broken springs and on their arms the faded silk was worn away, so that their stuffing leaked. But it was all still somehow gracious. A young Kate in her graduation gown, plainer than she was now and wearing glasses, gazed from the mantelpiece in a silver frame.

Even when he was a boy David had understood that the Flynns were unfashionable because they had their minds set on higher standards of good taste. Kate’s father was already dead then, he had been some kind of musician; Kate was the only child. Her mother was Jewish. There must have been money at some point, to buy this big house; he couldn’t remember that Mrs Flynn had ever worked, apart from giving a few piano lessons. Here and there around the room were incongruous contemporary things that Kate must have brought with her when she came home: a bright-coloured pot full of pens and pencils, a poster advertising a photography exhibition at the ICA, bright striped silk cushions, a pink-and-yellow blanket thrown over the back of the sofa, signs of the different life Kate must have in London.

She carried in the Glenmorangie and two glasses, also a pot of coffee ready to plunge. David never usually drank coffee in the evening, but he didn’t care tonight if he was kept awake.

— So what did you think of Jephtha ? she asked.

— I thought it was excellent.

— It was. But the staging irritated me.

He didn’t want her to demur. He never cared, anyway, how the designer chose to dress things up, he took no notice of that. He hoped Kate wasn’t going to fuss about it.

— All that Italian neo-realist bit, headscarves and Mussolini suits. They see that it’s about authority and patriarchy, and then the ideas bulb pops on: oh, it’s just like Fascist Italy. Wasn’t that annoying?

— It didn’t bother me, he said coolly, warning her off. — Music isn’t ‘about’ things. Personally, I’d rather hear it sung as a concert.

She was a university lecturer; no doubt they got into the habit of holding forth, thinking they knew everything. Perhaps she would be tiresome after all. To his surprise she fished in her bag for cigarettes and a lighter; there was hardly anyone in his acquaintance these days who still smoked. She didn’t ask him if he minded; slipping off her shoes and tucking her feet under her, she curled up in one of the big old armchairs, contemplating him sitting in the opposite chair through the cloud of her smoke. The black cat that had followed her into the room jumped into her lap. There was something familiar in the way Kate smiled at David, as if she knew things about him he didn’t know about himself; it must come from when they were teenagers, and he was such an innocent, without a clue as to what you were supposed to do and say with girls.

He wanted to change the subject. — If you’ve moved to live down here, does that mean you’ve given up your job in London? Are you working here?

— I’ve given up full stop. I’m not working.

— Not working at all?

— Isn’t it amazing? Billie gets a care allowance, I’m renting out my London flat. We seem to manage. I live like an aristocrat. Lying in bed late, reading all day, going to concerts and the cinema, visiting friends. We watch all the detective programmes on television. I think I ought to take up cards. What do the leisured classes play in the old novels? Bezique? Piquet? Vingt-et-un ? No doubt it all seems very dissipated, to a man with serious responsibilities.

— It’s a big sacrifice to make, to look after your mother.

— I’m not the sacrificing kind. I really didn’t do it out of goodness. I was curious. Is there anything left inside, after twenty years? Anyway, nobody cares any more: the students, the administration. I was bored with everything about academic life that had enchanted me at first. The obedient processing of the latest fad. I’m too old for it.

— Is that really all you think it is?

— Don’t take me too seriously. I don’t know what I think. Anyway, now I’m so happy, doing nothing. Of course it’s early days. I may yet end up gibbering on the street, or murdering Billie in a moment of overweening rage. Or begging for my job back. I did leave that option open. I managed to arrange a year’s unpaid leave.

— You’re not secretly scribbling? We’re not to expect the publication of some great work of fiction one of these days?

She looked disappointed in him. — Oh no, she said. — Why does everyone think that? That’s the last thing. Perhaps if you haven’t had children they think you ought to give birth to novels instead.

Kate didn’t know whether David Roberts could remember a little scene that had gone on between them in this house, years and years ago, when they were young and she’d made an awful fool of herself; she didn’t care whether he could or not. He looked so imperturbable, sitting perched on the edge of his chair in his suit and tie, with his knees apart, twirling his drink and looking into his glass as if he never would unbend, frowning his disapproval of her thoughts on the oratorio. She would have quite liked to make him blush. The thing had happened at one of her teenage parties; she had had the best, the wildest parties (Billie had been so persuadable, usually she agreed to stay away for the night). David must have tagged along with Carol. The idea of those parties generally was that by the end of the evening the crowd of individuals was resolved to a number of interlocked couples in a darkened room. They had had the folding doors pushed open to make this room and the library into one; Kate had been lying on the old chaise longue, she had patted a space for David to sit down beside her. Perhaps if the doors hadn’t been closed now, the sight of the chaise longue would have reminded him.