The Master Bedroom

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate’s 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.

David’s 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.

David’s seventeen-year-old so, 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 at Firenze one night, drunk and desperate.

Tessa Hadley

is the author of two novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and Everything Will Be All Right, as well as Sunstroke, a collection of stories. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker and Granta.

Tessa Hadley's q & a

What sparked The Master Bedroom?
My idea began in a place which didn't quite become the centre of the novel.
My first idea was my married couple David and Suzie: they are growing apart because he's so rational and reasonable and only believes in things he can see with his own eyes; while Suzie is beginning to be stirred by a sense of things outside rational knowledge. She imagines that the bird that crashes down on her car on the motorway in the first chapter is a sign, that the world is full of hidden signs we fail to read, including messages from the past and from the dead. The interesting challenge is, to make both those perspectives feel valid, and sympathetic.

At first I didn't have the centre of the book in there at all - Kate and her
mother and her house.

Where and when is the novel set?
It's set in Cardiff, and it's contemporary. It's my first novel set in
Wales, even though I've lived here for more than quarter of a century. I
thought for a long time that if I wrote a novel set in Wales I'd have to
address all the baggage of Welsh politics and history; then eventually I
understood that Wales was going to be the medium and texture of my novel, not its subject. The baggage would all be there - how interesting - but I didn't have to sort it out.

The place at the heart of the novel is a beautiful municipal park five
minutes walk from where I live in Cardiff. I love city parks. I love the the
expertise that goes into caring for all the trees and flowers, and the civic ideal that such places embody, families out together on Sunday afternoons, the ice-cream van and the rose garden and the boating lake. Though like Kate my character I really like it best of all when I have it almost to myself, on a rainy afternoon. The city's past is still there in those parks for us to walk around in, they are full of atmosphere and nostalgia.


Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
I was very happy to make such a good decent man as David, as I'd made some bad ones in my books before. His good steadiness is real, it isn't there to be knocked down, or to be boring.

But I suppose I most enjoyed writing my character Kate: not 'good' at all. It was liberating to have her behaving so audaciously, as if she could just make up the rules as she went along. At forty-three, childless and without a partner, she gives up her job and decides just to live, like people did in novels in the old days, letting the days pass, going to concerts and playing cards and reading and thinking. Of course what she discovers is that she becomes prey to an intense life of imagining - obsession and passion and dreaming - just as women at home did in the old days. Then she falls into playing a dangerous game with a young boy, David's son, almost because there's nothing else to do.

What's your favourite children's book and why?
Oh, that's very hard, how to choose the most favourite of all... I think
I'll have to have The Secret Garden AND Tom's Midnight Garden (I notice a parks and gardens theme developing). Both of these have reverberated strongly, through my childhood and in my life ever since. Both use the garden to express themes of the present haunted by the past, of the shapes the past leaves behind, which we exist inside. They are both about children's dawning recognition that the adults around them were once children too, that they too will grow up and grow old. I'm sure these books helped to tune my sensibility to that elegiac note.