The River Home : A Novel (2020)

by Richell, Hannah

  ‘Tell me what you want, Margot,’ he said, his hands on her waist, sneaking up under her T-shirt. ‘Tell me what you think about. I’ve read your mother’s books. You must know the expression: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? Tell me what you think about, when you’re alone.’

  It was almost as if he could read her thoughts, those silly moments when she had imagined kissing him. She didn’t want to share that with him. ‘I want to go back to the others,’ she said. She didn’t want to offend him, not when he had been so kind to her – but all she wanted was to be back outside, laughing and joking around by the river.

  ‘We will,’ he said. ‘But not yet.’ He leaned in again, pushing her hard against the desk, grinding against her. The cider on his breath reminded her of the apples falling to waste in the long grass of Windfalls’ orchard, rotting and fermenting on the hillside. In her growing panic, the scent seemed to seep up off the floor and ooze from the walls of the old apple store, sickly and cloying. It made her want to gag.

  ‘The others will wonder where we are,’ she said, turning her head, her hands on his chest, pushing him, willing him to step away and release her.

  ‘I said not yet.’ He wasn’t smiling, teasing Mr Hudson any more, but a dark, looming figure pulling her ponytail, a little too hard, so that her scalp sang and her head tilted back, exposing her neck to his mouth. She moaned – not in pleasure but in fear – her body arching away from his.

  ‘You like that, do you?’ He was breathing hard now, his hands on her belt buckle.

  ‘No. Please—’ she said, but the word ‘stop’ was lost as his mouth covered hers again. He tugged roughly at her jeans and then spun her around, one hand at his own belt, the other pressing her face down onto the desk.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, her voice high and scared, but he didn’t listen; instead, he forced her legs apart with a knee, spreading her across the desk like the white pages of paper her face was now pressed against. His hand gripped her shoulder, his thumb pressing into the soft curve of her neck.

  Margot choked back a scream. Searing pain ripped into her like grinding broken glass. She could hear the others on the jetty still, their chatter and laughter but the thought of any of them stumbling in and seeing this – seeing Mr Hudson doing what he was doing to her – was too much. She clamped her mouth shut, willing it to be over. She wanted to stop this thing she had started with her silly smiles and her thoughts of kissing. But Mr Hudson wasn’t stopping. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she sobbed through the tears that had begun to fall.

  He’d leaned over her, his mouth beside her ear. ‘Because I know you want me to.’

  As the paper crumpled under her and the desk juddered, Margot lay pinned beneath his weight. She closed her eyes and tried to block the pain – tried to take herself away from the horror of the moment – as the sickly scent of apples rose up to fill her lungs and outside, the silent river flowed relentlessly on its course.

  FRIDAY

  20

  Standing in the living room, Margot can see the marquee through the window, the white fabric billowing ghost-like among the trees. This time tomorrow, Lucy will be married and the house will be filled with the commotion and revelry of family and strangers. For now it is silent, just her, the ticking clock, the cat stretching on the sofa, and her mother hidden somewhere in the house.

  Over on the bookshelves, she spots a copy of The Quartz Heart, her mother’s fifth book in the Rare Elements series. She reaches for it, opening to the first page where a dedication is typed upon the white page.

  For my girls – the most precious elements of all.

  Love wildly. Live boldly.

  As Margot studies the words, emotion rises in her, a sickening, see-sawing tug of love and pride and anguish. Most precious. Is she precious? She doesn’t feel it. She knows what they all think of her. She knows how they judge her.

  And the rest of it: love wildly, live boldly. If only it were that simple. She sees the way Lucy throws herself at everything, optimistically, with her heart open and full of hope, but Margot cannot live like that. She tried, and the result was pain and violence. Imprisoned by her experience, she cannot seem to escape the confines of her trauma.

  Try as she might, she can’t help but feel her wound is somehow linked to her mother’s absence, to her mother’s words, and to her wafty, liberal attitudes about sex and relationships. Is it any wonder Margot struggles to let people close now? Is it really that strange that any feelings of desire and intimacy she has are laced with a need for punishment? She glances down at the dedication, then shuts the book, returning it to the shelf.

  Upstairs, she tries hard to ignore it, but the call of the vodka lying hidden in the bag beneath her bed is impossible to resist. Those unsettling thoughts about her mother and her growing unease about the family dinner ahead, compounded by the fact she hasn’t spoken to Lucy since their confrontation in the marquee, have stirred a need in her. Just a little, she tells herself, to calm her frayed nerves and blunt the sharp edges of her anxiety.

  She drags the holdall out from beneath the bed and unwraps the bottle from her clothes. The first swig scours the back of her throat, but by the third she is all heat and blissful numbness. She takes another couple of swigs before returning the lid to the bottle and lying back on her bed. That’s it. Just enough to take the edge off. She doesn’t need any more.

  After Lucy’s sharp words in the marquee, she had been tempted to get a train straight back to Edinburgh. She’d gone so far as to look up the return train timetables. Screw Lucy and screw her stupid wedding. Screw them all. She had come all this way to be with them. Why couldn’t that be enough? Why was Lucy pushing so hard? She doesn’t know what she is asking of her.

  Margot turns her face and sees the ripped patch of wallpaper beside the bed. It’s tempting to work a little more off the wall, but the sound of her phone beeping startles her from her reverie. She unlocks the screen and finds a message from Jonas. A single jpeg attachment. No words.

  Confused, she clicks on the thumbnail and watches as the screen fills with a black-and-white photo. She frowns. A face stares back at her. Her own.

  She recognises the location. The Edinburgh skyline is visible as a black silhouette behind her. The shot was taken in Jonas’s flat. She thinks back, and it comes to her, a day a few months ago when he’d returned home from work with a flashy new camera lens. ‘A few portrait shots,’ he’d begged. ‘So I can test it out. I’ll delete them right away, I promise.’

  ‘Fine, but I’m not posing.’

  ‘I don’t want you to pose,’ he’d said, lifting the camera and taking a photo.

  ‘Wait, I wasn’t ready.’

  ‘It’s fine. I want you like this. Natural. Candid. Perfectly yourself.’

  She’d sat there, feeling self-conscious and stiff, until the repetitive sound of the camera’s shutter opening and closing had sent her into an almost meditative state. ‘That’s it,’ he’d said a few minutes later, scrolling back through the frames. ‘You were great.’

  She hadn’t asked to see the images. She had assumed, incorrectly, that he had stuck to his word and erased them from the camera. As she peers at her phone screen, studying the image a little more closely, a second message appears.

  ‘See,’ he has written. ‘Beautiful.’

  She stares again at the photo. She doesn’t agree that she looks beautiful, but there is certainly something rather startling about the portrait, if only for the light captured in her eyes and the softness in her face, the way she gazes into the middle distance, her lips slightly parted. It’s not how she usually sees herself.

  ‘You said you’d delete them,’ she texts back.

  ‘I did. All but one. This one was too lovely to lose.’

  Too lovely to lose? She’s not sure about that, but the image certainly carries the hallmarks of Jonas’s work. There is a candour to the photo, a clarity he has become well known for, that has seen his demand as a photographer rise steadily in r
ecent months. For some reason, she finds herself thinking of the photograph tacked to the fridge in the flat – the shot he took all those years ago of his mother beside a lake in his hometown in Sweden.

  ‘Where are you?’ she types, wanting to imagine him, wherever he might be.

  ‘Somewhere near York. En route to my next job.’

  ‘Hope it’s a good one,’ she replies, confused by the sudden sense of longing she feels to be near him. She throws the phone back onto the bed and, before she can stop herself, reaches again for the bottle standing beside the bed.

  21

  Eve is wrestling May into a dress when Andrew calls from the offi ce. ‘I’m leaving now,’ he says. ‘Can we talk when I get home?’

  She tucks the phone between her ear and shoulder and pulls the fabric over May’s head. May squawks in protest. ‘I can’t breathe,’ she complains from beneath the dress. ‘It’s too tight.’

  ‘You’ll be fine if you stop wriggling.’

  ‘Eve? Are you there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Sorry, getting the girls changed. You haven’t forgotten about tonight’s dinner, have you?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m leaving early.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘So, can we talk? When I get back?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ Eve hesitates. ‘Is everything all right? It sounds important.’

  ‘It is. Look, I’ll talk to you when I get there, OK?’

  ‘Right.’ Eve feels a flutter of anxiety.

  ‘Have the girls ready and I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  ‘OK.’

  Andrew rings off and Eve sits for a moment on the floor in May’s bedroom, while her daughter grumbles and tugs at the dress.

  It’s not like Andrew to sound so … intense. What could he possibly want to talk to her about? His job? Their relationship? She sighs. She’s been dreading the family meal. It was bad enough that Lucy had stirred tensions with Margot yesterday. Combined with the thought of navigating a dinner with Andrew at her side and Ryan in residence at the pub, she’s been feeling nauseous all day. And now Andrew is acting strangely. Could he know? Or could it be something else?

  She picks up the second dress by her side. ‘Chloe,’ she calls. ‘Come and get changed, will you?’

  ‘In a minute, Mum,’ comes a small voice from downstairs.

  ‘Not in a minute. Now!’

  Chloe huffs up the stairs. ‘Sheesh, Mum.’ Her daughter’s eyes fall on the dress in her hands. ‘Not the frilly one.’

  ‘Come on. Do it for me. You look so lovely in this.’

  Chloe groans. ‘Oh Mum, you’re the worst.’

  Eve eyes her daughter. ‘Yes, Chloe. I am. Now come here.’

  Forty-five minutes later and with Andrew still not home, Eve checks the clock in the kitchen. They will need to leave in ten minutes if they are to get to the pub on time. She finds a stick of scarlet lipstick in her handbag and applies it in the hall mirror. She is just wondering if it looks a little too red – a little too ‘scarlet woman’ – when her phone rings again. ‘Sorry, love, the traffic’s been terrible. I’m five minutes away.’

  ‘Girls, get your shoes on. We need to be ready to leave as soon as Daddy gets here.’

  Moments later, Andrew rushes through the door. He pecks her on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry. There was an accident on the London Road. I’ll change and we’ll be off.’

  She nods. ‘What about that chat? Shall we do it in the car on the way?’

  Andrew eyes the girls. ‘No. Later.’

  Eve watches her husband rush up the stairs, two at a time, and feels a terrible sense of unease. Why does it feel as if everything is about to unravel?

  22

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ Kit reaches for her arm as they draw close to the pub, her grip surprisingly firm.

  Margot stops and turns back. ‘What if I have?’

  ‘Oh, Margot.’

  ‘Oh, Margot what? What do you think I’m going to do? What are you so terrified of, Mum?’ Margot can hear the slight slurring of her words and tries hard to annunciate more clearly. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ sighs Kit. ‘You’re here. Behave yourself, OK?’

  ‘You don’t need to worry,’ mutters Margot. ‘None of you need to worry.’

  The table has been set for an unlucky thirteen. Margot spots Ted and Sibella as she enters the pub. They are already in their seats at the far end of the table next to Tom’s family. Tom’s father, a grey-haired man in a crumpled suit with a walking cane propped next to his seat was, Margot remembers Lucy telling her, a respected professor of physics at some university somewhere until taking early retirement due to a Parkinson’s diagnosis. The trembling of the man’s hands is obvious as he leans across to chat with Ted and Sibella. Tom’s mum, a small, birdlike woman with Tom’s beaming smile, sits beside her husband, deep in conversation with Tom’s younger sister, Sarah, a primary-school teacher. At least, if she’s not a primary-school teacher, thinks Margot, taking in her rosy cheeks, floral dress and tied-back hair, she should be. She looks exactly how a primary-school teacher should look, clean and wholesome. The sight of her makes Margot feel the exact opposite.

  Lucy sits on her own at the centre of the table, looking lovely in a pale green shirt-dress. She is fiddling with the bangles on her arm, drumming her fingers on the table. Spotting Margot and Kit, she waves then gestures at Tom, who is up at the bar, ordering drinks. ‘Just in time,’ he says, kissing first Kit then Margot on the cheek. ‘What can I get you?’

  Kit orders a glass of wine. ‘Vodka tonic, please,’ says Margot. ‘A double,’ she adds, ignoring the angry glance from Kit.

  ‘You must be Margot,’ says Ryan, pouring half her tonic into a glass. ‘I’ve heard about you,’ he adds, as she shrugs off her leather jacket, revealing the full extent of the tattooed sleeve creeping up her bare arm.

  ‘All bad, I assume.’

  He laughs and slides her drink across the bar.

  ‘You’re the new manager here?’

  ‘For my sins.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Ryan.’

  The door to the pub swings open and Chloe and May burst through, wearing matching blue dresses, closely followed by Eve. ‘Auntie Margot,’ they cry, leaping all over her. Andrew follows behind, laden with an assortment of iPads, pens and colouring books.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ says Margot, hugging the girls tightly in turn, feeling a little of her tension release at their effusive greeting. ‘Who stole my nieces and replaced them with these giants?’

  Eve lets out a long exhalation and looks around, nodding at Ryan, before glancing at the table laid out at the far end of the pub. ‘Are you OK?’ she asks Margot, her voice low.

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ replies Margot, her voice a little too loud. Eve flinches. ‘Are you OK?’ Like Lucy, Eve looks weirdly tense. And she thought she was the only one who’d been dreading tonight?

  ‘Yes. I’m fine,’ says Eve, though she looks anything but.

  She glances across at her brother-in-law who is trying to shake Tom’s hand and simultaneously wrestle Chloe out of a pink, furry coat. ‘Had an argument with Andrew?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Evening, Margot,’ says Andrew, coming to kiss her on the cheek.

  She turns away slightly and offers him her coldest ‘hello’ in return.

  Ryan pushes a glass of red across the bar towards Eve. ‘And for the good gentleman?’ he asks, turning to Andrew.

  ‘Well, cheers,’ says Margot, clinking her glass against Eve’s. ‘Here’s to an uneventful evening,’ she adds, so that only Eve can hear.

  ‘Yes, quite,’ Eve agrees, taking a sip of her wine.

  Kit heads to the table. ‘Ted … Sibella,’ she says coolly, before offering a warmer greeting to Tom’s parents. Margot watches the awkward interlude, noting how her mother chooses a seat a tactful distance from Sibella and Ted, at the far end of the table. Eve and her family crowd in around Kit, leaving the only empty seat besi
de Lucy. Margot slides into it and carefully stands her drink on the coaster in front of her place setting. They haven’t spoken since she fled the marquee the previous afternoon, but Margot has already decided to pretend the altercation never happened.

  ‘Well, isn’t this nice,’ says Kit, raising her glass at them all from the head of the table, though Margot can see from the tight line of her mother’s jaw that her jolly tone is forced. Her gaze comes to rest on Margot’s tattoos and she winces visibly. Margot raises her own glass at her in response.

  Ted, seated at the other end, picks up on Kit’s cue. ‘We should toast the happy couple,’ he says. ‘Let’s wish them the best of luck for their big day tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Kit. ‘Best of luck, Tom and Lucy. May you have a long and happy life together.’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Tom, squeezing Lucy’s arm. Lucy nods at her parents but looks oddly grim-faced. Margot catches Eve’s eye and smirks. So this is how it’s going to be: false bonhomie and snide digs.

  ‘I like your tattoos,’ says May, gawping at the inked patterns winding up Margot’s arm. She reaches out and traces a spiralling vine with the tip of her finger until she comes to the small heart near the crook of her arm. ‘When I grow up, I’m going to get one just like it. We can match.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Margot with a wink, ‘I thought I might do the other arm too,’ she adds, holding out her bare right arm.

  ‘Yeah!’ says May. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ murmurs Eve.

  Gradually, the chatter turns to discussions of the menu. Margot leans in towards Lucy. ‘Shall we try and forget yesterday?’ she suggests. A peace offering. ‘Focus on tonight.’