The River House

‘Ginnie, for God’s sake.’

‘She needs something.’

‘Well, so do I. I mean, what will wake me up?’ He turns slightly towards me; I smell the chalk on his breath.

‘You could use the alarm on your watch.’

‘OK, OK,’ he says wearily.

We drive through the Chilterns, through the swoop and dip of the downs. The sky is blue as ash. I can just hear the faint tinny sound of the music on Amber’s iPod.

‘I wonder what it will be like without her,’ I say.

‘Well, not so very different, I imagine.’

‘We could do more things together, I suppose.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps we could go out a bit.’ My voice small, tentative. ‘You know, when Amber stays with her friends. Perhaps we could go away together or something.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ he says. ‘Though to be honest I’d welcome a bit more time to get this book together. Fenella’s very patient, but she’s starting to make noises.’

I think of Fenella, his literary agent: her Sloaney clothes—the pearls, the velvet Alice bands—her immaculate vowels and limitless self-assurance. I try to push away the irritation I feel.

‘But—I mean—things will be different now, won’t they? It’s a big change.’

‘Ginnie, we only left Molly half an hour ago.’

‘But we have to make it a positive thing. You know, a chance to do things differently…’

He’s quiet as though he’s thinking. I feel a flicker of hopefulness—that maybe he will agree.

‘There was one thing I thought of,’ he says. ‘I thought I might move into Molly’s bedroom. Just while she’s away. I’m sure we’d both sleep better. Would that be OK with you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I say. ‘If you want to.’ This jolts me. I swallow hard. ‘I’d have to clear out her room first—it’s a total tip in there.’ Trying to be light about it. ‘But I was thinking more of maybe doing things together…’

‘Let’s not go rushing into anything,’ he says.

A dark mood washes through me.

The cars all have their headlights on now: bright beams from the oncoming traffic weave across us. We drive through a stand of birches, their slender trunks and branches pale and naked in the lights. I realise I had hoped for something in this moment—though the hope was never fully conscious, and certainly never expressed. That there’d be a kind of freedom or renewal. That we’d enter a new landscape, with glimmerings of what life might be like when Amber too goes, when it’s just the two of us, and that it would be a place that I could live in. That there’d be a new intimacy—dinner sometimes in restaurants on the waterfront, trips to the theatre, winter weekends in Prague. A rediscovery of one another.

Yet in this moment I know the limits of what we have, what we are. I see that what is missing is not just something postponed or which can be recovered. Not something put aside for a while or safely stowed away—like a book you never quite finished but hoped one day to return to. Is this my fault? I wonder. Have I tried hard enough, done enough to mend it?

We went to a Marriage Guidance counsellor once. It was my idea, of course, but Greg agreed to come—unwillingly, but at least he agreed. I was so grateful to him. I remember this, as we drive along the motorway and the countryside darkens around us. I tell myself—at least I did what I could, at least I tried.

The counsellor had a room with walls the colour of mint toothpaste, and on the table an African violet that looked as though it was made from plastic, the leaves too clean and symmetrical to be real. She smelt of anti-bacterial soap and she wore a polyester blouse with a floppy bow at the collar.

We talked for three sessions before we reached what we’d come for. She never seemed quite comfortable with us: perhaps my being a psychologist made her nervous. We talked about our children, the families we grew up in, and what we did when we disagreed—which seemed to be her speciality. The thing we had really come to say hung there in the room with us.

Eventually I told her that sex was our problem. She flushed a little when I said this, her neck blotching with purple above the polyester bow. Her embarrassment seemed a serious flaw in a marriage counsellor. She said, rather primly, that she thought the physical relationship between any two people would be fine if the communication was right. And I thought, No, that’s not true: sex is about sex, it’s not about communication.

I remembered how it had happened. How after the children I was always so tired; and we went on having sex, though I didn’t really want to, because it seemed mean to say No: but an orgasm seemed to take more energy than I had. There’s a moment of decision, of reaching out for pleasure, you have to focus, to fantasise—well, it’s like that for me anyway—and it never seemed quite worth the effort. So I used to say, Leave it, really, I don’t mind. And sex had come to seem pointless, even inappropriate—as though it wasn’t what our relationship was for. I’d tell myself this didn’t matter, that I could live without it. Yet always with an awareness of something obscurely wrong, of an absence—some primary colour missing from my life, as though I were a picture painted without red. I couldn’t begin to explain this to her.

She tried a different tack. She said how sex—just the physical thing—often isn’t enough for women: we women need to feel we’re making love. She said this with emphasis, as though it were a unique insight. I told her this was a distinction I’d never understood. My response seemed to perplex her. But romance was so important, she said, all those little gestures that make a woman feel special.

I tried again.

‘But I mean—after having kids—sex does go sometimes, doesn’t it? Don’t you find that with other couples? What happens to them? Does it ever come back?’ My voice was shrill, urgent. I really wanted to know this.

She said it was us she wanted to talk about now—not other couples.

She had some suggestions, some stratagems. I was to ring Greg at work and to make an appointment for sex. When she saw how we both responded to this, imagining me interrupting a semiotics tutorial with a lascivious proposition, she moved on down her list. I needed to pamper myself, she said—she was very keen on pampering, which seemed to involve the purchase of scented candles and expensive bath products. I muse on this now, as we drive on through the darkening landscape—because it’s quite a common belief, and yet so very strange. As though sex can be found at a department store cosmetics counter, among the flash balms and exfoliants, and purchased from one of those pushy women with clinical white coats and far too much mascara. Whereas desire is to be found in other places entirely. At a party where a stranger comes up behind you and runs his hands down your sides. Or in an afternoon office, where a man who smells of smoky rooms holds your eyes for a little too long and pushes up his shirtsleeves. Yes, especially that: just thinking of it.

And then Greg said, ‘Ginnie’s ever so tired, aren’t you, darling? Bringing up the girls—she has her hands full. You know, life’s very busy.’

And the counsellor said yes, that it would probably all change when our daughters were older. I felt a kind of despair then, as they both insisted that our problem was not such an issue really and perfectly predictable. I knew such bleakness, in the room with the African violet and the toothpaste walls. Feeling that this was beyond repair, that we’d reached the end of the line.

After that she retreated to safer ground—to our relationship history and the story of how we’d met. She sat back in her chair now, she seemed to be more at ease. I understood what she was seeking to do—to unearth or recover whatever had originally drawn us together. I might well have done the same in her place. Though I didn’t see how this could help us. You can’t go back there.

I told her how we’d met at a dinner party—just giving the outline of the evening. It was a Burns Night dinner, held by some friends of Max’s, who’d wangled me an invite: and we were all told to bring a song or a poem: and I fell in love with Greg when he was reading aloud.

It was done with panache—a long refectory table, a proper damask tablecloth, the whole place shimmering with candles. The men wore dinner jackets, the women were in long dresses. I remember one woman who had a dress of some slippery cloth that was tight across her breasts, and a heap of blonde hair pinned high up on her head. There was whisky that tasted wonderfully of woodsmoke.

But even after the whisky, most of us were a little embarrassed reading the poems we’d brought. Mostly we chose comic poems, keeping the emotional temperature down, so as not to seem pretentious. Max read something by Craig Raine. I read a poem by Wendy Cope, which was short and a little poignant. The blonde woman didn’t read anything, though toward the end of the evening she pulled out her hair clip and let down all her hair, shaking her head a little as it fell, so it rippled and gleamed in the candle-light. Max watched intently. Someone took out a guitar and sang a Tom Lehrer song.

I didn’t really notice Greg till he started to read. He was rather too thin for my taste, and anyway seated up at the other end of the table. But he had a beguiling speaking voice—a subtle, cultured baritone. He read something obscure and Celtic, a strange tale of enchantment, of four companions who were walking in their lands when a mist fell: and when it lifted the land was bright but everything they knew had disappeared, all their flocks and herds and houses and the people who were with them; there was no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling, so only the four of them remained alone. The narrative was disjointed, dreamlike, as though the storyteller had stitched together many different strands. There were curses and metamorphoses and one thing becoming another, and magical objects and animals—a shining white boar, a golden bowl. Greg read with complete confidence, expecting to be listened to. It was a bold thing to do, to read something so rich and elusive. We heard him in attentive silence. Afterwards, before we clapped, there was a little collective sigh of pleasure.

At the end of the evening, as people started to drift away, I went to him and asked about the story. I was warm with the wine, fluid, more forthcoming than usual. It was from the Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh stories, he said. He lent me his copy, wrote his phone number in it, insisted that I had to give it back when I’d finished. I noticed that his cufflinks were little silver fish. He seemed quirky, cerebral, charming: but with a kind of reserve that made me feel at ease. Max gave me a quick knowing smile as he slid out of the room, his arm round the blonde woman, his fingers tracing the curve of her hip through the flimsy fabric of her frock, as though they were lovers already.

Yet I misread Greg, of course. The whole attraction was based on errors of interpretation. I saw his detachment as a kind of peacefulness, a safety I knew I needed. And he, I think, misunderstood me too—welcomed my shyness, my hesitancy, believing I would be happy to be a rather traditional wife, grounding him, keeping everything calm and stable: while life for him, the real thing, happened elsewhere. There’s such readiness, at some points in your life, to move on to the next stage—the old world over, the new one not yet begun. You grasp at anything you feel might take you forward. There, it’s all signed and sealed, the choices made, the path plotted out. And you find yourself in the middle way: your marriage empty, your children leaving, the mist falling over the land.

CHAPTER 9

I sit in the soft late afternoon sun that falls across my office, sipping a final coffee. I like to stay here sometimes before I head for home, letting the day and all its tensions fall from me.

The file of the last child I saw is on the desk in front of me. Gemma Westerley—a little waif in frilled socks, with hair the colour of straw and a naked, timid smile. She has special needs, though for years her teachers didn’t realise; she was quiet in class and her exercise books were orderly with hearts drawn in the margins, and nobody saw how little she understood. Now her teacher is worried she might have been abused. Her confusion is still here in the room, like a trace of smoke or perfume. I make some notes, then put the file away.

I plan my evening. There’s fish in my bag for tea. I went to the market at lunchtime and braved the fish stall with its glazed dead eyes: this made me feel like a good mother. Amber is going out later, to the Blue Hawaii for a birthday party, where they will drink cocktails named after sex acts and laced with too much v dka, and I want to make sure that at least she’s eaten properly. And when Amber has gone I shall start to tidy Molly’s room.

At the thought of Molly, I feel a little surge of anxiety. I wonder whether she woke on time this morning, and whether she has made friends with the girl with the black shiny hair. I wonder when she will ring me.

I look through some post that wasn’t urgent—courses I could go on, and a catalogue from a firm I’ve used before. They make hand puppets and therapeutic games. The catalogue is glossy, full of colours. I flick through. There’s a crocodile with a zipper mouth, to use with children who’ve been abused, to help them tell the things they’re keeping secret. There’s a wolf that’s half as big as a child. ‘A large scary wolf who can also be afraid. Is he then so scary?’ I think how Amber would have adored him when she was little and had a scheme to keep a wolf as a pet. And there’s a grey velvet caterpillar, with poppers you can undo to hatch a yellow butterfly. I shall take the catalogue home and see if there’s anything useful. Perhaps I should order the crocodile for Gemma. But I’m tempted too by the chrysalis that turns into a butterfly. I’m not sure which child I would use it with: but I love its velvet wings.

My mobile rings. I scrabble in my handbag, thinking it’s Molly.

It’s a number I don’t recognise.

‘Now, am I speaking to Ginnie?’

My pulse has skittered off before I consciously recognise his voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Ginnie,’ he says. ‘It’s Will.’ I notice how he doesn’t give his surname. ‘Look, I’ve got some info on your little patient. Quite interesting.’

‘Thanks so much,’ I tell him.

There’s a little pause, as though he’s drawing breath or working out how to put something. The sun through the window is warm on the skin of my arms.

‘Would you like to meet up to talk about it?’ he says.

‘That would be really helpful,’ I tell him.

‘I wondered about after work today,’ he says. ‘About six. I could do that if it suits you.’

I tell him, yes, it would suit me. We talk for a moment or two with enthusiasm about how useful this will be—to talk about it properly. Our voices are level, reasonable: we are two professionals planning a case discussion. I have a crazy fear that even over the phone he can hear the thud of my heart.

‘There’s a pub,’ he says. ‘In Acton Street. D’you know it?’

I explain, perhaps with rather too much emphasis, that it will be the easiest place in the world for me to find.

‘I’ll see you there,’ he says.

I put down the phone but his voice is still inside me. Desire ambushes me, taking away my breath.

I ring Amber. It’s her voicemail.

‘Sweetheart, look, I’m going to be late, I have to go to a meeting. There’s some lamb stew from yesterday in the fridge. It just needs heating through. Make sure you heat it for ten minutes, and be really careful to switch the ring off afterwards.’ But I know she’ll ignore my message, and go to the Co-op for crisps and a pack of Cherry Bakewells.

In the cloakroom I study myself in the mirror for a moment. I think of the dream I had of him. I hold my hands under the tap then pull wet fingers through my hair. At least I have a lipstick. My skin is still flushed from talking to him.

I take my coat from my office, and the bag with the fish in—though I’ll probably have to throw it out, it needs to be cooked today—and the catalogue with all its therapeutic toys. I decide I shall order the butterfly.

CHAPTER 10

It’s the pub that I passed when I walked home from work, a lumbering building with purple paintwork and advertisements for Sports Night. I get there too early and sit in my car round the corner, nervous, suddenly wondering why I’m here.

At exactly six I go in. At first I can’t see him. I try to remember his face, but it eludes me, though I saw it so precisely in my dream. I worry, like a girl on a first date, that he’s here and I haven’t recognised him.

He’s in the corner, by the fruit machine. I see him before he sees me. In that brief moment before he knows I’m there, he seems quite different from when we met before, his shoulders bowed, head lowered—as though something weighs on him and presses him down. As though there’s a shadow on him. This surprises me.

He looks up.

‘Ginnie.’

He’s vivid, eager, again. I forget the shadow.

He stands and kisses me lightly, his mouth just brushing my skin. I breathe in his smell of smoke and cinnamon.

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he says.

‘I’d love a whisky.’ I wish that my voice didn’t sound so girlish and high.

The pub looks as though it hasn’t been decorated for years. The chairs have grubby corduroy seats, and there are curtains with heavy swags, and eighties ragrolled walls. You can smell hot chip oil. The place is filling up with workers from local offices, relaxing before their journey home—raucous men with florid ties, and women in crisp trouser suits and wearing lots of lip gloss. A teenage boy with an undernourished look and blue shadows round his mouth and eyes comes up to the fruit machine and starts to play.

I take off my coat, rather carefully: my body feels clumsy and ungainly. I watch all the glittering colours that chase across the fruit machine. I have a strong sense that I’m forgetting something important. Pictures of home move through my mind, a catalogue of possible disasters: Amber losing her keys and waiting on the doorstep in the cold, or starting a fire because she heats up the casserole after all and then gets sidetracked by an urgent text message. I take out my phone, I’m about to ring her again. But Will is coming back with my drink. I watch his easy grace as he weaves through the crowd towards me. Instead of ringing Amber, I turn off my phone.

He sits.

‘So you’re OK?’ he asks. Just to fill in the silence. His eyes linger on my face for a moment, then flick away. I realise he too is nervous.

‘I’m fine.’

He smiles at me rather earnestly, as though this is encouraging information.

‘I hope this pub’s all right,’ he says. ‘I thought it would be easier to talk here.’

‘Of course, it’s great,’ I tell him.

I think of the dream I had about him, his warm slide into me, the shocking openness of it. Now, sitting here in this banal place with this man who’s still a stranger, I’m embarrassed by the memory of my dream.

He sips his beer.

‘Let me tell you,’ he says. ‘About young Kyle.’

‘Yes. Please.’

‘You were absolutely right,’ he says. ‘In what you suspected. The father’s very violent.’

I nod.

‘The mother called us a few times. I had a word with Naomi Yates, who’s her liaison officer. Nasty stuff: he used to choke her, she said. It started when she was pregnant. As so often.’ A kind of weariness seeps into his voice.

‘Did he ever hurt Kyle directly? ‘

‘Not so far as we know. That happens, doesn’t it?There are men who’ll beat up their wives and not lay a hand on the kids.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

He takes a sip of his beer. I watch his hands, his long pale fingers curving round the glass.

‘She’d leave and then go back to him. You know the story—these women who keep on leaving and then can’t stay away. All it takes is some tears and a bunch of cut-price roses. It’s one of the great mysteries, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Why women don’t just give up on these psycho husbands.’ When he frowns, there are hard lines etched in his face. ‘There’s fear, of course, but it isn’t always fear. I don’t want to buy into that whole hooked-on-violence thing, but you’ve got to wonder.’

‘Perhaps it’s remorse they get hooked on,’ I say.

This interests him. Lights from the fruit machine with all their kaleidoscopic colours glitter in his eyes.

‘You could be onto something,’ he says. ‘I imagine it’s very seductive. He sobs and says he’s sorry and it’ll never happen again… We believe what we want to believe, I guess. About the people we love.’ His gaze is on me, that intent look. ‘I mean, we all do that, don’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

This hint of intimacy stirs something in me, a little shimmer of sex.

‘You know about this stuff, then, Ginnie,’ he says,after a moment. ‘Well, of course you would. You work with the kids who get caught up in it all.’

I have a sudden sharp impulse to uncover myself, to reveal something.

‘It’s not just that,’ I tell him. ‘It’s in the family.’

His eyes widen. He’s very still suddenly.

‘Now, you mean?’ He leans towards me, his voice is careful, slow. ‘Or are we talking about the past here?’

‘Not now. Now is OK. In the past. My childhood.’

‘Your childhood,’ he says gently.

He makes a little gesture, reaching his hand towards me as though to touch me. His hand just over mine. My breathing quickens—I don’t know if he hears this.

There’s a resonant clatter of coins from the fruit machine beside us. The noise intrudes and pushes us apart. Will leans back in his chair again. The teenage boy scoops up his winnings and stuffs his pockets with coins.

Will looks at me uncertainly, but the mood has changed, we can’t get back there.

‘Tell me more about Kyle,’ I say.

‘The last time was the worst,’ says Will. ‘Naomi reckons this is what triggered the mother’s breakdown. She said she was going to leave, that this time she really meant it, and he threatened her with a pickaxe. Actually, threatened doesn’t quite capture it. I think this could be the thing you need to know.’

‘Kyle built a room with Lego,’ I say, ‘but he wouldn’t open the door.’

Will nods.

‘How Naomi told it—Kyle and his mother were in the bedroom, and she pushed the wardrobe over and barricaded them in. She’d got her phone, thank God, she managed to call us. We got there just as the father was breaking down the door. Afterwards he said he wanted to make her love him. Weird kind of loving.’ He twists his mouth, as though he has a bitter taste.

I shake my head.

‘I got it totally wrong,’ I tell him.

‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ he says.

‘No, really. He’s so terrified. And I thought the thing he was so scared of—I thought it was there in the room with him. That he’d been abused or something. He’s always so afraid.’

‘It’s a pebble chucked in a pond,’ he says. ‘That kind of violence. It reaches out, it hurts a lot of people.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

A little silence falls.

He leans towards me again. His hands are close to mine on the table.

‘Tell me about yourself, Ginnie,’ he says lightly. ‘You have a family of your own? ‘

I tell him about taking Molly to university. I feel uncertain though: it makes you seem so old, to have a child at college. I wonder if he’s working out my age.

‘It made me think how when I was just eighteen, I was so sure that one day I’d have everything sorted,’ I tell him. ‘That I’d know where I was going.’

‘I know just what you mean,’ he says. ‘And then you wake up and you find you’re forty and all that’s happened is that life just got more complicated…’

Forty, I think. Shit. Forty.

‘My other one—Amber,’ I tell him. ‘She’s sixteen. I worry about her. She drinks a lot and stays out late—I mean, she’s quite pretty.’

‘Well, she would be,’ he says.