The River House (13 page)

Driving back to rejoin the motorway, I have to go past the gravel pits. It’s a road that still makes me uneasy; when I was
a child, I was followed once on this road. I was walking back from a piano lesson. I don’t know why I didn’t have my bicycle—perhaps
a puncture I hadn’t had time to fix. But I know I was wearing a faded blue cotton frock that I liked, that the sun was warm
on the bare skin of my arms, that my music case was heavy with a new volume of Beethoven sonatas that I was very proud of:
I carried the case with my arm stiff and straight, so it wouldn’t bang on my legs. There was a smell of sun on grass, and
the musty, sweaty scent of that ragged yellow-flowered weed that seems to thrive in gravelly soil. Beyond the gravel pits
there would be the field with the two horses—one black, one chestnut—that would come up to the fence when I passed and that
liked to be petted and talked to. I looked forward to the horses. I walked on through the hushed summer afternoon under the
arc of the sky.

I became aware that there was a man behind me. He was walking at just my speed, perhaps twenty paces behind. I glanced over
my shoulder. He was ordinary-looking, a little taller than me, in his shirtsleeves. Not someone I’d ever seen before. I was
afraid, my heart pounding. He didn’t gain on me, just stayed there, walking behind me, always keeping his distance. You could
see a long way to either side. There were no people, nothing. Trucks were parked at the gravel pit, but nobody was working
there today. It was quiet on the road, no sound but the cries of seagulls. The smell of the yellow weed was thick. I thought
of the girl whose body was found in a ditch on Southampton Common; I’d read about it in the
Southern Evening Echo.
I wanted to run, but something stopped me: embarrassment, perhaps, and some calculation that he could run faster anyway,
and my music case was so heavy, and I didn’t want to leave my new sonatas behind.

I came to the crossroads. I heard his quickening footsteps behind me. I knew he was gaining on me. He drew level with me,
standing close. I couldn’t move; I felt pure terror. He asked me the time, then walked on, overtaking me, going off to the
left beyond the field at the crossroads. As soon as he was out of sight, I forgot the weight of my music case and ran all
the way home. I remember it still so vividly—the footsteps behind me, the sense of something so inevitable, drawing closer,
something I couldn’t escape from.

I
SEE
W
ILL EVERY
T
HURSDAY
through November. It’s cold by the river. When there’s no sun, the water is a harsh color, like metal, with a white skin
where it holds the shine of the sky. Some of the trees are bare now; at the sides of the path there are soft, dark drifts
of leaves. The balsam is dying back and broken, just a few ragged leaves still clinging, with swollen red knots like injuries
on the stems. The ground and the trees are sodden, and we have to take care or the places where we make love will leave their
mark on us, and we’ll go back with smears on our clothes from the green velvet algae on the tree trunks, or wet leaves in
our hair.

Our timing is wrong. We should be having this love affair in the summer, when it’s close and warm and secret here, and pale
dust rises from the path where you tread, and flower scents brush against you, the winey sweetness of elder, and the fruit-gum
smell of the balsam flowers, which are mauve with a scribble of black and intricate as orchids. Like on the summer afternoons
when I came here with the girls, walking the towpath or exploring the islands in the river.

I think of the time we crossed the arched footbridge onto Eel Pie Island. The houses had a shacklike, temporary air, and the
gardens were overgrown, with tangled roses with great shaggy heads, spilling out their perfume, and white hollyhocks that
brushed against us like pallid, fleshy hands. In one garden, baby dolls and Barbies were stuck into the window boxes and beds
of earth like flowers, perhaps fifty of them, all naked, their hair matted and stiff with soil. The girls stared at this perverse,
witchy planting. Amber went close, intrigued, but Molly was scared.

“That’s creepy, Mum,” she said. “The dolls won’t like it.” Her licorice eyes widening, her hand tightening in mine.

Another time I took them across a different bridge to an island farther upstream. It was a summer Sunday morning, with a slight
silver haze on the river. There were notices saying that this was Taggs Island and trespassing wasn’t allowed, but we just
walked on past them; it was one of the few illicit things I’d ever done. It was an island of gardens, of moored houseboats
each with its own small plot of lawn and flower bed, the gardens ornate with pergolas and rockeries, and the houseboats painted
the colors of fruit—mandarin, lime, lemon—and one apple green with a little blue dinghy tied up. It was completely quiet,
a world away from the Sunday traffic on the riverbank road, no one around but a cat with narrow gold eyes, and an old man
sitting in the sun on his porch, who viewed us with suspicion. The island is a horseshoe shape; there was water on every side
of you, crimped by the breeze and shimmering. An enchanted place on that hazy summer morning: Though I didn’t feel the enchantment
was entirely benign. But Amber adored it.

“Could we live here, Mum? Could we? I really, really want to.”

“Maybe we could,” I said. “One day. Who knows.”

“I want to, Mum. I shall live in the little green houseboat. And I shall have a cat and a boat to row in. …”

In summer the plants at the sides of the river paths grow as tall as a man, weaving lavish walls of meadowsweet and mallow.
There are places off the path where you might be hidden—shadowed, scented places, private and enclosed.

But it’s winter, and our dreams are all of rooms.

“I’d like to lie down with you,” he says. “I’d like to stretch out on a bed beside you. To make love to you so slowly on a
great big bed.”

We talk about this room where we could meet in secret, but never reach a decision.

“We could go to a hotel perhaps,” he says.

“Yes. I suppose. I don’t know …”

I like to think of going to a hotel. I imagine it often. I picture the delicious embarrassment at reception, feeling like
people from a 1930s movie; it’s so like a scene from an old film in my imaginings, that when I picture it, it’s in black and
white and I’m wearing suede court shoes. I think how I’d try to keep my face sealed, serious—yet knowing I must look flushed,
a little apprehensive, thinking for a moment, perhaps, What on earth are we doing? We’d walk up the stairs, not touching,
maintaining a decorous space between us; and we’d go in together and close the door. The room would be nondescript, impersonal,
with prints of stags on the walls and a red Gideon Bible and little soaps wrapped in cellophane; and we’d make love with such
extravagance, relishing all that space and license, my head flung back over the side of the mattress as he moved his mouth
on me, my back stretched out and arched, intensifying everything.

“Could we really do that?” I say. “Can you book a hotel room just for an hour or two? Do people do that—ordinary people like
us? Just take a room?”

“I’m sure they do.”

“But the girl on reception—I mean, she’d know exactly what we were doing.”

“Of course. It would be good though, wouldn’t it?” He pushes my hair away from my eyes; his fingers are warm on my skin. “But
I don’t suppose we will.”

I would like him to say, We’ll do it—I know just where to go, I’ve booked the room. … Yet at the same time I feel uncertain—if
you take a room, you’re doing something definite, irrevocable. You’re leaving clues; there’s a trail for people to find.

Sometimes I think of rooms that are more dreamlike, that don’t belong to anyone: that we inhabit in a different life that’s
parallel to this one, that’s entirely constructed around this passion we share. A basement room perhaps, with muslin curtains
blowing at the windows and people passing in the street above us—near enough to hear us, not able to see in. Or an opulent
room with a wide white bed and a canopy of some pale crushed apricot fabric—and I lie very still on the mattress under the
apricot canopy as he moves his hands across me and eases me apart. It’s absolutely vivid when I think about it: I can feel
his fingers opening me and the wash of heat over my skin.

I never tell him about these rooms I imagine. We don’t talk much when we meet. We just make love, quite quietly, in some hidden
place by the river path, then drive to the bar on Sheffield Street, and if he has time we’ll have a Coke and a whiskey and
a snatch of conversation. He might tell me a little about his work, and I love it when he does this; I’m hungry to know about
him. It’s mostly boredom, he says, but sometimes there’s the kick, the thrill, and that’s what hooks you. Like when you’re
doing surveillance and nothing happens for ages, you’re just waiting in the car, then suddenly the call comes, and your coffee
goes straight out the window, and you’re following this guy, you’re on a high for hours. …

I tell him I envy him for the directness of what he does, how it somehow seems so real. Whereas in my own work, I deal in
representations all the time, in memories and imaginings.

“But you’re good at what you do,” he says. “I can tell that. Your empathy for those kids you work with.”

He runs one finger down the side of my face, his hand so gentle, as though I am some precious thing.

He’d hoped to have moved a bit further up the ranks, he tells me. He applied for the job that Roger Prior has now, in the
murder squad.

“To be honest, I knew I didn’t have a hope once I heard that Roger was going for it too,” he says. “He’s sharp. You can’t
get anything past him.”

I sense the disappointment in him—the feeling that life hasn’t turned out the way he’d planned. I rest my hand on his. And
we leave the bar, and he kisses me as we stand there in the street, a light, formal kiss, his lips just brushing my cheek,
and we move back into our separate lives, the things we have to do, the people who need us. ’Til this rhythm starts to seem
natural to me, and I come to believe that nothing will be damaged.

I
T’S PARENTS’ EVENING
at Amber’s school.

I’m late; the school gym is already a sea of people. There’s a faint, residual smell of feet and adolescent sweat, and the
air tastes stale, as though it’s been breathed a thousand times before. The women are dressed as though for a job interview,
smartly lipsticked and jacketed, and most have their husbands with them. I try to quell the familiar pang of envy. Greg has
never come to a parents’ evening. I used to try to persuade him, but he’d always be reluctant; now, I just handle all the
girls’ issues on my own. But I’ve noticed how the teachers view you differently if you’re without a man, take you somehow
less seriously.

The teachers are sitting at desks arranged down the sides of the hall. We all have bits of paper with our interview times,
but nobody keeps to their times and you end up queuing for hours. Every ten minutes someone sets off a school bell that sounds
like a fire alarm, to encourage us to move on. I feel a quick instinctive panic every time it sounds. I join the queue for
Mrs. Russell, Amber’s form tutor.

I glance around the hall. Eva is in a queue a few yards away, waiting to see the Computer Studies teacher. She’s wearing a
classy long black skirt with part of a French poem printed in white around the hem.

The siren sounds and it’s my turn.

“I’m Amber’s mother.”

“Ah,” says Mrs. Russell. She shakes my hand.

I sit down. She has a cup of tea beside her, with a ginger nut in the saucer. She takes a sip of tea.

I haven’t met her before. She has a pink, flustered face, and her purple lipstick clashes with her sweater—as though she doesn’t
have time to make things match.

“I’m sorry my husband couldn’t come,” I say.

“Not to worry,” she says.

She has Amber’s marks set out in a book in front of her. I realize I’m craning forward, trying to read them upside down. She
looks at her book; there are sharp little vertical lines between her eyes. A familiar apprehension clutches at me. I think
of the comments on Amber’s most recent report: “Teaching Amber is like stirring porridge”; “Amber’s efforts are to be commended
in a subject for which she has so little aptitude or enthusiasm.”

“Amber does have quite a mixed bunch of marks, I’m afraid,” says Mrs. Russell. “To be honest, we
are
a little concerned.”

I flinch, thinking guiltily of the private tutor I never got around to fixing.

“It’s not that she doesn’t have ability—quite the reverse,” she says. “But she’s so erratic. She needs to get herself organized.”

She has a resonant voice. I remember what Amber said about Academic Mentoring Day, when the girls all have individual interviews
with their form tutors. You’re in this hall, and everyone’s waiting behind you, and Mrs. Russell says, like, really loudly,
Amber, are you being bullied? And you think, No, but
now
I will be.

“I know what you mean,” I say carefully.

Her look is severe and concerned, as though she thinks I haven’t understood.

“This is a really crucial year for her,” she says. “It’s a very bad time to lose the plot. And unfortunately we don’t feel
anything’s in the bag yet, quite honestly, with her GCSE’s. She badly needs a bit of focus.”

I don’t know what to say. I have a brief wayward urge to explain about my daughter. How she seems to slip through my fingers
like water—yet I always feel her feyness is part of her, the way she’s meant to be. How her talent for friendship dazzles
and delights me. How when she was little she wanted to fly across the river on the back of a bird.

“I don’t think planning’s her strong point,” I say. “You know, thinking things through—thinking into the future. I don’t think
she connects what she does now with the future—with the rest of her life. I mean, teenagers don’t really, do they?”