The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  “Earlier today,” says the voice-over, “Sean Faulkner made an appeal for help from the public in solving the murder of his wife, Maria.”

  My immediate response is a warm surge of relief. I feel almost that it’s a sign, that I’ve made the right decision. People will come forward now, all sorts of other people, all the witnesses. It’s nothing to do with me now. The thing I saw will count for nothing; it won’t be up to me.

  A reporter reiterates the details of the crime. There are shots of the scene by the river, the day they found the body. You can see the vivid sunlight, the rowers, the barge with painted flowers. There are more shots of the room then, the camera panning around the audience, taking in the journalists and all the other people who wait, tense and expectant; and moving back to the table, to Roger: his gray hair, gray eyes, composed face. He has a slight frown of concentration, as though he’s watching out for something that no one else can see.

  The camera slides along the table, seeming to follow Roger’s gaze, coming to rest on Sean Faulkner. Sean Faulkner clears his throat and starts to speak.

  “There’s someone out there who knows the person who did this. He must be somebody’s brother, somebody’s partner, somebody’s son. Maybe a person you know behaved suspiciously or oddly around the time Maria died. I’m appealing for anyone who can help to come forward. Please, please help the police to solve this appalling crime. …”

  He’s urgent, pleading, his voice shaky with grief, very clear in the hushed room. But I scarcely hear the words above the thud of my heart.

  “I loved Maria. She was a beautiful woman, and I miss her terribly. …”

  He cries, his face is contorted, anguished—the face of a man who inhabits some private, unguessable hell. But his grief doesn’t touch me. As he cries he chews his lower lip, he pushes his blond hair back from his face—and I see him now as I saw him then, the week before they pulled Maria’s body from the water: running between the river and the rowan.

  CHAPTER 31

  I WAKE AND FEEL THE THICKNESS OF THE DARK. It’s so quiet in the room without Greg: The space feels hollow and still. I realize how his presence used to soothe me, in ways I was unaware of, his slow, heavy breathing and the warmth of his body part of the familiar texture of the night.

  I lie awake for a long time, wandering the mazes of my mind. Eventually I hear the click of the door and know that Amber is home. It’s the loveliest sound in the world to me. I go out onto the landing.

  She’s flushed, and the plaits are ragged now. A hazy smell of smoke hangs around her.

  “I didn’t mean to be this late,” she says. Her gestures are vague; she’s blurred with tiredness and too many Malibus. She’s forming her words with care. “Me and Lauren lost our coatroom tickets, so they made us stay ’til last to check the coats were really ours. You were meant to be asleep.”

  “Was it good?”

  She yawns.

  “It was OK,” she says.

  She goes into her room.

  I lie down again and wrap the duvet tight around me. The arguments in my head start up again. There’s a smooth voice, a voice that can talk its way out of trouble. The voice of sense, of pragmatism. The police had Sean Faulkner in their sights anyway. That’s why they got him to make the appeal. They do that, I know—I’ve read about it somewhere—they get the suspect to face the press, to see if there are clues in his or her behavior. It’s one reason they set up appeals, to see how the suspect reacts under that pressure. They make special videos that show the least flicker of expression, that they can slow down and analyze: Were these real tears? Is this emotion genuine? That’s why Roger seemed so intent and focused when I saw him on television. They undoubtedly have something on Sean Faulkner—they don’t need my evidence. And anyway, what did I see? A man running along the river path. I’m sure it was him—but what does that add up to? It’s near where they used to live. Anyone can go there. It might mean nothing.

  I want so very much to believe this voice.

  I lie there ’til I hear the first bird, with a call like a pot being scraped, and light seeps silver around the edges of my curtains. I feel such relief that night is nearly over. I fall uneasily asleep, and dream the dream I had before, about the dead houses and finding my children there.

  The ordinariness of my office in the clear morning light comforts me. There’s a wide-open sky, and the air is echoey with the calls of rooks. Some hyacinths on my windowsill have flowered: The room is sweet with their clingy, insinuating scent.

  Clem comes to talk about a case she’s finding difficult, one of her anorexic girls. Clem’s been trying to get the father involved, but it isn’t working well. He sat with his daughter for two hours, urging her to eat, while she slid her hard-boiled egg around her plate and shredded her slice of cucumber into fifty tiny pieces: Then he hit her. I admire Clem for taking on these cases; they’re terribly hard to treat.

  “Ginnie, are you OK?” she says as she closes the file.

  “Just tired.”

  She frowns at me.

  “You look like you might be coming down with something.”

  “Really, I’m fine,” I tell her.

  “Everything’s OK, isn’t it? You know, with the family?”

  Her eyes rest on me, brown and quizzical.

  “OKish,” I say.

  “If you need me, you know where I am,” she says.

  Everything seems simpler than in the mazes of the night. I’m sure what I must do now. I need to ring Will, and we will talk and share this and work it out together. I tell myself that he withdrew from me because he was frightened and confused—he wasn’t thinking clearly. But I know he’ll understand now; when I say it was Sean Faulkner that I saw, he’ll know how much this matters. I think of Will’s tenderness to me, and I reach out my hand for the phone. But then I hesitate, and tell myself I’ll wait and call him at lunchtime. I need a little more time to think this through.

  I see Katy Croft. She’s a diminutive Goth with a spiky collar and boots that are made for kicking and frightened eyes. She cuts herself: she scratches her arms with compasses, and sometimes she’ll press pull tabs from cola cans into her thighs. She’s kept this secret for months, even from her family. “I can’t tell people what really is me, what’s really inside of me,” she says in a small voice, glancing at me through the curtains of her hair. By the end of the session she’s started to meet my gaze and her voice is stronger, and I feel we’ve made a beginning.

  At lunchtime I take out my phone to call Will. But before I can dial, the phone rings, making me jump. It’s Ursula.

  “Oh, Ginnie, I’m sorry. Are you at work? I’m so sorry if I’ve bothered you at work.”

  There’s a gasp in her voice, as though she can’t get enough breath.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “Really.”

  “We went to the hospital this morning. She had the scan on Monday. They’ve got the results,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. They were hoping it was just a bleed.”

  “Just a bleed?”

  “Well, you can survive a bleed apparently. They said they were very sorry but it wasn’t a bleed.” Her voice is careful, edging around the words, as though they were sharp and could cut her. “It’s a tumor, Ginnie.”

  “Does she know?”

  “She doesn’t want to know, she hasn’t asked,” says Ursula. “If she asks I’ll tell her, but I just feel she doesn’t want to know. Like she knows there’s something very wrong, she just doesn’t want the details. That’s OK, isn’t it? It just seems wrong to tell her if she doesn’t want to know.”

  “But can’t they operate?”

  “She’s too old.” Her voice is heavy and tired. “The tumor’s too big. It’s nearly half of her brain. They said she’d never survive the operation.”

  We’re silent for a moment. We don’t ask if she should have gone into hospital sooner, if there’s something we could have done. But the thought
lurks under our words.

  “We saw Dr. Spence. You know, the one who grew up on the Isle of Wight? He was very nice to us. He took us into his office, Paul and me. He said life has to go on. … They’ve put her on steroids. He said they’ll give her a bit of relief for a while. I mean, we suspected something like this, didn’t we? We knew it wasn’t a stroke. It never sounded like a stroke to me.”

  “I’ll go tomorrow,” I tell her. “I’ll take the day off and go down.”

  “Don’t feel you have to, Ginnie. You don’t have to drop anything. She’s not going to … I mean, it’s not going to happen that quickly. It could be several weeks, they said.”

  “I’d like to,” I say.

  “Well, I’m sure she’d love to see you. But, Ginnie, look, don’t tell her anything she doesn’t want to know.”

  I put down the phone. My mother takes up all my mind. I know I won’t ring Will now.

  Amber comes straight home from school as she promised, to do her essay. I hear the clatter as she kicks off her shoes and flings down her bag on the floor. She comes into the kitchen. Her hair is crinkled where it was braided; she still smells of smoke from the party. She peers in the fridge, shrugs, goes to the breadbasket. She takes out the bread and breaks off a chunk with her hand, though the bread knife is in its usual place on the counter. The ink stains on her fingers have smudged the bread with blue. I bite back the urge to tell her off.

  “Amber, there’s something you need to know.”

  She spins around sharply, as though she expects a reprimand. Her eyes are smeary with last night’s mascara, which she hasn’t yet wiped off.

  “What is it?” she says. “What have I done now? I came home like we said.”

  “It’s nothing to do with you,” I tell her. “Ursula rang about Granny. She’s very ill.”

  Her eyes widen.

  “You mean she’s going to die?”

  “Sweetheart, she could.” I clear my throat. “I mean, yes, she will. It’s a brain tumor. It’s too far gone to operate. Anyway, she’s too old.”

  “Poor Granny,” she says vaguely. She takes a bite of the bread. “God, I’m famished. There were only these gross samosas left when I got to the canteen.”

  “I’m going down tomorrow.”

  “No problem, Mum. I was going around to Lauren’s anyway. We might see Love Actually. It’s meant to be quite a laugh.”

  She drifts off upstairs, chewing at the bread. I feel a rush of irritation.

  I start to make a meal, a chicken stew that I can easily reheat when Greg comes home at nine, when the faculty closes. It’s a clear, bright evening, light flooding the kitchen, the searching light of spring that shows up any imperfection. I see how smeared my window panes are. Everywhere feels dirty—my windows and my kitchen and the inside of my head. I start to cut the vegetables, but I’m clumsy after my sleepless night and I put the knife through my skin. I watch the blood well from my finger, tulip-bright. The pain is almost welcome, a relief from all the turmoil in my head. I have a moment of empathy with girls like Katy who cut themselves.

  Amber’s music is turned up loud—the whole house seems to shake with it. I can’t imagine how she can work like that. Mrs. Russell is in my mind: Obviously, you’ll provide good conditions for her to work in. … I think we perhaps do need to take a firmer line. … My finger throbs.

  Eventually I go upstairs. I push her door open without knocking.

  The room is in chaos. She’s on the floor by the desk, a litter of paper and cardboard cuttings and bread crusts around her. Just by her feet there’s a perilously full jar of paint-stained water.

  “Amber—what on earth is this?” My voice is shrill. “You’re meant to be doing your essay.”

  When I shout she flinches from me as though I have raised my hand to her.

  “I was making a card.” She has a tight, hurt voice. “For Granny. I thought you’d be pleased,” she says.

  It’s made from an old shoe box. She’s punched holes in two squares of cardboard and tied them together with ribbon, like a little book. There’s a cutout bird stuck to the front, a waterbird flying, a goose or a swan, like in her childhood nursery rhyme book, with a tangerine beak and intricate, textured feathers and a wide white sweep of wing. She’s made the feathers with shavings of cardboard that she’s curled by wrapping them around her pencil.

  I can’t speak for a moment.

  When I don’t say anything, she looks at me uncertainly.

  “Don’t you like it?” she says. “I thought perhaps it wasn’t good enough.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  “I don’t know. You feel it has to be extra good, if someone’s as ill as Granny. If somebody’s going to die, you can’t send them a crap card, can you? And I worried it might fall apart on the way, before she gets it.”

  “Sweetheart, I’ll make sure it gets to her safely. I’ll be so careful, I promise. And Amber, when you’ve finished …”

  “OK, OK. I’ll do the essay.” She opens up the card and takes a purple pen and writes a flamboyant greeting. “But sometimes you’ve got to think what really matters, Mum.”

  CHAPTER 32

  I HAVE AMBER’S CARD in a padded envelope, and a primrose in a pot. I feel sick with anxiety, walking through the hospital, past its blue walls and trolleys and affable porters and antiseptic smells.

  But my mother is sitting up in bed, with lipstick on, and a bed jacket. She looks so different from last time, her face more vivid, defined. I feel a brief, crazy flicker of hopefulness. She sees me coming and smiles.

  “Ginnie. How lovely.”

  I kiss her.

  “I’m so much better,” she says.

  “Well, I can see that.”

  “They’ve put me on these wonderful drugs. Steroids. They make such a difference,” she says.

  “That’s marvelous,” I say.

  She smells of Blue Grass, and I see she has painted her nails. But close to her, touching her, I know how fragile she is, and see that the vividness in her face is an illusion, unreal, like the ruddy outdoor complexion of fever.

  The afternoon ward is quiet and full of gluey yellow light. Through the wide windows you can see the shining cityscape, the silver office blocks and towers, all bright and far and silent.

  I give my mother Amber’s card. She runs her finger along the curled feathers, in a gesture like a caress. She props it up on her locker.

  “It’s like the ones Molly used to make,” she says. “Does Molly still do her drawing?”

  I tell her about the canvas Molly painted.

  “She took it from a photo we had—you and Dad and Ursula and me. It’s huge—the school had to send it round in a van.”

  A shadow moves across my mother’s face.

  “I’d have loved to have seen it,” she says.

  Her face is tight, dark, her eyes on me, just a whisper of grief in her voice. She’s telling me that she knows: that she will never see Molly’s picture. Ursula is right: We don’t need to tell her anything. She knows what she needs to know.

  I put my hand on hers. Her skin is cool, and dry as winter leaves.

  “You’d have loved it,” I tell her. “It was in the garden at Bridlington Road, in front of the forsythia.”

  She’s entering into this, trying to remember, pushing away the sadness.

  “Was it the one your Auntie Carol took?”

  “I don’t know. It might have been.”

  “Was your father wearing that pinstripe shirt?”

  “I think so.”

  “I remember the one. It’s good of your father, that photograph. He wore clothes well,” she says.

  “I guess so.”

  “He was a good-looking man, your father,” she says.

  I shrug. “Yes,” I say.

  She hears my hesitation.

  “Now, Ginnie, you mustn’t judge your father too harshly.”

  I don’t say anything. I think she will move on, leave it there, just as Ursula
always does. There’s a thread of reticence and evasion stitched into everything she says. Things weren’t so bad; we mustn’t exaggerate; really we were a perfectly normal family. … Silence laps at us, a little darkening pool.

  “I know that you thought I should just leave him,” she says quietly. Dropping her words like stones into the silence, clear and precise and astonishing. “You did, didn’t you, Ginnie? That’s what you thought.”

  My heart pounds.

  “Maybe,” I say carefully.

  “I could see that,” she says. “Poor Ursula was terrified we’d divorce, and you really wanted us to. Ursula was so frightened of being different—she wanted to fit in more than anything in the world. But you—I always felt that you were impatient with me. That you felt I should have just taken you both and gone.”

  “Yes,” I say quietly. “I did think that.”

  The easy rhythms of the ward would soothe you into sleep—the rustle of magazines, the footsteps in the corridor, the clink of cups and murmur of talk where the nurse with the turquoise eye shadow is bringing tea around. The woman in the next bed snores softly, her head on one side, her face sunk sideways and out of shape, under her sprawl of newspaper. But my mother is alert, intent.

  “I thought about it, believe me,” she says. “I thought about it a lot.”

  “I didn’t know,” I say.