The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  The nurse at reception on Bentham Ward has flamboyant turquoise eye shadow and a wide, white smile.

  “Your sister’s here already,” she says, when I introduce myself. “She’s a poppet, your mother. Really no bother at all.”

  I follow her down the ward. We’re high up here. Broad windows open onto a vista of rooftops and tower blocks and the dazzle of sun on windows, a cityscape of gleaming towers. A sharp smell of antiseptic catches in my throat.

  Ursula is there at the bedside, in a sleek new coat of mahogany leather. She gives me a small, anxious smile. Lying in the bed is a gray, gaunt woman who, just for an instant, I don’t recognize. Her face is worn and frayed, the bones sharper, the shadows deeper, as though since I last saw her she has lived through many years.

  I’m walking toward her, but she doesn’t seem to have seen me.

  “Look who’s here,” says Ursula.

  “Mum.” I go to kiss her.

  Her cheek is cold. Illness hangs around her—in the sourness of her breath, in the partial, fractured gestures of her hands.

  “Ginnie.” She swallows carefully. “How lovely.”

  “I’ve brought you some flowers,” I tell her.

  “They’re pretty,” she says, but her mouth twists, as though the words have a bitter taste.

  There are vases at the nursing station. I take one, fill it, arrange the tulips on the locker, glad to have this simple task to preoccupy me. I’m vaguely aware of the groups at other bedsides, the gentle flurry of visitors, the self-consciously bright voices, the gifts of fruit and flowers. At the next bedside, a woman is having trouble with her little girl, who keeps slipping from her quick as a minnow and running around the ward: “Stop it, Sophie, only hooligans do that. … No, I’m not laughing, I’m very cross with you.” The child’s hair bounces as she runs and light ripples in it: Her vivacity is welcome in the quiet of the ward. The air is thick and warm; it presses down.

  The nurse with the turquoise eye shadow comes up to us.

  “You’re having a busy time, Jacquie. Quite a social whirl. I’ll sit you up,” she says.

  She adjusts the pillows and props our mother against them. Our mother tries to thank her, but her face contorts in panic, her hand flailing toward her locker as she starts to retch. The nurse grabs a foil bowl from the locker and puts an arm around my mother’s back and holds the bowl for her. The little running girl stops and watches with fascination. Our mother’s body convulses as she retches into the bowl.

  “Never mind,” the nurse says, over and over. “Never mind.”

  She lays our mother down again. She wipes her face and smoothes her hair with her hand. She’s embarrassed.

  “Oh, dear. Not one of my better ideas,” she says. And then, as she goes, “She’s marvelous. Really no trouble.”

  “Sorry,” says our mother as the nurse moves away.

  Ursula pats her hand. “They’ll have you right as rain soon,” she says.

  We sit there for a while. The light through the wide windows edges across the floor. I hunt in my mind for things to say, but my mind seems wiped clean, as if someone has stolen my memory. Ursula too is quiet. We’re stilled, silenced under the blanket of thick, hot, disinfected air.

  I’ve brought photographs of the girls. I hold them in front of my mother, but her face has a veiled look—she doesn’t seem able to focus.

  “Thanks, Ginnie,” she says. “I’ll look at them properly later.”

  Saying this exhausts her. She closes her eyes for a moment. A petal drops from the tulips onto the locker; you can hear the soft thud as it falls. Ursula brushes it into the rubbish bag taped to the side of the locker.

  Eventually Ursula catches my eye.

  “OK?” she says.

  I nod.

  “Mum,” she says, “we’re going to leave you to sleep now.”

  Our mother murmurs something I can’t make out. We kiss her.

  Her eyelids flicker extravagantly. She falls asleep with the abruptness of a door closing.

  There’s a cafeteria in the entrance hall. It looks out onto a patch of gravel, and beds of those municipal shrubs with shiny, dark leaves that always look the same. We buy muffins and coffee from a slow, tired woman who has purple patterned artificial nails. We go to a table by the window, under a sign that says, “Please be a helping hand and return your tray.” The cafeteria has a halfhearted country-kitchen look, with a rustic beam in the ceiling and a copper kettle and three old books on a shelf. The plastic surface of the table is veined to look like marble, and has a faint smell of dishcloth.

  “I didn’t think she’d look so ill,” I say.

  Ursula sips her coffee. It’s hot in the cafeteria, but she doesn’t take off her coat.

  “She’s been very odd.” Her voice is hushed, the way you’d speak of something of which you’re ashamed. “I stayed with her one night last week, and she got up at three in the morning. She sounded perfectly normal, like she really thought it was time for the day, and she made me get up too and she made a pot of tea and got dressed and put in her curlers, just like a normal morning. … Things like that. As though her body clock had packed up. I know it sounds kind of funny.”

  “It doesn’t sound funny,” I say.

  Ursula starts to take the cellophane off her muffin. She does this rather slowly, as though the task is too difficult for her. My coffee has a sour taste, like my mother’s breath, as though I’ve breathed her in.

  “Another time she was just standing in the kitchen,” says Ursula, “and she did this kind of slow-motion faint—just slid very slowly down the side of the cupboard ’til she was sitting on the floor. Like in a film, when somebody’s been shot. It was quite spooky, really.”

  She sits there quite still for a moment. There’s a menu card on the table—“Look out for our tasty special offer.” She runs a finger absently along the edge of the card.

  “Ginnie, what d’you think it is?” she says then. “It’s not a stroke, is it? They thought it was a stroke to start with. I mean, I don’t know about brains, but I don’t think it’s a stroke.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a stroke,” I say.

  I take a bite of my muffin, but it’s hard to swallow; it sticks to the roof of my mouth.

  “Well, at least we know she’s in the best possible hands,” says Ursula.

  “Yes.”

  “Her doctor’s really nice. Dr. Spence. I think we’re very lucky that Mum’s got such a good doctor. He told me he came from the Isle of Wight, from Ryde. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  “I’m glad he’s good,” I say.

  We sit quietly for a moment. Around us other people are chewing at food they don’t want or staring out of the window. A man in a crisp, expensive suit scrunches up his Mars Bar wrapper and sticks it into his polystyrene cup. He has the look of a sleepwalker. I know we must seem the same.

  I don’t know what to say next. We aren’t easy together, Ursula and I. We don’t know how to talk to each other. I try to imagine a fluid, comfortable sisterliness, sharing clothes and secrets and doing each other’s nails, like Amber and Molly. An ease that would mean you could say anything: Greg and I haven’t had sex since four years ago last Christmas. … I’m in love with a man I fuck in a house on the riverbank. … She’s dying, isn’t she?

  Ursula is moving things around on the table—the ketchup bottle, the saltshaker—as though playing chess against an invisible opponent.

  “They’re going to ring me straightaway if there’s any change,” she says. “They’ve got a brain scan booked. Not ’til next week though.”

  “Shit. Why not now?”

  “There’s a lot of pressure on resources, Dr. Spence told me.”

  “But can’t we do something? Pressure them—make them do it sooner?”

  She shakes her head.

  “You know how it is with the NHS,” she says.

  “Did he tell you what they’re looking for?” I say.

  “He didn’t,” she says
. She raises her cup to her lips; her hand is shaking slightly. I see her Adam’s apple move as she swallows. “He said he wanted to wait to discuss it ’til he had something definite.”

  “Well, I suppose he would.”

  “She’s had a good life, really,” says Ursula. She looks at me warily, as though afraid I’ll say something that cannot be unsaid.

  “I guess so,” I say.

  She moves on hurriedly, telling me about her latest project, another fairy-tale book—“Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Princess and the Frog,” and “Hans My Hedgehog.”

  “They’re going to be quite contemporary. I’m planning to do Beauty in Chanel, with a boxy jacket and little white gloves. A bit Jackie O,” she tells me.

  “That sounds delicious,” I say.

  I puzzle over the contradiction of my sister, this cautious woman with rather thin lips and a garden full of decking, and the fabulous things she imagines into existence—the princesses, the entangled gardens with parakeets and claws.

  “There are so many stories like that,” she says. “The animal groom stories. Where the person the girl falls in love with is both a man and an animal. And of course you don’t find out which ’til you get to the end of the tale. It’s weird, isn’t it? The way that kind of story just keeps on cropping up? I guess it must mean something.”

  “I’m dying to see what you do with them,” I say. Then flinch at my choice of word, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Mum’s so proud of you with all your books,” I tell her.

  “And you with your girls,” says Ursula.

  We’re being so polite and careful: like in the photos from our childhood album, with our candy-stripe summer dresses and shiny parallel shoes.

  “It’s so nice Mum knew about Molly getting into Oxford,” she says. “Before—you know—before all this started happening. … They love her on the ward, don’t they? They really think she’s marvelous. Of course, Mum’s the perfect patient, really. She’d never want to give anyone any trouble.”

  CHAPTER 25

  I SIT WITH AMBER ON THE SOFA, attempting to test her French verbs. It’s one of those rituals you go through because it’s what a good mother should do, rather than for any result: like making wholemeal sandwiches for children’s birthday parties, though you know they’ll all be left uneaten on the plate. Amber is struggling, protesting that we have war, we have famine—why do we need all these declensions? She fiddles with the scrunchy in her hair.

  It’s getting dark, but I don’t close the curtains. My room is brightly reflected in the darkening windows—my kilims and velvet cushions in all their jewel colors, the family photos on the piano, the fig in the corner with leaves like wide-splayed hands. There’s a rich smell of pork and garlic from the casserole that’s simmering in the kitchen. Light from my table lamps spills across the floor like fallen petals. Our house feels safe, protected, in the warm spilled light: Nothing could harm us here.

  Amber stretches extravagantly and sighs.

  “Mum, I have to wash my hair. It’s really gross. I can’t possibly concentrate when my hair’s all greasy.”

  I tell her we’ll leave it and close the book at s’asseoir. Afterward I shall always remember this, which verb it was.

  I turn on the television for the weather forecast, to get some idea what the weather will be on Thursday, when I’m seeing Will, to help me work out what to wear. But it’s not quite time for the weather; it’s still the local news. I go to the kitchen to see if the casserole is ready. Night is settling over my garden, over the narcissi and the little sunken lawn, but there are rags of light still hanging in the sky. I shall wear my red boots, I think, even if it’s raining, and my new short skirt, the one I bought at Christmas. I sometimes worry that Greg might wonder why I only wear skirts on Thursdays. Standing there, I let myself enter my secret world for a moment: imagining the warm pressure of the palm of Will’s hand on my thigh.

  Amber’s shout jolts me.

  “Hey, Mum. Come here. Mum! This is freaky.”

  I go back to the sitting room. Amber is standing quite still, one hand to her hair, as though entranced in the act of taking out her scrunchy. I stare at the picture on the screen.

  It’s the car park by the river: our car park, the place where I go with Will. It must have been filmed this afternoon. There are police cars with flashing lights, and forensics experts in baggy suits, and uniformed policemen and women, talking in twos and threes. The path is cordoned off with tape. An ambulance waits, but no one is rushing; there’s no urgency, everyone is slowed—they have all the time in the world. You know if you could hear their voices they’d be solemn and subdued. You can tell there’s death here. My first thought, quick as a heartbeat, is that something has happened to Will: my mind making some instant crazy connection between this place that we have made our own and the whisper of fear that’s always there, my dread that I might lose him.

  “Mum—don’t you recognize it?”

  I nod; for a moment I can’t speak. I stare at the television. Behind the cars and the people, the river is in carnival mood, festive with rowers in striped Lycra and barges painted with roses in blowsy, lipstick colors; but the pennants and flowers and brightness seem all wrong. I have a sense of huge confusion, and a nagging thought that there’s something here that I ought to have expected.

  “Mum—for God’s sake.” There’s impatience in Amber’s voice, as though I’m not reacting at all the way she’d hoped. “It’s where we used to go for our river walks, isn’t it? You know, when we were little.” And, when I don’t say anything, “You know, where I used to sneak up and give the heron a fright? I used to love those walks. Oh my God, this creeps me out.”

  My mouth is so dry it seems to stick together.

  “What’s happened?”

  “They’ve found someone,” says Amber. “In the river.”

  “Do they know who it is?”

  “They’ve just said it’s a woman.”

  “Maybe it was suicide.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” says Amber, very definitely. She has the slightly triumphant look of those who have privileged information.

  “She could have jumped off a bridge,” I say. “It’s happened before. The tide can move things for miles.” I try to convince myself, to make this true. I tell myself that Amber always loves to dramatize. “Drowning’s quite a common form of suicide.”

  “Strangling isn’t,” says Amber dryly. Her eyes glint; she’s relishing the drama of this. “I don’t think she managed to strangle herself somehow. Anyway, Mum, they found her in a garbage bag.”

  Everything in the room around me seems to recede, like something seen through thick glass: It’s sharp and clear, but very far away.

  A woman in a sheepskin coat appears on the screen. She has stiff gray hair and immaculate vowels. Amber grabs the remote, turns up the sound. The woman is saying that she lives near the place where they found the body and she won’t feel safe ’til they catch the man who did this. A reporter with blond expensive hair is nodding with practiced empathy.

  Amber twists her scrunchy around her wrist and shakes out her hair, pulling her fingers through it.

  “I bet it’s the same guy,” she says. “You know, the one who did that other murder. That girl who got killed so near her home. I bet it’s a serial killer.”

  “Is that what they’re saying?”

  “They haven’t exactly said it yet. No one’s said anything about who did it. But I bet it is. I bet it’s that psycho. Mum, don’t you think it’s weird?”

  I tell her yes, I think it’s weird, for it to have happened just there. But she shakes her head a little, as though I just don’t get it.

  “How long ago do they think it—you know—happened?” I ask her.

  “They haven’t said. They haven’t identified her or anything.”

  A detective is on the screen now. He has a stern gaze and a bony, hollowed-out face. He talks in the careful, measured way in which we spe
ak of the tragedies of strangers—the composed face, the downward intonation. I wonder if Will knows him. There’s the usual warning that women should be wary of going out alone. And then the appeal for witnesses: if you’ve seen anything odd or suspicious near the place where the body was found—anything at all, no matter how trivial it might seem. There’s a number to ring. My body is weighed down. I don’t move.

  Amber looks at me as though I have disappointed her.

  “Honestly, Mum, I thought you’d be more interested.”

  She goes to wash her hair.

  It’s cold in the kitchen. I make a coffee but don’t drink it. I sit at the table, clasping my hands around the mug. Light catches in the gluey silver trail of a snail, that traces a random arabesque across my terra-cotta tiles. Other women don’t have snail trails in their kitchens. I ought to be like other people, with their orderly, thought-out lives.

  I realize that I’m shivering, my body shaking as if this death has touched me in some direct way. I clutch my coffee mug to warm my hands and tell myself that this has nothing to do with me. That the man I saw was just an ordinary stranger, out for a walk by the river, minding his business, caught in a shower of rain. I sift through all the things I know about witnesses and how they can’t be relied on, how we can’t remember precisely what we saw; we think we remember, but really we’re recalling details we’ve imagined. Details that are quite vivid to us—as I now picture the woman who died, whom I have never seen; as this conjured face persists for me, her glazed eyes and that swollen, terrible pallor of those who find death by water. This woman I have never seen—yet in my mind she is real.

  I tell myself again and again that there was nothing odd about the man I saw on the river path. I’ve invented details, given it too much significance, because I was there with Will, illicitly, and scared of someone seeing us. I’ve projected the guilt I felt onto this random stranger, seeing him as guilty and scared of being seen.