The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  I take Greg’s arm.

  “I’m cold. Let’s go back in.”

  We refill our glasses and seek out Ted, who is comforting and capacious and tonight is wearing a tie with a pattern of peonies, and we have a soothingly banal conversation about the cost of dentistry.

  We go at half past eleven, leaving Amber to find her own way home. I briefly consider offering to come back later to pick her up—but her boyfriend is wrapped around her, his fingers pushed proprietorially into the back pocket of her jeans, and I know my offer wouldn’t be welcome.

  I sleep fitfully, waking repeatedly, listening for her. Just after two o’clock a noise wakes me. I get up and go out onto the landing. There’s a smell of cigarette smoke, and down in the hall I can see her kicked-off shoes: I breathe the smell in gratefully, and I go back to bed, stretching out luxuriously, knowing I will sleep now.

  On Sunday I drive down to Hampshire to see my mother.

  I park in the road. The garden is tended, the Michaelmas daisies in flower, purple as smoke and ragged under the front bay window. Her car is parked in the driveway; I see there’s a dent in the wing. She hasn’t said anything about this. I wait on the doorstep, amid the sounds of my childhood—the whispering shrubbery, the singing of the electricity wires that pass over the back of our garden.

  She greets me warmly. She feels thin, more fragile, in my arms, her face a little frayed; but she smells freshly of soap and Blue Grass, and her makeup is neat, exact, her hands well cared for, her nails palely varnished. She leads me into the sitting room. She’s taken the dust sheets off the furniture for me. Everything is orderly—the photos on the mantelpiece, the small shelf of books that marked us out as a middle-class family—though her colors and tulip prints are fading now. The room looks out over the back garden, the plum tree, the stream that is sometimes bright with toxins, the heavy, moist hedges hanging over the stream; and I see she has put out food for the birds. All these things reassure me.

  I’ve brought her a novel I thought she might like, and some photos of the girls. She puts the novel to one side.

  “I don’t read very much nowadays, darling,” she says. “I seem to lose the thread.”

  Only the photographs interest her.

  It’s cold in the house—heating it adequately always seems extravagant to her, no matter how much Ursula and I assure her that we will pay the bill. When I rang I said I’d take her out for lunch, but she hadn’t wanted to go. Now I regret that I didn’t persuade her. I’d like to be with her in some place that’s cozy and banal, to have a dry sherry and a gammon steak and talk to the waitress about the unseasonal weather and the autumn colors in the forest: I don’t want to be here, in this cold house full of memory.

  She brings in tea.

  “I didn’t make you anything,” she says, apologizing for the shop-bought Victoria sponge. “I don’t do much baking nowadays. I seem to get so tired.”

  I tell her the cake is delicious; and think of my childhood, when her hands were always busy—mixing her fruitcakes in a vast yellow-glazed bowl, or ironing shirts on a blanket on the kitchen table: Monday was her wash day, and Ursula and I would come home from school to the safe, particular smell of almost-scorched linen.

  It isn’t easy to talk today. Usually she has gossip to tell, about people at church, or her neighbors, but she seems to have run out of stories.

  “Ursula said you had a bad spell in church,” I say tentatively.

  “Ursula thinks I should go to the doctor.” In her voice there’s an edge of impatience at Ursula’s insistence. “She’s fixed it up. She says she’s going to take me.” She shrugs. “But what can he do?” she says.

  Her gesture reminds me of Amber—a way they both have of shrugging while turning their faces away.

  I ask what happened to her car.

  “Nothing, darling,” she says. “Is there anything wrong with my car?” A splinter of hesitation in her voice.

  I feel a flicker of panic.

  “It looks like something bashed into you.”

  “Does it, darling? I could have driven into something. I can’t remember exactly.”

  Her face is veiled.

  As we say good-bye, she stands there for a moment, her hands on my arms, her fingers pressing into me.

  “Darling, I do so hope things work out well for all of you—Amber’s exams and Gregory’s book and everything.”

  I feel her thin, urgent grasp on my arms. I smile and hold her close. I try to push away the meaning of what she’s saying. But I know she thinks she may not see me again.

  I take a detour on the way home: I drive down to the sea and park for a while on the cliff top, looking across the Solent toward the Isle of Wight. The sea is a cold blue, the island misted and gray. It was an enchanted place to us as children: a place that was always there on the horizon, blue as hyacinths or hidden by rain or absolutely precise with its fields and little woods in the clear, wet spring sunshine—yet never visited, unknowable. We used to talk about going there; Ursula and I used to beg to be taken to this magical, inaccessible land across the water, and our mother would play along, imagining a picnic on the cliffs, a swim in the sea at Ryde, where the waves would be rougher and more exciting than on our familiar beaches—but somehow it never happened. Now, even as I watch, the island is blurred behind a veil of rain.

  Driving back to rejoin the motorway, I have to go past the gravel pits. It’s a road that still makes me uneasy; when I was a child, I was followed once on this road. I was walking back from a piano lesson. I don’t know why I didn’t have my bicycle—perhaps a puncture I hadn’t had time to fix. But I know I was wearing a faded blue cotton frock that I liked, that the sun was warm on the bare skin of my arms, that my music case was heavy with a new volume of Beethoven sonatas that I was very proud of: I carried the case with my arm stiff and straight, so it wouldn’t bang on my legs. There was a smell of sun on grass, and the musty, sweaty scent of that ragged yellow-flowered weed that seems to thrive in gravelly soil. Beyond the gravel pits there would be the field with the two horses—one black, one chestnut—that would come up to the fence when I passed and that liked to be petted and talked to. I looked forward to the horses. I walked on through the hushed summer afternoon under the arc of the sky.

  I became aware that there was a man behind me. He was walking at just my speed, perhaps twenty paces behind. I glanced over my shoulder. He was ordinary-looking, a little taller than me, in his shirtsleeves. Not someone I’d ever seen before. I was afraid, my heart pounding. He didn’t gain on me, just stayed there, walking behind me, always keeping his distance. You could see a long way to either side. There were no people, nothing. Trucks were parked at the gravel pit, but nobody was working there today. It was quiet on the road, no sound but the cries of seagulls. The smell of the yellow weed was thick. I thought of the girl whose body was found in a ditch on Southampton Common; I’d read about it in the Southern Evening Echo. I wanted to run, but something stopped me: embarrassment, perhaps, and some calculation that he could run faster anyway, and my music case was so heavy, and I didn’t want to leave my new sonatas behind.

  I came to the crossroads. I heard his quickening footsteps behind me. I knew he was gaining on me. He drew level with me, standing close. I couldn’t move; I felt pure terror. He asked me the time, then walked on, overtaking me, going off to the left beyond the field at the crossroads. As soon as he was out of sight, I forgot the weight of my music case and ran all the way home. I remember it still so vividly—the footsteps behind me, the sense of something so inevitable, drawing closer, something I couldn’t escape from.

  CHAPTER 16

  I SEE WILL EVERY THURSDAY through November. It’s cold by the river. When there’s no sun, the water is a harsh color, like metal, with a white skin where it holds the shine of the sky. Some of the trees are bare now; at the sides of the path there are soft, dark drifts of leaves. The balsam is dying back and broken, just a few ragged leaves still clinging, with swollen red
knots like injuries on the stems. The ground and the trees are sodden, and we have to take care or the places where we make love will leave their mark on us, and we’ll go back with smears on our clothes from the green velvet algae on the tree trunks, or wet leaves in our hair.

  Our timing is wrong. We should be having this love affair in the summer, when it’s close and warm and secret here, and pale dust rises from the path where you tread, and flower scents brush against you, the winey sweetness of elder, and the fruit-gum smell of the balsam flowers, which are mauve with a scribble of black and intricate as orchids. Like on the summer afternoons when I came here with the girls, walking the towpath or exploring the islands in the river.

  I think of the time we crossed the arched footbridge onto Eel Pie Island. The houses had a shacklike, temporary air, and the gardens were overgrown, with tangled roses with great shaggy heads, spilling out their perfume, and white hollyhocks that brushed against us like pallid, fleshy hands. In one garden, baby dolls and Barbies were stuck into the window boxes and beds of earth like flowers, perhaps fifty of them, all naked, their hair matted and stiff with soil. The girls stared at this perverse, witchy planting. Amber went close, intrigued, but Molly was scared.

  “That’s creepy, Mum,” she said. “The dolls won’t like it.” Her licorice eyes widening, her hand tightening in mine.

  Another time I took them across a different bridge to an island farther upstream. It was a summer Sunday morning, with a slight silver haze on the river. There were notices saying that this was Taggs Island and trespassing wasn’t allowed, but we just walked on past them; it was one of the few illicit things I’d ever done. It was an island of gardens, of moored houseboats each with its own small plot of lawn and flower bed, the gardens ornate with pergolas and rockeries, and the houseboats painted the colors of fruit—mandarin, lime, lemon—and one apple green with a little blue dinghy tied up. It was completely quiet, a world away from the Sunday traffic on the riverbank road, no one around but a cat with narrow gold eyes, and an old man sitting in the sun on his porch, who viewed us with suspicion. The island is a horseshoe shape; there was water on every side of you, crimped by the breeze and shimmering. An enchanted place on that hazy summer morning: Though I didn’t feel the enchantment was entirely benign. But Amber adored it.

  “Could we live here, Mum? Could we? I really, really want to.”

  “Maybe we could,” I said. “One day. Who knows.”

  “I want to, Mum. I shall live in the little green houseboat. And I shall have a cat and a boat to row in. …”

  In summer the plants at the sides of the river paths grow as tall as a man, weaving lavish walls of meadowsweet and mallow. There are places off the path where you might be hidden—shadowed, scented places, private and enclosed.

  But it’s winter, and our dreams are all of rooms.

  “I’d like to lie down with you,” he says. “I’d like to stretch out on a bed beside you. To make love to you so slowly on a great big bed.”

  We talk about this room where we could meet in secret, but never reach a decision.

  “We could go to a hotel perhaps,” he says.

  “Yes. I suppose. I don’t know …”

  I like to think of going to a hotel. I imagine it often. I picture the delicious embarrassment at reception, feeling like people from a 1930s movie; it’s so like a scene from an old film in my imaginings, that when I picture it, it’s in black and white and I’m wearing suede court shoes. I think how I’d try to keep my face sealed, serious—yet knowing I must look flushed, a little apprehensive, thinking for a moment, perhaps, What on earth are we doing? We’d walk up the stairs, not touching, maintaining a decorous space between us; and we’d go in together and close the door. The room would be nondescript, impersonal, with prints of stags on the walls and a red Gideon Bible and little soaps wrapped in cellophane; and we’d make love with such extravagance, relishing all that space and license, my head flung back over the side of the mattress as he moved his mouth on me, my back stretched out and arched, intensifying everything.

  “Could we really do that?” I say. “Can you book a hotel room just for an hour or two? Do people do that—ordinary people like us? Just take a room?”

  “I’m sure they do.”

  “But the girl on reception—I mean, she’d know exactly what we were doing.”

  “Of course. It would be good though, wouldn’t it?” He pushes my hair away from my eyes; his fingers are warm on my skin. “But I don’t suppose we will.”

  I would like him to say, We’ll do it—I know just where to go, I’ve booked the room. … Yet at the same time I feel uncertain—if you take a room, you’re doing something definite, irrevocable. You’re leaving clues; there’s a trail for people to find.

  Sometimes I think of rooms that are more dreamlike, that don’t belong to anyone: that we inhabit in a different life that’s parallel to this one, that’s entirely constructed around this passion we share. A basement room perhaps, with muslin curtains blowing at the windows and people passing in the street above us—near enough to hear us, not able to see in. Or an opulent room with a wide white bed and a canopy of some pale crushed apricot fabric—and I lie very still on the mattress under the apricot canopy as he moves his hands across me and eases me apart. It’s absolutely vivid when I think about it: I can feel his fingers opening me and the wash of heat over my skin.

  I never tell him about these rooms I imagine. We don’t talk much when we meet. We just make love, quite quietly, in some hidden place by the river path, then drive to the bar on Sheffield Street, and if he has time we’ll have a Coke and a whiskey and a snatch of conversation. He might tell me a little about his work, and I love it when he does this; I’m hungry to know about him. It’s mostly boredom, he says, but sometimes there’s the kick, the thrill, and that’s what hooks you. Like when you’re doing surveillance and nothing happens for ages, you’re just waiting in the car, then suddenly the call comes, and your coffee goes straight out the window, and you’re following this guy, you’re on a high for hours. …

  I tell him I envy him for the directness of what he does, how it somehow seems so real. Whereas in my own work, I deal in representations all the time, in memories and imaginings.

  “But you’re good at what you do,” he says. “I can tell that. Your empathy for those kids you work with.”

  He runs one finger down the side of my face, his hand so gentle, as though I am some precious thing.

  He’d hoped to have moved a bit further up the ranks, he tells me. He applied for the job that Roger Prior has now, in the murder squad.

  “To be honest, I knew I didn’t have a hope once I heard that Roger was going for it too,” he says. “He’s sharp. You can’t get anything past him.”

  I sense the disappointment in him—the feeling that life hasn’t turned out the way he’d planned. I rest my hand on his. And we leave the bar, and he kisses me as we stand there in the street, a light, formal kiss, his lips just brushing my cheek, and we move back into our separate lives, the things we have to do, the people who need us. ’Til this rhythm starts to seem natural to me, and I come to believe that nothing will be damaged.

  CHAPTER 17

  IT’S PARENTS’ EVENING at Amber’s school.

  I’m late; the school gym is already a sea of people. There’s a faint, residual smell of feet and adolescent sweat, and the air tastes stale, as though it’s been breathed a thousand times before. The women are dressed as though for a job interview, smartly lipsticked and jacketed, and most have their husbands with them. I try to quell the familiar pang of envy. Greg has never come to a parents’ evening. I used to try to persuade him, but he’d always be reluctant; now, I just handle all the girls’ issues on my own. But I’ve noticed how the teachers view you differently if you’re without a man, take you somehow less seriously.

  The teachers are sitting at desks arranged down the sides of the hall. We all have bits of paper with our interview times, but nobody keeps
to their times and you end up queuing for hours. Every ten minutes someone sets off a school bell that sounds like a fire alarm, to encourage us to move on. I feel a quick instinctive panic every time it sounds. I join the queue for Mrs. Russell, Amber’s form tutor.

  I glance around the hall. Eva is in a queue a few yards away, waiting to see the Computer Studies teacher. She’s wearing a classy long black skirt with part of a French poem printed in white around the hem.

  The siren sounds and it’s my turn.

  “I’m Amber’s mother.”

  “Ah,” says Mrs. Russell. She shakes my hand.

  I sit down. She has a cup of tea beside her, with a ginger nut in the saucer. She takes a sip of tea.

  I haven’t met her before. She has a pink, flustered face, and her purple lipstick clashes with her sweater—as though she doesn’t have time to make things match.

  “I’m sorry my husband couldn’t come,” I say.

  “Not to worry,” she says.

  She has Amber’s marks set out in a book in front of her. I realize I’m craning forward, trying to read them upside down. She looks at her book; there are sharp little vertical lines between her eyes. A familiar apprehension clutches at me. I think of the comments on Amber’s most recent report: “Teaching Amber is like stirring porridge”; “Amber’s efforts are to be commended in a subject for which she has so little aptitude or enthusiasm.”

  “Amber does have quite a mixed bunch of marks, I’m afraid,” says Mrs. Russell. “To be honest, we are a little concerned.”

  I flinch, thinking guiltily of the private tutor I never got around to fixing.

  “It’s not that she doesn’t have ability—quite the reverse,” she says. “But she’s so erratic. She needs to get herself organized.”