She has a resonant voice. I remember what Amber said about Academic Mentoring Day, when the girls all have individual interviews with their form tutors. You’re in this hall, and everyone’s waiting behind you, and Mrs. Russell says, like, really loudly, Amber, are you being bullied? And you think, No, but now I will be.
“I know what you mean,” I say carefully.
Her look is severe and concerned, as though she thinks I haven’t understood.
“This is a really crucial year for her,” she says. “It’s a very bad time to lose the plot. And unfortunately we don’t feel anything’s in the bag yet, quite honestly, with her GCSE’s. She badly needs a bit of focus.”
I don’t know what to say. I have a brief wayward urge to explain about my daughter. How she seems to slip through my fingers like water—yet I always feel her feyness is part of her, the way she’s meant to be. How her talent for friendship dazzles and delights me. How when she was little she wanted to fly across the river on the back of a bird.
“I don’t think planning’s her strong point,” I say. “You know, thinking things through—thinking into the future. I don’t think she connects what she does now with the future—with the rest of her life. I mean, teenagers don’t really, do they?”
“Some of them do, Mrs. Holmes,” she says rather sternly. “Some of our girls here are very goal-oriented, I’m happy to say. Of course Amber is a very pretty girl, and I feel her social life does rather take precedence over everything.”
“She’s quite an extrovert, I guess,” I say.
Mrs. Russell folds her hands with precision.
“Another thing I feel with Amber—she’s quite an impulsive lass. Perhaps a bit of a drama queen?”
“I can see why you’d think that,” I say.
I think of the wild streak in Amber, the way she’s sometimes drawn to destructive, extravagant gestures. Once, after she’d fallen out with Lauren, I found her in the bathroom, sobbing and cramming some aspirin into her mouth; and when a boyfriend had dumped her she scratched her arm with some scissors. It was just a little scratch, but it scared me. I don’t tell Mrs. Russell this.
“I worry too that she’s rather distractible,” she goes on. “Obviously, you’ll provide good conditions for her to work in.”
It’s a question.
I picture Amber in her room—the whole place shuddering with sound, Amber tugged in so many directions by urgent text messages and friends on MSN and ominous horoscopes and crucial clothing decisions.
“I hope so. I try to.”
Perhaps I look upset, because she reaches out her hand in a little truncated gesture, as though to reassure me.
“Don’t worry too much, Mrs. Holmes,” she says. “With a following wind, she could do very well. I’m just so concerned she won’t quite do herself justice. She absolutely needs stability in her life.” And then, embarrassed about what she might be implying, “Which I’m sure you give her.”
The siren blares again. I have a strong urge to evacuate the building.
She’s glancing over my shoulder, at all the couples waiting behind me to see her.
“Just one last thing, Mrs. Holmes. D’you know if she’s sorted out her work experience yet?”
I feel a pang of guilt. The letter came home weeks ago, along with a reminder that the correct length for hemlines was no more than half an inch above the knee.
“I don’t think she has,” I tell her.
She puckers up her purple lips.
“It’s scheduled for the second week in December,” she says. “She really should have it organized by now. It’s that lack of commitment again, you see. I wondered if you or your husband could help with that at all?”
I explain that Amber can’t come to my clinic because our work is confidential.
“Your husband perhaps? Now, I’m not sure where he works.”
“At the university. He’s a lecturer in medieval Irish literature.”
Her whole face softens. “How wonderful,” she says. “So could he fix up something for Amber perhaps?”
“I suggested that, but she didn’t seem too keen.”
I remember her actual words—OK, Mum, if you give me a swig of Rohypnol.
“What does she want to do?” says Mrs. Russell. “When she leaves school?”
“She’s not at all sure yet.” In my mind I run through Amber’s only expressed ambitions: to become a roads protester, to release some captive mink into the wild, to be a DJ on Agia Napa.
“Well, time’s running out,” says Mrs. Russell briskly. “If worse comes to worst, we could probably fix her up with a nursery somewhere. But I do really like the initiative to come from the girls. Organizing the placement is very much part of the project.”
I promise her I’ll see what I can do.
The interview is over; she’s already smiling at the couple behind me. The man has gold cuff links and an executive air. Mrs. Russell greets them warmly.
I weave my way through the milling parents to Eva, who’s still waiting for the Computer Studies teacher. I’m so happy to see her.
“Fancy a drink?” I say.
She brightens. “You bet. Are you through yet?”
“Not really. But I’m thinking of absconding.”
“I’ve only got one to go, but it could be half an hour,” she says. “I think I might give it a miss.”
She stands and smoothes down her skirt. The white words ripple.
“Are you sure, Eva? What about Lauren’s computer skills?”
She shrugs. “I’m not too bothered, quite honestly. She seems to know what she’s doing. She’s been molesting people in chat rooms for years.”
We leave, feeling like truants.
The Café Matisse is almost empty. There are candles on the tables and, over the sound system, Nina Simone.
Eva orders a Bloody Mary; I have whiskey.
We catch up. Josh has just bought an amplifier on eBay that he can’t afford and is in big trouble with Ted. And Lauren has alarmed Eva by catching the wrong night bus home after clubbing with a friend in Leicester Square, and they didn’t realize it had turned around and was heading back toward London. They got stranded at Clapham Junction at three in the morning, and Ted set off a speed camera rushing to pick them up.
Eva is a laid-back parent; she’s always believed in making things easy. When Lauren and Josh were younger, she’d sometimes draw the curtains, turn the clocks forward by two hours, and tell them it was bedtime—which was, I thought, quite dazzlingly delinquent. She used to think I made things harder for myself, with the absolute rule I had about not smacking my children.
“I’ve only ever smacked in anger,” she’d say. “Not deliberately—in cold blood—I think that’s rather horrible. But if you just lose it and wallop them—well, so what? They’ll live.”
But she really doesn’t like the teenage years.
“It freaks me out,” she says now. “I can’t get to sleep ’til they’re in. I think this is just the worst bit of parenting—I hate it, it’s just so scary.”
We’ve both heard about a murder on the news—a girl going home from the cinema, taking the last bus with just a five-minute walk from the bus stop to her home. She was attacked there in the street a few yards from her house by someone with a hammer; and there was a ring at the door and the mother thought, She’s forgotten her key again, but it was the police to say they’d found her daughter’s body.
“I cried when I read that,” says Eva. “Your heart goes out to her. That poor, poor woman.”
Her eyes are full. We drink for a while in silence. My whiskey tastes wonderful after the hot, stale air of the gym. There’s a single dahlia in a glass on our table—you can smell its thin, peppery scent.
“Lauren’s madly in love with some boy again,” she says then. “It’s the real thing, as usual.”
I smile.
“Still, he is rather cute. You’ve got to admire her taste.” Her eyes are on me, pensive. “D’you envy the
m, Ginnie, having all that in front of them?”
“Sometimes,” I tell her.
“All that exploration, all that sex,” she says. “All the stuff that seems to have gone for good.”
She looks at me, a look like a question.
“Eva,” I say carefully, “there are lots of couples who don’t have that much sex.”
“It’s not that exactly,” she says. “I mean, we do have a sex life. It’s not like when the kids were babies.” She smiles. “You and I used to have that running joke—remember? ‘It’s nice to know sex is still there, like the Tower of London, and if I get the energy I might revisit it one day. …’”
“I remember,” I tell her.
“No—we do quite well, really. Once a week or so. It’s just—I don’t know. There’s none of the charge. But then, of course, there wouldn’t be. You’ve got to be real, haven’t you? And of course you can’t expect it to be like it used to be. It’s fine, really. I mean, you know how Ted is. He’s a really sweet man. He’s so polite, I’ve heard him say thank you to a cash machine.”
There’s a sadness to Eva nowadays, a mood she seems to trail around with her, a faint lavender scent of nostalgia. Throughout our friendship, she’s always seemed to have so much of everything, with her earth motherliness, her assurance about what it means to be a woman, her involved, dependable husband, her splendid curves. But somehow, imperceptibly, she’s become rather mournful and full of regret. I wonder when this happened.
“It’s fine, really,” she says again. “There isn’t a problem.”
We listen to Nina Simone, that darkly luminous voice, singing about abandonment.
“Sometimes I wonder if we’re all like this,” she says quietly. “Hungry. Hungrier than ever. Is this what happens? Do people just get hungrier?”
“Maybe they do. I don’t know.”
She licks the tomato juice off her lips.
“We’re much better off than lots of people, Ted and me. I know that. I don’t know what I want really,” she says. “It’s desire, I suppose. The thrill. And I know I won’t have that again. Not ever. And sometimes I just feel so sad. If I watch something on the TV that’s got romance in—you know, Casablanca, or something—I can feel like crying for days, just thinking that that’s over in my life.”
I’d so love to open up to her, to tell her about Will. I imagine how we’d lean toward each other across the table, our heads almost touching, the candle flame flickering in our excited breath, how her eyes would gleam and widen.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be like that,” I say tentatively.
She looks at me quizzically. “I’d never have an affair,” she says. “Anyway, who’d have me?”
I rest my eyes on her—her wonderful cleavage, her skirt with the French sonnet.
“Eva, you always look fantastic.”
She shrugs this off. “The other day I was at the MAC counter,” she says, “and I glimpsed myself in a mirror, and I thought, There’s some mistake here, this isn’t really me. That isn’t what I look like. I really thought that—that it was a mistake.”
“I hate the lights in that shop,” I say. “They’re quite excessively bright. You can see the most minuscule wrinkle.”
“And my knees are starting to sag,” she says, “and when I lie on one side everything kind of responds to gravity. If I had an affair, I’d have to do it standing up.” She takes a long, slow sip of her drink. “No, Ginnie, you’ve got to be real. You just have to live with it, I guess. The hunger.”
The music wraps itself around us, the sadness, the velvet voice.
“Though just sometimes,” she says, “just sometimes I feel. … Like, if there was a bargain, and if I was willing to sacrifice everything, I could have those feelings again, have all that again … sometimes I feel I’d do it,” she says. Her voice is faint, misty. She runs her finger around the top of her glass, like you did when you were a teenager, making your glass ring—that moment of effortless magic. I can’t work out her expression; I think it might be fear. She takes a deep breath. “Not really, of course,” she says, and her voice is her own again, brisk, cheerful. “Not really. Hey, if you’re there, God, forget it, OK? I didn’t mean it.” She looks across at me. “Just sometimes,” she says. “Just for a moment.”
I touch her hand. I don’t say anything.
“It’s this music,” she says. “It isn’t good for us.”
CHAPTER 18
THE RIVER DAZZLES under the pale blue shine of the sky. There’s light everywhere. The turning trees are richly colored, like the hides of animals, and the hawthorn bushes are bare, their crooked branches an embroidery of spiky cross-stitch, and in the place off the path where we go, the leaves seem too thin and fragile to conceal us. I think, What if somebody sees? Then he reaches out his hand to my face and it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
There’s a crashing in the undergrowth, something lurching toward us.
“Hell,” says Will.
He grabs my jacket and holds it around my shoulders, pulling me close. A Labrador hurtles into the space between the bushes, twitchy and alert. Behind him, a woman with crisp white curls walks through the bushes toward us, with confidence, as though there is a path there. She passes, looking away from us, calling her dog. I rest my head on Will’s shoulder. I feel embarrassed, ridiculous. I know she must have seen.
“We can’t stay here,” says Will. “You’d better get your clothes on.”
I leave my bra in my bag and just pull on my T-shirt. A twig caught in the fabric scratches my skin.
We stand on the path for a moment. There are dog walkers and cyclists, and the river is alive with rowing teams, barges, pleasure boats. Out here in the busy brightness, our furtive attempt at love-making seems a crazy, chaotic dream.
“It’s like the fucking High Street,” says Will.
I sense how the desire has left him. He’s frowning. I know he’s going to say that we shouldn’t be here, that we need to get back to the car. I can’t bear it. I want him so much, the grace of his hands exploring me and the patterns of his quickening breath and the cinnamon scent of his skin.
“What the hell do we do now?” he says.
There’s a sound of geese going over, seven of them, in immaculate formation, flying up the river. We watch them for a moment, hearing their harsh, scraping cries and the rush of their wings.
“We could go on for a bit.” My voice is thin, unsure. “You know, round the bend in the path.”
“What happens up there?”
“I don’t really know. I’ve never been that far.”
“OK. If you’d like to.”
We walk on—a little apart, not walking like lovers. All conversation eludes me.
I’m sure he will stop and turn. I know exactly how this will happen: how he’ll touch my arm and say, You don’t mind, do you? Apologetic, knowing he’s taking something from me: I can hear his exact intonation. I’m sorry, but I really ought to be getting back now. … Each time he draws breath I fear he is going to say this.
The river bends so the path behind is hidden. Suddenly it’s quiet. The rowers have passed; there are only ducks on the water, and rubbish circling in an eddy near the riverbank, a polystyrene cup like some pale, exotic flower. Here, the belt of woodland to the left of us seems thicker and more tangled. A rowan leans across the path, its berries bright as flame.
“Look,” he says.
Ahead of us and to the left, between the trees and the path, there’s a little wooden building. It seems broken-down, abandoned. The walls were once painted white, and the roof is edged with intricate bargeboards, jade green and curled like opening leaves or ferns. You often find this kind of carving on buildings near the riverbank, as though the river somehow gives license to extravagance. It was once perhaps a summerhouse, belonging to a big house that stood higher up the slope, that must now be demolished. We stop for a moment; he moves in to me and slips his hand in mine.
At the side of the house, the
re are the remains of a garden: a lawn of long grass, and hydrangea bushes with papery dead flower heads, and a hedge that no longer seems to mark out any boundary, and, on a sprawling rosebush, the tattered remnant of a white summer rose. The plants are straggly, neglected for years, the roses half strangled with ivy, but it’s like the place hasn’t quite forgotten how to be a garden. I wonder who the people were who tended this garden, who walked here by the river. At the edge of the lawn the wood presses in, with just a narrow gap where a path leads through the trees.
I go to the river. There’s a broken jetty that seems to belong with the summerhouse, and a dinghy, half rotting, tied up with fraying rope. The boat has a name on the prow in peeling letters. Sweet Bird of Youth: a flamboyant name for such a little boat. Fallen leaves have massed on the water between the boat and the bank, thickly, like a carpet: So in a moment of carelessness, or of being willingly taken in by the illusion, you might almost step out onto them, believing them to be solid, not just a surface loveliness of yellow and russet and gold.
“I like it here,” I say.
There are windows at the side of the house, with cracked glass. Will goes to look in the window, cupping his hand at the side of his face to shield his eyes from the brightness.
“It’s empty,” he says.
The door in the side of the house is green like the bargeboards, though the paint is peeling and worn.
Will glances along the path, then unwinds the twist of wire that secures the door.
“Will, for God’s sake—we can’t just go in,” I say.
“Why ever not?”
“It’s trespassing.”
“That isn’t a crime,” he says. “Not if you don’t damage anything.”
“But surely—I mean, this must belong to someone, musn’t it?”
“It doesn’t look like they’re very bothered about it,” he says.
He turns the handle, holds it there, gives the door a quick kick. It shakes and creaks open, with a shower of paint flakes.
He peers in.
The River House Page 11