Reading Guide: The Master Bedroom

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Tessa Hadley

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About Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley teaches at Bath Spa University and lives in Cardiff.

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About the Book

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate¹s forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother in Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it’s because she’s bored and hasn’t got anything else to do, but she can’t stop. David is married, rational, dependable: the last type to want an affair. David¹s marriage isn’t as solid as it looks, though. His wife Suzie has moved out of their bedroom, she avoids talking to David or spending time at home with him and their children, she has made new friends who smoke dope and believe in fortune telling. David takes refuge in Firenze, where he can talk to Kate about music. David¹s seventeen-year-old son Jamie is also drawn to the old house full of books and history. He is more like Kate than his father is, bookish and clever: he wants to find out all about life from her. He turns up one night at Firenze, drunk and desperate. Tessa Hadley’s intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, lovers and friends; the past casts its long shadows in the present; men and women who were once confident they knew themselves, learn to attend to the changes unfolding inside them.

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Tessa Hadley interview/review

What was the inspiration for The Master Bedroom ?

The idea for a novel seems to come in layers.

First I remember thinking about a marriage between a very sceptical, reasonable man, scientifically trained, and a wife who began to believe in all kinds of magic. The argument between Susie and David doesn’t feel quite like the heart of the book now, but that’s where it began.

Then the next thing I felt sure of was the old house by the lake that Kate comes home to, full of the past, shaped by a way of living that was leisurely and privileged. I got hold of Kate through he streak of white in her dark hair and her dangling earrings. David first sees her at the opera from behind, he notices her bare neck and the strong way she holds up her head; that was what I first saw too.

The last piece of the puzzle that needed to be slotted in to make up my story was the most wicked: the boy, David’s son, who falls for Kate even though she’s old enough to have been his mother’s friend. It’s a test for a writer to try to weave something new out of the twisted skein of love’s entanglements: here, a father and son are in love with the same woman.

Was any part of the novel influenced by your own life?

Not directly. No seventeen-year-old lovers. (Alas?) But every page is full of hoarded scraps of experience.

When I was fifteen, the sister of a French girl I exchanged with had a streak of white in her hair like Kate’s: I found it overwhelmingly attractive and glamorous. I go for a walk in our local park in Cardiff every day after writing at my desk, if I can, and the park in the novel is borrowed almost exactly from this real one. Around the lake at the end of the park there are some grand rather fantastical houses like the one Kate and Billie live in, one even with a turret.

I have never been inside any of these real houses, so I could make up freely what went on inside, that crazy mess, all the stuff hoarded from three generations of lifetimes. I suppose the book is partly about the last traces of a vanished way of living, bourgeois and suburban, deeply quiet, routinised, cultured, optimistic.

But then all through the novel we know that Kate’s family are Jewish, and then at the end when she finds the box of photographs of missing people we’re reminded that the seeming timeless quiet of the suburbs was only ever an illusion: like walking on deep still water, into which at any moment you might have fallen and drowned.

Who was your favourite character to write about?

I like Kate, although I suppose she behaves very badly (very badly towards everyone except her mother). But she’s brave, she doesn’t try to please, she says what she thinks. She has a kind of unthinking confidence in her own authority, which women don’t often attain to.

When she comes home to live with her mother Billie she’s really testing life outside the safe structures of a job and a public identity, to see what mysteries it will throw at her. It’s as if she steps off the routines of her working life into empty air. She has no family, apart from Billie, to worry about, or to freight her and make her feel herself substantial. Kate was the easiest to write, just because her energy and her sense of drama seemed to spill over into my words.

It’s harder to write the quiet virtues of characters than their noisy transgressions. But it was fun waking up David too. I wanted to make a really good man, and then I wanted him painfully to open up to things outside what he has rationally conceived as the sum of his life. I feel sad about how the novel leaves him at the end: something, after all, isn’t going to happen to him. And probably after a while he will close up the space inside himself, so that he won’t even know that the thing hasn’t happened. (Will it matter, then?)

When and where do you write? Do you have a special place and routine for writing?

First thing in the morning seems a good time to write – before all the other stuff comes crowding in, muddying the water. But ‘first thing’ for me isn’t very early, I don’t like getting up. The work just has to be launched into when the mind’s still fresh: washed clean, you hope, by sleep and dreaming. You need to be sharp and yet misty at the same time, to write.

Mentally, it’s like holding some very difficult position in ballet, it strains the mind-muscles. Even though we have quite a big house and there are lots of rooms empty now two of my three sons have left home, I write at a table in the bedroom, unless the neighbours (students) are too noisy to bear. I don’t know why I like to write in there. I’m not superstitious, but having a special study to write in might seem like tempting fate. You might sit in the special study and find the clarity and the visions refused to come.

What book are you reading at the moment?

I’m re-reading Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. It’s such a joy of a book. It feels like a youthful book, although Stendhal wasn’t young when he wrote it – instead of the weary perspectives of an all-knowing author, he seems somehow to participate in the moods and passions and alterations of his characters as if these things were happening in the moment of writing. There’s such appetite in it all.

The style is so simple it seems unconsidered (it isn’t). Cleverness by itself could never achieve these insights, there’s a greatness of heart in the perception, as well as wit, and delicious sceptical irony. The middle aged characters are so finely and sympathetically done, as well as the young ones at the beginning of everything. Poor intelligent, charming, capable Count Mosca, dreading that la Sanseverina will prefer her beautiful nephew to his own fifty years of experience, his power and his money, his worn out face.

Can you tell us what you are working on at the moment?

I’m writing another novel. The central consciousness through whom almost everything in this new novel is related is a man. It has been exciting, liberating, difficult, trying to think as a man. Women know men so intimately well, we co-exist with them so closely, interact with such intensity, follow and study their motivations (at times) with such hungry interest: we ought to be able to write about them, imagine ourselves inside their so different envelope of flesh and history.

After all, male writers have loved to write about women, and through women’s narratives, and they have sometimes done it so well that women readers have accepted their portraits as truth.

Paul is a troubled thinker and writer. He’s full of dread when he thinks about the condition of the world, the degradation of nature; the women who surround him find his abstract worry slightly comical, exasperating. But isn’t he right, to be afraid?

His life seems to flood with the kind of experiences he believes he isn’t good at, to do with emotion and the mess of bodily function: his mother dies, his oldest daughter gets pregnant and leaves home, his first wife sends him out to look for her.

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Starting Points for Discussion

MARRIAGE & LOYALTY Francesca has once called him ‘unimaginatively monogamous’ (p.116) What does Francesca mean by this? Why is this one of the only things that David remembers her saying? What do you think it says about their marriage? Do you think David’s unimaginative approach to marriage is one of the reasons that Suzie tries to escape? Or do you think that Tessa Hadley holds back information about their marriage so that Suzie’s motivations stay unclear? Towards the end of the novel, Suzie’s ‘friends’ are not named yet it is made clear that she is not with Menna, Neil or Guila, the only friends she seems to be close to. Do you think she had an affair? Would David have been tempted if he knew that Suzie had definitely had an affair? Do you think he would have ever made the first move to be unfaithful?

LOVE & LUST — ‘[Kate’s father] was a violinist, he’d come over from Ireland to play for an orchestra here in Cardiff, that’s how they met. Isn’t it romantic; isn’t it poignant?…Kate says she thinks he only married her for her money, and that he drank and slept around. But then you know what Kate’s like. —She’s not romantic. —Or it’s just another kind of romance isn’t it? (p.137) What kind of romance does The Master Bedroom depict? David has a dream about Kate where he takes a little brown bird from beneath her dress but he does not fully understand what the metaphor signifies: is it love or lust? What do you think it represents? Why does Kate have a relationship with Jamie? Is it revenge for David’s teenage rejection of her advances (p.45) and his hesitation over his adult feelings for her? Or does she really have feelings for Jamie? The Observer describes this book as ‘a sexy read’. Do you agree with this statement? Is it more about lust then love? How do music and books play a role in the romantic feelings between characters? Look at Suzie and Kate’s different reactions to art and how this effects David’s feelings towards them. —I miss her body heat, Kate admitted. —Even her old body helped: the two of us kept warmer together than I can get by myself now. (p.290) Throughout the story Kate is unable to get warm. Even in the summer she has the fire on. Why do you think this is? What does it stand for? Does Kate ever really let anyone close enough to warm her?

PARENTHOOD ‘Kate put up her umbrella and hurried on through winter suburban streets where the water ran noisily…soaking her feet through her unsuitable shoes’ (p.309) This quote suggests that Kate is never ready for anything. If this is true, do you think that she is ready to be a mother? What kind of mother do you think she will make? Jamie and Kate begin their relationship so that Jamie can find out more about his mother. Is Kate a substitute mother? Jamie is seen by everyone else in the story as a ‘good boy’. Why can’t David see this? Why is he awkward in Jamie’s presence? Is he a good father to him? David refuses to talk about Francesca even to Jamie, her son. Why does he do this? How does this effect Jamie and his feelings towards his father and his family? Jamie is about to become a father in the story but he doesn’t know. Do you think that Kate will tell him? What kind of father do you think he will be?

FEELINGS VS RESPONSIBILITES — That’s the mistake I made at your age – thinking that all that matters is the personal stuff. If you are not careful you build your life around smoke. —It’s the rest that’s smoke. (p.275) Jamie does not bow to the pressure excreted from those around him to make a choice about his future. He thinks carefully about what he feels. Is he right to do this? Are his feelings holding him back? Does he build his ‘life around smoke’? David, compared to Jamie, is tied to his responsibilities and also to reason. Do you think this stops him from telling Kate how he feels? Does it stop him from confronting Suzie about their relationship? Who is the most balanced: David or Jamie? Also look at Kate and Suzie.

COMMUNICATION Kate had always spoken to her mother sharply. When she was a child she’d hit her too…Kate knew other people would be shocked that she swore at her mother and raised her voice. (p.50) Why do you think that Kate finds it difficult to communicate with her mother? Compare the way Kate speaks to her mother to the way she speaks to the other characters. She often relies on intelligential wit and sarcasm to avoid answering questions. Why does she do this? Does conversation draw people to her or push them away? Violence is often associated with the inability to communicate in the novel. Look particularly at Suzie and David’s ‘fight’ on the hill and Kate’s reaction to Max discoving her pregnancy. Why do the characters react so violently? —We’ll leave it like that, shall we? I won’t tell you anything either, about me. We won’t tell. It’ll be better for us, really. (p.285) Suzie is the only one who acknowledges that it is best – sometimes – not to talk everything over. But do you think this is the correct course of action for Suzie and David’s marriage? Or will the words unsaid come back to haunt them?

IN BRIEF What do you think the swan represents? Why is Kate so attractive to David, Jamie & Max? How important is Kate and Billie’s house, Firenze, to the story? How does it compare to the homes in the story? Why does Kate only have sexual relations with Jamie in the master bedroom? Carol is a kind and sensible character who helps and supports Kate. So why is Kate so dismissive of Carol’s life? And why does Carol continue to be so close to Kate? ‘Shall I take [the photos] with me? Do they belong to me?’ (p.307) Why can’t Kate relate to her family’s past? When things are tough for Kate she escapes to London. Look at the division between the city and the provinces in the book.

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Other Books by Tessa Hadley

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The Master Bedroom
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