The River House (10 page)

“Tell me about him.”

He hesitates, as though he isn’t expecting this.

“Well—he likes his Pikachu T-shirt,” he says. “He always has to wear it.”

I smile. “Mine had their share of obsessions too,” I say. Thinking of Amber, and the rhyme that always had to be read.

I expect him to say more, as parents always do, to talk about Jake’s passion for Mario Kart or his loathing of broccoli. But
he looks into his drink and doesn’t say anything. His reluctance makes me uneasy, as though I have trodden in a place that’s
forbidden.

“How’s young Kyle doing?” he says then. “I’d been wondering how it’s all going.”

“I feel I know how to approach it now,” I say. “It helped a lot—what you told me.”

“I’m glad,” he says.

We are ordinary again, professionals discussing a case: We are back in the everyday world.

When he’s finished his drink, we go out to my car together.

“I could give you a lift,” I say, wanting to hold on to him for a little longer.

But he shakes his head and says it’s better if he walks.

He kisses me lightly on the lips.

“I enjoyed that,” he says. “Very much.”

“It was wonderful,” I tell him.

But I know it’s different for him, that he doesn’t have my sense of astonishment.

“We could meet next week,” he says. “If you’d like to.”

“Yes. I’d love that.”

He takes a scrap of paper from his pocket and writes down his cell phone number.

“But you must absolutely promise not to ring me in the evening,” he says.

“Of course I won’t,” I say. “I’ll be careful, I promise.”

We smile, happy for a moment, everything settled, arranged. He leaves me with tenderness, his hand lingering on mine.

The house is empty when I get back. I’m relieved, though there’s no reason why Amber or Greg would be here. I put my T-shirt
in the wash. I clean off all my makeup. I shower and meticulously shampoo my hair. I try to brush the mud from my boots, though
because they’re suede it doesn’t come off easily, and there are stains on the toes, from kneeling in the mulch of leaves and
earth on the riverbank, that take a long time to remove. But even when I’ve done all these things, the smell of his skin seems
still to hang around me, as shockingly real to me as the perfume of the gardenias that grow in a pot on my windowsill.

I decide to make a casserole—something healthy, with lots of olive oil and vegetables. It’s perhaps some unthought-out notion
of penance, of proving that I am still a dutiful mother and wife.

I’m frying tomatoes and peppers when Amber comes in.

She dumps her schoolbag on the kitchen table.

“The police stopped the bus and they came and took somebody off,” she says. She’s flushed, pleased, enjoying her story. “He
looked the dodgy type. I mean, I don’t want to stereotype—he may do meals-on-wheels—but he had a shaved head and about nineteen
earrings. …” She hunts around in a cupboard, looking for crisps. “Mum, you were singing,” she says.

I feel my face go hot.

“Oh. I didn’t realize,” I tell her.

I keep my back to her.

“You were,” she says. “You were singing when I came in.”

There’s a question in her voice. I don’t respond.

She pokes a spoon in the frying pan.

“That smells yummy,” she says. “I hope you’re not going to mess it up with any bits of dead animal.”

Greg is home at five o’clock.

“I thought I could come back early and get in some work on my book,” he says.

“Did you have a good day?” I ask him.

“So-so,” he says. But he seems surprised by the question.

I’d worried that he would look at me and see it all written there in my face and immediately suspect me. But he’s keen to
get up to his study; he scarcely glances at me.

That night when I wake in the dark, as Greg stirs, breathing slowly beside me, I’m in the wet thicket with Will again. And
we make love, from start to finish, every touch remembered, and Death, with his bulbous eyes, his sack, his terrible rapaciousness,
doesn’t come near.

I
’M RAKING THE LEAVES FROM MY LAWN
. They’ve fallen quite suddenly, during the night. All my plants are dying back now, summer and its lavish muddle and disorder
giving way to the clarity of winter—white sky, black branches, seeing so much farther than before.

The phone startles me. I run in, wanting it to be Will.

It’s Ursula.

“Ginnie. So how are things?”

Her intonation is like mine. Families are so strange—these things that mark you out as belonging together. She and I inhabit
different universes, yet our voices are just the same.

“How’s Molly?” she says. “And Amber? Everyone OK?”

I tell her that everyone’s fine.

“That’s wonderful,” she says. But she’s rather brisk and formal, and I know she isn’t listening. All this politeness is just
postponing the thing she’s rung to say.

She clears her throat.

“Ginnie, it’s Mother,” she says then. “I’m a little bit worried about her.”

There’s a mouse-scurry of fear in the corner of my mind.

“We were round there last week,” she says. “It’s hard to put your finger on. … When did you last see her?”

I try to remember and realize, with a rush of the guilt my mother has throughout my life called up in me, that it’s been several
weeks at least.

“I’ve been busy with Molly going away,” I tell her. And think, There’s been Will too—filling my mind, so I’ve forgotten everything.
“I’ll go down at the weekend. She sounds OK on the phone. Is it her arthritis?”

“No,” she says. “It’s not her arthritis. I mean, it troubles her, of course, but she never makes a fuss.”

“No. Well, she wouldn’t.”

“I don’t know, Ginnie,” she says again. “Sometimes she just kind of sits there and keeps taking her glasses off and putting
them on again.” Her fear is circling, darkly predatory, swimming just under the surface of her words. “It’s not like her.
She’s just not quite herself.”

There’s silence between us for a moment. I sense how our relationship shifts to accommodate this new possibility. Something
we aren’t ready for: something you can never be ready for.

“It’s not like it’s stopped her from doing things,” says Ursula. “She gets to her church service. Though she did say one day
she fainted halfway through the Offertory and alarmed everybody. She was quite funny about it, but really I think she was
scared.”

“What about the doctor?”

“I’m working on it. But you know how Mother is. She never complains. She doesn’t like to trouble people. She’s a very private
person.”

“Yes,” I say. “She is.”

The things we have been through and never talked about together hang over us, press down.

“Oh, well, it’s probably nothing,” says Ursula then.

I know she doesn’t think that.

“I’ll go to see her as soon as I possibly can,” I tell her. “Probably Sunday.”

“And I’ll keep on at her about going to the doctor,” says Ursula. “There’s nothing more we can do, is there, really?”

“No,” I say.

Perhaps there has never been anything more that we could do.

Our mother still lives in the house where we grew up, in Hampshire, near the sea. She’s kept it much the same. The bedroom
I shared with Ursula still has the twin beds and the eider-downs of magenta taffeta, that were slippery and always fell off
in the night, so no matter how well you’d been tucked in you always woke up cold, and the mistily painted pictures of ballet
dancers, and the night-light with the cutouts of Enid Blyton elves that threw fantastical shadows. And in the hall and the
sitting room there are still the vivid colors, the tulip prints, the spider plants, the wallpaper patterned with violets;
our mother has always loved cheerful things—Gilbert and Sullivan, flowered fabric—letting these things sustain her. Everywhere
there are photographs, in silver or stained-wood frames. Photos from our childhood, and photos of our weddings, and of Molly
and Amber as children, and of Ursula and Paul on their increasingly exotic holidays. Photographs have always been important
in our family; in childhood they mapped out a separate world, a sunlit family life, a place of celebrations, and cake and
tea with relatives, and shiny, strappy shoes. Now, Ursula and I always have two prints made—one to give to our mother—and
there’s a ritual to handing them over, every picture examined and appraised.

Over the years the house has perhaps become even more itself. Our mother is from the generation that recycled without thinking;
everything was kept because it might come in useful. All our childhood possessions are there—clothes, toys—carefully stashed
away in labeled boxes. There are runners down the middle of the carpet, and dust sheets on the sofas, and when she isn’t in
a room, she draws the curtains to keep the sunlight out. She has such a fear of things wearing out or fading, a fear that
goes beyond a need to preserve these things for a purpose—for now she may leave on the dust sheets even when visitors come.
As though the preservation of these things has become an end in itself. Or as though these things protect her.

The garden, too, is much as it always was, just a little more overgrown. There are lupines, and buddleia that in summer is
bright with butterflies, and the little mossy lawn; and, in autumn, the ragged Michaelmas daisies under the sitting room window,
their flowers of a purple so faded they look as if they’re over even when they’ve only just opened out. At the bottom of the
garden is a stream that’s shadowed by a heavy hedge. Effluent from the dye factory in the village sometimes seeps out into
the water, which was always a source of great fascination to our school friends—one day it might be red, another purple, another
a viscous green. And farther down the road there are other houses and gardens, most of them too with their lawns and lupines
and sometimes a loop of the stream; and the Freedom Hall, with its urgently evangelical posters, promising a different kind
of religion from the undemanding Anglicanism of the Norman church where we went every Sunday morning, where we’d kneel on
the tapestry hassocks in the gorgeous stained light, our mother in her pillbox hat, and mumble the stately words of the Anglican
prayer book, words that stay with you always: “We have done those things that we ought not to have done, and there is no health
in us.”

Our mother knew a lot about the people who lived in these houses. As her own circle grew ever more restricted because our
father didn’t like her going out, these neighbors, these glimpsed and hinted-at households, became her life, her world. Like
Mary Grayson next door, whose daughter had left her husband and gone to live with a woman, and the doctor had told Mary that
once a woman had gone that way there was no going back. Or the Barkers, who lived in the big mock Tudor house next to the
Freedom Hall. He was an executive at the Esso Refinery, and they used to hold swinging parties there, said my mother, all
the men putting their car keys into a salad bowl and being taken to bed by other people’s wives.

But did our neighbors ever gossip about us? Did they wonder what happened in our house, behind the Michaelmas daisies and
the little mossy lawn? Maybe the more astute women noticed the small things—an edge to his voice, or the way he always seemed
to walk a few paces in front of her. But our father was always so charming, a pillar of the community, handing out the prayer
books for the family service: And our mother had blouses that buttoned high at the collar.

They’re vivid even now, the bad times. Waking in the bedroom I shared with Ursula, with the night-light with the Enid Blyton
cutouts throwing intricate shadows, shivering, my taffeta eider-down slipping to the floor. Waking suddenly, pulses hammering
everywhere in my body, hearing his voice from downstairs, rising, hardening. There are voices that can hurt you, that can
seem to tear into you: that make you want to hide, to burrow under your blankets, clasping them to you, bunched tight inside
your fists.

“Don’t start.” He would always say that. “Don’t start.” But when he said that, his voice too loud for the house, it had already
begun. And then, “Bitch. You fucking stupid bitch. You fucking whore.” The torrent of insults, the things he called her. I’d
feel that everything was breaking up around us, that there was too much rage, too much hate, for the house to contain.

Ursula always stayed in bed, deep down under the bedcovers, her rapid breathing muffled by the blankets that she pressed to
her ears and her eyes. But sometimes I’d creep out onto the landing—frightened but needing to know. I’d kneel by the banister,
clasping my hands tight around the posts, gripping so hard that later I’d find the imprint of the carving on my palms. Knowing
I should go down—perhaps I could do something, perhaps I could stop it from happening. I remember the violets on the landing
wallpaper, and the tiles downstairs on the floor of the hall, and the stab of white light across the tiles from the half-open
kitchen door. Kneeling there on the landing among the ordinary things: the spider plant, the flowered walls, the gilt-framed
mirror. And then the click as my mother closed the door before he hit her. Knowing I was there, perhaps, and trying to protect
me: making sure at least that I couldn’t see.

Sometimes, the morning after, he’d be the one who woke us. He would be white, with a muffled, melancholy look, an air of being
sorry for himself: as though it was he who’d suffered. “Your mother’s not well,” he’d say. Those mornings he’d put out our
breakfast cereal himself. It would be quiet in the house, a flat, dull feeling, as if the tension had been drained away. I
would creep into their bedroom before I went to school, needing to be sure she was alive: She’d be asleep, or pretending to
sleep, her back toward the doorway, but I’d be able to see the blankets moving with her breathing.

Afterward, he’d buy her flowers. Once I came back from school earlier than Ursula—we normally walked home together, but she
must have stayed for art club—and there were flowers, great blowsy bouquets, roses, arum lilies, too many for the room: She’d
put them in two vases, and she was sitting there between them, surrounded by all these heavy, polleny blossoms, her face swollen,
the bruises bright as the toxic stream in our garden. She held her head very still, as though it was breakable, moving her
whole body when she turned as I came in. Her bruised face frightened me, the fragile skin shiny, ugly, the paint box of bruising.
I hated the way the bloating distorted her face, as if she wasn’t the mother I knew anymore. I wished that Ursula were there.
The room was full of the sore-throat smell of Dettol and the clingy sweetness of roses.