The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  “That happens, I’m afraid,” he says. “It’s been crazy here. Tell me what can I do for you.”

  I tell him I’m a psychologist, that I’m working with a child that I don’t understand.

  He’s leaning forward across the desk, his hands loosely clasped in front of him. His hands are close to mine. I notice the pale skin, the dark hairs on the backs of his fingers, the lilac web of veins inside his wrists.

  I tell him about Kyle, how I feel he’s been through some trauma but I don’t know what it was. Will Hampden has his eyes on me, dark eyes, with red flecks in. As I talk I’m very conscious of his intent, puzzled gaze. I decide he doesn’t like me. I think how I must seem to him—prissy, bland, ineffectual, my skin reddened from walking here, my hair all messy from the morning’s rain.

  “I don’t remember the name,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean a thing. I’ll have a look on Crim Int. Let’s see what we can find out for you.”

  He searches on his computer, and gives me the dates the police were called to the house. He says he’ll have a word with the officer involved.

  “Where can I find you, Ginnie?”

  I give him my cell phone number.

  “I’ll see what I can do for you,” he says.

  I know this means that our conversation is over. I get up, pull my jacket around my shoulders. I have an odd, incomplete feeling, but there’s no reason to stay.

  “OK, then. Thanks.”

  “My pleasure,” he says. He sits there for a moment, looking me over. There’s something unequal about this, the way he doesn’t stand although I’m standing, as though he’s breaking some unspoken rule.

  “I like the shoes,” he says.

  “Thanks.” I make a little dismissive gesture, unnerved by this, not knowing what to say. “To be honest, I’m not sure they’re really me,” I tell him. Then wonder why I said that.

  His eyes hold mine.

  “What is really you, Ginnie?” he says.

  My stomach tightens. I don’t say anything.

  There’s a little silence while he just sits there looking at me. I can hear my breathing.

  “Well,” he says then. He pushes back his chair: He’s brisk again, full of purpose. “I’ll show you out, Ginnie. Where did you leave your car?”

  “I didn’t,” I tell him. “It’s in the garage. They told me the transmission had packed up. It’s been one of those days.”

  “For me too,” he says. He smiles at me, a sudden, vivid smile.

  He takes me out through the back of the station, down a long white corridor lit by harsh tubular lighting that shines into all the corners. The walls are scuffed in places, as though they have been kicked. We hear the shriek of a siren as a police car pulls away from the car park at the back of the building. I hunt around for something to say—some light, appropriate comment—but my mind is blank, as though all thoughts have been erased.

  “I’d give you a lift,” he tells me, “but there’s someone I’ve got to see. Some crap meeting that got set up and nobody bothered to tell me. I’d like to have given you a lift.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I tell him.

  We come to the door that opens onto the car park. The doorway is quite narrow, and he’s standing close to me; he smells of rain and smoky rooms, and some faint, spicy cologne.

  He looks at me in a serious way, unsmiling now.

  “Sorry about the shouting,” he says. “Someone messed up. Sorry. You shouldn’t have heard that.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say blandly.

  “I wouldn’t like you to think I’m always shouting at people,” he says.

  I put my hand on his arm. It’s happened without thought, an instinctive gesture of reassurance. But his sleeve is rolled up, and I touch his skin. It’s inappropriate, far too intimate, and I know he likes it. He turns to me; his face is close to mine. It would be the easiest thing in the world to reach out and trail my finger down the side of his face. It enters my mind that this is how it will be. The thought astonishes me.

  The voice comes on the intercom again: the registration number, the body they need to identify, repeated over and over. This is how it happens, with the news of a death, with someone’s story ending.

  I turn and walk across the car park between the lines of police cars, quickly, without looking back. I feel how his gaze follows me. In my new red shoes, the ground feels unsubstantial under my feet, as though it could slide away from me.

  That night I have a dream about Will Hampden. It’s a sexual dream—which is not in itself unusual; I have such dreams quite often. But usually they’re rather vague—as though my unconscious mind demurely follows the conventions of between-the-wars Hollywood movies. In these dreams, some indeterminate man, a stranger whose face I don’t see, might hold me or kiss me, or stand behind me and run his hand through my hair. Or the sexual feeling might be allied to some entirely neutral image—I might simply be swimming in a sunlit sea. And these images will be transient, rapidly merging with some other blurry narrative.

  This dream is different. A dream of penetration, first his fingers, then his cock, gentle, slow, insistent. And it’s quite precise and vivid. I’m on top of him in the dream; I’m gazing down at him, seeing his face quite clearly, my eyes on his as he moves so deeply inside me: And it seems to go on for a very long time, though the end still comes too soon.

  CHAPTER 7

  WE PARK NEAR THE RESTAURANT, on a wide, mellow street. The girls extricate themselves from the back of the car; they have bags of clothes wedged around their feet, and boxes on their knees.

  Honeyed autumn sunlight falls on Molly as she steps out onto the pavement. She’s wearing her flimsiest top, her most flamboyantly embroidered jeans. Her face is creased with worry.

  “What if someone nicks the car while we’re having lunch?” she says. “All my stuff’s in there.”

  She chews absently at a tendril of hair that’s slipped out of her scrunchy.

  “For God’s sake, Molly, no one will steal it,” says Greg.

  “We’ll sit in the window,” I tell her. “Then you can keep an eye on it.”

  Greg raises his eyebrows.

  Molly’s nervousness is like a glittery sheen on her. She moves on to her next worry.

  “Are you sure other people will have their parents with them?”

  “Yes, of course,” I tell her. “Everyone will have their parents.”

  “They won’t,” she says. “I bet they’ll all come with their mates in a van. They won’t have their parents. … And, Mum”—her frown deepening as another fear comes rushing in—“what if they all know each other already? What if half of them come from the same school and they’ve known each other for years?”

  “Molly, stop freaking,” says Amber severely.

  The restaurant is crowded, but we manage to get a table by the window. Molly takes out her lipsalve. When her chicken pie comes, she just dips a French fry in the sauce and sucks at it. I terribly want her to eat, as though I have some unexamined idea that we’re feeding her up for weeks, as though this final family meal will magically sustain her.

  She feels my gaze on her.

  “Sorry, Mum, I’d normally like it. I just can’t eat today.”

  She’s hunched in on herself, as though she’s shrunk a little. I wonder how well I have prepared her for this moment of moving on, the ultimate test of my mothering. Maybe I should have pushed her more toward independence—right from when she was tiny and I used to go on feeding her, when I should perhaps have urged her to take the spoon. She was always rather too willing then to let me look after her. Whereas Amber would grab the spoon from the moment she could clasp it, mashed pears and custard flying exuberantly everywhere. Amber would grab whatever she wanted no matter the mess it made.

  Another family comes to a table near us, two parents and a serious young man in a stylish denim shirt. He has a chiseled face and fine dark hairs on his arms. Amber glances at him, then away. She has an intent look.

/>   She catches Molly’s eye.

  “Mmm,” she says thoughtfully. “I hope he’s going to your college.”

  “For Chrissake, shut up,” hisses Molly.

  Amber’s lips curve in a small, secret smile.

  We have crème brûlée for dessert. Amber wolfs hers, then takes herself off to the bathroom. She comes back by a devious route, brushing past the boy’s table, catching his eye and smiling slightly, keeping her lips pressed together to hide her braces. I love it that it comes so easily to her, this intuitive choreography that I’ve always found so perplexing.

  I murmur to Greg, “Perhaps she’ll work a bit harder now. Maybe she’ll see the benefits.”

  He shrugs. He gives me a puzzled look. Perhaps he didn’t see.

  “We need to get back to the car,” he says. “We’re out of time on the meter.”

  He pays the bill.

  “OK?” I say to Molly.

  She nods. She puts on more lipsalve.

  We park at Molly’s college, and she goes to the porter’s lodge and is given her key. Two o’clock chimes across the city—we hear the hollow sounds of many clocks and bells. We’re directed around the back; there’s a patch of gravel to park on, a tangled herbaceous border, a decrepit potting shed. The plants in the border are drying out and dying back with autumn—shaggy heads of chrysanthemums, and tatty Michaelmas daisies, their colors fading as though they’ve been left too long in water. The thin white stalks of some of the flowers have a calcified look. Rich sunlight lies over everything. Around us, other families are unpacking their cars.

  We go through the open fire door, along a brown corridor with many photographs of academic women, who all have solemn expressions and mildly unkempt hair. White rose petals have blown in through the open door onto the carpet. Someone has drawn genitals in black felt tip on the figure on the door of the men’s bathroom.

  Molly unlocks her door. The room has that immediate bleakness of all uninhabited student rooms—it’s underfurnished and nothing matches, the purple curtains ugly against the mustard walls. The ceiling is high. Our voices echo.

  Panic flickers across her face, now that it’s really happening.

  “I like the view,” she says determinedly.

  We go to the window. The gardens are spread out before us—a velvet lawn, an ancient beech tree, its massive limbs propped up with wooden struts, a round flower bed with a sundial in the middle. It all has a subtle, disheveled loveliness, nothing too neat or ordered, no gravel path without its casual edging of lavender or sprawl of yellow daisies. Some autumn cyclamen, frail as moth wings, are flowering in the bare earth under the beech tree.

  “God, Molly,” says Amber. “I wish I was a geek.”

  We bring the boxes in while Molly starts to unpack. I tip out cosmetics into a drawer, and the vitamins I bought for her. Her bath oil isn’t properly fastened and spills as I unpack it. I bite back the urge to tell her off. I go to the bathroom to wash the oil from my hands. The basins are swarming with green gauzy flies, and word-processed posters urge the ecological advantages of showers: “If you’re gagging for a bath, share one with a friend.”

  The window is open, looking out over the gardens. I linger there for a moment, resting my arms. Nostalgia floods me. I’m eighteen again, walking a sepia corridor much like this one. Memories pass through me, a kaleidoscope of images. Men I went out with, tutors who scared me. The choir I used to sing in with Max, performing very old music in some chill college chapel, and afterward there’d be a party where everyone got drunk because the medical students had doctored the punch with ethanol. I think of a tight black velvet dress I wore for one of those concerts and, at the party afterward, a stranger who came up behind me and ran his hands quite slowly down my sides, his palms curved into me, his fingers just missing my breasts. And I remember how I felt then that life was a quest or a journey, a movement onward toward some ultimate attainment: that at some point you’d get there, that there’d be a kind of clarity. And here I am, years later: yet the present remains tentative, far too full of traffic jams and compromise, and the thing I thought I was moving toward continues to elude me.

  I take the final suitcase to Molly’s room. There are urgent lists in my head, things I need to tell her: This is how your heater works, and if you leave your radio there on the windowsill somebody could steal it, and promise you’ll take your vitamins. … Amber is pinning Molly’s postcard collection to the corkboard.

  Molly unpacks an alarm clock. It’s frivolously pink and was a present from a friend; she’s never used it.

  “I want to know you can set that thing,” I tell her.

  “For God’s sake, Mum, I’ll manage.”

  I insist. She tries, but it’s complicated.

  “I’ll be OK,” she says. “I can set the alarm on my phone.”

  “But then you have to leave it on all night—and what if somebody rings and wakes you?” My voice is shrill—all my anxiety about her focused onto this clock.

  She puts her hand on my arm.

  “Mum, it’s OK. Really.”

  She comes to the car park with us. It’s colder now. The wind stirs the leaves of the beech tree; the leaves are drying though they haven’t fallen yet, and there’s a rattle to the sound, a harshness that makes you think of winter. Behind us a girl with a sleek black bob is weeping as her parents’ car drives off. We stand there for a moment. Molly seems so small suddenly. I put my arms all around her.

  “I’ll be fine, Mum,” she says.

  I realize I am utterly unprepared for this moment. I hold her for a little while, and then she pulls away.

  Amber wraps herself around her sister.

  “Go, girl,” she says.

  Greg gives Molly a rare hug. She holds him a little stiffly.

  We get into the car and Molly turns and walks away. As we crunch out over the gravel, past the borders where the flower stalks are pale and fine as bones, I turn to watch her. She’s on the steps to the fire door, talking excitedly to the girl with the shiny bob, who a moment ago was crying and wanting her mother, and who is laughing now and flicking back her hair.

  CHAPTER 8

  WE DRIVE SLOWLY OUT OF THE CITY, through heavy traffic. The car feels lighter without all of Molly’s stuff in it.

  “I wonder how she’ll get on,” I say to Greg.

  “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine,” he says. “Molly always copes. Look, I don’t suppose you could dig me out a milk of magnesia, could you? I shouldn’t have had that crème brûlée.”

  There’s a packet he keeps in the glove compartment. I tip out a pill and hand it to him. The jasmine scent of Molly’s bath oil is still all over my hands. We have to wait for a long time at the roundabout on the edge of the city. I feel as if there’s something lurking just around the corner of my mind—some grief, skulking there, waiting to grab me.

  Amber is hunting in her bag for her Walkman.

  “It’s weird,” she says. “You feel you haven’t said good-bye properly—that there’s something you should have said which you forgot to say.”

  “I feel the same,” I tell her.

  She takes out the Walkman and slips in her Dido CD.

  “I’ll miss her,” she says, her voice a little husky.

  “I know you will, sweetheart. We all will.”

  She isn’t listening anymore; she has her earphones on.

  “Greg, I’m worried Molly won’t wake in time in the mornings,” I say. “I thought I’d send her our alarm clock—you know, just to tide her over ’til she can get to the shops.”

  “Ginnie, for God’s sake.”

  “She needs something.”

  “Well, so do I. I mean, what will wake me up?” He turns slightly toward me; I smell the chalk on his breath.

  “You could use the alarm on your watch.”

  “OK, OK,” he says wearily.

  We drive through the Chilterns, through the swoop and dip of the downs. The sky is blue as ash. I can just hear the faint, tinny
sound of the music on Amber’s Walkman.

  “I wonder what it will be like without her,” I say.

  “Well, not so very different, I imagine.”

  “We could do more things together, I suppose.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps we could go out a bit.” My voice is small, tentative. “You know, when Amber stays with her friends. Perhaps we could go away together or something.”

  “It’s a possibility,” he says. “Though to be honest I’d welcome a bit more time to get this book together. Fenella’s very patient, but she’s starting to make noises.”

  I think of Fenella, his literary agent: her Sloaney clothes—the pearls, the velvet hair bands—her immaculate vowels and limitless self-assurance. I try to push away the irritation I feel.

  “But, I mean, things will be different now, won’t they? It’s a big change.”

  “Ginnie, we only left Molly half an hour ago.”

  “But we have to make it a positive thing. You know, a chance to do things differently. …”

  He’s quiet as though he’s thinking. I feel a surge of hopefulness—that maybe he will agree.

  “There was one thing I thought of,” he says. “I thought I might move into Molly’s bedroom. Just while she’s away. I’m sure we’d both sleep better. Would that be OK with you?”

  “Yes, of course,” I say. “If you want to.” This jolts me. I swallow hard. “I’d have to clear out her room first—it’s a total tip in there.” I’m trying to be light about it. “But I was thinking more of maybe doing things together. …”

  “Let’s not go rushing into anything,” he says.

  A dark mood washes through me.

  The cars all have their headlights on now; bright beams from the oncoming traffic weave across us. We drive through a stand of birches, their slender trunks and branches pale and naked in the lights. I realize I had hoped for something in this moment—though the hope was never fully conscious, and certainly never expressed. That there’d be a kind of freedom or renewal. That we’d enter a new landscape, with glimmerings of what life might be like when Amber too goes, when it’s just the two of us, and that it would be a place that I could live in. That there’d be a new intimacy—dinner sometimes in restaurants on the waterfront, trips to the theater, winter weekends in Prague. A rediscovery of each other.