The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  I remember that certainty—how at sixteen life is so simple and obvious, and you’re utterly convinced you know what’s right. Though as you get older you become less sure.

  At the end of the week Amber decides she’s going to be a lawyer. I send Max a bottle of Glenfiddich. He rings to thank me.

  “Really, you shouldn’t have,” he says. “It was a pleasure.”

  I don’t see Will for two weeks over Christmas. We’re both with our families. We don’t speak or phone.

  Molly comes home, bringing an intimidating load of washing. Greg moves out of her room and rolls out the futon on the dining room floor.

  “That won’t be very comfortable,” I say. “You don’t have to sleep there.”

  My face goes hot when I say this: I’m embarrassed inviting him back into my bed, as though I’m suggesting something illicit. I think how strange this is.

  He shrugs: He says he’s got used to sleeping on his own.

  Molly looks different. She seems somehow to have grown, though she isn’t any taller. I gaze at her, loving to rest my eyes on her, trying to puzzle out what’s changed about her. There are the obvious things. Her style is cooler, more subtle. She wears her hair down, not piled up in complicated ways or wrapped all around itself. She doesn’t wear the little spangly tops anymore, and she’s thrown out the pink eye shadow. But something inchoate has changed as well, as though she has her adult bones now, as though the structure of her face is more defined.

  She’s out every evening, catching up with friends in the Blue Hawaii or Starbucks. She’s already planning her summer. “Is it OK if I don’t come on holiday with you guys next year, Mum? There’s this boy I know—his parents have a house in Crete, near Agios Nikolaos. You wouldn’t mind, Mum, would you?” When she’s at home, she spends hours with Amber in one of their rooms, playing music and sharing secrets, and when I go in they stop talking. She’s happy to be home, but I know she’s moving away from me.

  And she’s broke, of course. She’s terribly sorry—but could we help her out, just ’til her next loan check comes? She’s had to buy an awful lot of books. … Her eyes are large and liquid as she says this. Greg and I discuss whether to subsidize her.

  “For Chrissake,” he says, “she’s spent a fifth of her money on phone calls.”

  “But no one can manage on a student loan,” I tell him. “Shouldn’t we be glad we can help, so she doesn’t have to go off and be a strippergram?”

  It’s Christmas weather, cold and clear. One Saturday we wake to a powdering of snow; the world seems full of light, and there’s a line of frozen snow down the side of the trunk of the pear tree, precise, immaculate, like a child’s attempt at drawing light and shade. I wonder what it would be like at the river house. The grass that once was mown would be perfect under the snow, untouched except for the delicate stitchery of birds’ footprints, smoothed out and perfected, like white velvet. I imagine the quiet of it, and the dance of the light. Though when I glimpse the river from the window of Greg’s study, the brown of the water looks soiled against the dazzle of the snow.

  By midafternoon, it’s melting, and the world is full of the drip and glitter and rawness of the thaw. Amber is going out, wearing just her leather jacket over a cotton milkmaid top. Her breath smokes in the open doorway. Her skin is pimpling with cold.

  “You can’t go out like that,” I say.

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

  At my insistence she puts on a sweater; it has a very low neck.

  “Can’t you choose a warmer one?” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “I did what you said. I put on a sweater,” she says.

  “Well, wear your scarf then.”

  “I can’t,” she says, shocked, as though I’ve suggested something obscene. “I couldn’t possibly. Those colors together are gross.”

  Molly overhears and lends Amber a scarf of her own, a stripy one from Gap.

  “Funky,” says Amber. She tries it on and smiles at her reflection.

  “I’ll kill you if you get anything on it,” says Molly, as an afterthought.

  Amber is meeting friends tonight for a Mexican meal: I imagine a major scene, in which Amber hands back the Gap scarf with a chilli salsa stain. So I give the scarf back to Molly and hunt out a scarf of my own, which Amber seems content with, though it’s the exact same shade as the one she rejected. I wonder if all this negotiation was worthwhile, or if I should just have let her shiver.

  “Amber,” I call after her. “Have you got your keys and your phone?”

  “Mum, you don’t need to go on about it. I never go anywhere without my phone.”

  I go to the mall to start the Christmas shopping. There are massive queues in all the shops, and three large animated bears that are switched on every half hour and sing along to Christmas songs. Teenagers sit on the rampart of the fountain in the basement, eating crisps and texting their friends; the turquoise floor of the fountain glints with coins, and a notice says that this is a wishing well, and your money will go to charity. I buy the shot glasses that Molly wants, and some books and CDs for Greg, and a new short skirt for myself, thinking of Will, hoping that he will like it. There are new shops opening for Christmas, candle shops and places selling charity cards, and a shop that looks more permanent, a rather classy sex shop aimed at affluent women. It’s enticing, full of silk and mirrors. I wander inside, intrigued to reflect that I might have a use for these things. There are camisoles and thongs in subtle colors, pale like underripe fruit or the colors of skin, and satin blindfolds, and lubricants scented with passion flower, and leather restraints with a trim of blue glass beads. It’s all rather lovely, but in the end I walk out again with nothing. It all seems so pale and perfect: You’d have to be so young and unblemished to use or wear these things.

  The health-food shop is more promising. They have a special Christmas promotion—a free plaid blanket or sports bag if you spend more than twenty-five pounds. I shop with enthusiasm—ginkgo biloba to stave off Alzheimer’s, multivitamins for the girls, some blackcurrant-and-ginseng tea because I like the packaging. I am effusively grateful for my gift; the shop assistant, a cool, dark girl with a Central European accent, gives me a quizzical look. But in some crazy way, according to some eccentric moral code I have invented, this isn’t the same as deliberately buying a blanket: I can pretend to myself that I didn’t choose to do this. Yet I still feel troubled with the blanket in my bag, as though it binds the threads of my different lives together, when everything depends on keeping them apart. Then I hear Will saying, I’d like to lie down with you, that would be wonderful, and I feel desire move hotly through me. I think of spreading this blanket out on the floor of the river house: and just there, walking past the families, the toddlers writhing in their buggies and clutching Rudolf balloons, the bears singing “White Christmas,” I feel a shiver of longing, taking away my breath.

  Leaving, I throw a coin into the fountain. I do this surreptitiously—embarrassed, looking over my shoulder in case I’m seen by anyone who knows me. I close my eyes, but for a moment I don’t know how to articulate my wish, which is for everything to go on being just the way it is. My family, my lover, secret and safe and separate: everything the same.

  Greg is in the kitchen when I get back.

  “Why the blanket?” he says as I unpack my shopping.

  “They were giving them away in Millennium Foods if you spent over twenty-five pounds. It was either that or a sports bag. I thought it might come in useful.” I hold his eyes; then, remembering I read somewhere that people do that when they lie, I look away. “I mean, it’s quite good quality, and we could use it as a throw on the sofa. I’ve been thinking for a while that the cover’s looking quite tatty.”

  He shrugs, bemused at this elaborate explanation.

  “I hope you remembered my aloe vera,” he says.

  “Hell, I forgot.” Guilt seizes me. “Oh, Greg, I’m so, so sorry.”

  “OK, O
K,” he says. “There’s no need to go on about it.”

  That night I dream about Will. I dream of lying with him on the blanket from Millennium Foods, stretched out on the floor of the river house, feeling the pressure of his body against me, in some enthralled, sweet moment after making love. And then the dream changes; I’m not part of the dream now, I’m just an observer, and Will is at home with his family, in a house with elegant tall windows and a round dining table with a white damask cloth and a large jade teapot in the middle of the table. I know it’s his house in the dream, though no one is there, just the table set for tea. It’s a child’s vision of domesticity, really: a fifties family tea with angel cake and currant buns, a children’s picture book teatime. I have this dream again and again in these cold, crowded days around Christmas. Sometimes the table is empty; sometimes he sits at the table with his family. Always the quiet house, the perfect family, nothing to do with me.

  Eva comes around with her Christmas presents. My house has a hot scent of pastry and spices; my mince pies are from the supermarket, just heating up in the oven, but I always make my own mulled wine, loving its glamorous smells of cloves and brandy, and the citrus peel that leaves its rich oil on my hands.

  We sit in my kitchen, which is decorated with juniper branches cut from the garden and a trail of discreet magenta ribbon. I know that Eva’s own decorations will be equally restrained; last year her tree was draped in ice-blue beads. Neither of us really goes for red crepe paper and glitter—the early years of mothering expose you to enough primary colors to last a lifetime. There are carols playing, my favorite CD of Christmas music, the women’s voices very high and clear.

  Eva bites into a mince pie; a little flour sifts down and powders her sleeve.

  “D’you ever miss those Christmases when our kids were little?” she says. “You know, drowning in waves of ripped-up wrapping paper and someone always went ballistic because they were having some electronic toy, some Roller Blade Cindy or something, and you’d forgotten to get the batteries. D’you miss them?”

  “A bit, sometimes. Not very much.”

  “I do,” she says. “I miss them. When you’re in the middle of it all, you think that’s how it’s going to be forever. Isn’t that odd? All those lists and obligations and always so busy and needed. … You think it’s never going to end,” she says.

  She hasn’t put on any makeup, and I see how pale her lips are and that there are purple smudges in the skin around her eyes.

  “You look so tired,” I say.

  She says her school’s just been inspected.

  “Everyone’s stressed out and having tantrums. And the kids aren’t too good either,” she says. “And we had this god-awful staff party, as usual, and in Surprise Santa I got a bottle of sake with a lizard in it. Not just a bit of lizard, the whole damn animal.”

  I smile and fill up her glass with mulled wine. She wraps a tissue around it because it’s too hot to hold.

  “God, I’m fed up with teaching. Did I ever tell you?”

  “Just possibly.”

  “I hate it. The boys who say, Ooh, miss, are you a lesbian, miss, and the smell of the classrooms and the bitching in the staff room and the endless, endless admin …”

  “Couldn’t you move—do something different?”

  She slumps a little, shakes her head. “I think it’s too late to change, quite honestly, Ginnie. And Ted could be made redundant. The ad industry’s pretty cruel, they like to cull them at fifty.”

  There are women’s voices singing a lullaby in Latin: The music is pure, perfect. The sweetness of the wine spreads through me. Eva has her head down, her face in shadow.

  “I mean, I only did it because it seemed so convenient when the kids were little—you know, with the long holidays. And you think, Well, I can always change later on. And one day you wake and you think, Well, this is it, I’m stuck here, this is how it’s going to be.”

  She looks across at me, her face creased, as though she’s struggling to articulate something.

  “D’you ever feel it’s hard to cope with how random everything is?” she says. “You know? You make all these little decisions—some of them tiny decisions, very small stuff at the time—and where you are now is the sum of all those decisions. And somehow you’ve ended up in a place where you can’t really change anything.”

  Her voice is hesitant, thoughtful. I can only just hear her above the singing.

  “You’ve followed a particular path,” she says, “and without thinking about it very much, you always imagined you could turn off it—and now you find you can’t. …”

  “I know what you mean,” I say.

  We drink our wine and listen to the singing.

  “The trouble is,” she says slowly, “you don’t know which the important bits are at the time. Life doesn’t come marked up with highlighter pen to show you which are the things that really matter. You know—pay attention now, this bit’s important. …”

  I don’t know how to make her happy. I put my hand on her wrist.

  “There was this TV program,” she says, “about the Potters Bar rail crash. Did you see it?”

  I shake my head.

  “Christmas can be tough,” I say. “It gets to people. You’ll feel better once it’s all over.”

  She doesn’t seem to hear.

  “They had this CCTV footage,” she says, “all these people running for the train. And they thought they were going to miss it, and they must have been so relieved when they got on, and they all got into the last carriage, and that was the one that was crushed. So you knew what was going to happen to them. That they were all going to die. It was terrible—all these people, thinking it was just an ordinary day.”

  I fill up her glass again, but there’s nothing I can say.

  CHAPTER 21

  I SPREAD THE BLANKET OUT on the floor of the river house.

  “That’s good,” he says.

  He reaches out and unbuttons my coat. But as we undress each other, I briefly wish I hadn’t brought the blanket. It adds something new and awkward. We can’t just fling ourselves down on it, abandoned, like we do in my fantasies, sprawling out on the big wide bed with its vast white softness and its canopy of silk; the floor is hard, and we have to lie down with care. Lying, you’re so close to the smell of the place, the smell of wet and rot and growing things. I’m suddenly self-conscious. This feels so much less tentative than when we usually make love: You can’t pretend it’s something that just happens. We lie side by side, with my jacket for a pillow. On my back I feel the cool air from under the door.

  “Hey,” he says. He moves a finger down the side of my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  He kisses me.

  But then, as he starts to move his hands over me, it changes: I no longer notice the hardness of the floor. It feels so good, stretched out against each other, skin against skin. The rhythm changes, we’re slower, everything unhurried, more complete.

  “You come on top,” he says. “I don’t want to squash you.”

  He enters me, with a sigh.

  As we move together, so gently and slowly, I seem to enter a different place: as if I’ve passed some boundary where you normally stop, and I can’t quite tell where I end and he begins.

  Afterward I feel dazed. We lie there for a long time, wrapped around each other. When he gets up, it’s still too soon. I could have lain there forever, his warmth and his smell all around me, his heartbeat against me, everything fluid, merged.

  We pull on our clothes. A spider the color of apricots is crawling on my arm; I feel a surge of tenderness for this tiny creature, and ease it onto the table. I fold up the blanket, folding the dirty side inward—concealing evidence, like someone who has committed a crime. As soon as I get home I shall put it in the washing machine. He picks small dead leaves out of my hair, that have blown in under the door.

  We go out into the light, and he secures the catch. I watch him, his strong, dark h
ands twisting the wire together.

  I say, “That was the best time.”

  “The best time we’ve had?”

  “The best time ever.”

  He waits for a moment, turned toward me, as though he is surprised. He doesn’t say, For me too, and I feel a little thread of embarrassment, like the first time you say I love you: as though I have given too much away.

  I walk away from him. In the patch of ground that once was a garden, there are new shoots, little spears of sharp green. Bulbs—snowdrops perhaps, they’re usually first. And the lumps on the red stems of the roses, which in spring will be leaves, are beginning to swell. There’s a sense of things starting to happen, of the promise of the earth.

  “Look,” I say. “It all happens so early nowadays. Spring comes so soon.”

  He’s on the path, waiting for me, wanting to be off.

  “Make the most of it,” he says. “It’s all going to stop. When the North Atlantic Conveyor switches off. In twenty years the sea could cool and we’ll have another Ice Age.”

  I know he wants to go, but I linger there for a moment. I wonder what else will come up here, whether there will be primroses. I hope so. I love primroses, the perfection of their color, that yellow—pale, intense, like clotted cream.

  “Ginnie, I really need to be getting back,” he tells me.

  I slip my hand in his. We walk back along the sodden path, stepping around the puddles, which are metal-gray like the sky.

  “D’you ever wonder what it was like?” I say. “When this place was just built? When people lived here and the garden was cultivated?”

  He smiles as though I amuse him.

  “Not really,” he says. “I just think it’s amazing it’s been left like this so long.”

  But I imagine it. Walking back along the river path, in this languorous mood, my mind lazy, wandering. Imagining summer evenings here, when the garden was cultivated and in flower—those heavy blooms on the hydrangeas that start to brown at the edges even before they’ve fully flowered, and the lawn close-cropped and velvet, softly falling away. I imagine a party up at the house, a jazz band playing. In the shade of the trees on the riverbank, everything will be blue. A man and a woman come here, to the boat called Sweet Bird of Youth: They have left the party together; they are conspirators, seeking seclusion. She has a long dress of gauzy cloth, a shawl around her shoulders; her skirts flutter mothlike across the shadowy grass. He wears a dinner jacket, his white tie hangs loose, he has a bottle of wine. He holds the boat for her. She takes off her high-heeled shoes, but when she steps in, the boat still rocks unnervingly. She settles on the bench, arranging her silk skirts to keep them out of the dampness in the bottom of the boat, letting her shawl slip from her shoulders so he can see the curve of them: Her skin glimmers in the blueness. He pushes out from the jetty, takes up the oars. She trails a white hand in the river, leaving a wake of brightness where her fingers break the surface and the water catches the light. She’s looking at him, she loves to look at him, scarcely moving her eyes from his face even when the heron, disturbed by them though they make so little noise, takes to the air with a fierce rush of wings and a cry. There is no sound but the distant music and the dip of the oars and the heron and their breathing. Perhaps she too is escaping from something—from the sameness of things, from everydayness and loss, from the things that cannot be mended: imagining that it could all be different, stepping out into the boat and gliding free, leaving no trail but a wake of broken gold.