The River House (29 page)

“I’ve never seen it this high before,” says Greg.

“No. But there’s such a slope from here up to our house,” I say. “Just look how steep the road is. It would take a massive
flood for it to reach up there.”

Greg shakes his head.

“The soil’s so wet. It can’t hold much more water.”

Nothing reassures him. Sometimes I find him in his study, his face to the window, staring out at the river, and when I enter
the room he scarcely seems to hear.

Karen Whittaker rings. They’re holding an identification parade, and they want me to attend.

They send a car to pick me up. The driver is in uniform. He has a mop of sandy hair and an urge to reassure. The parade takes
place in a purpose-built suite, he tells me. It’s all very carefully planned; there’s really no need to get stressed out about
it. The building is split into two; the stooges and the baddies come in by a different door. I must trust him—there’s just
no way I could come face to face with the suspect.

“The only thing I’d say,” he tells me, “they’re a bit on the grim side to look at, those places. They could do with a vase
of flowers.”

I ask where they get the people from. They have lots of guys on their books, he tells me. It’s money for old rope if you’re
kind of normal-looking. You can make quite a bit of money, just for standing there.

I wait in a bleak gray room with the other witnesses, and we drink thin coffee from polystyrene cups. A uniformed police officer
talks us through the procedure; the formal language is somehow reassuring. When I’m taken through to the room with the one-way
screen and the lineup, I know the man from the river path immediately. I tell the officer his number.

The sandy-haired policeman drives me home. He still has an air of being concerned about me.

“That wasn’t too terrible, now, was it, Mrs. Holmes?” he says. “Nothing to get worked up about?”

No, it was fine, I tell him: though I’m with him on the flowers.

“Mind how you go,” he says. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”

I’m slowed down, heavy, vague, moving through the rooms of my house like someone wading through water. Sometimes I think about
my mother; sometimes I think about Will. I keep going over the last time I saw him, reenacting our conversation, flinching
from his anger and the way he turned away from me. I ask myself over and over: Should I have done what I did? Perhaps I should
have kept quiet and never have made the call. I wonder this obsessively, tracing out these labyrinths of the mind, worn out
with uncertainty. At times it enters my mind that Will behaved badly to me. This gives me a hot, shamed feeling—so I tell
myself that I understand his fear. I think of the unsmiling little boy in the photograph, and I know exactly why he behaved
as he did.

There are times when I ask myself if it would have been better if I had never met him—if I’d never felt his eyes on me and
watched as he pushed up his sleeves, showing the pale skin of his wrists and the lilac pattern of veins. Anyone else would
say this, surely—Eva, Clem—if I told them—that it would have been so much better if none of this had happened. But I can’t
make myself feel that: I don’t regret what I’ve done. I just want everything to be the way it was—before I saw Sean Faulkner
on the river path.

At times I think of Will with startling vividness. A sudden image of him will come to my mind unbidden, clear and precise
as a flashback—the touch of his hand, the remembered scent of his skin. Or there’ll be a man ahead of me on the pavement,
and something about him will make me think of Will—his short graying hair, or the angle of his shoulders. Though
think
is the wrong word. Because I see him, feel him, as though he is here with me.

I look at the picture for March on the calendar in my kitchen—the lovers at the railway station. They’re meeting again after
being parted; they’re clinging to each other. Stained light through red glass falls over them. She’s kicking up her stiletto
heels as she hugs him, and he has brought her flowers in white paper. I want to be the woman in that picture, with her trim
little skirt and her flirty, shiny shoes and her hair flying everywhere and her lover’s arms all around her. I cannot think
of any happiness like that happiness: meeting after an absence, held in your lover’s arms.

W
E PARK OUR CARS IN THE DRIVE
, behind our mother’s car.

The grass is long, the lawn littered with shaggy dandelions. Unlived-in, places so quickly start to revert to the wild.

“I’ll need to find someone to cut the grass,” says Ursula. “Before we get the estate agents in.”

She unlocks the back door. She has to push to open it; there’s a soft, heavy heap of letters and free newspapers inside.

She’s wearing a black silk suit she bought especially for the funeral; the fabric is rather beautiful, with a prismatic sheen
like oil on water. Now she pulls off the jacket and rolls up the sleeves of her shirt. She piles the letters on the kitchen
table.

“I’ll deal with those later,” she says.

There’s a list our mother was making flung down on the dresser—tomatoes, kitchen paper—things she was planning to buy when
she was taken into hospital. She’s briefly present in her so-familiar loopy, liquid writing, in the plans she was making,
the things she was going to do. I hand the list to Ursula, but we don’t say anything. The hymns that I mouthed soundlessly
because I had no breath still resonate inside me: I can taste the egg-and-cress sandwiches I didn’t want to eat.

“I thought we could just go round and get a sense of what there is,” she says. “And anything you want you can take now.”

The house has a musty, wet-earth smell.

“Let’s start in the living room,” says Ursula. “Bring your box.”

The curtains are drawn. Ursula pushes them aside. Long fingers of light reach in. I think of the last time I was here, eating
Victoria sponge, our mother flicking through the photographs I’d brought. The stillness in the house is a palpable thing,
as though the texture of the air has thickened, changed.

“These are all yours,” says Ursula. She points to the mantel-piece, to the pictures of Molly and Amber.

I pile the photographs up in the box. This taking back of what has been given unnerves me. I have such a strong sense of the
transience of everything—how ownership is temporary, and the things you gave, however wholeheartedly, are really only lent:
and how mysterious it is that, most of the time, we believe it to be otherwise.

“Do you ever feel life’s so precious,” I say, “and yet you spend so much of it being cross or impatient, or longing for something
to end, or standing in the queue in Sainsbury’s?”

“I know what you mean,” she says.

The tick of the clock jars in the stillness. Ursula trails her fingers along the books on the bookshelf—our father’s prize
books from school, various novels our parents had been given: I never saw either of them reading any of these books.

“Anything else you want?” says Ursula.

I look around at the books, the landscapes on the walls. It’s all too familiar, too full of ghosts, of memory. I shake my
head.

We go to our mother’s bedroom. Her lipsticks on the dressing table, her hairbrush with the gray hairs caught in the bristles—these
things seem to hold out some promise that you could reach her, touch her. Ursula opens the wardrobe. It’s crammed with clothes,
mostly hanging in plastic bags from the dry cleaner. A smell of Blue Grass and mothballs brushes against us. Smelling her
scent, I feel grief tug at my sleeve. I know it’s waiting there, just around the corner, biding its time, waiting to ambush
me.

At the bottom of the cupboard, there are piles of shoes. She hadn’t worn some of them for years, like the suede court shoes
we used to dance around in when we were children.

“What did she keep it all for?” I say.

“For when it came in useful,” says Ursula dryly. “It’s what she was brought up to do, wasn’t it? People did then—they kept
things, they didn’t just chuck them, they mended or darned them, they kept them for a rainy day. …”

It’s hard to breathe in here, as though these things use up all the air.

“Hey,” says Ursula. She points to a round hatbox up at the top of the cupboard. “It must be that pink hat she liked, that
she used to wear to church. I might take that myself.”

She moves a chair and climbs on it, reaching out to the hatbox.

“It could be good for my fairy-tale book,” she says. “For Beauty, in Chanel with little white gloves.”

She gets down with the hatbox, opens it. Dust motes float. She takes out the hat and twirls it on one finger. It has an old
smell—dust, damp. It’s palest pink, made of some ruched, frail fabric: but not as pretty as I remembered. It doesn’t look
elegantly retro, just rather dreary and faded.

“I don’t know,” she says, doubt creeping into her voice. “Maybe it’s not quite right.”

She pushes a wisp of hair behind her ear. All her lipstick has worn off—her face looks older, harder. She puts the hat back
in the box.

I want this to be over now. I want to be somewhere else, somewhere bright and banal—a shopping center; a motorway service
station, with packets of crisps for sale and rowdy children. Not here in the silence, with the past pressing in.

“We ought to just check the bureau before you go,” says Ursula, as though she’s read my thought. “It’ll only take a moment.”

In the dining room, the lightbulb has gone, and the only light comes through the narrow glass door that leads into the garden.
Outside, you can see where the heavy hedge that overhangs the stream is just coming into leaf. Long grass with daffodils in
it laps up to the door: The daffodils are dying back now, their brown-paper leaves creased and bent. There’s a swimmy emerald
light.

The bureau is closed with a key that is kept in the lock. Ursula opens it up: It’s all very tidy, orderly, inside—places for
stamps, for pens. She unlocks the top drawer, and takes out a batch of the letters I wrote to our parents from university,
neatly held in an elastic band. There are boxes of old photographs. Ursula picks one out, a woman with a tight fifties perm
and her skirt pushed out over a stiff net petticoat. She blows the dust away.

“Who on earth are all these people?” she says. “I mean, d’you know who this is?”

I shake my head.

“All this history that just gets lost,” she says. “These people we don’t know. And now there’s no one left to tell us. We
could be related to them, and they’re just like strangers.”

Underneath, there’s a white album tied with ribbon.

“Good God. I’d completely forgotten this,” she says. She puts the album down on the dining table and unties the bow.

The photographs are protected by sheets of tissue paper, and a sprig from our mother’s wedding bouquet, a flower blue as smoke,
is pressed in the front of the album; the flower looks like it might dissolve in the slightest movement of air. We look through.
The tissue whispers and rustles like fallen leaves. Our mother is wearing a suit, a hat with a veil of net, and elaborate
formal makeup—thin penciled-in eyebrows, dark lipstick with a Cupid’s bow. There are group pictures—our parents with three
bridesmaids in pale satin, and all the relatives with their carefully composed smiles. And then a series of just the two of
them, close-ups in front of a rose bed. There’s one where he’s turned to her, gazing at her, his lips curved in a half-smile
of such contentment, gazing at her as though she is infinitely precious.

Ursula touches the picture lightly with her fingertips, a fractured, tentative movement, as though to check that it’s real.

“He looks like he can’t believe his luck,” she says. Her voice is slow, exhausted. “He really loved her once, didn’t he? He
loved her so much. The way he’s looking at her. He really loved her.” She closes the album abruptly, pushes it away from her
across the shiny surface of the table, as though it could burn her fingers; her face, half in shadow, looks gaunt suddenly.
“What happened? What happens to love, Ginnie?”

She’s stricken; her voice is absolutely bleak. She shakes her head, tears spilling.

I put my arms around her. She holds me urgently for a moment, then pulls away and scrubs at her face with a tissue.

She tries to clear her throat.

“You might as well take your own letters back, Ginnie,” she says thickly. “If you want them.”

I don’t want them, but I can’t think what else to do with them. I put them in my box.

But Ursula can’t stop crying. “Shit,” she says. She pushes the tears aside crossly with her hand.

In the drinks cabinet I find the brandy that our mother kept to put in her Christmas cake. I take it to the kitchen and pour
it into tumblers that are still in the dish rack, washed by our mother before she went into hospital, still waiting there
for someone to put them away. The brandy is cheap and fierce, but it warms us. We sit at the Formica-top table and drink.

“It’s so quiet,” I say. “Quiet in a different way — not like if the house was just empty for a while because she’d gone out
shopping.”

Ursula nods.

“It spooks me, quite honestly,” she says.

She looks crumpled, in spite of her glamorous clothes, all the disarray of grief. I know I must look the same. She sips her
brandy. She isn’t looking at me.

“D’you ever dream about here?” she says slowly. “You know, about the house? About childhood?”

The question shocks me. It’s as though the brandy or the grief has loosened something in her.

“Yes,” I say. “Especially when I was pregnant. Dreams of planes crashing on the garden, of awful things being dug up.” I’m
careful; I don’t want her to stop talking. “What do you dream of?”

“Not nice dreams.” She’s looking away from me, twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger. “I dream about the
shouting, sometimes,” she says. “Still. I still dream about it. Isn’t that weird? After all this time, all these years. About
the shouting and the bad nights, and … you know … all that.”