The River House (11 page)

“He’s very sorry, Ginnie,” she said. “You mustn’t think too badly of him. He doesn’t know what got into him.”

I didn’t say anything. I should have gone and held her, but I hated her being so ugly and weak, so broken. I left her and
went upstairs. I tidied my bedroom and got on with my homework. Doing it immaculately, all so neat and fastidious, measuring
out the margin with absolute precision.

I think they tried to get help once. I was about thirteen. It was an odd day, everything out of shape, both of them wearing
their Sunday-best clothes on a Wednesday, our father in his churchwarden suit, our mother wearing her best Ponds coral lipstick
and a blouse in oyster silk with buttons that looked like pearls. She kissed me when we said good-bye, holding my face in
her hands to be sure she had my attention. Her voice was hushed and secret.

“It’s going to be all right now,” she said. “We’re seeing a special doctor. We’re going to get things sorted out.” Whispering
to me: It made me feel so special. “D’you mind not telling Ursula? I don’t want her getting all worried.”

Auntie Carol picked us up from school. We had our tea in her kitchen. For dessert, there were tinned peach halves, rounded
side up, in a pool of Carnation milk—she said they looked like poached eggs. She seemed very pleased with herself; she thought
this might amuse us. Ursula and I ate diligently, though we’d never had Carnation before, and its sweetness made my teeth
hurt. I was longing to be back home, for our happy new life to begin.

But that night our mother was quiet, with a gray look in spite of the cheerful coral lipstick. She didn’t tell me anything.
A few weeks later, it all began again.

I don’t think people did talk about us; I don’t think anyone knew. I once heard Mary Grayson of the lesbian daughter say to
my mother, “I saw your Brian in the flower shop. Those were lovely flowers he got you. He’s so romantic, your Brian. You’re
lucky to have found yourself a man who’s so romantic.”

We grew up and went our separate ways, Ursula and I—we’re very different people—yet each of us perhaps seeking to heal what
happened, to re-create childhood as a gentle place: me within the containing walls of my clinic, Ursula between the covers
of her fairy-tale books. I can see this clearly now, though at the time it was quite unconscious and our choices seemed to
follow from other imperatives—Ursula’s very evident talent, and my sudden infatuation with psychology, at the age of fifteen,
after finding a tattered paperback on Jung’s archetypes in the secondhand book stall at the church Fair. We never talked about
our father’s violence—not with each other, not with our mother, not with anyone—not even after he’d died.

Just once I raised it with her. It was when I was pregnant with Molly, toward the end of the pregnancy, when I was on maternity
leave, too huge and tired to do anything. It was a hot summer, and I lay for hours in the garden, letting the dandelions seed
around me, stupid as a stone. But at night my dreams were extraordinarily vivid and active, as though to compensate for the
lethargy of my days, and all concerned obsessively with my childhood: not in a direct way, but I’d dream about those gardens
with their lupines and Michaelmas daisies, and airplanes would crash on them, or earnest officers from some war crimes commission
would dig up the lawn behind the buddleia and unearth mutilated human remains. It was as though some intricate working out
was going on deep inside me. Ursula came for coffee on the way to an exhibition; and, disinhibited and half-drunk, perhaps,
with all the pregnancy hormones, I talked about our childhood.

“D’you ever think about it? You know—Dad, and the things he did to her?”

We were sitting at the table in my kitchen; I was sitting sideways because I could only just fit between the wall and the
table, everything about me lumbering and clumsy.

She looked at me warily, sitting stiffly, something withdrawing in her. She didn’t say anything.

I’d have leaned toward her and grasped her wrist, but I was pinned down by my swollen stomach, unable to reach out.

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “You can’t just not remember.”

I felt a quiver of impatience, the feeling growing in me that there was something I had to face up to before my own child
came—and that only she could help me.

Her face was tight, like a closed door. She picked a loose thread from her sleeve.

“They just had the odd bad patch,” she said. “It happens. It happens in an awful lot of families.”

I remembered her fear, how she’d pressed the blankets to her eyes and ears. I could see it, quite vividly.

“Some bad patch,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

I felt then how inviolate her reserve was—sleek and hard as varnish, everything running off it.

I tried again.

“D’you ever feel—I know it’s stupid, we were just kids—that we could have stopped it? I mean, I know we couldn’t. But d’you
ever feel guilty about it? D’you ever feel ashamed?”

She was glancing around my kitchen as though planning her escape.

“Ursula, please talk to me. Don’t you ever feel that?”

She cleared her throat.

“You live in your head too much, Ginnie,” she said. “I always think we were lucky to have such a happy childhood. I mean,
when you look at what some people go through.”

There were things I could have told her, that I wanted so much to tell her—the things I’d been thinking, lying amid the dandelions,
trying to understand. How I’d chosen Greg because he seemed so different from our father, but now I was starting to worry
that the peace he’d seemed to promise was really a kind of absence—that it wasn’t something you could build a marriage on.
How sometimes I wondered if half the things I’d done had been a struggle to prove that there’s some good in me. How even now
I felt such shame because I let Mum down.

But I couldn’t say these things to Ursula, who was frowning as she sat at my table, looking as though she wanted to be anywhere
but there.

“You mustn’t brood,” she said. “Really, Ginnie, you mustn’t. It’s bad for the baby.”

I
T’S A DULL DAY BY THE RIVER
—soft, warm for November. We go to the place at the side of the path, the secret place where the branches hang low. More leaves
have fallen since last we came here; we have to go farther in to be hidden from view. We make love quickly, keeping on most
of our clothes.

“D’you have to go straight back now?” I say as I brush the leaves and twigs from his shoulders.

He looks at his watch.

“More or less. Well, I don’t have time for a drink, anyway.”

“Perhaps a few moments?”

“OK. A few moments,” he says.

There’s a place where I turn off the path, taking him through the scrub between the path and the river. Over the water on
Eel Pie Island, the trees are turning gold. The grass here is worn where people have walked, and stone steps lead down to
the water.

“There’s a beach here,” I say. “When the tide’s right out.”

Years ago I often brought the girls here. We discovered the beach one lazy summer afternoon—a little crescent of bronze sand
littered with black fronds of seaweed, ragged and shiny and plastic-looking, the sand all lightly imprinted by the feet of
many birds. But today the tide is coming in; the sand is swallowed up already. We sit on the steps, our feet on the lowest
step not covered by the tide. The stone has a pale crust of dry mud. He puts his arm around my waist, pushing his hand between
my clothes and my skin. There’s a cold smell from the river.

“Talk to me,” he says. “Tell me what you think about when we make love. Tell me what you like.”

I’m hesitant. I think of his taste, of his warm slide into me, of everything in me opening up to him. But I’ve never had this
kind of conversation.

“I don’t know if I can say those things,” I tell him. “Women are different.” I’m playing for time, taking refuge in generalization.
“Women are better at saying what they don’t like.”

“I’d noticed,” he says, a little rueful and weary, making me smile.

“I could tell you the things I don’t like. … Anything to do with food—eating strawberries off each other, all that kind of
thing. And cross-dressing. I mean, why would anyone choose to dress as a woman if they don’t have to?”

“You don’t like being a woman?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You do it well,” he says.

“I’ve had practice.”

“But surely it’s much less boring, isn’t it, being a woman? I like women. Women are more interesting.”

I smile. Eva would say, A man who likes women a lot has liked a lot of women.

“Group sex, too,” I tell him. “I’ve never understood it. I don’t see how sex can be communal. Wouldn’t it lose its charge?”

“So what do you like, Ginnie?” he says.

The tide is rushing in, water clear as air covering the lowest branches of the rosebay willow herb that clings to the banks
of the river. I love the way the plant moves under the water—its dance, its sinuousness, the way it seems to be stirred by
a secret wind.

“Your mouth. Your hands, the things you do with your hands, the way you move them. The sound of your breathing.”

He has his mouth in my hair.

“OK,” he says. “Your turn. Ask away.”

“Things you like then.”

“Oh, all of it really. You know how men are.”

“Tell me.”

“I like to watch you come,” he says.

I curve into him. I want to make love again.

A houseboat goes by, green-painted with a pattern of roses and a dog stretched out on top. It’s all so contradictory here
by the river—behind us the path and the shadowy hidden places, and in front this watery thoroughfare where everything can
be seen.

There are other things I could ask, because they fill me with a feverish curiosity. How old is your wife—is she very much
younger than me? And is she very beautiful, as beautiful as her photograph? How often do you make love with her? Have you
had affairs before? How long did they last? And who did you have them with, and exactly how much did you love them? But I
don’t ask these questions.

A heron takes off from somewhere near, the sound of its wings like someone tearing linen, its plumage the color of smoke or
winter sky. It lands in the willow with branches that fall into the water at the end of Eel Pie Island. We are quiet for a
while, watching.

“When I first came here with Molly and Amber,” I tell him, “we found some mussel shells and an abandoned sandal, and someone
had written their name with a stick in the sand.” I think how the waves came rushing up in the wake of the pleasure boats,
making the girls shriek with delight and run for the safety of the steps, and with the turbulence came that wonderful brackish
smell, the mixture of fresh and salt, the promise of the sea. “And once we came in the evening, and the water was pink and
all these geese and swans were just standing in the shallows.”

“I’d like to hear more about your girls,” he says.

I tell him some of Molly’s university stories.

Two swans come over and linger near us, casually dabbling, their long necks sinuous as snakes, but mud-colored, not immaculate
like their backs or wings. They’re so close you can hear their grunting, and the soft shushing sounds their beaks make as
they preen their feathers.

“You never talk about Jake,” I say.

He slips his hand out from under my sweater; he still has his arm around me, but he isn’t touching my skin.

“Jake’s not like other kids,” he says. His voice is tired, heavy.

I think of the photograph, the unsmiling little boy.

“Megan always thought there was something wrong,” he says slowly. “She thought it for months, she kept on about it. I told
her not to worry.”

I wait quietly. I remember the shadow I’ve seen on him, and the way he looks so sad when he thinks that no one can see.

“I feel dreadful about that now,” he says. “I should have listened.”

For a while he doesn’t say anything. I bite back the urge to ask more.

“They say it’s Asperger’s,” he says then. “Like a mild form of autism. He can’t read people. … Sorry, I’m being really crass—you’d
know about these things.”

“Yes. But not from inside, like you do.”

“Everything’s very literal,” he says. “He doesn’t get the social rules. Stuff like—if someone says, ‘How are you?’ they don’t
really want you to tell them. And nobody likes him, of course. He says the wrong thing and upsets people.”

We’re sitting separately now. I’m very aware of the space between us, the way we have edged a little farther apart.

“Yes,” I say. I’d like to hold him and comfort him, but I feel I don’t have the right.

“I just see him getting everything wrong. It breaks your heart,” he says.

We’re silent for a moment, looking out over the water.

“Will you have another child?” I say then.

He shrugs.

“I don’t know. Not the way we’re going.”

He isn’t looking at me now.

“I have this dream,” he says, “of seeing him kicking a football round the garden with his mates. Except he doesn’t have mates.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

We sit there in the cold, with the sounds of the swans and the tide coming in. Soon the water will reach us.

“Ginnie.” There’s a new sound in his voice, urgent, definite. “I don’t want to change or disrupt anything. You know that,
don’t you?”

“Yes. Of course.”

He turns to me, he has my face in his hands. His hands smell of our lovemaking.

“Ginnie. Can we do this without anyone getting hurt?”

“If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be here,” I say: then think, Is that true? Wouldn’t I still be here no matter how risky
it was? Could I stop myself? My mind shies away from the thought.

He lowers his hands, shakes his head a little.

“There are all these people, all these children,” he says.

“I think … I make it all right with myself,” I tell him, “by imagining this is another world, a separate world. That when
I’m with you, I’ve entered a different world—and what happens in one world doesn’t change anything in the other. That what
I do here can’t harm them there. …”