The River House (22 page)

“Max, look at it another way. What’s the
right
thing for this woman to do? If you viewed it in the abstract, as a moral problem. What would be the right thing?”

He shakes his head at me.

“Jesus, Ginnie, if it’s moral advice you’re after, I’m the very last person in the world you want. You need a philosopher
or a priest—not a rather lecherous lawyer.”

“Tell me. Please. What would you do, if it was you?”

“Ginnie, this isn’t fair.”

“I’m asking you to tell me.”

He moves his hand, swirling the drink around his glass; the ice makes a percussive sound. He smiles the salacious smile I’ve
expected from the beginning.

“I’d need to know more, really. A few details.”

“No. You know quite enough.”

For a while he says nothing, sipping his drink.

“I think I’d keep quiet,” he says then. “You have to be pragmatic. You have to take the long view.”

“But justice matters.”

“Of course. Ginnie, look, you did ask for my opinion. It’s not fair to then say it’s the wrong opinion when I give it.”

“But maybe this woman owes something to … whoever was the victim of this crime.”

“Maybe.” He’s turned away from me, looking out at the garden.

“Wouldn’t she just feel guilty all her life if she left it?” I say.

“There are things that are best kept quiet,” he says. “Maybe I’m wrong. But that’s my view on it, Ginnie.”

He turns back to me.

“Look at it this way,” he says. “What’s done is done. Your friend can’t undo the bad thing—the crime—whatever it was she saw.
A lot of damage is done by people who are sure they’re doing the right thing. I think she’d be well advised to be pretty cautious
about this: to weigh any good she might do by telling against the hurt she might cause.”

I go to the bathroom before I leave. It’s plentifully stocked, unlike his fridge or his kitchen. On the shelf above the basin,
there are bottles of shampoo and shower gel in sugary, feminine scents, so there must be some woman who visits. Well, there
usually is. He has a picture above the bath, a Japanese erotic print, a man and a woman on a veranda, the moonlight shining
through a maple, the leaves of the tree as red as blood and fringed and curled like flowers. The man is behind her, poised
to penetrate her; you can see his large, pale penis and the intricate folds of her flesh. It’s unnerving, the way it’s at
once so explicit and so decorous: They’re still wearing their sprigged kimonos, they have neat, elaborate hair.

I stare at my face in the mirror for a moment. In the clear spring light you can see every crease and the grayness under my
eyes. I run cool water over my wrists. I feel very alone. He’s given me an excuse, a way that leads out of the wood—so why
don’t I feel more at peace? I realize I hoped for the wrong thing: that I looked for an easy answer, and there isn’t one.
Nobody can tell me what to do.

Max senses how I feel.

“I haven’t been much use, have I?” he says as he takes me out to the door.

“It helps to talk,” I say. “Thank you.”

He shakes his head a little.

“Obviously, this is just between us,” I tell him.

“Obviously.”

“And thanks again for having Amber.”

“Not at all. She was great to have around,” he says.

“She really enjoyed it,” I tell him.

We finalize our arrangements for next weekend, when we have the choir reunion in Walsall.

“It’ll do you a world of good,” he says. “Get you away from your troubles for a bit. Your poor mother, and your rather adventurous
friend …”

We hug, and I walk off between the immaculate conifers.

O
N
F
RIDAY EVENING
, Mrs. Russell brings Molly’s canvas to the house. It’s so big she has to use the school minivan. I see her struggling with
it in the street, and rush to open the gate. We ease it in through the door and prop it up in the hall.

The figures Molly painted command attention: our mother with her worried air, the lines deeply etched in her face, and our
father looming over her, and Ursula and me, with our stripy summer dresses and our conscientious smiles. The acrylic colors
sing out in my quiet hall. I think of the autumn evening when we went to the school art exhibition—the day before I met Will.
It seems so long ago now.

“There,” says Mrs. Russell, with relief. She’s pink; she’s breathing heavily. “Mr. Bates wanted to say thanks to Molly for
letting us keep it so long.”

“Not at all,” I say.

“He was very keen to have it there for our Open Day. I said I’d bring it round for him.” She lowers her voice a little. “I
thought I could take the opportunity to have a quick word about Amber.”

“Oh.” I feel a surge of anxiety, or maybe shame, expecting a reprimand. “I think she’s in the kitchen.” I gesture Mrs. Russell
through the hall.

“It was you I wanted to speak to,” she says.

She stands close to me; she smells of fresh deodorant.

I nod.

“I’m happy to say that generally there’s been a real improvement,” she says. “We’re very pleased. She seems to be putting
in a lot more effort. Several of her teachers have remarked on it. Obviously something you’re doing is really working.”

“Well. Good.” My voice is hesitant. I don’t think I’ve done anything.

“So, what happened?” she says. “Did you have a good talk with her?”

“Kind of.” I hunt around in my mind for something to say. “Well, she did enjoy her work experience. Maybe that helped her
get a bit more focused.”

“Excellent,” she says. “What I wanted to talk about—it’s just this issue of getting her work in on time. That’s the one area
where we don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Somehow we’re just not getting through. I can’t stress how important it is, with
her GCSE’s coming up.”

“Yes, I do see that.”

She has the flustered look she had on the parents’ evening, as though everything happens too fast for her, and things rush
past and she struggles after them, calling for them to stop. “Course work has to get there on time, there are no second chances.
If we don’t get it sent off by the due day, the girl risks not getting a mark. Well, I’m sure you understand.”

“Absolutely.”

“She doesn’t seem to listen when I tell her. It just doesn’t go in somehow.”

Her eyes are on me, her forehead creased in a frown.

I think how Amber slips away like water between your hands.

“She can be rather vague,” I tell her.

“I think perhaps we do need to take a firmer line. I don’t doubt she has ability. Well, it’s obviously there in the family.
Just look at what Molly’s achieved.”

She leaves a pause. I think of saying that Molly and Amber aren’t meant to be the same.

“Well, yes,” I say.

“Now, Amber’s English teacher tells me that her next piece of work is due on March the third. That’s the essay on
The Go-Between.
If you could make sure that she hands it in, we’d all be very grateful.”

“I’ll talk to her today,” I say. “And I’ll put it in the calendar.”

“It’s her future that’s at issue here,” she says. “I hate to see her throwing her chances away.”

Amber is sitting at the kitchen table poring over the
Evening Standard.
She’s changed out of her uniform. She’s wearing a T-shirt she bought on her shopping trip with Jamila. It says, “Boys are
stupid: throw rocks at them”: The fabric is a fetching petal pink.

“Mrs. Russell just came. She brought Molly’s picture.”

She screws up her face without raising her eyes from the newspaper.

“Why Mrs. Russell?” she says, in a tight, defensive voice. “What have I done now?”

“She wanted to check you got your course work in on time. She was trying to be helpful.”

Amber hasn’t put in a scrunchy today; when she looks at her paper, her face is almost hidden in the warm fall of her hair.

“I can’t stand Mrs. Russell,” she says. “Last week she did an assembly. On the Fallopian tubes. It was, like, Ground, swallow
me up.”

“Well, anyway. She says your English course work is due in on March the third. Your
Go-Between
essay.”

“I hate that book,” says Amber.

“Promise me you’ll get it in on time,” I tell her.

“Mum, you don’t need to go on about it.”

I can’t tell if she’s taken in a word I’ve said.

“I’m putting it in the calendar,” I tell her.

“Whatever,” she says.

My calendar is on the wall. It has paintings by Jack Vettriano—men in sharp suits, groomed women in stiletto heels—my Christmas
present from Molly. I turn the page to March. I’m briefly distracted by the picture—lovers meeting after an absence, perhaps
at a railway station, in front of a colored glass window: He has a lean, worn face and they’re wearing fifties clothes. I
write Amber’s Course Work in large letters on March the third.

I turn back to her. She’s still deep in her newspaper.

“I wish you’d pay attention when I speak to you,” I tell her. I can hear the irritation in my voice. “Nothing’s more crucial
than this. It’s your whole future, Amber.”

It’s Mrs. Russell speaking through me.

She looks up. Her eyes on me are the blue of summer sky after rain. She shakes her head, but I’m not sure what she’s saying
no to.

“They’ve found out her name,” she says then. “The woman in the river. They’ve found out who she is—I mean, was.”

There’s a lurch in my heart. I wonder if Amber will see the shock in my face, but she’s turned back to the newspaper. I read
it over her shoulder.

It’s just a short piece, placed between a double-glazing advertisement and a photo of a school presentation. The headline
says: BODY IDENTIFIED IN RIVER MURDER. It says she was called Maria Faulkner, and she was twenty-three. She worked as a care
assistant, and her husband was an estate agent. They’d been married three years, and they lived in Caterham. One evening she
told her husband she was going out for a walk: He rang the police that night, when she hadn’t returned.

It feels so different, knowing her name and where she lived: knowing about the people who knew and loved her. It brings her
closer.

“I wonder what she looked like,” says Amber. “They usually have a picture, don’t they, with these things? When somebody’s
died.”

“Maybe they didn’t have space to print it.”

“I’d like to know what she looked like.” She glances up at me, perplexed. “D’you feel kind of curious about it, Mum? Sort
of excited? That’s how I feel:
excited.
Is it horrible, d’you think, to be so interested?”

“No. Of course not.”

I put my arm around her shoulders. She rests her head against me. I’m comforted by her warmth and the papaya scent of her
hair.

“I think I’m horrible,” she says. “To feel like that. But I can’t help it.”

“When something like that happens in a place where we used to go, you’re bound to be curious,” I say.

“But
you
aren’t, are you?” she says.

“Maybe I just don’t show it,” I tell her.

Her eyes rest on me for a moment, wide and cool and clear. Then she looks away from me.

“I keep imagining it,” she says then, her voice hushed. “Being strangled. What it was like for her.”

I stroke her hair.

“When people get attacked it usually happens very quickly,” I say. “I expect it was over so quickly she didn’t feel very much.”

We both know I’m just trying to comfort her. She shakes her head a little.

“She shouldn’t have gone there alone,” she says. “Not in the evening. Not when there’s no one around. Anybody would know that,
wouldn’t they? It can be spooky by the river. D’you remember when we went to Eel Pie Island? And there were all those Barbies
in that garden, like they’d just been planted there? That was really freaky.”

“I remember,” I say.

“Taggs Island was lovely, I really wanted to live there,” she says. “But Eel Pie Island was weird.”

I move away from her; I go to the sink and start to wash some coffee cups.

“There’s something creepy about the river,” she says. “If you called out, no one would hear you.”

“I know what you mean,” I say. I keep my back to her.

“You wouldn’t want to be by the river on your own.” She flicks on through her newspaper. “It’s just so sad,” she says. “I
hope they catch him soon.”

I
DRIVE TO
W
ALSALL WITH
M
AX
. We go in my car; on Sunday Max is traveling on to Newcastle by train. I feel organized and efficient: There’s a load of
washing left to run, and a meal for tonight for Amber and Greg, and strict instructions to Amber to get her homework done.
Everything I’ve left behind feels tidy and controlled.

We pass through open countryside under a gentle spring sky. The hedges and fields are already greening with spring. Max and
I reminisce a little, and speculate on how big our audience will be—Dylan is rather unworldly and notoriously bad at publicity.
Once Max says, “That friend of yours”—leaving a significant pause, smiling in a knowing way—“did she solve that problem she
had?”

“I think so,” I say. I’m relieved he doesn’t pursue it.

We’re meeting at Dylan’s house for an afternoon rehearsal. He greets us with exuberance. He’s slim as a boy, with effortless
cheek-bones, his feyness now just starting to shade over into a stylish gauntness. We wish him happy birthday and thrust our
presents of music and alcohol at him, and meet his new partner, Jeremy, a plump and amiable dentist. The others are there
already, sixteen of us altogether—local singers from Dylan’s choir, and university friends. There are people here I once knew
so well—Ivor Browning, and Monica Druce with her diffidence and her shaggy, coppery hair. People with whom I once shared late-night
coffee and emotional crises; though now our knowledge of one another is limited to a line or two at Christmas and these reunions
every two or three years.

Ivor comes to hug me. He’s a GP in Somerset; he lives in a country rectory with Beathe, his wife, and their delectable daughters,
who have hair like lint and stripy dungarees. I’ve stayed with them sometimes, soothed by their sweet and orderly lifestyle;
there’s a mulberry growing up their wall, and a pony in a paddock, and at night it’s perfectly quiet and so dark the stars
look huge.