The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  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.

  CHAPTER 13

  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.

  “He’s very sorry, Ginnie,” she said. “You mustn’t think too badly of him. He doesn’t know what got into him.”

  I didn’t say anything. I should have gone and held her, but I hated her being so ugly and weak, so broken. I left her and went upstairs. I tidied my bedroom and got on with my homework. Doing it immaculately, all so neat and fastidious, measuring out the margin with absolute precision.

  I think they tried to get help once. I was about thirteen. It was an odd day, everything out of shape, both of them wearing their Sunday-best clothes on a Wednesday, our father in his churchwarden suit, our mother wearing her best Ponds coral lipstick and a blouse in oyster silk with buttons that looked like pearls. She kissed me when we said good-bye, holding my face in her hands to be sure she had my attention. Her voice was hushed and secret.

  “It’s going to be all right now,” she said. “We’re seeing a special doctor. We’re going to get things sorted out.” Whispering to me: It made me feel so special. “D’you mind not telling Ursula? I don’t want her getting all worried.”

  Auntie Carol picked us up from school. We had our tea in her kitchen. For dessert, there were tinned peach halves, rounded side up, in a pool of Carnation milk—she said they looked like poached eggs. She seemed very pleased with herself; she thought this might amuse us. Ursula and I ate diligently, though we’d never had Carnation before, and its sweetness made my teeth hurt. I was longing to be back home, for our happy new life to begin.

  But that night our mother was quiet, with a gray look in spite of the cheerful coral lipstick. She didn’t tell me anything. A few weeks later, it all began again.

  I don’t think people did talk about us; I don’t think anyone knew. I once heard Mary Grayson of the lesbian daughter say to my mother, “I saw your Brian in the flower shop. Those were lovely flowers he got you. He’s so romantic, your Brian. You’re lucky to have found yourself a man who’s so romantic.”

  We grew up and went our separate ways, Ursula and I—we’re very different people—yet each of us perhaps seeking to heal what happened, to re-create childhood as a gentle place: me within the containing walls of my clinic, Ursula between the covers of her fairy-tale books. I can see this clearly now, though at the time it was quite unconscious and our choices seemed to follow from other imperatives—Ursula’s very evident talent, and my sudden infatuation with psychology, at the age of fifteen, after finding a tattered paperback on Jung’s archetypes in the secondhand book stall at the church Fair. We never talked about our father’s violence—not with each other, not with our mother, not with anyone—not even after he’d died.

  Just once I raised it with her. It was when I was pregnant with Molly, toward the end of the pregnancy, when I was on maternity leave, too huge and tired to do anything. It was a hot summer, and I lay for hours in the garden, letting the dandelions seed around me, stupid as a stone. But at night my dreams were extraordinarily vivid and active, as though to compensate for the lethargy of my days, and all concerned obsessively with my childhood: not in a direct way, but I’d dream about those gardens with their lupines and Michaelmas daisies, and airplanes would crash on them, or earnest officers from some war crimes commission would dig up the lawn behind the budd
leia and unearth mutilated human remains. It was as though some intricate working out was going on deep inside me. Ursula came for coffee on the way to an exhibition; and, disinhibited and half-drunk, perhaps, with all the pregnancy hormones, I talked about our childhood.

  “D’you ever think about it? You know—Dad, and the things he did to her?”

  We were sitting at the table in my kitchen; I was sitting sideways because I could only just fit between the wall and the table, everything about me lumbering and clumsy.

  She looked at me warily, sitting stiffly, something withdrawing in her. She didn’t say anything.

  I’d have leaned toward her and grasped her wrist, but I was pinned down by my swollen stomach, unable to reach out.

  “Don’t you remember?” I said. “You can’t just not remember.”

  I felt a quiver of impatience, the feeling growing in me that there was something I had to face up to before my own child came—and that only she could help me.

  Her face was tight, like a closed door. She picked a loose thread from her sleeve.

  “They just had the odd bad patch,” she said. “It happens. It happens in an awful lot of families.”

  I remembered her fear, how she’d pressed the blankets to her eyes and ears. I could see it, quite vividly.

  “Some bad patch,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  I felt then how inviolate her reserve was—sleek and hard as varnish, everything running off it.

  I tried again.

  “D’you ever feel—I know it’s stupid, we were just kids—that we could have stopped it? I mean, I know we couldn’t. But d’you ever feel guilty about it? D’you ever feel ashamed?”

  She was glancing around my kitchen as though planning her escape.

  “Ursula, please talk to me. Don’t you ever feel that?”

  She cleared her throat.

  “You live in your head too much, Ginnie,” she said. “I always think we were lucky to have such a happy childhood. I mean, when you look at what some people go through.”