The River House (23 page)

“You’re obviously thriving, Ginnie,” he says, kissing me.

“You too,” I say.

But I notice the signs of aging in him—the lines scored deep in his face, the darkness under his eyes. And I wonder what he
really sees in me.

The church where Dylan is choirmaster is in a run-down part of the city, next to an outreach center for drug users. It smells
of childhood, of All Saints where my father used to hand out prayer books—a smell of dry-rot treatment, moldy prayer books,
pollen. In the Lady Chapel, four stone angels stand guard around a tomb—beautiful boys with indolent gestures and great, wide,
intricate wings. There’s been a wedding, and the flowers are still there, lilies and carnations, now drooping and spilling
their petals on the chancel floor.

We gather on the altar steps. We wear black and white, as we always did, these formal clothes, now rarely worn, evoking long-ago
college concerts, little snapshots of memory—concerts when I was faint with nerves before finals, or thrillingly in love with
some louche young man whose name I can’t recall. The chancel is lit, the rest of the building in darkness; in the shadows
the church seems immense, stretching into infinity, the angels white and poised where light from the chancel falls across
them, above us the great ribbed arches pale as bone. Everything is monochrome, except for the fading creams and pinks of the
flowers, and the quiet colors of our hands and faces and hair.

We have an audience of one—just a rather decrepit man, presumably from the outreach center, who sits near the front with an
expectant expression. Max mutters over my shoulder that this has to be a record. The man is unshaven; he has an ill-fitting
coat the color of mud, and several packages with him, all tied up with string with many elaborate knots. But he is our audience,
and for this moment we love him.

We sing Palestrina and Shephard. The man listens with an air of careful politeness. Now and then he taps his hand on the pew
in time to the music, as though to demonstrate his involvement. We sing well, the music casting its shimmering nets over everything.

Halfway through the program, the man gets up and gathers his bags together and gives Dylan an apologetic wave. He walks down
the aisle and pushes open the door. The outside leaks in for a moment—the tangerine glow of a streetlight, the shriek of a
siren. Then the door slams shut behind him. We are enclosed, apart.

Dylan gestures us into a circle. We sing on through the program; we sing to one another. Dylan scarcely moves his hand, the
slightest gesture holding us together. The music floats up into the night that contains us. We are a circle of light in a
sea of darkness. I feel weightless, disembodied; everything seems simple now—this music is the answer; everything is explained.

We end with a Bruckner motet, “Ave Maria,” a slow, hushed prayer. The words in my mouth seem rich in meaning.
Ora pronobis peccatoribus / Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
Pray for us sinners / Now and at the hour of our death. I think of my mother. I think of the woman pulled from the water.
I think of my own death.

We come to a quiet close, a long-held note. We listen to the echo, and the silence after the echo, a silence alive with remembered
sound, as though the music is still happening somewhere above us, way up in the rafters. There’s a little collective sigh,
something beyond happiness.

Dylan smiles.

“Perhaps an encore?” he says.

We sing it once more, to the silence and the dark.

Pray for us.

Afterward we go back to Dylan’s house, those of us who are staying there—Monica, Max, and Ivor and me—and sit around the table
in the dining room. I kick off my shoes; the men loosen their bow ties. I sense that Jeremy has an enviable and generous talent
for domesticity: There are daffodils in a white jug, an open fire of applewood; everything gleams. He’s made a birthday cake
for Dylan; he brings it in, candles ablaze. We sing “Happy Birthday” in slightly self-conscious harmony. The cake is moist
and dark, with lots of brandy in it. Monica has brought some whiskey that has a peaty taste.

Dylan has stories of people we used to know; he’s an inspired gossip, with an interest in people that is at once salacious
and compassionate. We drink the whiskey and listen to his stories. Chris, who used to be an administrator at Kingston University,
has become a Buddhist monk and lives a contemplative, celibate life in a monastery in Croydon. Fiona, who was abundantly attractive,
and lusted after by all the men in college when she appeared as Eve in a mystery play wearing only a body stocking and a fig
leaf, has fallen in love with a woman; they have an inventive sex life, involving copious quantities of strawberries and creme
fraiche. Jenny, who in our college days was our star soprano, has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and her husband,
an orthopedic surgeon, has left her for a younger, healthier woman.

“Let’s drink to absent friends,” says Dylan. “To Jenny! To Chris! To Fiona!”

In my twenties or thirties, I’d sometimes be envious, hearing other people’s stories, their loves and schemes and successes.
As you get older, it changes. You listen with a new gentleness: because by now we all have something, some block or burden,
something that defeats us. Everyone has the mist falling over the land.

The room is mellow, easy, a haze of whiskey fumes and the children’s-party smell of blown-out candles. I lick my fingers,
which taste of marzipan. Monica’s hair glints like metal in the firelight. We lean in closer around the table, talking of
ourselves.

“So, Ginnie,” says Dylan then. “Still busy with those girls of yours? Let’s have a quick resume—life, the universe and everything.”

I tell them about Molly.

“I don’t believe it,” says Ivor. “Molly at university already.”

Time slips by so quickly: We all agree.

“And Amber’s doing her GCSE’s. She’s really into clubbing and staying out late. And of course she simply isn’t bothered when
I’m worried. … Though Max sees a different side of her. Don’t you, Max?”

I turn to him. He murmurs agreement.

“She did her work experience at Max’s office,” I tell them. “She really enjoyed it, didn’t she? She seemed to have a good
time.”

Max nods.

“She was excellent,” he says. “Very conscientious.” He pulls out a pack of cigarettes, pats his trouser pocket to check for
his lighter. “Well, I’ll just go out for a smoke, if you’ll excuse me.”

He opens the door. I feel the touch of unheated air from the hallway, like a cold hand on my skin.

“It’s all fine, really,” I tell them.

I wonder how much the rest of us are hiding, what stories aren’t being told.

“To Ginnie!” says Dylan.

“To Dylan!” I say. We drink.

I put my hand on Ivor’s arm.

“Ivor, you haven’t told us anything.” I think of the last time I visited them: of the delectable daughters on the swing under
the apple tree, and Beathe in the kitchen, with a bunch of carrots just pulled, still smelling of the garden, her face flushed
and quiet and wise. “How’s Beathe? How’s life? Still flourishing?”

He takes a swig of whiskey, holding it for a moment in his mouth. The fire shuffles softly.

“I met a woman,” he says.

There’s a sudden tension in the room, a little electric charge. No one says anything.

“It was at a medical conference,” he says. “I fell in love between lunch and the afternoon tea break, watching her. We hadn’t
even spoken. I mean—can you understand that? That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

Dylan and Jeremy smile at each other.

“I understand,” I tell him.

Max has come in, but he doesn’t sit down, just waits behind my chair.

“I’ve never felt anything like it,” says Ivor. “The intensity of it.”

He’s staring into his whiskey. It’s quiet in the room apart from the shift and stir of the fire.

“I’ve tried to make some kind of sense of it. And I think she may have reminded me of my sister. The same blond hair that
swung across her face … I mean, you’re our resident psychologist, Ginnie. Does that make any sense to you?”

I nod; I murmur something.

He pours more whiskey, he drinks. For the moment he’s disinclined to say more.

Monica tells a story she read in the paper, about a man in East Germany who was taken from his mother and fostered in the
West and didn’t even have a picture of her; but when he kissed his first girlfriend and ran his hand down her hair, he suddenly
knew that his mother too had had long dark hair. We talk for a while about these sexual templates, the patterns that are imprinted
on the brain. But we’re marking time really, waiting for Ivor to talk again. He raises his head; we are quiet.

“Maybe it was that,” he says. “I guess it could have been. It was shocking, to fall in love like that.” He takes another long,
slow sip of whiskey. “We didn’t sleep together though. We didn’t have an affair.”

Max sits down heavily at the table, shaking it as he sits. I can feel his gaze moving across me. I keep my head down.

“Why the hell not?” he says.

“I wanted to,” says Ivor. “I’m sure it would have been wonderful: I know it would have been. … Well, wonderful to start with.”
He smiles a little: I don’t know how much struggle is hidden behind the smile. “Rather like stepping off a cliff—exhilarating
to start with, and then horribly messy.”

Dylan raises his glass.

“To Ivor!”

We drink.

Ivor doesn’t drink; he’s moving his finger on the shiny surface of the table, as though he’s writing words that only he can
read.

“D’you ever see her?” I say.

“Sometimes,” he says slowly. His face darkens. He looks old now. “We have dinner together—once or twice a year. … When you’re
twenty-five, you can make a mess of things. You’ve got all the time in the world. It doesn’t matter when you’re twenty-five.
But I’m forty-eight, I’ve got two kids, it’s different. When you’re forty-eight you can’t fuck up,” he says.

I
SLEEP DEEPLY
, and wake with my mind like a pressed sheet, the creases smoothed away. I drive Max to the station, then head off home alone,
taking my time, wrapping the benevolence of yesterday evening around me. I can still hear the music we sang.

At lunchtime I buy a baguette and a newspaper in a garage, and park beside the road, where amid the litter and the brambles
there are primroses: They are the most perfect of yellows, at once so rich and so pale. I open the window. There’s a little
wind that smells of the changing seasons. The newspaper says that the weather’s been too mild for early spring. There have
been all sorts of aberrations. Swallows are nesting in Kent, and frogs are mating in Shropshire, and there are bumblebees
in Scotland, and all the blossom is coming out too soon. Everything’s happening at the wrong time.

When I’ve finished my lunch, I stay there for ages, just sitting there. I think of our conversation, of people’s troubles.
I tell myself I am lucky, that I should cherish what I have. I hear people’s voices in my head. Max, calm, pragmatic, when
I went to visit him: There are things that are best kept quiet. And Ivor last night, his darkened face, his quiet resolution.
I tell myself that what I saw on the river path meant nothing; I gave it a significance it simply didn’t warrant, projecting
my own guilt onto this passing stranger. It all seems simple and obvious now, the way ahead quite clear.

It’s evening when I get back. Greg is hungry already—I suspect that he made himself a rather inadequate lunch. Amber has spent
the day with Jamila, wandering around Southall: They had free naan bread and dal in a gurdwara that had an open day, and signed
a petition in Punjabi for somebody not to be executed—they didn’t understand it, but they signed it anyway, because people
dying generally isn’t a good idea—and they went to this shop Jamila knows and bought some wicked Indian sweets. She hasn’t
begun her homework. Then I find that the wash I left running on Saturday morning had a tissue in it: It’s shredded and got
into everything, and the wash must all be done again. I make an early dinner, feeling my peacefulness already starting to
slip away.

Amber is going to a School Disco in a warehouse in Twickenham, where everyone will be dressed in a disco caricature of school
uniform. She wears a flamboyantly short skirt, deliberately ripped fishnets, her highest heels, and a crumpled school blouse
and tie. It’s time to go, but she isn’t ready. She’s standing in front of the mirror in the dining room, trying to plait her
hair. She’s arching her back, reaching behind her head to make a parting, but she can’t see what she’s doing. She mutters
expletives under her breath. I pretend I didn’t hear.

“Mum, would you do it for me?” she says then, cajoling. “If you do it I’ll come straight home from school tomorrow and start
my
Go-Between
essay. I
promise.
”

I do it for her. She watches intently, to check the plaits are even. I love the feel of her hair as it slips between my fingers,
leaving its musk on my skin and its faint papaya scent. I don’t often touch her now; it slides away from you so quickly and
irrevocably, that easy intimacy of the early years.

“I wish I had perfect hair,” she says. “Katrine’s hair is always perfect.”

“I think you have the loveliest hair,” I tell her.

She shrugs.

“You would say that. You’re my
mother.”

She puts on some candy-pink lip gloss that clashes fabulously with the red of her hair. She smiles at herself in the mirror.

“There,” she says.

I kiss her cheek.

I give her a lift to the party. I don’t want her waiting at the bus stop looking like that. Though I probably needn’t have
worried: It’s going to be a big event, and Twickenham seems full of nubile girls all dressed in similar clothes.

Greg is in his study when I get back. I pour myself some wine and stretch out on the living room sofa, trying to recover this
morning’s peaceful mood. Too lazy to read, I flick on the television.