The River House (27 page)

There’s a creak behind me. My pulse judders. I think it must be Greg—that Greg has come home and heard everything. I spin
around.

Amber is there in the doorway.

“My God. Amber. You frightened me. Why are you here?”

She comes straight up to me. Her eyes are huge, like a startled child’s.

“They were police, weren’t they, Mum?” She’s frightened, her voice is high, the words tumbling over one another. “They had
that look. They were so
serious
.”

Panic seizes me. I wonder how much she has heard.

“What’s happened, Mum?” she says. “Has someone died? I heard them say someone had died. Is it Molly, Mum? Just tell me Molly’s
OK.”

I know then she can’t have heard it all. I wrap my arm around her. She’s tense and taut as a wire.

“Everything’s OK.” I’m trying to be calm, but my heart is pounding: I wonder if she can feel it as I hold her. “It’s nothing
to do with Molly.”

“Everything can’t be OK,” she says. “You look awful.”

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “But, Amber—you shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s March the third, Mum.”

I stare at her blankly.

“You wrote it on the calendar,” she says. “It’s my course work. I came back for my course work.” She’s spelling it out patiently.
“My
Go-Between
essay, Mum. I forgot it and it has to be in today.”

“Does Mrs. Russell know you’re here?”

She nods. “I got permission and everything. Jamila wanted to come as well, but Mrs. Russell said she reckoned I probably knew
my way home by now. You were on at me about it. Don’t you remember? You got really stressed about it. I thought you’d be pleased
that I bothered. Anyway, for God’s sake, tell me, Mum.”

I tell her just the outline of it—that they came to ask me about the murder we saw on the television.

Her eyes are bright with astonishment.

“So why
you
exactly?”

“I went for a walk by the river,” I tell her, “before they found the body. And I saw this man who looked like the husband
who made the appeal. And I thought I should tell the police—you know, just in case it was relevant.”

She stares at me.

“But this is just so random,” she says. “I mean, I just don’t get it. You didn’t say anything, Mum—when we saw it on television,
when they found the body. You didn’t seem that interested.”

“I only thought of it later,” I say. “I only realized later it might be useful.”

There’s a deep frown stitched to her forehead. It’s the face she has when there’s something she can’t make sense of.

“So you’ll have to go to court and everything?” she says.

“I hope not,” I say. “Look, I’ll give you a lift if you like. I could take you to the bus stop.”

“OK,” she says.

But she just stands there, her perplexity written all over her.

“What were you doing there anyway, Mum? When you went for this walk?”

“It was to do with a work problem. A case, a child I was seeing. I wanted to clear my head about a case. …”

Her glance is sharp and glittery, like a blade.

“I didn’t know you were into that kind of stuff,” she says. “Going off for walks to think about things.”

I
GIVE
A
MBER A LIFT TO THE BUS
.

“Don’t forget to hand in your essay,” I tell her. “After going to all this trouble.”

“I came home, didn’t I, Mum?” she says.

But she’s still preoccupied. I leave her at the bus stop with a troubled frown on her face.

When I get home, the post has come. I flick through—offers of credit; a flyer for a book by the Queen of Clean, which will
tell me how to get pumpkin stains off my pine table with a little nongel toothpaste. And then a packet from Molly. As I open
it, photographs spill out. There’s a note inside, in her rounded, studious handwriting.

“Hi all. Just got these back from Jessops. We came to London for Kev’s birthday trip—we went on the London Eye. We had the
cake in Trafalgar Square, but the wind kept blowing out the candles. Hope you’re feeling better, Mum! xxxM.”

The pictures show a group of them in a glass bubble high in the sky, the spring sun shining bright on them. The girls have
stripy scarves and poised and nonchalant smiles; the boys, a little self-conscious, are making faces for the camera. Molly’s
face is flushed; she has gleaming licorice eyes. The city is laid below them like a great embroidered cloth flung out: You
can see the silver trail of the Thames with its many intricate bridges. I will send these pictures to my mother: I think how
she will love them, how proud she’ll be to show them around the ward. I look for a long time at these golden lads and girls
with the world spread out at their feet.

I go to the kitchen. The cups that I put out for the police, for the drink they didn’t want, are still waiting on the tray.
I make a coffee, but I don’t drink it. Everything is much as usual around me, yet it all looks different—like when you come
back from holiday and the shapes and sizes of things seem to have subtly changed. ’Til I heard Amber there behind me, I still
half-believed that I could limit the damage, and keep it all safe and secret. But I know now that I have to tell Greg—that
I have to talk to him before Amber does. I’m dizzy with the sense that everything is slipping beyond my control.

When Greg comes in that evening, he goes straight up to his study. Amber is at Lauren’s, but she could come back anytime.
I know I can’t postpone this.

He looks up, surprised, as I open his door.

“I was going to come and find you,” he says. “There’s something I want you to see.”

He takes a piece of shiny card out of his briefcase and hands it to me. He looks happy.

“It’s the cover for the book,” he says. “It only came today.”

It’s a drawing taken from a Celtic carving, a tangle and twist of budding branches and foliage: You can see the curl of a
fern frond, the patternings of leaves. You can’t make out where the shapes begin or end; everything is entwined with everything
else, nothing separate: It might all be drawn with a single elaborate line. And as you look, you begin to see creatures emerging
from the foliage, as though, by some enchantment, the plants are also animals—a tendril of ivy writhes like the coils of a
dragon, a stag sprouts antlers like the branches of trees.

“It’s beautiful,” I tell him.

He misreads the hesitation in me.

“Are you really, really sure?” he says. “You don’t sound convinced. I need an honest opinion.”

“Really. I love it. You can see so much in it.”

“Fenella wanted me to get your response,” he says. “You’re the nearest I’ve got to your average punter in the bookshop.”

“You can tell her I really like it,” I say.

“You don’t think it’s too abstract?” he says. “I mean, they did have some other ideas too. You don’t think it would be better
to have some diaphanous woman on it?”

“I think it’s lovely,” I say. “Well done.” I hand it back to him.

I think of the passage I read from his anthology, the woman looking at the man called Froech, and how she used to say of any
beautiful thing she saw, that she thought it more beautiful to see Froech in the dark pool. I think how that moved me. I don’t
know the way from here to where I have to get to.

I go to the window, glance down over the gardens. The sun is setting, lavishly red. Cotton-wool clouds soak up the colored
light like a stain. The river dazzles.

“Greg, there’s something I need to tell you.”

He’s quite still suddenly. His face darkens. I move on quickly.

“Some police came here today.”

“Police?” He’s baffled.

“Has Amber said anything?” I ask him.

“No, I haven’t seen her. Why would she anyway?”

“Because she saw them,” I say. “She’d come back for her course work. She was worried. I thought she might have mentioned it.”

His expression is strained, as though he’s peering at something that’s just out of sight.

“Ginnie, could you just tell me what this is all about?”

“They came because I rang them.” Laying the words out before him like little stones, precise and irrevocable. “It was about
that murder—the woman they found in the river.”

“Good God,” he says. “You mean you saw something?”

I tell him what I told Amber. That I was by the river. That I went off for a walk because I needed to think about a case.

He frowns.

“Why didn’t you ring them straightaway?” he says.

“I couldn’t decide how significant it was. Then I saw the TV appeal, and it made me feel I should do something. Because this
man I saw—he was like the man on the appeal, her husband. I mean, I can’t be sure, of course, but I think that it was him.”

“Well, it’s often the partner, isn’t it, in these cases? You’ve always said that.”

“Pretty much.”

“That poor woman,” he says. “Well, I’m sure you did the right thing.”

“I hope so,” I say.

He’s quiet for a moment. He takes off his glasses and puts them down on his desk and rubs his eyes. It’s an old man’s gesture.
He looks tired suddenly. His head is bowed; he isn’t looking at me.

I turn to go, breathing a little more easily. I’ve done what I had to do, I’ve told him, and nothing has been destroyed.

“You were by the river, you said?” His voice is light, level, as though this is just a casual inquiry. My heart lurches.

“Yes.”

“That’s quite a long way to go just for a walk, I’d have thought. From your clinic.”

“I had a bit of time to spare,” I say.

His head is bent; I still can’t see his eyes. In a moment of cold, it enters my mind that he suspects me: that he suspected
me long before this moment, before I told him these things.

It’s quiet between us for a moment. In the stillness you can hear the smallest sounds, the ugly chime of an ice-cream van,
a pigeon that startles in the pear tree in the garden, with a sound like something torn.

“I like it there,” I say. “I used to take the girls there.”

“Yes, I remember,” he says.

“So—anyway—I just wanted to tell you what happened.”

He looks across at me then. In the strange red light of evening, his eyes seem bright, too bright, as though they’re full
of tears.

“Will it go any further?” he says.

“I hope not. I really hope not.” Cheerful, confident. “I’m just assuming that’s the last I’ll hear of it. That it’s all over
now … I’ll leave you to get on then,” I say, and turn and go.

But I know that nothing is over. Not even this conversation.

I
WAIT AT MY FAVORITE TABLE BY THE WINDOW
. The bar is empty except for the barmaid. Today her hair is tied with velvet ribbon. There’s jazz playing. I look out into
the garden. It’s changed so much since first we came here. The drifts of dark leaves have all been raked from the lawn, and
bulbs are coming up in the grass, little slivers and blades of fresh green. But it’s pouring with rain, fat silver drops that
rattle and bounce on the terrace and wash the topsoil out of the flower beds. You couldn’t go out in this weather; in a minute
you’d be soaked through.

He’s late; he has a preoccupied look. He smells of smoke and rain.

“Perhaps we should wait here a little, see if it stops,” I say.

“OK,” he says.

I buy him a drink. We talk about our other lives. I tell him about my mother’s scan and diagnosis.

“Poor her,” he says. “Poor you.”

I ask about Jake. There’s a special school they’re trying to get him into, but it’s such a struggle, he says: The council’s
refusing to provide the funding. He says they’re going to fight it all the way.

The rain is easing off now: The sun is shining behind the cloud, so the pale sky has many faint iridescent colors, like a
pearl. Soon we will go to the river house.

“Will …” I watch his hand on the table, his long, clever fingers curling around his glass. I think how much I love his hands.
I know I have to tell him now. But it’s hard to drag the words out.

“Will, I saw Sean Faulkner’s TV appeal.”

The words in my mouth are solid things.

He looks up sharply.

“He’s the husband of the woman they found in the river,” I tell him.

He’s sitting quite still.

“I know who Sean Faulkner is,” he says.

“Will, I think he was the man I saw that day on the river path.”

I feel his gaze on me. He doesn’t say anything.

“I made that call,” I tell him. I’m looking at his hand, not looking at him. “To the Incident Room.”

I make myself look up then.

His eyes are narrowed, as though I am his enemy. His silence scares me.

“Jesus,” he says then.

“Will—how could I have done differently? I was trying to do the right thing. I couldn’t just leave it—it would have felt so
wrong.”

“The whole thing’s wrong,” he says. He’s leaning forward, speaking in a low voice—as though afraid people might hear, though
there’s no one near except the barmaid. I can see the red flecks in his eyes. His voice has a knife edge of anger, but I don’t
know who he’s angry with, whether it’s him or me. Perhaps he doesn’t know either. “We shouldn’t have been there anyway. We
shouldn’t have been doing this. None of this should have happened.”

His mood frightens me. For a moment I can’t say anything.

“And then?” he says.

I stare at him blankly.

“What happened?” he says, in that hard voice.

“They came to see me. They took a statement,” I tell him. “There were two of them, Ray and Karen.”

“Christ.”

“Will. I did everything I could to protect you—to protect us. I told them that I couldn’t say who I was with.”

“You said that—that you were with someone?”

“They’d have known,” I say. “They’d have worked it out. They’ve been around—they know what people are like. I mean, why would
I have been in the river house on my own? She isn’t stupid, that woman.”

He’s looking at me as if I appall him. I can’t believe how rapidly we got here. You’re so close to someone that he feels like
part of your body, you move to a single rhythm. Then just a few words and suddenly this coldness—so quickly, so easily—everything
undone.