The River House (20 page)

Amber twists her scrunchy around her wrist and shakes out her hair, pulling her fingers through it.

“I bet it’s the same guy,” she says. “You know, the one who did that other murder. That girl who got killed so near her home.
I bet it’s a serial killer.”

“Is that what they’re saying?”

“They haven’t exactly said it yet. No one’s said anything about who did it. But I bet it is. I bet it’s that psycho. Mum,
don’t you think it’s weird?”

I tell her yes, I think it’s weird, for it to have happened just there. But she shakes her head a little, as though I just
don’t get it.

“How long ago do they think it—you know—happened?” I ask her.

“They haven’t said. They haven’t identified her or anything.”

A detective is on the screen now. He has a stern gaze and a bony, hollowed-out face. He talks in the careful, measured way
in which we speak of the tragedies of strangers—the composed face, the downward intonation. I wonder if Will knows him. There’s
the usual warning that women should be wary of going out alone. And then the appeal for witnesses: if you’ve seen anything
odd or suspicious near the place where the body was found—anything at all, no matter how trivial it might seem. There’s a
number to ring. My body is weighed down. I don’t move.

Amber looks at me as though I have disappointed her.

“Honestly, Mum, I thought you’d be more interested.”

She goes to wash her hair.

It’s cold in the kitchen. I make a coffee but don’t drink it. I sit at the table, clasping my hands around the mug. Light
catches in the gluey silver trail of a snail, that traces a random arabesque across my terra-cotta tiles. Other women don’t
have snail trails in their kitchens. I ought to be like other people, with their orderly, thought-out lives.

I realize that I’m shivering, my body shaking as if this death has touched me in some direct way. I clutch my coffee mug to
warm my hands and tell myself that this has nothing to do with me. That the man I saw was just an ordinary stranger, out for
a walk by the river, minding his business, caught in a shower of rain. I sift through all the things I know about witnesses
and how they can’t be relied on, how we can’t remember precisely what we saw; we think we remember, but really we’re recalling
details we’ve imagined. Details that are quite vivid to us—as I now picture the woman who died, whom I have never seen; as
this conjured face persists for me, her glazed eyes and that swollen, terrible pallor of those who find death by water. This
woman I have never seen—yet in my mind she is real.

I tell myself again and again that there was nothing odd about the man I saw on the river path. I’ve invented details, given
it too much significance, because I was there with Will, illicitly, and scared of someone seeing us. I’ve projected the guilt
I felt onto this random stranger, seeing
him
as guilty and scared of being seen.

But I don’t convince myself. So I try to recall if anyone else was there that day by the river. I hunt along the path for
other people, for someone who could take this responsibility from me. But there was no one: not even the man in the shabby
coat who likes to feed the birds. Even the river seemed empty. I remember how glad I was, how it made it all seem safe and
perfect and somehow meant to happen—that the riverbank was ours alone, that everyone was sheltering from the gathering storm.

I shout to Amber that I’m going down to the corner shop. My cell phone is in my pocket.

Outside it’s cold; when I pass beneath the streetlights, my breath is thick as smoke. The moon shines yellow through a veil
of cloud. Halfway to the corner shop, in a pool of shadow where I can scarcely see, I stop and ring Will’s number. As I move
my hand, there’s a warning inside me, telling me not to do this, clear and unequivocal. I pay no attention.

“Yes?”

“Will, it’s Ginnie,” I say redundantly.

A silence.

“What is it?” he says then. His voice is level, brisk. It’s his work voice, not the way he ever talks to me.

“I’m sorry to ring you like this, but I didn’t know what else to do. …”

In the background I can hear music, and a woman talking; I don’t know if this voice is his wife’s or on the television. I
strain my ears to hear, but the voice is too far away. I try to picture the room where he is, the home he never talks about.
I think of my dream, of that perfect family life I envisioned for him—the damask tablecloth, the table set for tea, the jade
teapot. In that moment I see so clearly, how little I know of him and how little of him I possess. As though he’s just some
dream I had. I hear how he walks away from these sounds, out into a hallway perhaps.

“OK?” he says.

“Will, they’ve found a body in the river.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Near where—you know, near where we go. When we’re together.” It’s as though I need to remind him, because just at this moment
I don’t quite believe in our love affair. I can’t imagine that I was ever intimate with this brisk and wary man.

“These things happen,” he says.

“Why I rang—I was thinking about that man—you know, the man I saw on the river path. … Whether I should say something. …”

He cuts me off.

“Look, we need to talk,” he says. “But it’s not a good time for me right now. Couldn’t we speak on Thursday, like we planned?”

“Yes, of course,” I say. “But I wondered …”

“OK then,” he says. He switches off his phone.

As I go back through the front door, Amber’s music blares down at me. A sudden hot rage surges through me.

I go upstairs. The bathroom door is open. There’s a clot of long red hairs in the plug hole, and discarded towels and water
all over the floor.

I go into her room without knocking. She’s sitting on her bed eating a Kit Kat, talking on her phone. Her hair always has
a rich blackish sheen when it’s wet. It’s hanging everywhere, and she hasn’t begun to towel it—it’s dripping all over her
duvet and some schoolbooks that are flung down there.

“Amber, I want that music off.” My voice sounds shrill and ugly to me. But I can’t stop: Anger has its claws in me. “And no
wonder you can never eat your dinner if you’re forever stuffing yourself with crap.”

She looks up at me, outraged.

“Mum, for God’s sake, I’m on the
phone
.”

I pay no attention.

“And you can just go and deal with that bathroom now. It’s a bloody swamp in there.”

“Look, Mum,” she says, “I’m speaking to Katrine.” She articulates the words patiently, as though to someone rather stupid.
“I’ll deal with the bathroom when I’ve finished. Just cool it, OK?”

I turn to go.

“I’m so sorry,” she says to Katrine in a sibilant stage whisper. “That was my Mum. I think she’s had a bad day. I expect it’s
PMS.”

I go slowly downstairs. The rage has left me, as suddenly as it came. I’m ashamed to have been so angry about wet towels and
a Kit Kat. There are too many things I have done that I ought not to have done.

I have one of those dreams where you’re only half awake but believe in the dream that you’ve completely woken. It’s raining
again—I can hear the sounds of water—and I dream that the river has come into my room. I can smell its brackish scent, of
sea salt and decay. The river rises, above the bed, so my body is partly submerged, and my hands on top of the duvet have
the unreal look of the willowherb and balsam, when they’re gradually covered by the rising tide. I know there are things I
should do—that I should pile up sandbags to protect my home and children from the flood: But the water holds me there, I can’t
move.

The dream changes. The lights come on; this is a dream of daytime, ordinary and banal. I’m in a warehouse—one of those furniture
megastores where you go to buy flat-pack furniture and insubstantial sofas with abrupt Scandinavian names. I walk down the
aisles of the warehouse, between banks of shelves that stretch up to the ceiling, big metal shelves with a lot of space between
them; they hold bundles loosely wrapped in cloth, and I see that these are bodies stacked like carpets or rolls of curtain
fabric. I know this is one of the dead houses, but I don’t feel any fear, just a kind of certainty. All the bodies are turned
away, so I can’t see their faces. I reach to the two bodies nearest me and try to turn them over; they’re heavy, drenched,
and it takes all my strength to shift them. Their hair is dripping, as though they’ve just been pulled from the deep. One
of them has tangled hair of that dark color that red hair goes when it’s soaked, as though there’s a lot of black in it. With
a very great effort, I turn the bodies toward me. They have the faces of my children, just as I knew they would.

I
WAIT IN THE MIRRORED BAR
. I listen to the music and look at my newspaper, though none of it makes sense.

He comes on time. He kisses me. He’s just the same as ever. I feel a huge relief.

I drive toward the river house just as I always do. But halfway there I find myself stopping and pulling over the curb.

“What is it?” he says. “What’s the matter?”

“Perhaps we should go somewhere else,” I say.

He strokes my hair, but he’s a little impatient.

“There isn’t anywhere else to go,” he says. “We’ve been into all that.”

“Maybe we could—you know—find a hotel, like we keep saying we will,” I say without conviction. “Get a room somewhere.”

“There isn’t time,” he says. “I’ve got to get back by half past two.”

“It just seems weird going back there—after what happened.”

“Bad things happen everywhere,” he says. “They don’t leave anything behind.”

“But what about the police? Maybe there will still be police there.”

“No. They’ve finished,” he says.

I just sit there for a moment, don’t start up the car.

He cups my face in his hands; his skin is very warm. I press my mouth into his palm.

“Ginnie,” he says, “I really want to make love to you. But we don’t have to if you’re not sure.”

He pulls me toward him and kisses me.

“I’m sure,” I tell him.

The car park is churned up, and on the path there are tire tracks where vehicles wouldn’t normally go, but otherwise it is
all much as it always was. It’s a cold, bright day; frost has left its white footprints in the shaded places, and in the sun
the grass is heavy and bright with moisture. You can hear people playing football, perhaps on a school playing field, their
voices echoey in the stillness, as though the sound bounces off the hard rim of the sky. The swans are close to the riverbank.
As we pass, one takes off with a great clatter from the still, sepia water.

We walk on down the path. There, at the foot of a willow that droops down into the water, someone has left a bunch of flowers
in cellophane. The flowers are dying, finished off by the cold. I see him look, but neither of us says anything.

I want to make sure that everything is right between us; I’m longing to explain.

“Will—about Tuesday night—I wanted …”

He turns and puts a finger on my lips.

“Not now,” he says. “We’ll talk about it later.”

At the river house he untwists the wire. It’s chilly, colder than the path outside. Even the thin winter sun had a bit of
warmth in it. The spiders have been busy, their webs forming huge, soft festoons across the corners. I feel a shiver of some
inchoate emotion—anger, perhaps, and a sense that our secret place has been spoiled.

“Will, I’m not sure …”

He pushes my hair away from my face. I turn a little, so if by mistake I opened my eyes I still couldn’t see down the river
path.

“You’re so jumpy,” he says. “There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

He kisses me, his tongue exploring my mouth.

I’ve brought the blanket. We lie down. Today I want him on top of me, his warmth and weight and urgency, wanting to hide in
him. His body tells me how he loves me. I start to shake as he moves his hand on me.

But as excitement surges through me, an image sneaks into my mind. It’s whole and complete, as though I’m remembering something
I’ve seen. A man and a woman, naked and anonymous, like an image from pornography. The man is standing behind the woman—he
has his hands around her throat; his fingers are pressing into her. It’s precise and clear and many-colored, floating as dream
images float; I can’t switch it off or get rid of it. I don’t know if it excites me: maybe it does, I don’t know. It just
stays there, ’til I come: It won’t be pushed away.

Afterward he lies beside me, holding me for a moment.

“There. That was OK, wasn’t it?” he says. “It looked as though it was OK.”

I kiss him. “I’ve been in a weird mood. Sorry. I’m just not quite myself.”

He strokes my hair.

“Ginnie, you think too much,” he says.

We walk back past the fleet of swans, and the flowers in their wrap of cellophane, and the boy on Eel Pie Island. As always,
just for a second or two, I think that it’s a living child. When you’re by the river it’s hard to tell what’s real.

“I’ve got time for a drink,” he says as we go to the car.

This makes me happy. I always hate it when he leaves too soon. Really, I’d like to spend hours together after making love.
I’d like to drowse, our limbs entangled, to watch him as he’s sleeping, to see the flickering under his eyelids when he dreams.
But I know I can’t have that, and a drink is much better than nothing.

We go back to the bar. He has Coke; I have whiskey. We sit on the terrace, in our coats, though really it’s too cold for me.
There’s a low, dazzling sun. He puts his sunglasses on.

His hands rest on the table between us; I look at his hands, at the thin dark hairs on the backs of his fingers, the lilac
net of veins inside his wrists. I think how much I love him. I want to reach out, to press his hand between mine again, to
drag my finger along the smooth skin inside his arms. I would like to hold on to this moment, to keep it like this forever:
him sitting quietly here with me in the winter garden.