The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  “Are you OK with spiders?” he says.

  “Kind of.”

  He gestures me in.

  “But we can’t …”

  “Ginnie, just look at the state of it. No one’s been here for years.”

  I follow him through the door.

  It’s a single room, with bare floorboards and a table against the wall. The corners are hung with vast spiderwebs, like lacy festoons of some worn gray fabric, and there’s thick, dark dust on the floor and streaks of glimmering bird shit—there must be a missing tile where the birds get in. Things have been left here—a canvas deck chair folded up, a Coke can, a cigarette lighter thrown down on the floor—but these things are so dusty and long abandoned, they feel like outgrowths of the place, as organic as the ferns that grow up through the floor. There’s a rich river smell, of mud and rot and reeds.

  The glass in the windows is smeared and cracked, but a lot of light comes in—river light, the random, lovely intricacy of sunlight moving on water—so the room seems alive with silvery shiftings and patternings.

  He closes the door, turns to face me, leans back against the door.

  “Well,” he says.

  He gives me a small smile of triumph, like a man who has just achieved something. His eyes gleam in the river light. I’m standing there in the middle of the floor, looking at him. I stretch out my arms. I feel such excitement in this enclosed space, with its secrecy, its shut door. Here we can do anything. Here we will not be seen.

  He comes toward me and starts again to take off my clothes, piling them carefully on top of my bag, knowing the dust could mark us and give us away. I pull off his shirt and see how the river light moves across his body. Here there is a different rhythm: We can be slow, tender. I feel it all so exactly—the cool, dank touch of this enclosed air on me, the silky solidness of his cock against my lips, my fingers; and his body pressed against me, its lines and bones and hardness, and the softness of his skin.

  He kisses my hair as my breathing slows.

  “Did that feel good?” he says. “It looked as though it felt good.”

  But I can’t quite speak yet.

  He turns me around and bends me across the table and slides into me. He says my name over and over.

  Afterward I ask him to hold me, and we stay like that for a long time.

  “I’d like to lie down with you,” he says. “That would be wonderful. But this floor’s so filthy.”

  I think how that would feel, to lie stretched out together.

  “Perhaps I could find us something to lie on. Perhaps a blanket or something.”

  “Could you?” he says.

  We brush the dust off each other’s clothes. We leave and secure the door again, so it’s as it was before. We check along the path to see that no one is around. As though this is a crime we have committed.

  We don’t talk much as we walk toward the car. My body feels slowed, gentle. I drop him off at Sheffield Street, and go home with the dust of the river house on my knees and the soles of my shoes and his smell all about me—and for hours, if I close my eyes, I can see the river brightness against my eyelids, the dance and dazzle of light. There’s a childlike part of me that believes in pattern, in significance, that whispers, If it were all wrong, if we shouldn’t be doing this, then why did we find this place—this room full of glimmering light, this place to keep our secret?

  CHAPTER 19

  ON SUNDAY MAX AND CLEM COME TO DINNER. Max is first. He’s brought me flowers, yellow lilies with speckled hearts, and an expensive Burgundy. In his pale Armani jacket, he seems much younger than his years. He kisses me lingeringly on both sides of my face.

  “You’re looking well,” he says.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “No, really, Ginnie. There’s something different.”

  I shrug a little, laughing, afraid he can read something in me.

  He has an invitation for me. He’s had a call from Dylan, the conductor of the choir we sang in at university. Dylan is planning one of our periodic reunions, at the church in Walsall where he is choirmaster, to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in February. I say I’d love to come. I find a vase for the flowers and put them on the dining room table; their pollen powders my fingers, as though I have dipped them in turmeric.

  Clem is wearing one of her vintage outfits, a chiffony anthracite-gray skirt and blue suede boots with fringes, and her hair is tamed by some resinous hair product.

  I hug her.

  “You look gorgeous,” I say.

  “I saw a heron fly over,” she says as she takes off her jacket. “Making that weird noise they make. You always feel special, don’t you, if you see a heron? It must be lovely to live so near the river.”

  “It’s jolly damp,” says Greg. “We have awful problems with damp.”

  We go into the living room, and Greg pours us drinks. Max sprawls expansively on the sofa. Clem runs her fingers over my patchwork cushions.

  “You might have underground water,” says Max. “Perhaps there’s a stream that runs under your house—a tributary going down to the Thames.”

  Greg talks with animation about his fears of flooding, and the time the cellar flooded and we had it pumped out and got horribly overcharged.

  “There you are then,” says Max. “Apparently there are all these trapped rivers in London, rivers that have been concreted in, flooding people’s cellars and generally causing trouble. I just read this weird thing,” he says. “In Peter Ackroyd’s London. They did a study in some hospital and found that most of the people brought in with asthma or allergies lived over underground streams.”

  “Well, of course,” says Clem. “They disturb the magnetic field of the body. Underground water is terribly bad for you.”

  Her eyes glint: She knows about these things. Once she showed me how to dowse with rods made from metal coat hangers. She’d straightened the coat hangers out, with a little hook at the end. You held the rods between finger and thumb so they could swivel freely, and you had to walk quite smoothly, like a cat. It happened just as she said it would, the rods swinging out suddenly and precisely to follow the lines of streams below the ground. It was unnerving, feeling the tug of a force that I didn’t know was there.

  I never told Greg about this; he sees Clem as terribly flaky. Now, he raises his eyebrows slightly.

  “They say that where people think they see ghosts,” says Max, “or anything supernatural, there are usually underground rivers. That they make people feel spooked.”

  We go into the dining room. I’ve lit lots of candles on the mantelpiece in front of my wide gilt-framed mirror; the flames reflect in the glass with a witchy glamour. The walls of the room are a deep jade green; they seem almost black in the candlelight. The scent of Max’s lilies brushes against us.

  Clem admires the candles. The Burgundy is like velvet on your tongue. We eat melon, then coq au vin, and listen to Miles Davis. Max tells us more about the book about London he’s read. He likes to be listened to.

  “Some of it was quite gruesome,” he says. “There used to be these special places along the banks of the river, where they took the bodies of people who were dragged out of the Thames. Suicides or drownings. They called them the dead houses. The bodies were laid on a shelf ’til the coroner could come.”

  Clem shudders.

  “Imagine what those places would have been like,” she says.

  Greg takes a slow sip of Burgundy.

  “It means the Dark River,” he says.

  For a moment, the rest of us don’t understand what he means.

  “The Thames,” he says. “The word comes from tamasa. It’s Sanskrit—the Dark River.”

  Clem shakes her head a little.

  “All those poor lost people,” she says. “People who died and maybe nobody missed them.”

  For dessert I’ve made a blackberry pie, with blackberries from the garden and the last of the convent apples. It has a crisp, buttery crust, and the filling is sharp and sw
eet and winey, with a syrup that stains you. We eat and talk about Molly—everyone rather envious, wishing, as people do, that we could do it all again but knowing what we know now; and I talk, perhaps with excessive emotion, about the difficulties involved in parenting teenage girls, and Amber in particular, who has gone to the pub with friends and should be home by now.

  “You worry too much,” says Greg to me.

  “He’s right, it’s what kids are like,” says Max, with the authority of the childless. “You have to be a bit more laid-back about it.”

  “It isn’t that easy,” I say.

  After dessert, Greg says would we mind if he went to bed—he has a nine-o’clock lecture tomorrow. I see Clem glancing at me as he goes, but she doesn’t say anything. There’s a kind of easing after Greg has gone. Max lights a cigarette; Clem kicks off her shoes. The lilies glimmer in the candlelight, just a flower-shaped luminescence, their color all washed away, and the jade-green walls are so dark it’s as though we’re under water, under the sea in one of Ursula’s paintings, that claustrophobic jeweled world. I can just make out our faces in the mirror: The candlelight is kind to us, making our eyes gleam, showing the shape of our bones. The music has ended, but I like the silence. Almost any music would be wrong now, except perhaps a solitary flute, high and clear and distant, spooling out its bright notes into emptiness.

  Clem sips her wine. “Don’t worry about Amber,” she says. “I’m sure she’s being protected.”

  Sometimes Clem unnerves me.

  “Well,” I say lightly, “I hope so.”

  “No, really,” she says, “I’m serious.”

  There’s a little spilled wine on the table. Clem moves her finger in it, tracing a pattern that no one else can see.

  “I heard an angel once,” she says. Her voice is quite matter-of-fact, no question in it.

  I glance at Max. I expect a sardonic smile, or at least a deeply skeptical look, a raised eyebrow. But he’s listening quietly, blowing out blue smoke.

  “It was when all that stuff was happening with Gordon,” she says. “When it was falling apart.” Her voice quiet, thin, suspended in the stillness. “I was staying at my mother’s, and I woke, and it was dark. I was thinking, How could I carry on? I couldn’t begin to imagine how I could start all over again—love again, trust anyone again—and I heard this voice in the darkness. Saying the words of a hymn we’d sung when I was a child. ‘Love divine, all loves excelling …’ It wasn’t in my head,” she says, as though responding to some protest from Max or from me, though we’re just sitting there quietly. “It was an absolutely clear voice.”

  The reflections of the candles float in the dark of the mirror, as though they’re floating on water.

  “I went to this therapist last year,” she says, “and I told her about it, and she’d refer to it sometimes. And she’d always say, That angel you thought you heard. But I didn’t think I heard it: I heard it.”

  I can hear Max’s breathing, and at the window the whisper of the rain.

  “‘As we grow older, the world becomes stranger,’” he says. “Who wrote that?”

  But Clem and I don’t know.

  “It was some poet,” he says. “I think some poet said that.”

  “I’m envious,” I say. “I’d like to hear an angel.”

  “Sometimes I think … we’re all connected,” says Clem slowly. “Sometimes I think …” She makes a slight gesture. “I don’t know what I think …” Her voice trails off into silence. “But it was a wonderful thing. It got me through.”

  There’s a crash as the front door opens and is flung back. I jump, then feel the relief that always surges through me when Amber is home. We smile, lean back in our chairs, the spell broken.

  “There you are then,” says Clem.

  Amber comes in, stands uncertainly in the doorway.

  “Hi, you guys,” she says.

  She smiles, her new wide, practiced smile. She’s just a little shy. She never uses an umbrella—she hates the way the rain runs down her sleeve from the umbrella handle—and the furry trimming of her coat is clumped together and sodden, and her hair is wet, as though she’s been dragged through water.

  “Was it a good evening?” says Max.

  “OK.” She shrugs off her coat. She’s a bit disorganized, her movements rather random, from too much Bacardi perhaps. She’s wearing tight jeans and a little top, exposing lots of skin. There’s glittery varnish on her bitten nails. “There was this really sad guy,” she says. She twists her mermaid’s hair behind an ear. “He came up to me and it was, like, ‘If I could rearrange the alphabet I’d put U and I together.’ I gave him a look, and he went away. Can I have a drink, Mum?”

  “No, sweetheart, I think you’ve had enough already. Have you eaten?”

  She shakes her head.

  “There’s some coq au vin you could heat up in the kitchen.”

  She frowns.

  “Mum, you know I don’t like to eat animals.” She turns to Max and Clem. “I try to tell her,” she says, “about animal cruelty and stuff. I’ve even brought her leaflets. But will she listen? Yum. Blackberry pie.”

  I spoon some out on a coffee saucer for her. She eats greedily. They chat to her as she eats, about school and what subjects she’s doing and whether she likes her teachers. Her lips are wet and stained with vivid juice.

  “My form tutor, she’s always getting at me because I haven’t fixed my work experience placement,” she says. “Like it’s this big moral thing.” She’s expansive, making the most of her audience. “I mean, we have war, we have famine, we do these horrible things to animals: What’s the big deal about a few days’ work experience? She has issues, Mrs. Russell.”

  “So, what’s involved?” says Max.

  “It’s just for a week in December,” I say. “It shouldn’t be that difficult. But I can’t take her because of the confidentiality thing, and she’s adamant she’s not going to Greg’s department. Though really I can’t see why not.”

  “Mum, please don’t start all that again,” says Amber sternly.

  Max’s eyes rest on her. I see a bud of an idea beginning to form.

  “In December?” he says.

  She nods.

  “We’ve had students on placement before,” he says. “They seem to quite enjoy it.”

  “You could have me,” she says.

  He smiles. “I’m sure we’d be able to work out something. If you’d like that.”

  “Please,” she says. “It would be perfect.”

  “Max, are you sure?” I say. “I mean, it’s sweet of you, but you mustn’t feel you have to. …”

  “Absolutely. As long as Amber doesn’t mind being a general dogsbody—making the coffee, that sort of thing.”

  “She could learn,” I say.

  Amber glares at me.

  “And you could come to court, of course,” says Max. “Though I can’t guarantee there’ll be anything remotely glamorous. Most of the time it’s unbelievably boring.”

  “No murders?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t promise a murder.”

  “Will I need a suit?” she says.

  He shakes his head. “Just something smartish.”

  “Mum could lend me something.” She finishes her dessert and gives the spoon a comprehensive lick. “Thanks, Max. You’ve saved my skin.”

  She takes a scrap of envelope and an eyeliner pencil from her handbag and writes her number down for him, with a sketch of a flower next to her name. She hands it across to him with her new, lavish smile.

  “Court,” she says with satisfaction. “That’ll show her.”

  She doesn’t quite know how to say good night. She picks up her coat and gives Max and Clem a slight, self-conscious wave.

  “She’s so lovely,” says Clem, after she’s gone. “You’re so lucky, Ginnie, with your daughters. She’s lovely, isn’t she, Max?”

  “She certainly is,” he says. He tucks the scrap of paper in his pocket.

>   We hear Amber clatter upstairs, and the shower running. The mood has changed. I would like to talk more about Clem’s angel, but I know that the moment has passed. We are more ordinary now.

  I make coffee, and we discuss the mayoral election and the inadequacies of the local rail service; then Clem and Max gather their things together and go off into the night.

  I go back to the dining room, not wanting to go to bed yet. Amber is asleep now. My home is quiet, just creaking a little, like somebody turning over and settling down to sleep. I think of the things we talked about, of the pull of hidden water and the angel that Clem heard, of how as you grow older the world becomes stranger. And I think of making love with Will in the house on the banks of the river, and I wonder how I came to this place—everything fluid, nothing fixed, so different from how I’d imagined it would be.

  CHAPTER 20

  AMBER HAS HER WORK EXPERIENCE PLACEMENT in the second week of December. I’m pleased with how seriously she takes it. She buys herself a skirt—an item of clothing she didn’t previously possess—and a pair of prim, if rather high, court shoes. She borrows some pearl earrings of mine, which I never wear because I think they look too middle-aged on me, but on her they look beguilingly demure.

  I go to wake her on the first morning of the placement, but she’s up already. In her decorous new clothes, she looks like the secretary in a black-and-white romantic movie, in the moment of revelation when Cary Grant whips off her glasses and takes the clip out of her hair.

  Max arranges for her to spend the day in court. It’s a social security fraud case, which doesn’t sound especially thrilling, but the whole thing fascinates her—the wigs, the bundles of paper tied up in pink ribbon, all the pompousness and drama. She feels a rush of empathy for the defendant.

  “The prosecution lawyer gave her a really hard time,” she says. “This horrible barrister. Can they do that, Mum?”

  “They can do what they want,” I say. “They’re just out to get a result. It’s what they’re there for. They don’t care if they upset people.”

  “It shouldn’t happen. That poor woman. She was only trying to feed her kids,” she says. “She didn’t hurt anybody.”