The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  “It would have been so difficult, Ginnie,” she says. “We’d have been very hard up. And when you’re young, that may not seem so terrible. But I knew what it would be like, and I couldn’t face it. I felt you’d have a better life if we managed to stay together. And I’d say to myself, Well, it doesn’t happen very often. …”

  I don’t say anything. I put my hand on hers. Her hands are cold and quiet now: hands that in our childhood were smooth and quick and busy, keeping us fed and clothed and trying to protect us. Stirring the cake mixture in the yellow glazed bowl; ironing shirts on a Monday afternoon, with that hot, safe, delicious smell of almost-scorching fabric. Pushing shut the door.

  “It’s different today,” she says. “You can get help with these things. There isn’t so much shame. People talk about them. Back then—there was nothing. Though I did try, once, you know, Ginnie.” Defensive, as though she thinks I may blame her. “I want you to know that. I tried to get help. We went to this psychiatrist, Dr. Ellis. D’you remember? Your Auntie Carol had to pick you up from school.”

  I nod. Remembering the afternoon: my mother wearing the blouse with all the little pearl buttons, and tea in Auntie Carol’s kitchen—the tinned peach in Carnation that looked like a poached egg and tasted far too sweet.

  “Well, he wasn’t very sympathetic really, darling. He said I provoked your father. He said I obviously knew what wound your father up. That I made it happen with my provocative behavior.”

  Rage slams into me.

  “No, Mum.”

  My voice is too loud for the ward. The nurse glances sharply across at me.

  But my mother just shrugs.

  “Your father was wearing that Burton’s suit he had. As you know, he could be very charming. Dr. Ellis took a real shine to your father.”

  I shake my head. This appalls me.

  “To give him his due, I think in his saner moments your father knew that wasn’t right. It was confusing—we both felt so confused. It’s hard when someone says something is true, and you know in your heart it isn’t. You don’t know what to think then.”

  Her face looks tired suddenly, blurred. All her brittle energy has gone. Saying these things has drained away whatever vigor she had.

  “I gave up then,” she says. Quietly, so I have to lean forward to hear. “I knew there was no one to help me. I just decided—this was my bed, and I had to lie on it. … I hope you don’t mind me saying all these things. I didn’t want to bother Ursula—I know she finds it upsetting.”

  I stroke her hand.

  “It helps to know,” I tell her. “What it was like for you, why you did what you did. What you went through.”

  We sit there for a moment. Light from the long windows falls across the floor. “When you’re stuck here with nothing to do,” she says, “these things do prey on your mind. And you think, Did I do the right thing? It’s difficult to know, sometimes, just what the right thing is. It’s hard to be really sure.”

  The nurse with the trolley stops by my mother’s bed. She smiles her white, professional smile and gives us tea and ginger nuts. She lingers for a moment, looking at Amber’s card.

  “Is that from one of your granddaughters, Jacquie?”

  My mother nods.

  The nurse picks up the card.

  “When I was a kid, we lived by the river,” she says. Her face is suddenly serious. “You see something and suddenly you’re back there. All these years later. Just the smallest thing. It’s weird, that, isn’t it?” She props the card up on the locker. She switches her bland smile back on. “Well, ladies, enjoy your tea.”

  My mother sips at her tea as the nurse moves away.

  “You feel so lonely,” she says then.

  At first I think she means here, ill, in hospital.

  “Oh, Mum. I’ll get down again just as soon as I can. And Ursula comes often, doesn’t she?”

  “Oh, not here, Ginnie. I’m all right here. I’m very well looked after. You can see how nice the nurses are. No, I meant, when you’re in, you know, that situation—that I was in with your father.”

  She tries to put her cup down on the locker, but her hands are shaky and uncontrolled, and tea spills into her saucer. I put a tissue between the saucer and cup.

  “There’s no one to help you, Ginnie, you see. No one to take your side or hear your story. You think you’re completely alone. … Sorry to go on, darling. I guess this isn’t really what you came to hear.”

  The journey back is slow, especially once I reach the outskirts of London. There’s a race meeting at Kempton Park, and the traffic is stuck for miles. I’m tired and hungry and longing to be home. But when I come to the convent, on impulse I stop the car and go in through the gateway.

  There are petunia seedlings on the table today, where in autumn there were apples. A handwritten notice invites passersby to help themselves to the seedlings: The ink has run in the rain. There’s an old Cadbury biscuit tin for donations. My feet make an obtrusive crunch in the gravel that leads up to the door. I realize I’ve forgotten to change out of my driving shoes—the ugly, clumpy lace-ups I keep for motorway journeys. I must look like I’m off on a trek. My body feels clumsy and hot. I don’t know if I have any right to do this: I half expect that someone rather stern and holy will come and ask what I’m doing, or explain that this is a private and consecrated place and I really shouldn’t be here.

  The door is in a conservatory that has white tiles and lots of ferns in wicker potholders. Another handwritten notice advises you to ring the doorbell twice. I ring; a woman comes. She seems very down-to-earth for a nun, and unexpectedly stylish, a pashmina draped over her shoulders. She smiles at me through the glass as she unbolts the door.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you. I just need to be somewhere quiet. I wondered if I could come in and sit for a while. I mean, d’you have a chapel or somewhere?”

  She leans toward me a little, as though listening with care. My request sounds weird to me, but she doesn’t seem surprised. It enters my mind that people like me come knocking here quite often—apologetic people, tired and puzzled and on a difficult journey, still in their driving shoes.

  “I’ll show you the way,” she says. She takes me down a corridor.

  I hoped for something old, a shadowy, sacred space like a cave, with gold-encrusted icons and votive candles that dance in the dark with a secret, numinous glimmer. But it looks quite unexceptional: contemporary, with too much concrete, and chairs with wicker seats arranged in a semicircle, some with cushions, perhaps for the older women, and a plain cloth on the altar, and the whole place full of the ordinary light of day. But as soon as I sit there I feel the silence wrap itself around me, a silence that soothes and contains me, as real as an arm around your shoulder or the touch of a hand. There’s a faint polleny scent, where the windows are open onto the gardens at the back of the convent. I hear noises in the distance—planes going over, and people tending the garden, feet on gravel, raking, the insect drone of a mower. Now and then there are footsteps in the corridor—the pashmina-wearing nun, perhaps, going about her business, doing whatever nuns do. But these things all sound so far away: as though the stillness of this place encompasses and protects me.

  I sit there for a long time, like someone who has to come to a decision: though maybe the decision has already been made.

  CHAPTER 33

  I’VE KEPT THE NUMBER; it’s on a scrap of paper in one of the drawers in my apothecary cabinet. I poke around in the drawer, pushing aside the plasticine figures and Molly’s vague pink knitting. It doesn’t seem to be there. I feel a surge of relief, that perhaps I can postpone this: I have a perfect reason now for leaving it ’til tomorrow. But then I find it, under a box of fuses.

  I take the scrap of paper and go back to the car. Greg and Amber aren’t home yet, but I still don’t want to make the call from here. I drive around the corner and park on a side street, beside a squat gray church with a poster up that says “Come 4 a Miracle.” The writing is
faded and pale. You can hear the distant roar of rush-hour traffic. There’s a low sun in a saffron sky, and intricate tree shadows reach across the street. A boy in a fur-trimmed parka is delivering free papers from a fluorescent-green trolley. Two pigeons scuffle, fighting or mating, on the ridge of a roof. A builder with a wheelbarrow moves in and out of a front door, taking cement from a mixer. I see these things acutely, vividly, as if someone has turned up the definition, every detail clear.

  My phone is in my hand. I set myself targets. When one of the pigeons moves from that rooftop, I shall do it. When the builder comes back, I shall make the call. The pigeons fly away, the builder reappears on the porch of the house, and still I don’t move. And then find myself pressing the keys on my phone, almost without thinking. I watch my hand on the phone, as though this has nothing to do with me. It’s the easiest thing in the world, just a little step: as though there isn’t a rift here, a crack between before and after.

  “Incident Room.” A female voice, young, a South London accent.

  “There’s something I wanted to tell you. About Maria Faulkner.”

  “Right,” she says. “Now, would it be OK if I took your name?”

  “I’d rather not give it,” I tell her. “I hope that’s all right.”

  “Of course,” she says, but there’s a sag in her voice. “Now, my name’s Kim, OK? So if you ever want to ring again, you ask for Kim.” I imagine her bored already, playing with a Biro or examining her nails. “Now, what do you want to tell us?”

  “Well, it may be nothing.”

  Suddenly I’m full of doubt. Perhaps Will was right, perhaps it doesn’t mean anything. I watch as the builder shovels cement into his wheelbarrow, slowly, as though each shovelful is unutterably heavy: the whole world slowed, but inexorable.

  “Could you just tell me?” she says.

  I tell her. That I was on the river path, the day after Maria disappeared, the week before her body was recovered. That there was a man I noticed because he kept on looking around. I feel unreal, as though I’m outside the whole scene, watching myself do this: as though everything around me is a hallucination—the car, the boy with the parka, the flaming saffron sky.

  “Then when I saw the TV appeal,” I tell her, “I recognized the man. Maria’s husband was the man I saw.”

  “You saw Sean Faulkner’s appeal?”

  Sudden interest sharpens her voice. I can almost see her, the way she stiffens, everything alert.

  “Yes,” I say. “And I’m sure that he was the man I saw on the river path.”

  She wants the date, the time. I give them.

  “This is a lead I’m sure we’d want to pursue,” she says. “And it would be really helpful to us if you felt able to give your name—so we could follow this up in rather more depth.”

  “I was with a friend, and it’s a rather awkward situation,” I tell her.

  “I understand,” she says, her voice emollient, soothing. “I do understand.” I hear the carefulness in her voice, as if I’m a wild animal she’s scared will shy away. “And we do appreciate what you’ve done in ringing the line today. But if you were willing to talk to the investigating officers, we’d be extremely grateful.”

  There’s a little expectant silence.

  I stare down the street. Two girls come roller-skating along the pavement. They’re six or seven, wearing cartoon sweatshirts. They’re messing about, their long hair swishing, waving their hands around, one of them pushing her ponytail up and over the top of her head, so it flaps on her face like a fringe. They giggle.

  “I don’t think I could,” I tell her.

  “It would all be very relaxed,” she says. “And they’d see you wherever you chose. Just wherever suited you.”

  The girls move on down the pavement, through the woven shadows of trees. The sky is deepening; yellow darkens to bronze. I don’t say anything.

  “It’s really nothing to worry about,” she goes on. “You could just tell them what you’ve told me and answer any questions that they might have. I mean, is there anything you’d like to ask about what that might involve?”

  “No, not really,” I say.

  The girl with the ponytail trips and falls. She lands on her knees, breaking her fall with her hands. She holds on to a garden fence and drags herself to her feet again. Her face is creased with pain, but she’s trying not to cry.

  “It’s entirely up to you,” says the woman, “and I do understand it’s difficult. But as you can imagine we’re all so very keen to get justice for Maria.”

  It’s just a little step. I give my name.

  CHAPTER 34

  THEY COME AT TEN IN THE MORNING, when Greg is giving a lecture and Amber is safely at school. There are two of them, a woman and a man. I see their shapes through the frosted window in my front door—featureless, darkly dressed, like shadows against the glass. For a moment I think: I could refuse to see them. But I go to open the door.

  The woman is blond and rangy, with long, toned limbs and Princess Diana hair. The man is short and solid and smells strongly of some over-sweet hair product. I once had a boyfriend who smelled like that: I’m reminded quickly, irrelevantly, of teenage dates, of fumblings in the back row of a cinema watching Barbra Streisand. They both have briefcases.

  “Mrs. Holmes?” says the woman. Her lips curve in a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Karen Whittaker, and this is Detective Constable Ray Jackson. Just call us Karen and Ray.”

  “Right,” I say. I take them into my living room. I offer them coffee, but they say they’re fine.

  There’s a tender blue sky, light spilling over everything. Out in my garden, there are drifts of pale narcissi in the lawn. A little wind shivers the tiny new leaves of the pear tree. Along the path by the river house it will all be happening now, all the fattening and opening up and reaching out of spring—yellow lacquered celandines glinting among the nettles, and a frail white froth of blossom on the sloe. I long so much to be there.

  The woman sits beside me on the sofa, the man on the armchair. The man opens his briefcase and takes out a pen and a notepad, and eases off the elastic band that holds the notepad shut. The woman crosses her elegant legs and looks around her; she’s taking in my house, as women do.

  “What a beautiful room,” she says.

  I feel this is just politeness, that it isn’t her kind of thing; my style would be too bohemian for her. And today it looks so scruffy. I cleaned before they came, feeling some subliminal fear that they might charge me with keeping a disorderly house and having illicit snail trails in my kitchen. Yet in the searching spring light that reaches its long fingers everywhere, I see how tatty everything is—my bookshelves made from reclaimed church pews, and my patchwork velvet cushions, and all my fringes and unravelings. The worn, distressed textures I love, that seem so rich in a gentle light, look threadbare in the sunshine. Everything here is lined and fading and old.

  The woman looks at the piano, at the framed pictures of my children taken by school photographers and the pictures of family Christmases. Molly at ten, with hair pulled back and soft, dark licorice eyes, diffident and earnest. Amber as a toddler, unafraid and gleeful, thrusting bread at pushy geese that come up to her shoulder. The four of us eating Christmas dinner, photographed by Ursula. The latest school shots of the pair of them, Amber with her closed-lip smile before she had her braces off, and both of them with illicit makeup, discreetly applied so the teachers wouldn’t see.

  “Those are your daughters?” she says.

  “Yes,” I tell her.

  “What lovely girls,” she says.

  She turns back to me and clears her throat and leans a little forward. She pushes a crisp blond curl behind an ear.

  “Right, Mrs. Holmes. On Tuesday you rang us and said you had some information that you could give us, about Maria Faulkner?”

  My mouth dries. I nod.

  “Perhaps we could go
right back to the beginning and hear it in your own words,” she says.

  I repeat what I said to the woman on the phone. The man is writing it down. When I say that I saw the television appeal, and realized that the man I’d seen looked like Maria’s husband, they catch each other’s eye—just a tiny look, a flickering.

  “OK,” says the woman then, quite impassively. “Let’s take this a step at a time. Now, what date are we talking about? When you saw this person?”

  I tell them.

  “You seem very sure,” says the man.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I say.

  I take a deep breath, like someone flinging herself into water.

  “There’s something I need you to know. I was there with a friend. I know the date because we always meet—met—on a Thursday.”

  “Right,” says the woman. I see her glance toward the piano and all the family photos, a rapid, darting blue glance, then back again to me. There are justifications I’ve used—that I loved him so much, that no one would be hurt if we were secret, that my affair was in some way keeping me here, helping me hold my family together. Desire pleads its case with such eloquence. But my arguments dissipate in an instant under this woman’s cool blue gaze.

  “There are families involved,” I say. “We’re trying to keep it all very quiet. I don’t want my husband to know.”

  “We understand,” she says. She’s soothing, matter-of-fact. Her hands are folded precisely on her lap; she has manicured nails and a platinum wedding ring. I try to tell myself this is nothing to them—just an ordinary affair, an everyday bit of deception. They see this all the time. “In the circumstances, we do appreciate you coming to us,” she says. “We’ll go through it all quite slowly. So—you’re pretty certain you’re right about the date?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were where on this date?”

  “There’s a place we go to. You go round a bend in the path, and there’s this little house.” The smell of the man’s hair gel is making me nauseous. I clasp my hands tight together. “It’s a house that’s broken-down, just a single room. There’s a little quay and a dinghy tied to the quay.” I try to remember it, the crimped light swinging across the ceiling, the thrill of freedom we felt the first time we went there. But all I can see is the spiderwebs and the way the dirt clung to our clothes.