The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  From outside, Max’s house looks like an ordinary semi, but it’s been expensively gutted and modernized. His silver soft-top Mercedes is parked in the street. I ring his bell and wait on his doorstep, between two trim conifers in metal buckets. I can hear the Saturday sounds—children playing in a garden, the lazy afternoon rhythms of surburban trains.

  “Ginnie. How lovely.”

  There’s a tiny hesitation before he kisses my cheek. But maybe I’m imagining it. He has a rich male smell, of sandalwood and leather.

  “There’s something I need to talk about.”

  “Ginnie, you said. Come through.”

  His kitchen is gleaming and glamorous, all stainless steel and spotlights and complicated controls. He uses it for fixing drinks and cooking an occasional Marks & Spencer ready-meal.

  I watch as he pours our whiskey. In the unrelenting afternoon light that comes through his wide windows, you can see that his hair is flecked with gray, that his body is getting more solid, gravity pulling hard on him, his Guernsey sweater just a bit too tight. Still good-looking though, with elegant hands. I’m sure men don’t have the faintest notion how avidly we watch their hands—the way they pour a drink or take out their cuff links and push up the sleeves of their shirts—always secretly alert for a grace that might give us pleasure. And you can guess from his hands that Max would be a skillful lover.

  It could have happened, perhaps, if I had let it. There was always something between us—a flicker of sex—though compromised by the fact that I’m an inch or two taller than him. I remember a moment in the early days of our friendship, when we were still students. We were drinking after a concert; all the others had gone—even Dylan, who always drinks with great commitment—and Max held my eyes a little too long, and remarked that I seemed so uptight, that I really ought to let go. That moment when everything can change, the man moving in closer, speaking obliquely or in metaphors, casually bringing sex into the conversation or saying he’d really have liked to give you a lift. … I’ve always found that how you respond in that moment is utterly beyond your conscious control; yet a laugh or a slight turning away will close the door forever. And in my head I was open to a relationship with Max—but I think I laughed a little and shrugged and looked away. All for the best, probably; it could have been a disaster. Max can be pretty heartless. I once spent an intense evening sharing a bottle of Beaujolais with one of his many discarded lovers: He’d dumped her by e-mail, and she’d been devastated by the casual way he’d ended what for her had been the real thing. Not that he doesn’t take his love affairs seriously. He views them with a cool detachment, as a practical project worthy of proper study, like choosing and maintaining a stereo system.

  Max opens his fridge to get to the icebox. The fridge is empty except for a bottle of sparkling mineral water. He breaks ice into our glasses.

  “Are you OK?” he says, turning back to me. “You look a bit shaky, Ginnie.”

  I tell him about my mother.

  Max sympathizes. He knows about sick parents—his own mother has osteoporosis. Max often stays the weekend with her. I’ve met her: She’s stiff and twisted as a thorn tree, but sometimes I feel that this worn, fragile woman is still his safety, his center—that he’ll commit to a lover only when she’s gone.

  “But that isn’t what I came to talk about,” I say.

  “No. I gathered that.”

  He gives me my drink, and we go through to his living room, which has leather sofas and CDs alphabetically arranged. Wide windows open onto the garden, which is mostly expensively landscaped pebbles. There are orange tulips in pots. The flowers are sprawling open; you can see the blue stain at their throats.

  I’ve chosen Max to confide in because I know he will be secret. He won’t condemn me, and I’m sure he’d never tell. Not out of some moral compunction, not because he’d think it essentially wrong to break a confidence, just because it would never occur to him to do so. But now that I’m here it’s difficult, more difficult than I thought. My mouth is like blotting paper.

  “Max, I’d just like to get your view on something.”

  “Yes. You said.”

  He has a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  “You don’t mind?” I ask him.

  He makes a quick, vague gesture with the hand that holds the drink. The ice rattles.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he says.

  He glances across at me. He’s sipping his whiskey too rapidly, as if he’s anxious at being confided in: though maybe I’m imagining this, projecting my own anxiety onto him.

  I clear my throat.

  “There’s a woman I know,” I tell him.

  A slight smile. “OK.”

  “She has a relationship that’s very secret.”

  He nods. “It happens,” he says. He’s peering into his whiskey.

  I’d thought he’d be more intrigued—that he’d tease or cajole me, trying to find out more. But he just waits quietly for me to carry on.

  “She’s with her friend in a secret place, and nobody knows they’re there. And she sees something that perhaps should be reported.”

  He’s alert now, looking at me: but also in some way more relaxed, as though some tension has fallen from him.

  “To the police, you mean?” he says. “This thing she sees—it’s something criminal?”

  “Maybe. She doesn’t know that. She just thinks it could be. But she’d certainly report it if she hadn’t been with this person.”

  He nods. There’s a glint in his eye—he’s enjoying this game we’re playing.

  “But if she tells, and it all comes out—people might be hurt?” he says.

  I nod. We sit in silence for a moment.

  “I wanted to know what might happen if she rang the police. I mean—she could do that anonymously, couldn’t she?”

  “Yes. Of course. Lots of people do.” He takes a pensive sip of whiskey. “But you’d have to think—your friend would have to think—would she be happy to do that and leave it there, if she really had some information that might affect a criminal prosecution? And presumably that’s what she thinks or she wouldn’t be so concerned.”

  “Yes. She thinks that.”

  “She has to ask herself—what will she do if the case goes to court, and they want her to give evidence?”

  “They could make her?” I say.

  “That depends. The judge could subpoena her. But that’s a last resort, of course. The police would try to persuade her, they’d rather she did it voluntarily. Assuming her evidence is crucial to the prosecution’s case, and she can’t know that yet. How I see it, Ginnie—it would be hard to take just one step along that path and leave it there.”

  For a moment I don’t say anything. I think of the face that haunts me—her glazed eyes, her swollen pallor—the woman pulled from the water. Of the flowers on the riverbank.

  “Max, look at it another way. What’s the right thing for this woman to do? If you viewed it in the abstract, as a moral problem. What would be the right thing?”

  He shakes his head at me.

  “Jesus, Ginnie, if it’s moral advice you’re after, I’m the very last person in the world you want. You need a philosopher or a priest—not a rather lecherous lawyer.”

  “Tell me. Please. What would you do, if it was you?”

  “Ginnie, this isn’t fair.”

  “I’m asking you to tell me.”

  He moves his hand, swirling the drink around his glass; the ice makes a percussive sound. He smiles the salacious smile I’ve expected from the beginning.

  “I’d need to know more, really. A few details.”

  “No. You know quite enough.”

  For a while he says nothing, sipping his drink.

  “I think I’d keep quiet,” he says then. “You have to be pragmatic. You have to take the long view.”

  “But justice matters.”

  “Of course. Ginnie, look, you did ask for my opinion. It’s not fair to then say it�
�s the wrong opinion when I give it.”

  “But maybe this woman owes something to … whoever was the victim of this crime.”

  “Maybe.” He’s turned away from me, looking out at the garden.

  “Wouldn’t she just feel guilty all her life if she left it?” I say.

  “There are things that are best kept quiet,” he says. “Maybe I’m wrong. But that’s my view on it, Ginnie.”

  He turns back to me.

  “Look at it this way,” he says. “What’s done is done. Your friend can’t undo the bad thing—the crime—whatever it was she saw. A lot of damage is done by people who are sure they’re doing the right thing. I think she’d be well advised to be pretty cautious about this: to weigh any good she might do by telling against the hurt she might cause.”

  I go to the bathroom before I leave. It’s plentifully stocked, unlike his fridge or his kitchen. On the shelf above the basin, there are bottles of shampoo and shower gel in sugary, feminine scents, so there must be some woman who visits. Well, there usually is. He has a picture above the bath, a Japanese erotic print, a man and a woman on a veranda, the moonlight shining through a maple, the leaves of the tree as red as blood and fringed and curled like flowers. The man is behind her, poised to penetrate her; you can see his large, pale penis and the intricate folds of her flesh. It’s unnerving, the way it’s at once so explicit and so decorous: They’re still wearing their sprigged kimonos, they have neat, elaborate hair.

  I stare at my face in the mirror for a moment. In the clear spring light you can see every crease and the grayness under my eyes. I run cool water over my wrists. I feel very alone. He’s given me an excuse, a way that leads out of the wood—so why don’t I feel more at peace? I realize I hoped for the wrong thing: that I looked for an easy answer, and there isn’t one. Nobody can tell me what to do.

  Max senses how I feel.

  “I haven’t been much use, have I?” he says as he takes me out to the door.

  “It helps to talk,” I say. “Thank you.”

  He shakes his head a little.

  “Obviously, this is just between us,” I tell him.

  “Obviously.”

  “And thanks again for having Amber.”

  “Not at all. She was great to have around,” he says.

  “She really enjoyed it,” I tell him.

  We finalize our arrangements for next weekend, when we have the choir reunion in Walsall.

  “It’ll do you a world of good,” he says. “Get you away from your troubles for a bit. Your poor mother, and your rather adventurous friend …”

  We hug, and I walk off between the immaculate conifers.

  CHAPTER 28

  ON FRIDAY EVENING, Mrs. Russell brings Molly’s canvas to the house. It’s so big she has to use the school minivan. I see her struggling with it in the street, and rush to open the gate. We ease it in through the door and prop it up in the hall.

  The figures Molly painted command attention: our mother with her worried air, the lines deeply etched in her face, and our father looming over her, and Ursula and me, with our stripy summer dresses and our conscientious smiles. The acrylic colors sing out in my quiet hall. I think of the autumn evening when we went to the school art exhibition—the day before I met Will. It seems so long ago now.

  “There,” says Mrs. Russell, with relief. She’s pink; she’s breathing heavily. “Mr. Bates wanted to say thanks to Molly for letting us keep it so long.”

  “Not at all,” I say.

  “He was very keen to have it there for our Open Day. I said I’d bring it round for him.” She lowers her voice a little. “I thought I could take the opportunity to have a quick word about Amber.”

  “Oh.” I feel a surge of anxiety, or maybe shame, expecting a reprimand. “I think she’s in the kitchen.” I gesture Mrs. Russell through the hall.

  “It was you I wanted to speak to,” she says.

  She stands close to me; she smells of fresh deodorant.

  I nod.

  “I’m happy to say that generally there’s been a real improvement,” she says. “We’re very pleased. She seems to be putting in a lot more effort. Several of her teachers have remarked on it. Obviously something you’re doing is really working.”

  “Well. Good.” My voice is hesitant. I don’t think I’ve done anything.

  “So, what happened?” she says. “Did you have a good talk with her?”

  “Kind of.” I hunt around in my mind for something to say. “Well, she did enjoy her work experience. Maybe that helped her get a bit more focused.”

  “Excellent,” she says. “What I wanted to talk about—it’s just this issue of getting her work in on time. That’s the one area where we don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Somehow we’re just not getting through. I can’t stress how important it is, with her GCSE’s coming up.”

  “Yes, I do see that.”

  She has the flustered look she had on the parents’ evening, as though everything happens too fast for her, and things rush past and she struggles after them, calling for them to stop. “Course work has to get there on time, there are no second chances. If we don’t get it sent off by the due day, the girl risks not getting a mark. Well, I’m sure you understand.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “She doesn’t seem to listen when I tell her. It just doesn’t go in somehow.”

  Her eyes are on me, her forehead creased in a frown.

  I think how Amber slips away like water between your hands.

  “She can be rather vague,” I tell her.

  “I think perhaps we do need to take a firmer line. I don’t doubt she has ability. Well, it’s obviously there in the family. Just look at what Molly’s achieved.”

  She leaves a pause. I think of saying that Molly and Amber aren’t meant to be the same.

  “Well, yes,” I say.

  “Now, Amber’s English teacher tells me that her next piece of work is due on March the third. That’s the essay on The Go-Between. If you could make sure that she hands it in, we’d all be very grateful.”

  “I’ll talk to her today,” I say. “And I’ll put it in the calendar.”

  “It’s her future that’s at issue here,” she says. “I hate to see her throwing her chances away.”

  Amber is sitting at the kitchen table poring over the Evening Standard. She’s changed out of her uniform. She’s wearing a T-shirt she bought on her shopping trip with Jamila. It says, “Boys are stupid: throw rocks at them”: The fabric is a fetching petal pink.

  “Mrs. Russell just came. She brought Molly’s picture.”

  She screws up her face without raising her eyes from the newspaper.

  “Why Mrs. Russell?” she says, in a tight, defensive voice. “What have I done now?”

  “She wanted to check you got your course work in on time. She was trying to be helpful.”

  Amber hasn’t put in a scrunchy today; when she looks at her paper, her face is almost hidden in the warm fall of her hair.

  “I can’t stand Mrs. Russell,” she says. “Last week she did an assembly. On the Fallopian tubes. It was, like, Ground, swallow me up.”

  “Well, anyway. She says your English course work is due in on March the third. Your Go-Between essay.”

  “I hate that book,” says Amber.

  “Promise me you’ll get it in on time,” I tell her.

  “Mum, you don’t need to go on about it.”

  I can’t tell if she’s taken in a word I’ve said.

  “I’m putting it in the calendar,” I tell her.

  “Whatever,” she says.

  My calendar is on the wall. It has paintings by Jack Vettriano—men in sharp suits, groomed women in stiletto heels—my Christmas present from Molly. I turn the page to March. I’m briefly distracted by the picture—lovers meeting after an absence, perhaps at a railway station, in front of a colored glass window: He has a lean, worn face and they’re wearing fifties clothes. I write Amber’s Course Work in large letters on
March the third.

  I turn back to her. She’s still deep in her newspaper.

  “I wish you’d pay attention when I speak to you,” I tell her. I can hear the irritation in my voice. “Nothing’s more crucial than this. It’s your whole future, Amber.”

  It’s Mrs. Russell speaking through me.

  She looks up. Her eyes on me are the blue of summer sky after rain. She shakes her head, but I’m not sure what she’s saying no to.

  “They’ve found out her name,” she says then. “The woman in the river. They’ve found out who she is—I mean, was.”

  There’s a lurch in my heart. I wonder if Amber will see the shock in my face, but she’s turned back to the newspaper. I read it over her shoulder.

  It’s just a short piece, placed between a double-glazing advertisement and a photo of a school presentation. The headline says: BODY IDENTIFIED IN RIVER MURDER. It says she was called Maria Faulkner, and she was twenty-three. She worked as a care assistant, and her husband was an estate agent. They’d been married three years, and they lived in Caterham. One evening she told her husband she was going out for a walk: He rang the police that night, when she hadn’t returned.

  It feels so different, knowing her name and where she lived: knowing about the people who knew and loved her. It brings her closer.

  “I wonder what she looked like,” says Amber. “They usually have a picture, don’t they, with these things? When somebody’s died.”