The River House (12 page)

The water has reached our feet now. We get up and turn to go. I realize that I’m shivering.

“We just have to be very careful,” I say. “As long as we’re careful, everyone will be safe. Won’t they?”

There’s such a sense of loss when he leaves me, when I drop him off on Sheffield Street and he walks away. As I move through
the week, I tell myself, With every step I take, I am walking toward the next time.

I
HAVE ANOTHER SESSION
with Kyle McConville. He kneels on the floor by the Lego box. He’s turned away from me. He builds the room again, the high
walls made of Lego, no doors or windows in the room, the adult and the boy.

His face is white as chalk. He still seems very afraid. I think of what Will told me.

“The little boy’s safe in the room,” I say. “The walls are keeping him safe. Nobody’s going to harm him.”

He goes on building. His movements seem less abrupt today, his hands moving more fluidly as he snaps the bricks into position.

I choose some window pieces from the box of Lego. I spread them out beside him on the floor.

“Perhaps the boy would like a window in his room,” I say. “He might like one of these windows. It could go in quite high up.
Just a little window.”

He looks at the window pieces for a long, slow moment. I sit there quietly, not looking directly at him. There’s silence all
around us: You can hear the rooks in the elms, and Kyle’s rapid, shaky breath. His forehead creases as he frowns. Then he
puts out his hand and picks up one of the window pieces. He slots it into his wall.

“Now the boy’s got a window,” I say. “He can see out a bit if he wants to. He’s still quite safe in his room.”

He goes on building. He builds the walls very tall, and he puts on a roof with a chimney. When he’s finished, he sits back
on his heels and looks at his work for a moment.

When he goes he gives me a small, crooked smile. I know that we’re moving forward. One day soon he’ll put a door in the wall:
and he’ll go through the door and face the thing he’s afraid of.

Amber has her braces removed.

I’m in the kitchen when she comes back from the orthodontist’s appointment. I hear her fling down her bicycle, and her rapid
step in the passageway. I can tell she’s happy.

She makes an entrance, pushing the door wide, tugging off her helmet so all her hair swings out.

“Well?” she says, and smiles with parted lips.

It’s startling. She isn’t a girl anymore. She has a wide, even, immaculate smile.

“Wow.” I hug her. “You look beautiful.”

There’s a bag of toffees she’s bought in celebration—forbidden for two years in case they stuck to her braces. She dumps them
on the table: She’s eaten half the bag already.

“I’ve got this retainer, it really hurts.” She thrusts a pink box at me. “But nobody wears them anyway.”

“That’s up to you,” I say.

“Are you sure they’re OK?” she says. “Are you really, really sure they’re completely even? That there isn’t a tiny gap?”

“I’m sure. It’s just the most perfect smile,” I say.

She turns to look at herself in the mirror that’s shaped like a crescent moon. The mirror is high—she has to stand on tiptoe.
She has her head to one side, then the other; she’s posing, holding her head at different angles, like a photographer’s model.
She’s thin and her hair is heavy and full where she crimped it last night for a party; she seems top-heavy, like a flower,
her head a bright, lavish blossom on the slenderest stalk.

“Yes,” she says. It’s a statement of how things are. She gives a little laugh of pleasure.

She’s about to go upstairs. I look at her, her skinny jeans and her long red hair and that smile. I clear my throat.

“Amber—there’s something I’ve wanted to say. If you and this boy you’re seeing—you know … I mean, if you’re serious …”

She fixes me with a clear stare. Her eyes are a washed blue, like sky after rain.

“What is this, Mum? Are you trying to say, am I on the Pill?”

“Well, yes.”

“Mum, for God’s sake, what do you think? Of course I am.”

“But you haven’t been to the doctor.”

She shrugs. “We all get our stuff from Oasis,” she says.

It’s a clinic where some of the girls I work with go. I picture her sitting in reception next to Caron Clarkson, whose arms
are tattooed with dragons, who has sex in car parks for very small sums of money.

“Is that, well, OK?”

“It’s what everyone does, Mum. I’d thought you’d have known.”

“Well, good,” I say. “As long as you keep yourself safe. As long as you know what you’re doing.”

I start to fill the dishwasher. I think of all the books I read when Molly and Amber were younger—books on raising girls with
boundless self-esteem and inspiring joyous sexual self-awareness and empowering our daughters to feel at ease in their bodies.
This isn’t the conversation I’d imagined having.

“Lauren knows some people who have sex in Saint Dunstan’s churchyard,” she says. She’s a little self-righteous, as though
to say that she’d have nothing to do with such excesses. “I think that’s gross. People should get a room.”

“Amber, if you ever want to bring anyone back here …”

“Thanks, Mum, but we’re OK.”

She unwraps a toffee and stuffs it in her mouth. It makes her cheek bulge. She looks like a little girl again.

“Mum, I just can’t believe you’d think I’d be that stupid. You know, not to use anything.”

“You wouldn’t rather go to our doctor?”

“Mum, I’m fine, OK? How often do I have to tell you, exactly?”

She goes up to her room, leaving the box with the retainer but taking the toffees.

On Saturday, Eva throws a party—a joint birthday party for her husband, Ted, who is fifty, and the twins, who are sixteen.
It’s at the rowing club.

It’s a squat concrete building, unimposing from outside, but on the first floor there’s a bar and a dance floor and a balcony
with a wide view of the Thames. The place is already full when we get there. There’s a band, playing eighties hits with great
enthusiasm. We drink, and talk to Ted and Eva’s friends. There’s a thread of sadness woven through these conversations. Someone’s
father has Alzheimer’s and can’t remember his wife’s name, though he can still play the piano; someone’s daughter has Down’s,
and she leaves school in the summer, and what will happen to her then? I think that we are fortunate, Greg and I.

The more extroverted of Eva’s friends are already on the dance floor, remembering the moves they used to make, bouncing around
with an air of unselfconscious enjoyment, the febrile gorgeousness of disco lights playing across their faces and clothes.
I’d like to ask Greg to dance, but I know what he would say. The teenagers—Lauren and Josh’s friends, Amber among them—lurk
like beautiful moths on the periphery of things. The girls are dressed like Amber, in clingy jeans and vest tops, all bones
and gleaming golden skin and expectation. I recognize some of them—Jamila, Sofia, Katrine—it’s a loose friendship group that
Amber is part of. In winter they meet at parties; on summer evenings they like to gather in Stoneleigh Gardens, behind the
gasworks, where they gossip and drink from cans and text their friends. Their parents perhaps have brought them tonight, but
they don’t really want to be here yet. They stand with their backs to the dance floor, keen to convey that whatever is happening
there is no concern of theirs. Occasionally one of them will weave her way to the bar across the floor between the dancers—shoulders
hunched, eyes down, rapid and unsmiling, like someone venturing into enemy territory. Later the parents will go, and their
party will begin.

When it gets too hot in the bar, we go out onto the balcony. You can smell the cold smell of the river. Everything is black—the
sky, the water, the trees on the opposite bank—except where light from the rowing club catches the water just below the balcony,
spilling from the tops of the waves the way shine spills from silk. Across the water a single white-painted house glimmers
pale. Our music must be loud to them, carrying over the river with unimpeded clarity. There’s a scattering of stars and a
slice-of-melon moon. You can’t see people’s faces out here, only the lights from inside that play across them, the careless
dancing colors in their glasses of wine and their eyes. After the heat in the bar, the cold, silk touch of the river air is
wonderful on my skin. We drink silently for a moment, resting our arms on the balustrade. I glance at Greg. His face is blotted
out by shadow. I have a sudden giddy sense that I have no connection to him: that he could be anyone. If I said his name,
would he turn to me? Once I saw a TV program about how people cope with urban living: how for each of us there is a group
of familiar strangers—those people we recognize but never greet. Sometimes Greg seems like that to me—someone I don’t really
know, just someone who’s waiting on the same rail platform. I look out over the water, feeling the dizziness that’s induced
by its scarcely perceptible movement, just caught on the edges of vision—as though where you’re standing is not as secure
as you thought.

I take Greg’s arm.

“I’m cold. Let’s go back in.”

We refill our glasses and seek out Ted, who is comforting and capacious and tonight is wearing a tie with a pattern of peonies,
and we have a soothingly banal conversation about the cost of dentistry.

We go at half past eleven, leaving Amber to find her own way home. I briefly consider offering to come back later to pick
her up—but her boyfriend is wrapped around her, his fingers pushed proprietorially into the back pocket of her jeans, and
I know my offer wouldn’t be welcome.

I sleep fitfully, waking repeatedly, listening for her. Just after two o’clock a noise wakes me. I get up and go out onto
the landing. There’s a smell of cigarette smoke, and down in the hall I can see her kicked-off shoes: I breathe the smell
in gratefully, and I go back to bed, stretching out luxuriously, knowing I will sleep now.

On Sunday I drive down to Hampshire to see my mother.

I park in the road. The garden is tended, the Michaelmas daisies in flower, purple as smoke and ragged under the front bay
window. Her car is parked in the driveway; I see there’s a dent in the wing. She hasn’t said anything about this. I wait on
the doorstep, amid the sounds of my childhood—the whispering shrubbery, the singing of the electricity wires that pass over
the back of our garden.

She greets me warmly. She feels thin, more fragile, in my arms, her face a little frayed; but she smells freshly of soap and
Blue Grass, and her makeup is neat, exact, her hands well cared for, her nails palely varnished. She leads me into the sitting
room. She’s taken the dust sheets off the furniture for me. Everything is orderly—the photos on the mantelpiece, the small
shelf of books that marked us out as a middle-class family—though her colors and tulip prints are fading now. The room looks
out over the back garden, the plum tree, the stream that is sometimes bright with toxins, the heavy, moist hedges hanging
over the stream; and I see she has put out food for the birds. All these things reassure me.

I’ve brought her a novel I thought she might like, and some photos of the girls. She puts the novel to one side.

“I don’t read very much nowadays, darling,” she says. “I seem to lose the thread.”

Only the photographs interest her.

It’s cold in the house—heating it adequately always seems extravagant to her, no matter how much Ursula and I assure her that
we will pay the bill. When I rang I said I’d take her out for lunch, but she hadn’t wanted to go. Now I regret that I didn’t
persuade her. I’d like to be with her in some place that’s cozy and banal, to have a dry sherry and a gammon steak and talk
to the waitress about the unseasonal weather and the autumn colors in the forest: I don’t want to be here, in this cold house
full of memory.

She brings in tea.

“I didn’t make you anything,” she says, apologizing for the shop-bought Victoria sponge. “I don’t do much baking nowadays.
I seem to get so tired.”

I tell her the cake is delicious; and think of my childhood, when her hands were always busy—mixing her fruitcakes in a vast
yellow-glazed bowl, or ironing shirts on a blanket on the kitchen table: Monday was her wash day, and Ursula and I would come
home from school to the safe, particular smell of almost-scorched linen.

It isn’t easy to talk today. Usually she has gossip to tell, about people at church, or her neighbors, but she seems to have
run out of stories.

“Ursula said you had a bad spell in church,” I say tentatively.

“Ursula thinks I should go to the doctor.” In her voice there’s an edge of impatience at Ursula’s insistence. “She’s fixed
it up. She says she’s going to take me.” She shrugs. “But what can he do?” she says.

Her gesture reminds me of Amber—a way they both have of shrugging while turning their faces away.

I ask what happened to her car.

“Nothing, darling,” she says. “Is there anything wrong with my car?” A splinter of hesitation in her voice.

I feel a flicker of panic.

“It looks like something bashed into you.”

“Does it, darling? I could have driven into something. I can’t remember exactly.”

Her face is veiled.

As we say good-bye, she stands there for a moment, her hands on my arms, her fingers pressing into me.

“Darling, I do so hope things work out well for all of you—Amber’s exams and Gregory’s book and everything.”

I feel her thin, urgent grasp on my arms. I smile and hold her close. I try to push away the meaning of what she’s saying.
But I know she thinks she may not see me again.

I take a detour on the way home: I drive down to the sea and park for a while on the cliff top, looking across the Solent
toward the Isle of Wight. The sea is a cold blue, the island misted and gray. It was an enchanted place to us as children:
a place that was always there on the horizon, blue as hyacinths or hidden by rain or absolutely precise with its fields and
little woods in the clear, wet spring sunshine—yet never visited, unknowable. We used to talk about going there; Ursula and
I used to beg to be taken to this magical, inaccessible land across the water, and our mother would play along, imagining
a picnic on the cliffs, a swim in the sea at Ryde, where the waves would be rougher and more exciting than on our familiar
beaches—but somehow it never happened. Now, even as I watch, the island is blurred behind a veil of rain.