The River House (8 page)

I pick up my bag.

“Well, thanks for the drink and the info. I guess I have to go.”

I’d like him to grasp my wrist and say, Don’t go yet, Ginnie.

“Yes,” he says. “We both should.”

As we get up, the noise in the place breaks over me, all the talk and music and laughter. I can’t believe how unaware of it
I’ve been. Roger is at the bar, chatting to a very toned blond woman, who smiles and nods subserviently at everything he says.

I follow Will to the door. I think how I’ll never see him again, and a sense of loss tugs at me.

Outside it’s getting dark and the streetlamps are lit, casting pools of tawny light. There are smells of petrol and rotting
fruit, and a dangerous, sulfurous smell where kids have been letting off fireworks. A chill wind stirs the litter on the pavements.

“God, what a dreary night,” he says. “You’re the only bright thing in the street.”

This charms me.

I point out where I’ve parked my car, thinking we’ll say goodbye now and he’ll leave me. But he walks beside me.

I stop by the car.

“That was a real help,” I tell him. I’m very polite and reserved. “Thanks for taking the trouble.”

I’m fumbling in my bag for my keys, keeping my head down. I’m embarrassed at what he might read in my face, something too
open and hungry.

“A pleasure,” he says.

I expect him to say good-bye, but he just stands there. It’s quiet on the street, just for the moment—no traffic, no one passing.
I feel the quiet in me everywhere. I am stilled, waiting.

“Would you like to meet again?” he says. “Perhaps for lunch or something.”

“Yes. Yes, I’d like that. I’d like that very much,” I say. I manage not to say please.

“We’ll do that then,” he says. “If you’d like to.” But he doesn’t move.

I can feel his eyes on me, but there’s such a space between us: unbridgeable space.

“Ginnie,” he says.

My name in his mouth. The tenderness in his voice undoes me. I look up, meet his eyes: everything loose, fluid in me.

Slowly he moves his hand across the space between us, reaches out toward me, runs one finger slowly down the side of my face,
tracing me out, watching me. I feel the astonishing warmth of his hand right through me: hear my quick in-breath.

He shakes his head, with that look he has, as though I puzzle him.

“I dream about you,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. I think of my own dream.

“I want to make love to you. You know that, don’t you?” I nod. I can’t speak.

We stand there for a moment. He cups the side of my face in his hand. I press my mouth into his palm: There is an extraordinary
pleasure in the feel of his skin against my mouth. I would like to feel his whole body against me. He says my name again.

But people are coming toward us along the pavement—people from the bar, with their harsh, raised voices and laughter. He takes
a step away from me, lowers his hand. I can understand that he doesn’t want to be seen here with me, but I still feel a quick
ache of rejection when he takes away his hand. I hate these people. I would like to stay here forever on this pavement, his
gaze on me, feeling his warmth on my skin.

He shrugs a little.

“We’ll speak,” he says, and turns and walks away.

T
HURSDAY IS MY AFTERNOON OFF
. I decide I shall clean out Molly’s room so Greg can sleep there.

Greg is working at home today, in his study under the eaves. Before I start on the bedroom I take him a mug of coffee. He’s
intent on his work; he doesn’t hear me come in. In the angled light from his desk lamp, the bones and lines of his face are
etched in shadow; he looks older, more severe. The room feels cloistered, apart; up here you’re scarcely conscious of the
bustle of the street. You can see across the trees in people’s gardens and down to the river, on this dull, wet day a sullen,
dark surge.

He’s checking through the editing of his latest book, an anthology of medieval Irish prose and poetry aimed at a general readership.
I glance at the page over his shoulder. There’s a little poem called “The Coming of Winter”: It tells how the bracken is red
and the wind high and cold, the wild goose crying, cold seizing the wings of the birds.

“I like that,” I say. “It makes me feel cold just to read it.”

He smiles a little. This pleases him.

“We’re calling the book ‘Our Celtic Heritage,’” he says. “Fenella reckons that anything Celtic sells.”

“It’s a good title,” I tell him.

“D’you think so? I’m really not sure,” he says. “I thought I’d have a word with Mother about it.”

Greg’s mother is a highly energetic woman, who likes to wear elegant layers of gray linen, and volunteers with the Citizens
Advice Bureau, work to which she seems admirably well suited. I don’t doubt she’d have an opinion.

I put the coffee mug down on the desk beside him.

“Not there,” he says.

I put it on the floor.

Molly’s room has purple walls and fairy lights and a feather boa draped across the mantelpiece. She used to say smugly, No
one would think it’s a lad’s room, would they, Mum? But today her room smells troublingly of vinegar, and everything is covered
with a velvet bloom of dust. I fling the curtains wide. This hasn’t been done for months; she lived a subterranean life, never
let the day in. There are cobwebs where I’ve pushed back the curtains; I swipe at them with a duster and they break up, but
the rags of web have an unnerving stickiness, lacy gray fragments clinging to my fingers. I feel a vague surge of guilt. There
are certain feminine skills I’ve never really mastered—ironing, making your home gleam, straightening your hair. When the
girls were small and I picked them up from school, there were women I used to notice at the gate, who clearly understood these
things, who knew what it means to be female: who were different from me, sleek and ironed and certain. I bet those women never
find such cobwebs in their homes.

Molly is a hoarder. Her desk is littered with things she has no use for but can’t quite throw away—earrings speckled with
tarnish, dog-eared essays, Karma bracelets. I come upon a handmade birthday card from Else, her German pen friend. It’s decorated
with spangly stickers, and inside Else has written, in carefully looped handwriting, “To your eighteenth birthday. I wish
you health, good luck, and a lot of effect in your life!”

I penetrate under the bed, where I find a muddle of magazines and an apple core and an open bag of crisps—the source of the
vinegar smell. I scoop up all the glittery chaos from her desk into boxes, and dust and polish everywhere. The room comes
into focus, as though its lines and edges are clearer, sharper, than before.

And as I do these things there’s part of me that’s somewhere else entirely—as though I’m living another life in parallel to
this one. A life in which I’m with Will on the pavement in the dark of the evening: And this time no one disturbs us, and
he pulls me toward him and holds me to him, the whole warm length of his body pressing into mine. The sensation overwhelms
me, and for a moment I sit on the bed and just let myself feel it—and the smell of his skin and the touch of his hands are
almost as real as if these things are happening. As though it’s this room and my life here that are imagined. But mixed in
with the longing, I feel a kind of fear. Yet what is it I’m so afraid of? That something will happen between us? That I could
imperil everything? Or do I fear that nothing at all will happen, that nothing will be imperiled, that my life will just carry
on, quite calmly, like before?

I Hoover under the bed, and the noise brings Greg downstairs.

“How long is this going to take?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’ll just be a moment or two.”

Next to the fireplace there are bookshelves that stretch to the ceiling. It’s a kind of archaeology, these layers of the past—A-level
and GCSE textbooks and, from further back, the books the girls liked as children. There have always been loud protests if
I threatened to give them away. “The Storyteller” is here—and Death who played dice with a soldier, with his bulbous eyes
and his sack, the drawing that haunts me—and Amber’s book of nursery rhymes. I turn to “Gray Goose and Gander,” the poem I
had to read each evening, feeling a mix of tenderness and tiredness, remembering the countless repetitions of early mothering,
the things that always had to be done the same. Eva can get quite poignant about this sometimes, in the Café Matisse after
one too many Bloody Marys, resting her chin in her hands, her splendid cleavage gleaming, the candle flames reflecting in
her eyes. “What happened, Ginnie?” she’ll say. “D’you ever think—what happened to those children? The little children you
bathed and read all those stories to? Don’t you sometimes want to be back there? You know—when you could make them perfectly
happy by buying a chocolate muffin. … And you’re so scared for them—you fear for them, that it’s all so fragile, that something
awful could happen, that they’ll stick their fingers in an electric socket or something. But the thing is, you lose them anyway.
You don’t think about that, you think it’ll go on forever.” She’ll look down into her glass and slowly shake her head. “Sometimes
I wonder—where have those little children gone?” I always tell her that I don’t share her nostalgia—that I like the teenage
years; but now as I pile these books into boxes, ready to go to the secondhand bookshop in Sunbury, it seizes me for a moment,
that sense of something lost and irreplaceable.

Right at the top of the bookcase there’s a shelf of Ursula’s books. Leaves and tendrils from her drawings decorate the spines.
Ursula draws such wonderful plants—extravagant, Italianate—that she sometimes gets letters from fans: “Ursula, I would so
love
to see your garden.” But the plot at her Southampton home is a few square yards of decking and a cactus—the enchanted gardens
she draws are all from her imagination. I run my finger along the spines, feeling a flicker of envy; it must be good to have
achieved something as solid as this whole shelf of books. The one that made all the difference for her is here—the volume
of Hans Andersen fairy tales she illustrated.

She wasn’t always successful. She’d been struggling for years, largely living off Paul, her husband, wondering if it was worth
it, or whether she should perhaps go back to primary teaching, when she did this book. I remember when she showed it to me—hesitant,
self-deprecating—she used to be hesitant then. I could see at once it was special. There was something about these stories
that suited her wayward imagination—these white-fleshed girls with their voluptuous deprivations: the mermaid trying to walk
on the beautiful legs that cut her, the curve of Gerda’s white throat and the scratch of the robber girl’s knife. Everything
was animate, full of sex or threat, every petal, every tree root; tendrils of ivy clutched like greedy, caressing fingers,
the flowers had lascivious smiles.

Nothing much happened to start with—she sold the usual few thousand copies; and then it was chosen by children’s BBC to illustrate
a series of fairy tales read by celebrities, and suddenly everyone was buying it. Not just children either, for her books
inhabited that sought-after terrain—books for children that adults also enjoy. One drawing was even reproduced in
Vogue
, in a piece on the New Romantics—the picture of the Little Mermaid that I have in my kitchen, the one Molly found so troubling
as a little girl. I remember when Ursula visited, just after the arrival of her first fat royalty check. She looked different.
Still hardly any makeup, and her hair severely tied back, but with a new coat of the softest buttery suede. Though it wasn’t
just the money. There was a new certainty about her: She knew what she was for.

My phone rings. It’s Molly.

“Sweetheart, how are you?”

“Well … my pimp beat me and then I got raped and I’ve started shooting up. …” She can’t quite suppress a giggle. “Fine otherwise.”

“Tell me what’s happening.”

The Freshers’ Fair was great, she says—she’s joined at least thirty societies. Even the Blond Society—you don’t have to be
blond, they just go around all the cocktail bars. And can she have a long denim skirt and some shot glasses for Christmas?
And thanks for the alarm clock, but she didn’t really need it, she’s using the clock on her cell phone.

“Molly, are you eating OK? Can you manage all right with the cooker?”

“I don’t cook much really,” she says. “If I miss a meal I have Pringles.”

I question whether Pringles are a satisfactory meal.

Molly sighs extravagantly.

“Mum, d’you ever listen to yourself? You been on one of those parenting courses or something? Look, I’m fine, OK? I’ve just
joined thirty societies and I’m fine.”

“Have you got everything you need? D’you want me to send you anything? I could send you some echinacea.”

“OK, Mum, if you want to.”

“Are you making plenty of friends?”

“They’re really nice in my corridor. We’re going out for corridor curry tomorrow.”

“Any men you like the look of?” I say tentatively.

“Just don’t go there, Mum, OK? Anyway, half the guys in my college are gay—that’s why they have such nice sneakers. … Look,
my phone needs recharging,” she says. “I’ve really got to go.”

I finish the room. I box up the rest of the books, and strip the bed and take the linen down to the kitchen to wash.

It’s raining more heavily now; there’s a thick brown light in my kitchen. I make a coffee and sit at my kitchen table. Suddenly,
after talking to Molly, I feel ashamed; the things I’ve been thinking astound me. All the desire has left me. I can’t believe
I considered getting involved with this man, this stranger: took it seriously, half imagining it would actually happen. My
family and their needs are all that seem real to me now: Amber, struggling with schoolwork, needing stability; Molly, just
starting out, eager but brittle, tense with the newness of everything, joining thirty societies; Greg and the Celtic anthology
that he works on with such diligence, for which he has such hopes. How could I have imagined I would put this life at risk?