The River House (15 page)

At the side of the house, there are the remains of a garden: a lawn of long grass, and hydrangea bushes with papery dead flower
heads, and a hedge that no longer seems to mark out any boundary, and, on a sprawling rosebush, the tattered remnant of a
white summer rose. The plants are straggly, neglected for years, the roses half strangled with ivy, but it’s like the place
hasn’t quite forgotten how to be a garden. I wonder who the people were who tended this garden, who walked here by the river.
At the edge of the lawn the wood presses in, with just a narrow gap where a path leads through the trees.

I go to the river. There’s a broken jetty that seems to belong with the summerhouse, and a dinghy, half rotting, tied up with
fraying rope. The boat has a name on the prow in peeling letters.
Sweet Bird of Youth:
a flamboyant name for such a little boat. Fallen leaves have massed on the water between the boat and the bank, thickly,
like a carpet: So in a moment of carelessness, or of being willingly taken in by the illusion, you might almost step out onto
them, believing them to be solid, not just a surface loveliness of yellow and russet and gold.

“I like it here,” I say.

There are windows at the side of the house, with cracked glass. Will goes to look in the window, cupping his hand at the side
of his face to shield his eyes from the brightness.

“It’s empty,” he says.

The door in the side of the house is green like the bargeboards, though the paint is peeling and worn.

Will glances along the path, then unwinds the twist of wire that secures the door.

“Will, for God’s sake—we can’t just go in,” I say.

“Why ever not?”

“It’s trespassing.”

“That isn’t a crime,” he says. “Not if you don’t damage anything.”

“But surely—I mean, this must belong to someone, musn’t it?”

“It doesn’t look like they’re very bothered about it,” he says.

He turns the handle, holds it there, gives the door a quick kick. It shakes and creaks open, with a shower of paint flakes.

He peers in.

“Are you OK with spiders?” he says.

“Kind of.”

He gestures me in.

“But we can’t …”

“Ginnie, just look at the state of it. No one’s been here for years.”

I follow him through the door.

It’s a single room, with bare floorboards and a table against the wall. The corners are hung with vast spiderwebs, like lacy
festoons of some worn gray fabric, and there’s thick, dark dust on the floor and streaks of glimmering bird shit—there must
be a missing tile where the birds get in. Things have been left here—a canvas deck chair folded up, a Coke can, a cigarette
lighter thrown down on the floor—but these things are so dusty and long abandoned, they feel like outgrowths of the place,
as organic as the ferns that grow up through the floor. There’s a rich river smell, of mud and rot and reeds.

The glass in the windows is smeared and cracked, but a lot of light comes in—river light, the random, lovely intricacy of
sunlight moving on water—so the room seems alive with silvery shiftings and patternings.

He closes the door, turns to face me, leans back against the door.

“Well,” he says.

He gives me a small smile of triumph, like a man who has just achieved something. His eyes gleam in the river light. I’m standing
there in the middle of the floor, looking at him. I stretch out my arms. I feel such excitement in this enclosed space, with
its secrecy, its shut door. Here we can do anything. Here we will not be seen.

He comes toward me and starts again to take off my clothes, piling them carefully on top of my bag, knowing the dust could
mark us and give us away. I pull off his shirt and see how the river light moves across his body. Here there is a different
rhythm: We can be slow, tender. I feel it all so exactly—the cool, dank touch of this enclosed air on me, the silky solidness
of his cock against my lips, my fingers; and his body pressed against me, its lines and bones and hardness, and the softness
of his skin.

He kisses my hair as my breathing slows.

“Did that feel good?” he says. “It looked as though it felt good.”

But I can’t quite speak yet.

He turns me around and bends me across the table and slides into me. He says my name over and over.

Afterward I ask him to hold me, and we stay like that for a long time.

“I’d like to lie down with you,” he says. “That would be wonderful. But this floor’s so filthy.”

I think how that would feel, to lie stretched out together.

“Perhaps I could find us something to lie on. Perhaps a blanket or something.”

“Could you?” he says.

We brush the dust off each other’s clothes. We leave and secure the door again, so it’s as it was before. We check along the
path to see that no one is around. As though this is a crime we have committed.

We don’t talk much as we walk toward the car. My body feels slowed, gentle. I drop him off at Sheffield Street, and go home
with the dust of the river house on my knees and the soles of my shoes and his smell all about me—and for hours, if I close
my eyes, I can see the river brightness against my eyelids, the dance and dazzle of light. There’s a childlike part of me
that believes in pattern, in significance, that whispers, If it were all wrong, if we shouldn’t be doing this, then why did
we find this place—this room full of glimmering light, this place to keep our secret?

O
N
S
UNDAY
M
AX AND
C
LEM COME TO DINNER
. Max is first. He’s brought me flowers, yellow lilies with speckled hearts, and an expensive Burgundy. In his pale Armani
jacket, he seems much younger than his years. He kisses me lingeringly on both sides of my face.

“You’re looking well,” he says.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“No, really, Ginnie. There’s something different.”

I shrug a little, laughing, afraid he can read something in me.

He has an invitation for me. He’s had a call from Dylan, the conductor of the choir we sang in at university. Dylan is planning
one of our periodic reunions, at the church in Walsall where he is choirmaster, to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in February.
I say I’d love to come. I find a vase for the flowers and put them on the dining room table; their pollen powders my fingers,
as though I have dipped them in turmeric.

Clem is wearing one of her vintage outfits, a chiffony anthracite-gray skirt and blue suede boots with fringes, and her hair
is tamed by some resinous hair product.

I hug her.

“You look gorgeous,” I say.

“I saw a heron fly over,” she says as she takes off her jacket. “Making that weird noise they make. You always feel special,
don’t you, if you see a heron? It must be lovely to live so near the river.”

“It’s jolly damp,” says Greg. “We have awful problems with damp.”

We go into the living room, and Greg pours us drinks. Max sprawls expansively on the sofa. Clem runs her fingers over my patchwork
cushions.

“You might have underground water,” says Max. “Perhaps there’s a stream that runs under your house—a tributary going down
to the Thames.”

Greg talks with animation about his fears of flooding, and the time the cellar flooded and we had it pumped out and got horribly
overcharged.

“There you are then,” says Max. “Apparently there are all these trapped rivers in London, rivers that have been concreted
in, flooding people’s cellars and generally causing trouble. I just read this weird thing,” he says. “In Peter Ackroyd’s
London
. They did a study in some hospital and found that most of the people brought in with asthma or allergies lived over underground
streams.”

“Well, of course,” says Clem. “They disturb the magnetic field of the body. Underground water is terribly bad for you.”

Her eyes glint: She knows about these things. Once she showed me how to dowse with rods made from metal coat hangers. She’d
straightened the coat hangers out, with a little hook at the end. You held the rods between finger and thumb so they could
swivel freely, and you had to walk quite smoothly, like a cat. It happened just as she said it would, the rods swinging out
suddenly and precisely to follow the lines of streams below the ground. It was unnerving, feeling the tug of a force that
I didn’t know was there.

I never told Greg about this; he sees Clem as terribly flaky. Now, he raises his eyebrows slightly.

“They say that where people think they see ghosts,” says Max, “or anything supernatural, there are usually underground rivers.
That they make people feel spooked.”

We go into the dining room. I’ve lit lots of candles on the mantelpiece in front of my wide gilt-framed mirror; the flames
reflect in the glass with a witchy glamour. The walls of the room are a deep jade green; they seem almost black in the candlelight.
The scent of Max’s lilies brushes against us.

Clem admires the candles. The Burgundy is like velvet on your tongue. We eat melon, then coq au vin, and listen to Miles Davis.
Max tells us more about the book about London he’s read. He likes to be listened to.

“Some of it was quite gruesome,” he says. “There used to be these special places along the banks of the river, where they
took the bodies of people who were dragged out of the Thames. Suicides or drownings. They called them the dead houses. The
bodies were laid on a shelf ’til the coroner could come.”

Clem shudders.

“Imagine what those places would have been like,” she says.

Greg takes a slow sip of Burgundy.

“It means the Dark River,” he says.

For a moment, the rest of us don’t understand what he means.

“The Thames,” he says. “The word comes from
tamasa
. It’s Sanskrit—the Dark River.”

Clem shakes her head a little.

“All those poor lost people,” she says. “People who died and maybe nobody missed them.”

For dessert I’ve made a blackberry pie, with blackberries from the garden and the last of the convent apples. It has a crisp,
buttery crust, and the filling is sharp and sweet and winey, with a syrup that stains you. We eat and talk about Molly—everyone
rather envious, wishing, as people do, that we could do it all again but knowing what we know now; and I talk, perhaps with
excessive emotion, about the difficulties involved in parenting teenage girls, and Amber in particular, who has gone to the
pub with friends and should be home by now.

“You worry too much,” says Greg to me.

“He’s right, it’s what kids are like,” says Max, with the authority of the childless. “You have to be a bit more laid-back
about it.”

“It isn’t that easy,” I say.

After dessert, Greg says would we mind if he went to bed—he has a nine-o’clock lecture tomorrow. I see Clem glancing at me
as he goes, but she doesn’t say anything. There’s a kind of easing after Greg has gone. Max lights a cigarette; Clem kicks
off her shoes. The lilies glimmer in the candlelight, just a flower-shaped luminescence, their color all washed away, and
the jade-green walls are so dark it’s as though we’re under water, under the sea in one of Ursula’s paintings, that claustrophobic
jeweled world. I can just make out our faces in the mirror: The candlelight is kind to us, making our eyes gleam, showing
the shape of our bones. The music has ended, but I like the silence. Almost any music would be wrong now, except perhaps a
solitary flute, high and clear and distant, spooling out its bright notes into emptiness.

Clem sips her wine. “Don’t worry about Amber,” she says. “I’m sure she’s being protected.”

Sometimes Clem unnerves me.

“Well,” I say lightly, “I hope so.”

“No, really,” she says, “I’m serious.”

There’s a little spilled wine on the table. Clem moves her finger in it, tracing a pattern that no one else can see.

“I heard an angel once,” she says. Her voice is quite matter-of-fact, no question in it.

I glance at Max. I expect a sardonic smile, or at least a deeply skeptical look, a raised eyebrow. But he’s listening quietly,
blowing out blue smoke.

“It was when all that stuff was happening with Gordon,” she says. “When it was falling apart.” Her voice quiet, thin, suspended
in the stillness. “I was staying at my mother’s, and I woke, and it was dark. I was thinking, How could I carry on? I couldn’t
begin to imagine how I could start all over again—love again, trust anyone again—and I heard this voice in the darkness. Saying
the words of a hymn we’d sung when I was a child. ‘Love divine, all loves excelling …’ It wasn’t in my head,” she says, as
though responding to some protest from Max or from me, though we’re just sitting there quietly. “It was an absolutely clear
voice.”

The reflections of the candles float in the dark of the mirror, as though they’re floating on water.

“I went to this therapist last year,” she says, “and I told her about it, and she’d refer to it sometimes. And she’d always
say, That angel you thought you heard. But I didn’t
think
I heard it: I
heard
it.”

I can hear Max’s breathing, and at the window the whisper of the rain.

“‘As we grow older, the world becomes stranger,’” he says. “Who wrote that?”

But Clem and I don’t know.

“It was some poet,” he says. “I think some poet said that.”

“I’m envious,” I say. “I’d like to hear an angel.”

“Sometimes I think … we’re all connected,” says Clem slowly. “Sometimes I think …” She makes a slight gesture. “I don’t know
what I think …” Her voice trails off into silence. “But it was a wonderful thing. It got me through.”

There’s a crash as the front door opens and is flung back. I jump, then feel the relief that always surges through me when
Amber is home. We smile, lean back in our chairs, the spell broken.

“There you are then,” says Clem.

Amber comes in, stands uncertainly in the doorway.

“Hi, you guys,” she says.

She smiles, her new wide, practiced smile. She’s just a little shy. She never uses an umbrella—she hates the way the rain
runs down her sleeve from the umbrella handle—and the furry trimming of her coat is clumped together and sodden, and her hair
is wet, as though she’s been dragged through water.