The River House (2 page)

“Are you OK, Ginnie? You look kind of shattered,” she says.

“It’s death by shopping. I’ve got this massive list of stuff that Molly seems to need.”

“You need to treat yourself,” says Clem. “A bit of self-indulgence.”

I sip my coffee. Clem likes to eat organic food, but the coffee she makes is satisfyingly toxic. I feel a surge of energy
as it slides into my veins.

“I did,” I say. “I really tried.”

I tell her about the boots I bought, in a reckless moment out buying bedding with Molly. How they caught my eye in a shop
window—suede ankle boots the color of claret with spindly improbable heels. How Molly urged me on: Go for it, Mum. You look
fab in them. And for a moment I believed her; I felt a shiver of possibility, a sense of something shifting. And then the
moment of doubt when I handed over my credit card, wondering why I was doing this.

“You haven’t worn them yet,” says Clem sternly.

“No. Well, I probably never will.”

She shakes her head at me.

“Ginnie, you’re hopeless,” she says with affection. “So tell me. Kyle McConville.”

“There’s something I’m missing,” I tell her.

She waits, her fingers steepled in front of her face, like someone praying. She has bitten nails, and lots of silver rings
engraved with runes, that she buys at Camden Market.

I take a breath.

“He makes me feel afraid. Like there’s some threat there, something that’s happened or might happen. It sounds silly now,
but I found myself kind of looking over my shoulder. I don’t know when I’ve had such a powerful feeling of dread—not even
with kids we know have been abused. But there’s nothing in his case notes. …”

She nods. I know she’ll take my feeling seriously. We have a mantra, Clem and I: How someone makes you feel is information.
We understand this differently. I’m more prosaic perhaps—I think we’re all more sensitive than we realize and respond unconsciously
to one another’s signals; while Clem’s quite mystical about it, believing we’re all connected in ways we don’t understand.

“He builds a bedroom from Lego,” I tell her. “Over and over. I feel that he went through some trauma there. But maybe that’s
too simplistic.”

“So much
is
simple,” she says.

“I said that he wasn’t trapped, he could escape from the room. He just closed up completely when I said that. But it felt
so right to me—you know, to walk out of your prison. …”

Her eyes are on me. She has brown, full eyes, always a little dilated, that give her a childlike look. Now they widen a little.

“Ginnie,” she says tentatively. “Perhaps there was some other reason that seemed to make so much sense …” Her voice fades.

There’s silence between us for a moment.

“I just can’t tell if it’s something I ought to pursue,” I say then. “Given how he reacted.”

She leans toward me across the desk.

“Ginnie, you need the story,” she says. “You’re dancing in the dark here. You need a bit more background. Who else has been
involved?”

“There’s a note to say the police were called to the house.”

“Well, there you are then.”

“But no one was charged. And no one told social services, so Kyle can’t have been thought to have been in any danger.”

“So what?” she says. “Maybe someone messed up. Go and talk to them, Ginnie.” There are lights in her eyes; this amuses her.
“Isn’t it what we’re all meant to be doing nowadays? I mean, it’s all about interfacing, isn’t it? Collaboration and interfacing
and stuff. You need to go off and collaborate. …”

She pulls the notes toward her, flicks open the cardboard cover. Her fingers with the runic rings move deftly through the
file. I wait to see what she says. You can hear the murmuring of the pigeons, as though the air is breathing.

She pauses, her hand on the page. A shadow crosses her face.

“Oh,” she says. “That’s not what you’d choose exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

She looks up at me, a little frown stitched to her forehead. “I’ve met this guy—the detective you need to talk to. He’s at
Fairfield Street, runs the Community Safety Unit. DI Hampden. I know him.”

“You don’t sound very impressed.”

“Maybe it’s nothing,” she says. “I mean, I could have got him wrong. He spoke at this conference I went to. Very energetic.”

“You mean difficult.”

“I didn’t say that, Ginnie. A bit combative, perhaps—but there were some pretty crass questions from the floor. What the hell.
I’ll give you his number.”

She writes it down for me.

I feel tired suddenly. I know just how it will be, this encounter with Clem’s rather combative detective. A meeting like all
the others, hurried and inconclusive, both of us distracted and rushing on to the next thing, in a room that smells of warm
vinyl: trying to find a way forward for yet another troubled, damaged child.

“I guess I could try him,” I say.

The reluctance is there in my voice. She looks up sharply.

“Ginnie, you are OK, aren’t you? I mean, should I be worried?”

“I’m fine, Clem, really. Just shattered, like you said.”

She frowns at me with mock severity.

“This isn’t burnout, is it, Ginnie?”

“Nothing so glamorous.”

I can’t quite tell her how I really feel. How I’ve lost the shiny hopefulness I used to have. How as you get older it changes.
You learn how deep the scars go; you worry that healing is only temporary, if it happens at all. You know there’s so much
that cannot be mended.

I take the number and walk back to my office. The bars of sunlight falling from the windows seem almost opaque, like solid
things—as though if you put out your hand you might touch something warm and real.

M
Y HOUSE IS HALF HIDDEN
behind tall hedges. It’s a house that belongs in the country—you’d never guess you were on the edge of London—a cottage,
with a little sunken garden; and at night its crooked old walls and beams and banisters seem to stretch and creak as if they’re
living things that are shifting and turning over and settling down to sleep. Sometimes I think how we’d all have loved this
house if we’d moved here earlier, when the girls were little and we lived in a forgettable thirties semi. How it would have
preoccupied me in my domestic days, when I thrilled to fabric catalogs and those little pots of paint you can try out on your
walls. How the girls would have relished its secrets and hiding places; and how Amber especially would have loved that the
river was down the end of the road, the Thames, which runs on through London, with its willows and islands and waterbirds.
Like in the poem she made me read each night when she was three:

Gray goose and gander,

Waft your wings together,

And carry the good king’s daughter

Over the one-strand river.

I don’t know what it was about the poem. It made her think perhaps of the walks we sometimes took on weekend afternoons, when
Greg was busy in his study preparing his lectures: driving down to the river, parking on a patch of gravel where nobody seemed
to come, walking along the river path where in summer the balsam and meadowsweet grow higher than your head. Amber especially
loved those walks, poking around with Molly in the tangle of bushes beside the path and coming upon some tiny, astonishing
creature—a sepia moth with lacy wings, a beetle like a jewel, black and emerald. Or maybe it was just the sound of the words—maybe
gander
sounded to her a little like
Amber
—for when children are greedy for poetry, it’s often for the sound as much as the sense. There was a picture that went with
the poem—the rush-fringed mud flats beside the glinting river; the princess a teenage girl in a cloak and a coronet with a
look of perplexity; the soaring goose, wide-winged. I’d read it endlessly, ’til it had no meaning, but it always evoked a
particular mood—lonely, a little melancholic, with bulrushes whispering and the smell of the river, the mingled scent of salt
and rotting vegetation. This house would have been perfect for us in those days. But things don’t always happen at the right
time in our lives, and I think my daughters now scarcely notice the house they live in, as they move toward independence and
their center of gravity starts to shift away.

Molly has begun packing, ready for Sunday and the start of her first term at Oxford; the hall is cluttered with boxes. I check
my voice mail for messages. Amber must be already home: she leaves a trail behind her—her shoes kicked off, her grubby pink
school-bag with books spilling out, her blazer, still inside out, flung down on the floor. I remember she had the afternoon
off for an orthodontic appointment.

I call to her. She appears at the top of the stairs. The light from the landing window shines on her and glints in her long
red hair. She is drinking something electric blue from a bottle.

“You shouldn’t drink that stuff,” I say routinely. “It leaches the calcium out of your bones. Girls of twenty are getting
osteoporosis.”

With a stagy gesture, she hides the bottle behind her.

“You weren’t meant to see it,” she says.

“Nice day?”

“OK,” she says.

She pushes back the soft heap of her hair, tossing her head a little. Stray flyaway bits turn gold.

“Have you finished your Graphics course work?”

She shrugs. “I’m waiting to get in the mood.”

There’s a brief blare of music as she opens her door and goes back into her bedroom.

Molly, making the most of her last week of leisure, is sprawled on the sofa in the living room, her little pot of Vaseline
lipsalve beside her. She’s already dressed and made-up for the art exhibition; she’s put on lots of pink eye shadow, and she’s
wearing one of her many pairs of embroidered jeans. She glitters against the dark colors of my living room, the kilims and
patchwork cushions. My daughters dazzle me, with their long limbs, bright hair, and that sudden startling shapeliness that
seems to happen between one day and the next. Molly once told me she could remember the precise day—she was just thirteen,
she said—when she first looked at herself in the mirror with interest.

She fixes me now with eyes that are dark and glossy as licorice.

“Hi, Mum. I don’t suppose there’s any food?”

I suppress a sigh. Molly is quite capable of complaining that there’s never anything to eat while standing in front of a fridge
containing a shepherd’s pie, a cheesecake, and six yogurts.

“I’ll be cooking in a minute.”

“OK.” She turns to me then, her fingers tangled in the kilim on the sofa. Her lips are slick from the Vaseline. “Dad
is
coming, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I say, a bit too emphatically. “Of course.”

I remember her as a little girl, one time when I had a case conference and couldn’t make it to her Harvest Festival: What’s
the point of me learning all the words to these songs if
you
aren’t there to hear me?

“Dad wouldn’t miss it,” I tell her.

“I want him to see it.”

“Of course you do,” I say. “Don’t worry. He’ll be there.”

I go to the kitchen to ring him, so that she won’t be able to hear.

My kitchen soothes me, with its warm red walls and its silence. It’s a jumble of things that don’t quite fit together, that
almost seem to belong in different houses. There’s a clutter of mismatched flowered china on the dresser, and a mirror shaped
like a crescent moon, and an apothecary cabinet that I loved the look of, though its many little drawers are really very impractical.
I keep all sorts of oddments in the drawers, things that aren’t much use but that I can’t bear to get rid of—the wrist tags
the girls were given in hospital just after they were born, and a piece of pink indeterminate knitting Molly did in infant
school, and the tiny photos you get in the pack of assorted prints from the school photographer, that are too small to frame
but that I’d never throw away. On the wall by the sink, there’s a copy of my sister Ursula’s painting of the Little Mermaid,
from one of the fairy-tale books she’s illustrated, the mermaid diving down through the blue translucent water, with around
her the dark, drenched treasure and seaweed like curling hair. When Molly was a toddler, the picture used to trouble her,
and she’d stare at it with widening licorice eyes: “But won’t she drown, Mum, under all that water?” On the windowsill there
are some leggy geraniums, and apples from the Anglican convent down the road. Passersby were invited to help themselves to
the apples, and I had some vague hope that, given their ecclesiastical origins, they might be especially nourishing. I see
in the rich afternoon light that it all needs cleaning, that I haven’t wiped my windowsills for weeks.

He’s slow to answer. I worry that he’s in the middle of a tutorial.

“Greg, it’s me. It was just to check you hadn’t forgotten tonight.”

“What about tonight?”

“It’s Molly’s exhibition. The art show at the school.”

There’s a brief silence. Something tenses in my chest.

“Hell,” he says then.

“I
did
tell you.” I hear the irritation edge into my voice—I try to control it. “It matters, Greg.” It depresses me how familiar
this is—me always wanting more from him than he is willing to give. “She worked so hard,” I tell him. “And she spent all yesterday
stapling it up.”

“Look, I’ll be there, OK? There’s no need to go on about it. Though it’s quite a pain, to be honest. I was hoping to get in
a bit more work on my book.”

I sit there a moment longer. I should be making dinner, but I just wait for a while and let the quiet knit up the raveled
bits of me and ease away the disturbance of the day. I see that a tiny fern is growing out of the wall behind the sink. This
shouldn’t happen. An apple shoot once sprouted from a pip that had fallen behind my fridge. Sometimes I feel that if I relaxed
my vigilance for too long, my house would rapidly revert to the wild.

I decide I will make a vegetable gratin, a concession to Amber’s incipient vegetarianism. I cut up leeks and cauliflower.
I’m just at the delicate stage, adding the milk to the roux, when the phone rings.