Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

For Kate and Carol in those days David had only been an earnest little brother who could never be coaxed into trouble: he was still a child, with doubting eyes and a sober careful mouth. Experimentally, when he sat down she’d taken his hand — a boy’s brown hand, with bitten nails, fingers stained with biro ink — and put it inside her blouse. She’d been wearing a wraparound crêpe top, a black print with gypsy flowers, and no bra underneath; she had expected David to be astonished and grateful, immediately in her thrall. David instead had snatched back his hand as if she had burned it, and jumped up from the sofa with an expression of absolute disgust, then gone to find Carol and let her know he was going home. Kate had told herself at the time that he must have been terrified — they used to say sagely that some boys were ‘terrified’ of sex — but she had known it wasn’t that. And although a thousand worse things than this little humiliation had happened to Kate since — infinitely worse things — she had held a grudge against David Roberts all the same, and thought him rather a bore, even in all the years afterwards when she met him sometimes at Carol’s. She had only finally forgiven him tonight, when he called out her name in the Millennium Centre, and his pleasure at seeing her shone so transparently in his face.

He wasn’t anything like Carol. They came from an old non conforming Cardiff family, which once had owned a steelworks; Carol had showed her the Unitarian chapel whose foundation stone was laid by a great-great-grandmother of theirs. Carol was dauntless and crusading; David seemed stolid and cautious beside her. He had trained as a doctor, and been a GP for a while; now Kate thought he did something in Public Health. His tight dark hair surprised her, growing crisp and close to his head; when he was a boy it had been silky and straight (everyone in those days had worn their hair long, even the science students). Its bristling tightness now seemed a manifestation of the effort with which he held himself back. He had lived, of course, through dreadful things. Kate had known Francesca, they had been at university together; Carol and Francesca had shared a flat at one point, before Francesca ever knew David.

— Do you know my wife? David asked her, and she startled, before she understood that of course he meant the present one, the one Kate had last seen weeping at the side of the motorway after that extraordinary thing with the swan; she had thought once or twice since, with curiosity, about the blonde farouche girl whose beauty had only gleamed out like an accident in the great luck of her escape. Kate had an instinct not to tell David how she and his wife were mysteriously linked; anyway, she wouldn’t be able to explain why she hadn’t made herself known at the roadside.

— I’ve met her, she said pleasantly, — at Carol’s. But I’ve forgotten her name.

David gazed, burdened, into his Glenmorangie.

— Actually, Suzie was there with me tonight, at the oratorio. But she hated it, she left after the second interval. She doesn’t really enjoy music.

While David and Kate were talking there came the sound of slow steps on the stairs, and then Mrs Flynn walked into the room. She was tiny like Kate, and had the same sculpted head with its drama of cheekbones, tautly curving nose and eloquent eyes; perhaps because she had no chin her expression was bland and sweet where Kate’s was decisive. David was shocked at how Mrs Flynn’s shoulders were bowed and her hair was pure white; she stepped with brittle stiffness as if she was afraid of falling. His own mother hadn’t come anywhere near this phase of ageing; she was still brisk and busy with her voluntary work. Perhaps Mrs Flynn had always been older than the other mothers; perhaps she wasn’t young when she had Kate. He had prepared, when he heard her coming downstairs, to see her in nightclothes or a dressing gown; but she was dressed up in a flowered skirt and pink cardigan, with white button earrings, as if she was going somewhere. Her white hair was neatly pinned up behind.

— I heard you had visitors, Kate. She held out her hand, smiling.

David stood up to explain himself; her hand in his was impossibly light, a scatter of bird-bones loose in their pouch of skin. — My sister Carol is an old friend of Kate’s.

— How nice, dear, she said. — I do know Carol.

— Billie, said Kate. — What are you doing? You were all nicely tucked up in bed when I looked in. Whatever have you put your clothes on for? It’s the middle of the night.

Mrs Flynn was unrepentant. — Is it really? she smiled. — I thought it was morning. I didn’t want to waste the lovely day.

— It’s late, Mummy. It’s night.

— I don’t often get the opportunity to listen in while you young ones talk.

— You see how mad she really is? said Kate. — She still thinks I’m one of the young ones.

Mrs Flynn made a comical face at David, sticking out her lower lip in a pout. — Why should I miss all the fun? And of course music. This is a great house for music. Music and books. Are you a reader? I’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded with art and beauty, all my life.

She lowered herself, clinging to the arm with her two hands, onto the end of the sofa, where she sat stiffly graceful, smiling from one to the other.

— David’s a doctor, Billie.

— Well, that’s fascinating, isn’t it?

— I’m a Consultant in Public Health. Communicable diseases. Don’t get me started on how fascinating: I love my work. But I should read more. Sometimes the only reading I find time to do is Thomas the Tank Engine to my son.

— I hate that ‘should’ of dreary obligation.

— We have so many books, Mrs Flynn sighed.

— Where are your books? David asked, looking around. — I remembered books, but they aren’t in here.

— We have quite a library, next door. Would you like to see? Please borrow something. Please use it as your own.

— I expect, Kate said, — he thinks books are frivolous, in the face of the kind of work he does. Explosions, epidemics, disasters.

— Why don’t you lend me something? David said. — Poetry or a novel. If you lend me something interesting I’ll try. It would be good for me.

— Anyway, isn’t your son too old for Thomas the Tank Engine ? He’s surely in secondary school by now?

— You’re thinking of Jamie, David said. — Jamie’s seventeen. I have a younger son who’s only six.

— Seventeen? Oh, that’s shocking. He can’t be seventeen: it seems like yesterday. What is he like, Francesca’s son?

David for a moment didn’t answer her: for some reason he didn’t want Kate to know that Jamie was more like her than he was: clever and sceptical and difficult, a voracious reader.

— He’s a great cyclist, he said. — Out at all hours on his bike.

After David Roberts had gone, Billie was supposed to be putting the kettle on for cocoa (she would have difficulty getting back to sleep after the stimulation of a visitor), but she had found her spectacles instead and was sitting looking competent at the table in the kitchen, going through an old pile of leaflets and pointless mail.

— What are you doing ? Kate wailed. — That’s all been sorted! It’s for recycling.

— I just thought there might be post that needed dealing with.

— Fat chance, if there was, of your dealing with any of it. Anyway, it’s bedtime.

Obediently, Billie put down the free sample of fabric softener. — Do you think that this stuff’s any good?

— For Christ’s sake. I can’t forgive you for coming downstairs when I bring my friends in. What kind of social life am I supposed to have? What kind of sex life, for that matter?