The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  My phone rings. It’s Molly.

  “Sweetheart, how are you?”

  “Well … my pimp beat me and then I got raped and I’ve started shooting up. …” She can’t quite suppress a giggle. “Fine otherwise.”

  “Tell me what’s happening.”

  The Freshers’ Fair was great, she says—she’s joined at least thirty societies. Even the Blond Society—you don’t have to be blond, they just go around all the cocktail bars. And can she have a long denim skirt and some shot glasses for Christmas? And thanks for the alarm clock, but she didn’t really need it, she’s using the clock on her cell phone.

  “Molly, are you eating OK? Can you manage all right with the cooker?”

  “I don’t cook much really,” she says. “If I miss a meal I have Pringles.”

  I question whether Pringles are a satisfactory meal.

  Molly sighs extravagantly.

  “Mum, d’you ever listen to yourself? You been on one of those parenting courses or something? Look, I’m fine, OK? I’ve just joined thirty societies and I’m fine.”

  “Have you got everything you need? D’you want me to send you anything? I could send you some echinacea.”

  “OK, Mum, if you want to.”

  “Are you making plenty of friends?”

  “They’re really nice in my corridor. We’re going out for corridor curry tomorrow.”

  “Any men you like the look of?” I say tentatively.

  “Just don’t go there, Mum, OK? Anyway, half the guys in my college are gay—that’s why they have such nice sneakers. … Look, my phone needs recharging,” she says. “I’ve really got to go.”

  I finish the room. I box up the rest of the books, and strip the bed and take the linen down to the kitchen to wash.

  It’s raining more heavily now; there’s a thick brown light in my kitchen. I make a coffee and sit at my kitchen table. Suddenly, after talking to Molly, I feel ashamed; the things I’ve been thinking astound me. All the desire has left me. I can’t believe I considered getting involved with this man, this stranger: took it seriously, half imagining it would actually happen. My family and their needs are all that seem real to me now: Amber, struggling with schoolwork, needing stability; Molly, just starting out, eager but brittle, tense with the newness of everything, joining thirty societies; Greg and the Celtic anthology that he works on with such diligence, for which he has such hopes. How could I have imagined I would put this life at risk?

  I make plans. I shall put more energy into my home, my family. I shall get a private tutor to help with Amber’s maths and one of those French courses she can do on the computer. I shall hold a dinner party; if Greg won’t take me out to dinner, then I shall ask people here: Clem and Max, perhaps—they might get on well together. I shall redecorate my kitchen, which looks so gloomy in this dull brown light. These colors I’ve loved—deep russet red, and the sort of green that has a lot of blue in it—are all too dark, too dreary. I shall paint this room a brisk, cheerful color—cream, or the yellow of marigolds. I shall have a lot of effect in my life.

  I drink my coffee, hearing the rain on the gravel, like many people walking outside my window.

  My phone rings and I jump. I take it out of my pocket, expecting Molly again.

  “Ginnie, it’s Will.”

  My body changes when I hear his voice, something opening out in me.

  “Oh. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you. …”

  “It was good to see you,” he says.

  “Yes, it was good,” I say.

  There are moments when we choose. Maybe this is the moment: here in the silence, waiting, hearing his breathing on the other end of the line.

  “Will.” I hear how my voice is hushed now. “Look, I’m at home at the moment, so …”

  I leave the rest of the sentence unsaid. In that moment we become conspirators.

  “OK,” he says evenly. “We won’t talk long. I only wanted to ask if you’d like to have lunch sometime? Perhaps a week today? There’s a bar in Sheffield Street—it’s a little farther from where I work, we shouldn’t be interrupted.”

  He says we could meet at twelve thirty. He tells me how to get there. We both know I have said yes already.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE BAR IS EMPTY. It’s like an old-fashioned ballroom, with cream walls and many mirrors with elaborate gilt frames. As I walk in I am surrounded by reflections of reflections. There are hanging baskets full of ivies that curl and reach out like hands. The back wall is all glass—wide French windows that look out into the garden, letting in lots of light—but today the light is dull, thick, like in an old photograph. Soon it will rain again.

  A barmaid is wiping glasses at a sink behind the bar; she’s young, with sharp, pretty features, her hair tied up with string. There are baguettes in a glass case. I order a whiskey and go to sit by the windows on a flimsy bentwood chair. There are only one or two other people drinking here. Outside there’s a wet gray sky and eddies of starlings, and the lawn is covered in drifts of fallen leaves, soaked through and shiny as mahogany, everything fading, sifting down, except in the flower bed, where a random rose still clings to a blood red stem. A saxophone is playing a song on the edge of memory, something I know but can’t name.

  I sip my drink and read my newspaper, the same paragraph over and over, none of it making sense. My other world doesn’t exist—my children, my home, my husband: There’s just here, now, the sepia garden, the saxophone, in my mouth the taste of whiskey.

  Twelve thirty passes and Will doesn’t come. Perhaps he will never come. I was crazy, deluded, to think that he meant what he said. Undoubtedly, he has been prudent and thought better of it. What did I expect? I’m not the kind of woman men take risks for. I would like to be someone different, to be confident, at ease: a woman skilled in the way she moves her body, the way she touches a man. I would like to be balanced on one of the slender barstools, poised, rather louche, a woman who expects to be looked at; or leaning on my elbow at the bar, wearing a short black dress and vanilla-pale stockings and dazzlingly high heels, the sort of heels that make your pelvis tip and your body arch a little—a woman who perhaps has a vibrator discreet as a silvery lipstick hidden in her handbag.

  The barmaid changes the CD. A lazy beat, a pensive, muted trumpet. Maybe, like me, she only likes slow music.

  I can see how it will happen, the whole thing spooling out in front of me, filmic, vivid, as though I am watching myself. How I sit here, drinking whiskey, studying my paper, not looking up too often, and still he doesn’t come. And then at last I shrug and gather up my things and walk away—not very embarrassed, because I’m too old for that, but a little: watched by the barmaid with string in her hair, who has seen this before, who immediately comprehends the whole scenario. Feeling a surge of shame—the shame of having so longed for something that I have no right to, no claim on.

  The music stops, and you can hear the squawk of starlings in the garden. The barmaid wipes more glasses, holding them up to the light to check for smears.

  I look up and into the mirror on the wall in front of me: Will is there, his reflection as he walks down the street toward me. A sudden easy happiness warms me. Of course he would do what he said. I watch him in the mirror, intrigued to see him when he can’t see me. He’s serious, unsmiling, like someone heading for a work meeting, preoccupied, someone on whom things weigh heavily. Not someone coming to meet a woman. I watch him ’til he walks out of the mirror.

  The door opens behind me and I turn. We smile; he kisses my cheek.

  I eat him up eagerly with my eyes—his worn face, his knowing hands.

  “So. Was your morning OK?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. He brings the dregs of work with him—the things that still have to be done, or that have been done, but badly. While I have given no thought to such things, coming here with reckless abandon, leaving my whole other world behind. I want to peel all this preoccupation from him, to say, Don’t think about all that. Just be he
re with me for a while, for this moment.

  He doesn’t take off his coat: I notice this. He sits in one of the bentwood chairs; he’s too big for this feminine furniture. I sense his uncertainty. He’s looking at me, trying to read me. It would be easy to keep it all ordinary and safe: to buy him a drink, to talk about our work. The easiest thing in the world.

  “Are you hungry?” he says.

  “Not especially.”

  “Me neither,” he says.

  I don’t know what to say now. I don’t know how to get from here to where we want to be.

  I look at his face, his mouth, his dark eyes with the red flecks, his jaw shadowed with stubble. I would like to move my hand on his face, to trace out the lines of him, to pull him toward me and explore his mouth with mine. I feel no guilt, just this wanting—clear, explicit, exact.

  “Perhaps we could go off somewhere?” I say.

  “Where would you like to go?” he says.

  “We could go down to the river.” My voice hushed, questioning. “There’s a car park I know. It’s quiet there. Perhaps we could walk by the river.”

  “I’d like that,” he says.

  I leave my whiskey unfinished.

  We drive there through the dull day. We talk about the traffic and the weather.

  At the park by the river I stop the car. It’s raining again. It seems a bleak, forsaken place in the rain: There are puddles on the gravel, filled with the gray of the sky, and a starling pecks at a litter bin. When I turn off the engine, all you can hear is the water on the roof, like drumming fingers. A single dark leaf with a rim of white light is pressed against the windshield. I turn to him as he undoes his seat belt: I hope he will kiss me properly, but he just gets out of the car. I put on my raincoat, but I leave my umbrella—some calculation that there’s something deeply unsexy about an umbrella. It’s as though I’m drugged, or in a dream.

  “I’m sorry about the rain,” I say, then think how silly this sounds.

  There’s one other car in the car park: a man sitting there, smoking, his newspaper propped against the steering wheel. He stares at us, a cool, unguarded stare. This makes me uneasy. I think how obvious we must be—a preoccupied man, a middle-aged woman in suede boots that are clearly all wrong for the weather, and both of us oblivious to the rain.

  We walk to the left along the path by the river. Even on this dull day, the water has a faint shine, reflecting the opalescence of the sky. The river is running high and dimpled by the rain and full of movement, all its contrary surges and eddies and ripples. We can see Eel Pie Island to our right across the water, one of the biggest islands in the Thames. At either end there’s a nature reserve, huge gold willows reaching down to the water, but there are houses too, and from this bank we can see the back gardens of some of them, ending abruptly in a steep drop to the river. On the flagstones at the end of one garden sits a terra-cotta boy, one leg dangled over the edge, his head turned as if he’s looking down the river; he’s so precisely the color of sunburned flesh that you think for a moment he’s real. But there are no houses or gardens here on the bank where we walk—on one side of us the river, to the other side a tangle of bushes and trees.

  Ahead there’s a noise and chaos of geese and swans on the path; an old man in a tattered coat is scattering bread from a brown paper bag, undeterred by the rain. With the birds all clustering around, he’s a figure from an engraving, from one of Ursula’s fairy tales, at once grotesque and beneficent, the sort of man who might give you three gifts or three wishes. Scattering crusts, paying us no attention, around him the flurry of wings.

  The river path curves. We’re out of sight of the car park and the old man. The trees hang low over the path here. A pigeon startles through the tree canopy above us, with a sound like something torn. Will takes my hand and pulls me after him, in under the trees. Bramble bushes catch at my legs. We go in a long way, so we’re hidden from the path. There’s a place where the bushes open out a bit, though the branches are low over our heads, catching at our hair. The rain doesn’t penetrate here, but it’s wet underfoot, a thick, shiny mulch of dead bracken and earth and leaves.

  He turns to face me. He puts his hands on my shoulders, lightly moving me to face him. I shiver at his touch. He keeps his hands on my shoulders, keeping me there, looking in my face, that hungry, unsmiling look that stirs me. I feel my stomach harden. Then, so slowly, he reaches out and starts to unbutton my coat. I love the slow purposefulness of his hands. I can hear the loud sound of our mingled breathing. He undoes my coat, moves his hands under my T-shirt, pushing my T-shirt and my bra above my breasts. There’s a catch in his breath as he does this. I feel exposed, but utterly without self-consciousness. My skin is cold in the chilly, wet air: The warmth of his hands astonishes me. I would like him to touch me like this for a long time, just the slow turning and trail of his hands on my breasts, their roughness and gentleness. He kisses me, and slides his hand down my stomach between my clothes and my skin and into me. The sensation is so strong, it makes me shake, I cling to him.

  He pushes my clothes down, moving his hand on me, gentle but very rapid. It feels good, but it isn’t in quite the right place, his movement constricted by the waistband of my skirt, which is resting on my hips. I think, I must tell him: in a moment, I’ll tell him. I feel a little surge of weariness, that there is always this moment, having to explain. Then, before I can say anything, I find myself coming, my hands clutching at his shoulders, feeling I will collapse. I hear my voice cry out, and it sounds a long way away.

  “Ssh,” he says, holding me. “Ssh.”

  There are slow footsteps on the gravel of the path. He pulls me close to him.

  “Someone could see us here,” he says.

  We stay quite still, pressed together under my coat. I feel a different kind of hunger, wanting to be filled with him. When the footsteps have faded, I move my hand down, struggling with his belt, wrapping my fingers around his cock, feeling him hot and silky against my palm. I feel his shudder. When I kneel I’m vaguely aware of the wetness of the ground under me. He tastes of salt; the way his breathing quickens excites me. He lifts me up, turning me around to rest against the trunk of a tree, peeling down my clothes. I hear the rustle as he unwraps the condom. He moves my legs apart, slides into me. When he comes he says my name.

  We put on our clothes and inspect our coats for leaves and bits of mud. My legs are shaking so much it’s hard to walk. I am full of a sense of amazement. The old man is sitting on a bench now, his empty bag in his hand—the geese and swans have gone.

  As we drive back, Will rests his hand on my thigh. I feel a light happiness, my body fluid, loose. I catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror: my mascara smudged, my hair messy, all the strain wiped out of my face.

  I drive back to the pub where we met.

  “Shall we have a drink?” I say. “Before you go back to work?”

  He hesitates. I’m suddenly anxious. His answer matters so much. Will I see him again? Is this all there will be?

  I put my hand on his wrist. I think how his hands still look unfamiliar to me.

  “Just for a moment or two? I’d really like you to,” I say.

  He looks at his watch. It’s as if he’s somewhere else already.

  “I could do ten minutes,” he says.

  He has a Coke; I have another whiskey. As we stand at the bar and I reach across him to take my glass, I let my hand brush his. His skin is so warm against mine. I’d like to make love again.

  He puts the change back into his wallet. There’s a picture tucked in the photograph slot, the child I saw in the picture in his office.

  “Is that your little boy?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulls it out so I can see it properly. My heart lurches. The sex all seeps away. I feel how the cold has got into me, all the cold from the river. I wrap my coat closer around me.

  The child in the picture is beautiful—fair hair, delicate features, his face quite smooth and still. It
’s an unusual picture of a child because he isn’t smiling.

  “That’s Jake,” he says.

  “He’s beautiful,” I say.

  He puts the picture away. He picks up his glass, and I follow him to a table.

  “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.