The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  Molly turns to me, unsure suddenly. She’s never had Amber’s certainty.

  “Is it OK? D’you like it, Mum?”

  I realize I’ve just been standing here, staring.

  “Molly, I love it. It’s wonderful.” Instinctively, I put my arm around her, then remember she will hate me doing this in public. But she tolerates it for a second or two before she slides away.

  “Mr. Bates asked if my grandparents were coming,” she says. “He kind of blushed when I said that grandad was dead. It was, like, really embarrassing. … Mum, make sure Dad sees it.” She moves off with Amber toward a gang of her friends.

  I go to find Greg.

  “You have to come and see Molly’s work,” I tell him.

  He says good-bye to the earnest philologist. I take him to see the canvas.

  He has an appraising look, one eyebrow raised, the look he has when he’s reading a student’s essay.

  “Goodness,” he says. “It’s quite in-your-face, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t you like it, though?”

  But I see that he doesn’t, that he wouldn’t.

  “It’s rather raw,” he says.

  “Yes. But isn’t that good? All that emotion? I love it.”

  “Her plant drawings are great,” he says. “But it takes a bit of maturity to draw people. Maybe she should stick to plants for now.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t say that to her,” I tell him.

  I feel a pulse of anger: Why can’t he just be generous?

  I go to find the girls, to say it’s time to leave. Amber has moved away from her friends, from Jamila and Katrine, and is talking to someone Molly knows, a boy about three years older; she’s standing close to him, her head on one side, and flicking back her hair. She mutters to me that she’ll make her own way home.

  “What about your Graphics?”

  “Mum, for God’s sake.”

  It’s dark on the street now. There’s an edge to the air, a smell of autumn, a hint of frost and bonfires. We stand by Greg’s car in a pool of apricot lamplight.

  “Did you like it, Dad?” says Molly.

  I’m worried about what he’ll say.

  “Sure, it was great,” he tells her.

  I remember her when she was little, thrusting some drawing she’d done at me: “But d’you really, really like it, Mum? Say it as though you mean it. …”

  Now, she doesn’t say anything.

  “Mum, I’m coming with you,” she tells me.

  We go to our separate cars. I notice how scruffy my Ford Escort looks beside all the other cars, and that moss is growing in the rubber around the passenger window. When I turn the ignition, there’s a grinding sound from under the car, and it’s hard to get into gear.

  I glance at Molly. The lamplight leaches all the color from her face, so you can’t see most of her makeup; her face looks rounder, more open, as though she is a child again. A bit of glittery eye shadow has smudged under her eye.

  “He didn’t look at it, Mum,” she says.

  “He did, sweetheart.”

  She chews at a strand of her hair.

  “Not properly,” she says. “He didn’t look through my sketchbooks or anything. I was watching. Well, why would he want to look at it anyway? It’s a load of crap.”

  “That’s nonsense, Molly.”

  “No, it’s true,” she says. “I don’t know why I got such a good mark. It must have been a mistake.”

  There’s a tug at my heart.

  “Don’t say that.” I want to stop the car and reach out and hold her, but I know she’d hate it. “Sweetheart, you’ve got to have faith in yourself. Everyone loves what you’ve done.”

  But the shine has gone from the day for her, and I know she isn’t listening.

  I wake in the night with a start, from some indeterminate dream, feeling the thickness of the dark against me. Greg is snoring quietly beside me; I can sense the sleep-warmth coming off his body. I press the button that illuminates the face of my alarm clock. 4:15. Shit. This happens over and over, this sudden waking at three or four, and the thoughts are always the same. Thoughts of dying, of endings, when death seems so real to me I almost believe that if I turned I would see him there behind me. Looking perhaps like the picture of Death in one of the girls’ old storybooks: Death who played dice with a soldier in “The Storyteller,” with green bulbous eyes and a sack and a look of cool composure. He lays it out before me, clinical, utterly rational. You’re forty-six, you’re over halfway through; even with luck, great blessings, and longevity, you’re more than halfway through; and you’ve certainly had the best bit. … He fixes me with his cool green stare, knowing and expectant.

  I slip out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Greg, though nothing seems to stir him. I go downstairs. I haven’t drawn the curtains in my kitchen—outside, the yawn of a black night. I make myself some toast and flick through the pile of yesterday’s post on the table—a catalog full of cardigans with little satin trimmings, an offer of a new credit card: seeking to ground myself in these safe and trivial things.

  CHAPTER 5

  IT’S EIGHT IN THE MORNING, and Amber isn’t yet up. I go to her room.

  “Amber, you ought to be dressed.”

  I pull back the curtains. She groans and hides under the duvet.

  “My braces hurt,” she says. “I can’t go in.”

  “Amber, for God’s sake, you can’t stay home because your braces have been adjusted.”

  “Sofia always has a day off after her orthodontic appointments,” she says, though without much hope, from under the bedclothes.

  “I don’t care what Sofia does,” I tell her. I suspect a hangover. She went to the pub last night with the boy that she met at the art show, and he probably bought her one too many Malibus. “I’ll bring you a Nurofen, but you are going in.”

  Then I find I have no clean work clothes. All my trousers have paint and Play-Doh on them, and the only thing that’s respectable is a short black skirt I hardly ever wear. It’s velvet, shapely, too smart for work really. I’m keeping it for best, I suppose. I do that with clothes, I probably do it with everything. It’s a pattern of mine—deferring gratification, saving things up for some brilliant future time. This is always thought to be a positive trait. There’s an experiment where you sit a three-year-old at a table with a single marshmallow, and you ask them not to eat the sweet while you go out of the room. You promise that if they don’t eat it, when you come back they can have two. The children who can wait do better at school and even later in life: There’s something fundamental about being able to postpone the small, immediate pleasure in hope of achieving a greater one further down the line. But perhaps you can carry this too far. Perhaps there’s a time in life when you have to stop deferring. Sometimes I think that at forty-six I’m still waiting patiently for my two marshmallows.

  I put on the skirt, but my usual flat boots look silly with it. My eyes fall on the wine-colored boots I bought in a rash moment with Molly. I slip into them. High heels feel odd to me—it’s only rarely that I wear them—and in spite of their sophistication, they make me feel somehow childlike, as though I’m just trying on grown-up things. Like when Ursula and I would borrow our mother’s shoes and put a jazz record on the ancient wind-up gramophone she’d inherited from our grandmother and stomp around the living room. Conjuring up a life of unguessable glamour, of martinis with little umbrellas in them, and of dancing under a pink-striped awning to the sounds of the band.

  I glance at myself in the mirror. I’m taller, thinner, more vivid. I look like somebody different.

  Amber is dressed now, but she says her mouth is too painful to eat, and really she can only manage a can of Dr Pepper for breakfast: so she won’t be able to concentrate, so what’s the point of school? I don’t respond.

  I’m late: I hate being late. I have a case conference at the hospital, and I’ll only get there in time if there’s hardly any traffic. I go out to the road, into a sodden world of
thick brown water-laden light. The traffic is always slower in the rain. I start up the car. The pedals seem to be at the wrong angle, and at first I think it’s because of my unfamiliar shoes. The grinding sound from under the car is louder than yesterday. I don’t know enough about cars to guess what’s wrong with the engine; perhaps the rain has got in.

  Where the side road joins the main road, I pull out in front of a bus and press on the accelerator, and there’s no response from the car—no power, nothing. The car creeps forward; the bus driver hoots aggressively. Panicked, I pull to the side of the road, and switch on my hazards, and crawl to the nearest garage, where a stooped and rather smug man who smells of engine oil informs me somberly that my transmission has gone.

  I know my hair will be frizzing in the rain. My new red boots have mud on them. I ask tentatively what kind of money we’re talking about.

  “I could do a reconditioned one for about five hundred quid,” he says. “New, we’d be talking seven.” He casts a pitying eye over my car, taking in the rust marks and the moss around the passenger window. “But, to be honest, love, there’s no point putting a new one into this, now, is there?”

  I feel ashamed, as though my mossy car is a moral failing.

  It will take two days, he tells me. I manage to get a taxi, but I am still late for my meeting. I arrive with mud on my legs, self-conscious in my shoes.

  At lunchtime, looking through my To Do list, I see where I have written the number of the Fairfield Street Police Station, and Will Hampden’s name.

  I ring.

  A woman’s voice, brisk and sibilant. “Sorry, he’s in a meeting. Can I take a message?”

  I leave my number and say it’s about a patient—nothing current, I just need some information.

  At the corner shop I buy baguettes for Clem and me. It’s still raining. We eat in Clem’s office.

  “The shoes are fab,” she says. “You ought to wear things like that more often.”

  Clem’s in a rather mournful mood. She’s just had a date with a rather hunky medical-insurance broker who explained between the sorbet and the espresso that he really enjoys her company but she has to know commitment isn’t his thing.

  After lunch there is a team meeting. Peter lectures us on the vexed subject of the waiting list, and how cutting patient waiting times really has to be our priority. Brigid talks with passion about the coffee fund. Rain traces out its spider patterns on the windows; pigeons, plumped-up, pink-eyed, huddle on the sills. Bad temper has its claws in me.

  The phone rings as I go back to my office, and I hope it will be Will Hampden, but it’s the man from the garage, saying he needs to revise his estimate upward.

  I try the police station again. It’s the same woman.

  “Like I said, he’ll ring you back. You must understand, he has to prioritize, he’s very busy,” she says.

  There’s an edge to her voice, but I know she’s probably responding to some crossness in my own.

  There are days that you can’t make right or mend. I make more calls, but no one is in. I have a desultory session with Kerry James, a ten-year-old girl who’s been referred with suspected depression. She draws immaculate little pictures of cats, and nothing I say gets near her. In the end I just leave, rather early. The rain has stopped. I’ll walk for part of the journey and pick up the bus when I’m tired. Perhaps the walk will calm me.

  I need my map; I have to go down roads where I’ve never been. These streets are dreary, with bleak terraced houses with grimy curtains and gardens full of old motorbikes. I turn onto Acton Street, where there’s an ugly purple-painted pub with advertisements for “Sports Night” and a wide-screen television. I pass a grim tower block, where the playground has a high wire fence, like an exercise yard in a prison. But over all this there’s a wide washed sky, and a light that makes distant things seem near, so you feel you could see forever. Birds fly over, gray geese like in Amber’s poem, wafting their wings together: six of them, in a black ragged V, against the shining sky. I watch them ’til they’re out of sight and their creaking cries have faded in the distance. I feel the day’s irritations start to seep away.

  As I study my map on a street corner, I see that my route will take me near to Fairfield Street. And something perhaps can be retrieved from the general mess of my day.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE DESK SERGEANT IS YOUNG AND ANGULAR, with gelled hair.

  “Is it possible to speak to Detective Inspector Hampden?”

  “It should be. Who shall I say it is?”

  I tell him. “I did try ringing earlier. I just wanted some information about a case.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he says. He speaks into his phone. “He isn’t answering,” he says, “but I know he’s somewhere around.”

  Suddenly I wonder why I’m here.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “Not if he’s busy. I can ring him. I just dropped in on the off chance. You know, as I was passing …”

  “You might as well see him now you’re here,” he says. “I’m sure I can get hold of him. Why don’t you sit down for a moment, Mrs. Holmes.”

  In the waiting area there are metal seats fixed to the wall. The only other person waiting is an elderly woman. A faint smell of urine hangs about her, and she has three bulging Kwik Save bags and many large safety pins fixed to the front of her coat. A voice crackles over an intercom; it sounds like traffic information. The woman inches sideways toward me, catching her capacious skirts in the space at the back of the seats.

  She reaches out and puts her hand on my arm. “You’re pretty, aren’t you?” she says. Her voice is surprisingly cultured. There’s a fierce scent of spirits on her breath.

  “Mrs. Holmes,” says the desk sergeant. I get up, go to him. “Let me take you through,” he says. “I’m sure he won’t be long.”

  He takes me down a corridor; through the open doors on either side, you can hear phones shrilling and cut-off scraps of conversation. He shows me into an empty office, which smells of tuna and cigarette smoke.

  “I thought you might prefer to wait in here,” he says. “Maureen does go on a bit.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  He closes the door behind him.

  It’s a cluttered, disorderly office: on the desk a computer, a litter of papers, a heap of blue three-ring binders—and the more personal stuff, framed photos, a mug with pens and highlighters in. My eye is drawn to the photographs—a little blond boy, rather serious; a woman with a fall of straight dark hair. I think idly of something I once read in a novel by Milan Kundera, that I thought to be rather wise: that women aren’t essentially drawn to the most beautiful men—that the men we desire are the ones who have slept with beautiful women. There’s a half-drunk cup of coffee on the desktop and discarded sandwich wrappings in the bin.

  The phone on the desk rings, and I have a quick, instinctive urge to answer it. The voice over the intercom makes a new announcement, giving the number of a car that’s been abandoned, and inside it the body of an unidentified male. Above the sounds of phones and footsteps from the corridor, I can hear shouting, a man’s voice harsh with anger. I can only make out certain phrases—“for fuck’s sake,” repeated several times—and then a softer voice, a woman, seeking to placate. The anger in the first voice makes my pulse race. I sit there for what feels like an age in the smells of smoke and tuna, hearing the distant shouting.

  The shouting stops; there are rapid footsteps along the corridor. The door bangs as it is pushed back. He comes into the room, then stops quite suddenly when he sees me.

  “What are you doing here?” he says, as though I’m someone he knows, and I shouldn’t be there.

  He’s a little taller than me, with cropped graying hair and a lived-in face. Forty-something. I see in a theoretical kind of way that he is quite attractive, that other women might like the way he looks.

  “I’m sorry.” I feel an acute, disproportionate embarrassment about everything—hearing the quarrel, that I’
m here at all.

  He’s staring at me still, as though he finds me perplexing.

  “I’m Ginnie Holmes from the Westcotes Clinic,” I tell him.

  “Hi, Ginnie,” he says. He reaches out, as though he’s remembering how he ought to behave. I half get up, unsure what to do. He shakes my hand, and I notice the warmth of his skin.

  “The desk sergeant showed me through,” I say.

  “He could have told me,” he says.

  I decide that Clem was right, that he is a difficult man.

  He’s restless, the energy of his anger still hanging around him. He sits at the desk and takes out his cuff links and pushes up his sleeves.

  “So, Ginnie, how can I help you?” His gaze is hard, puzzled.

  “I’ve been trying to ring you,” I tell him. “I couldn’t get through.”