The River House (7 page)

At the thought of Molly, I feel a little surge of anxiety. I wonder whether she woke on time this morning, and whether she
has made friends with the girl with the black shiny hair. I wonder when she will ring me.

I look through some post that wasn’t urgent—courses I could go on, and a catalog from a firm I’ve used before. They make hand
puppets and therapeutic games. The catalog is glossy, full of colors. I flick through. There’s a crocodile with a zipper mouth,
to use with children who’ve been abused to help them tell the things they’re keeping secret. There’s a wolf that’s half as
big as a child: “A large scary wolf who can also be afraid. Is he then so scary?” I think how Amber would have adored him
when she was little and had a scheme to keep a wolf as a pet. And there’s a gray velvet caterpillar, with snaps you can undo
to hatch a yellow butterfly. I shall take the catalog home and see if there’s anything useful. Perhaps I should order the
crocodile for Gemma. But I’m tempted too by the caterpillar that turns into a butterfly. I’m not sure which child I would
use it with, but I love its velvet wings.

My cell phone rings. I scrabble in my handbag, thinking it’s Molly.

It’s a number I don’t know.

“Now, am I speaking to Ginnie?”

My pulse has skittered off before I consciously recognize his voice.

“Yes.”

“Ginnie,” he says, “it’s Will.” I notice how he doesn’t give his surname. “Look, I’ve got some info on your little patient.
Quite interesting.”

“Thanks so much,” I tell him.

There’s a little pause, as though he’s drawing breath or working out how to put something. The sun through the window is warm
on the skin of my arms.

“Would you like to meet up to talk about it?” he says.

“That would be really helpful,” I tell him.

“I wondered about after work today,” he says. “About six. I could do that if it suits you.”

I tell him, yes, it would suit me. We talk for a moment or two with enthusiasm about how useful this will be—to talk about
it properly. Our voices are level, reasonable: We are two professionals planning a case discussion. I have a crazy fear that
even over the phone he can hear the thud of my heart.

“There’s a pub,” he says. “In Acton Street. D’you know it?”

I explain, perhaps with rather too much emphasis, that it will be the easiest place in the world for me to find.

“I’ll see you there,” he says.

I put down the phone, but his voice is still inside me. Desire ambushes me, taking away my breath.

I ring Amber. It’s her voice mail.

“Sweetheart, look, I’m going to be late, I have to go to a meeting. There’s some lamb stew from yesterday in the fridge. It
just needs heating through. Make sure you heat it for ten minutes, and be really careful to switch the ring off afterward.
…” But I know she’ll ignore my message and go to the co-op for crisps and a pack of Cherry Bakewells.

In the bathroom I study myself in the mirror for a moment. I think of the dream I had of him. I hold my hands under the tap
then pull wet fingers through my hair. At least I have a lipstick. My skin is still flushed from talking to him.

I take my coat from my office, and the bag with the fish in it—though I’ll probably have to throw it out since it needs to
be cooked today—and the catalog with all its therapeutic toys. I decide I shall order the butterfly.

I
T’S THE PUB THAT
I
PASSED
when I walked home from work, a lumbering building with purple paintwork and advertisements for Sports Night. I get there
too early and sit in my car around the corner, nervous, suddenly wondering why I’m here.

At exactly six I go in. At first I can’t see him. I try to remember his face, but it eludes me, though I saw it so precisely
in my dream. I worry, like a girl on a first date, that he’s here and I haven’t recognized him.

He’s in the corner, by the slot machine. I see him before he sees me. In that brief moment before he knows I’m there, he seems
quite different from when we met before, his shoulders bowed, head lowered—as if something weighs on him and presses him down.
As though there’s a shadow on him. This surprises me.

He looks up.

“Ginnie.”

He’s vivid, eager again. I forget the shadow.

He stands and kisses me lightly, his mouth just brushing my skin. I breathe in his smell of smoke and cinnamon.

“I’ll get you a drink,” he says.

“I’d love a whiskey.” I wish that my voice didn’t sound so girlish and high.

The pub looks as though it hasn’t been decorated for years. The chairs have grubby corduroy seats, and there are curtains
with heavy swags, and eighties rag-rolled walls. You can smell hot chip oil. The place is filling up with workers from local
offices, relaxing before their journey home—raucous men with florid ties, and women in crisp trouser suits and wearing lots
of lip gloss. A teenage boy with an undernourished look and blue shadows around his mouth and eyes comes up to the slot machine
and starts to play.

I take off my coat, rather carefully; my body feels clumsy and ungainly. I watch all the glittering colors that chase across
the slot machine. I have a strong sense that I’m forgetting something important. Pictures of home move through my mind, a
catalog of possible disasters: Amber losing her keys and waiting on the doorstep in the cold, or starting a fire because she
heats up the stew after all and then gets sidetracked by an urgent text message. I take out my phone; I’m about to ring her
again. But Will is coming back with my drink. I watch his easy grace as he weaves through the crowd toward me. Instead of
ringing Amber, I turn off my phone.

He sits.

“So, you’re OK?” he asks. Just to fill in the silence. His eyes linger on my face for a moment, then flick away. I realize
he too is nervous.

“I’m fine.”

He smiles at me rather earnestly, as though this is encouraging information.

“I hope this pub’s all right,” he says. “I thought it would be easier to talk here.”

“Of course, it’s great,” I tell him.

I think of the dream I had about him, his warm slide into me, the shocking openness of it. Now, sitting here in this banal
place with this man who’s still a stranger, I’m embarrassed by the memory of my dream.

He sips his beer.

“Let me tell you,” he says. “About young Kyle.”

“Yes. Please.”

“You were absolutely right,” he says. “In what you suspected. The father’s very violent.”

I nod.

“The mother called us a few times. I had a word with Naomi Yates, who’s her liaison officer. Nasty stuff—he used to choke
her, she said. It started when she was pregnant. As so often.” A kind of weariness seeps into his voice.

“Did he ever hurt Kyle directly?”

“Not so far as we know. That happens, doesn’t it? There are men who’ll beat up their wives and not lay a hand on the kids.”

“Yes,” I say.

He takes a sip of his beer. I watch his hands, his long, pale fingers curving around the glass.

“She’d leave and then go back to him. You know the story—these women who keep on leaving and then can’t stay away. All it
takes is some tears and a bunch of cut-price roses. … It’s one of the great mysteries, isn’t it?” he says. “Why women don’t
just give up on these psycho husbands.” When he frowns, there are hard lines etched in his face. “There’s fear, of course,
but it isn’t always fear. I don’t want to buy in to that whole hooked-on-violence thing, but you’ve got to wonder.”

“Perhaps it’s remorse they get hooked on,” I say.

This interests him. Lights from the slot machine with all their kaleidoscopic colors glitter in his eyes.

“You could be onto something,” he says. “I imagine it’s very seductive. He sobs and says he’s sorry and it’ll never happen
again. … We believe what we want to believe, I guess. About the people we love.” His gaze is on me, that intent look. “I mean,
we all do that, don’t we?”

“Yes,” I say.

This hint of intimacy stirs something in me, a little shimmer of sex.

“You know about this stuff then, Ginnie,” he says, after a moment. “Well, of course you would. You work with the kids who
get caught up in it all.”

I have a sudden, sharp impulse to uncover myself, to reveal something.

“It’s not just that,” I tell him. “It’s in the family.”

His eyes widen. He’s very still suddenly.

“Now, you mean?” His voice is careful, slow. “Or are we talking about the past here?”

“Not now. Now is OK. In the past. My childhood.”

“Your childhood,” he says gently.

He makes a little gesture, reaching his hand toward me as though to touch me. His hand just over mine. My breathing quickens—I
don’t know if he hears this.

There’s a resonant clatter of coins from the slot machine beside us. The noise intrudes and pushes us apart. Will leans back
in his chair again. The teenage boy scoops up his winnings and stuffs his pockets with coins.

Will looks at me uncertainly, but the mood has changed; we can’t get back there.

“Tell me more about Kyle,” I say.

“The last time was the worst,” says Will. “Naomi reckons this is what triggered the mother’s breakdown. She said she was going
to leave, that this time she really meant it, and he threatened her with a pickax. Actually, threatened doesn’t quite capture
it. I think this could be the thing you need to know.”

“Kyle built a room with Lego,” I say, “but he wouldn’t open the door.”

Will nods.

“How Naomi told it—Kyle and his mother were in the bedroom, and she pushed the wardrobe against the door and barricaded them
in. She’d got her phone, thank God, she managed to call us. We got there just as the father was breaking down the door. …
Afterward he said he wanted to make her love him. Weird kind of loving.” He twists his mouth, as though he has a bitter taste.

I shake my head.

“I got it totally wrong,” I tell him.

“I’m sure you didn’t,” he says.

“No, really. He’s so terrified. And I thought the thing he was so scared of—I thought it was there in the room with him. That
he’d been abused or something. He’s always so afraid.”

“It’s a pebble chucked in a pond,” he says. “That kind of violence. It reaches out, it hurts a lot of people. …”

“Yes,” I say.

A little silence falls.

He leans toward me. His hands, on the table, are close to mine.

“Tell me about yourself, Ginnie,” he says lightly. “You have a family of your own?”

I tell him about taking Molly to university. I feel uncertain though—it makes you seem so old, to have a child at college.
I wonder if he’s working out my age.

“It made me think how when I was just eighteen, I was so sure that one day I’d have everything sorted,” I tell him. “That
I’d know where I was going.”

“I know just what you mean,” he says. “And then you wake up and you find you’re forty and all that’s happened is that life
just got more complicated.”

Forty, I think. Shit. Forty.

“My other one—Amber,” I tell him. “She’s sixteen. I worry about her. She drinks a lot and stays out late—I mean, she’s quite
pretty.”

“Well, she would be,” he says.

His eyes are on me. I realize I am flirting, running my hand through my hair, pushing it back from my forehead, as though
it was the sleek, glossy hair you can do that with. For a moment I feel I have that kind of hair.

“And you?” I ask.

“We’ve got a son. He’s seven.”

He doesn’t tell me his son’s name, or anything else about him. I’m suddenly uneasy, as though everything is fragile. I don’t
know where this feeling comes from.

“So you’ve still got all that teenage stuff to look forward to,” I say lightly.

He nods. There’s still a wariness about him.

“And your wife?” I ask tentatively, thinking of the photograph in his office, the woman with the long dark fall of hair. “What
does she do?”

“Megan’s a photographer,” he says.

“That sounds so glamorous,” I say.

“She’s good,” he says, with a thread of pride in his voice. “She doesn’t work much now though. She’s not happy with that really.
But I guess we all compromise.”

I would like to hear more: I have a feverish, disproportionate curiosity about her. But Will is distracted, staring over my
shoulder across the room.

“Great,” he says, very quietly, meaning the opposite.

I turn and follow his gaze. The man who walks toward us is shorter than Will but authoritative, in a sharply cut linen jacket
the color of wheat. They greet each other with that slightly forced bonhomie men will sometimes use, when they know each other
well but aren’t at ease together. Will introduces us. The man’s name is Roger Prior, and he works in the murder squad.

“I’m helping Ginnie with a case,” Will tells him.

“Great to meet you, Ginnie,” says Roger. I’d guess he comes from a different background from Will, probably rather affluent,
his voice deliberately roughened to fit in.

He bends down toward me. I can smell his aftershave, a bland, rather sweet smell, with vanilla in it. His skin against mine
is cool, like some smooth fabric; his handshake seems to last a little too long. I see myself through his eyes, sitting here
drinking whiskey when I should be home with my family, too old to be holding a stranger’s gaze and running my hand through
my hair, my voice too eager, my shoes too bright and high.

“Will’s helping out, then?” says Roger. “Will’s always pleased to help.”

“Ginnie’s a psychologist at the Westcotes Clinic,” says Will.

“A psychologist?” says Roger, his cool gray gaze on me. “So you can see straight into me, Ginnie?”

My laugh sounds forced and shrill. Roger has an affable look, but his eyes are veiled.

“Well, I mustn’t distract you both,” he says. “I mean, from your case discussion. Good to meet you, Ginnie. Don’t let Will
take advantage.”

He goes to join someone on the other side of the bar, but it’s as if he’s still with us—his skepticism and cool amusement
and vanilla smell. It’s hard to talk, to recover the ease we had, as though Roger’s pragmatism has undone something. I realize
I had impossible hopes for this encounter—wild, deluded fantasies. I know it’s time to leave.