The River House (16 page)

“Was it a good evening?” says Max.

“OK.” She shrugs off her coat. She’s a bit disorganized, her movements rather random, from too much Bacardi perhaps. She’s
wearing tight jeans and a little top, exposing lots of skin. There’s glittery varnish on her bitten nails. “There was this
really sad guy,” she says. She twists her mermaid’s hair behind an ear. “He came up to me and it was, like, ‘If I could rearrange
the alphabet I’d put U and I together.’ I gave him a look, and he went away. Can I have a drink, Mum?”

“No, sweetheart, I think you’ve had enough already. Have you eaten?”

She shakes her head.

“There’s some coq au vin you could heat up in the kitchen.”

She frowns.

“Mum, you know I don’t like to eat animals.” She turns to Max and Clem. “I try to tell her,” she says, “about animal cruelty
and stuff. I’ve even brought her leaflets. But will she listen? Yum. Blackberry pie.”

I spoon some out on a coffee saucer for her. She eats greedily. They chat to her as she eats, about school and what subjects
she’s doing and whether she likes her teachers. Her lips are wet and stained with vivid juice.

“My form tutor, she’s always getting at me because I haven’t fixed my work experience placement,” she says. “Like it’s this
big moral thing.” She’s expansive, making the most of her audience. “I mean, we have war, we have famine, we do these horrible
things to animals: What’s the big deal about a few days’ work experience? She has issues, Mrs. Russell.”

“So, what’s involved?” says Max.

“It’s just for a week in December,” I say. “It shouldn’t be that difficult. But I can’t take her because of the confidentiality
thing, and she’s adamant she’s not going to Greg’s department. Though really I can’t see why not.”

“Mum, please don’t start all that again,” says Amber sternly.

Max’s eyes rest on her. I see a bud of an idea beginning to form.

“In December?” he says.

She nods.

“We’ve had students on placement before,” he says. “They seem to quite enjoy it.”

“You could have
me
,” she says.

He smiles. “I’m sure we’d be able to work out something. If you’d like that.”

“
Please
,” she says. “It would be perfect.”

“Max, are you sure?” I say. “I mean, it’s sweet of you, but you mustn’t feel you have to. …”

“Absolutely. As long as Amber doesn’t mind being a general dogsbody—making the coffee, that sort of thing.”

“She could learn,” I say.

Amber glares at me.

“And you could come to court, of course,” says Max. “Though I can’t guarantee there’ll be anything remotely glamorous. Most
of the time it’s unbelievably boring.”

“No murders?”

“I’m afraid I can’t promise a murder.”

“Will I need a suit?” she says.

He shakes his head. “Just something smartish.”

“Mum could lend me something.” She finishes her dessert and gives the spoon a comprehensive lick. “Thanks, Max. You’ve saved
my skin.”

She takes a scrap of envelope and an eyeliner pencil from her handbag and writes her number down for him, with a sketch of
a flower next to her name. She hands it across to him with her new, lavish smile.

“Court,” she says with satisfaction. “That’ll show her.”

She doesn’t quite know how to say good night. She picks up her coat and gives Max and Clem a slight, self-conscious wave.

“She’s so lovely,” says Clem, after she’s gone. “You’re so lucky, Ginnie, with your daughters. She’s lovely, isn’t she, Max?”

“She certainly is,” he says. He tucks the scrap of paper in his pocket.

We hear Amber clatter upstairs, and the shower running. The mood has changed. I would like to talk more about Clem’s angel,
but I know that the moment has passed. We are more ordinary now.

I make coffee, and we discuss the mayoral election and the inadequacies of the local rail service; then Clem and Max gather
their things together and go off into the night.

I go back to the dining room, not wanting to go to bed yet. Amber is asleep now. My home is quiet, just creaking a little,
like somebody turning over and settling down to sleep. I think of the things we talked about, of the pull of hidden water
and the angel that Clem heard, of how as you grow older the world becomes stranger. And I think of making love with Will in
the house on the banks of the river, and I wonder how I came to this place—everything fluid, nothing fixed, so different from
how I’d imagined it would be.

A
MBER HAS HER WORK EXPERIENCE PLACEMENT
in the second week of December. I’m pleased with how seriously she takes it. She buys herself a skirt—an item of clothing
she didn’t previously possess—and a pair of prim, if rather high, court shoes. She borrows some pearl earrings of mine, which
I never wear because I think they look too middle-aged on me, but on her they look beguilingly demure.

I go to wake her on the first morning of the placement, but she’s up already. In her decorous new clothes, she looks like
the secretary in a black-and-white romantic movie, in the moment of revelation when Cary Grant whips off her glasses and takes
the clip out of her hair.

Max arranges for her to spend the day in court. It’s a social security fraud case, which doesn’t sound especially thrilling,
but the whole thing fascinates her—the wigs, the bundles of paper tied up in pink ribbon, all the pompousness and drama. She
feels a rush of empathy for the defendant.

“The prosecution lawyer gave her a really hard time,” she says. “This horrible barrister. Can they do that, Mum?”

“They can do what they want,” I say. “They’re just out to get a result. It’s what they’re there for. They don’t care if they
upset people.”

“It shouldn’t happen. That poor woman. She was only trying to feed her kids,” she says. “She didn’t hurt anybody.”

I remember that certainty—how at sixteen life is so simple and obvious, and you’re utterly convinced you know what’s right.
Though as you get older you become less sure.

At the end of the week Amber decides she’s going to be a lawyer. I send Max a bottle of Glenfiddich. He rings to thank me.

“Really, you shouldn’t have,” he says. “It was a pleasure.”

I don’t see Will for two weeks over Christmas. We’re both with our families. We don’t speak or phone.

Molly comes home, bringing an intimidating load of washing. Greg moves out of her room and rolls out the futon on the dining
room floor.

“That won’t be very comfortable,” I say. “You don’t have to sleep there.”

My face goes hot when I say this: I’m embarrassed inviting him back into my bed, as though I’m suggesting something illicit.
I think how strange this is.

He shrugs: He says he’s got used to sleeping on his own.

Molly looks different. She seems somehow to have grown, though she isn’t any taller. I gaze at her, loving to rest my eyes
on her, trying to puzzle out what’s changed about her. There are the obvious things. Her style is cooler, more subtle. She
wears her hair down, not piled up in complicated ways or wrapped all around itself. She doesn’t wear the little spangly tops
anymore, and she’s thrown out the pink eye shadow. But something inchoate has changed as well, as though she has her adult
bones now, as though the structure of her face is more defined.

She’s out every evening, catching up with friends in the Blue Hawaii or Starbucks. She’s already planning her summer. “Is
it OK if I don’t come on holiday with you guys next year, Mum? There’s this boy I know—his parents have a house in Crete,
near Agios Nikolaos. You wouldn’t mind, Mum, would you?” When she’s at home, she spends hours with Amber in one of their rooms,
playing music and sharing secrets, and when I go in they stop talking. She’s happy to be home, but I know she’s moving away
from me.

And she’s broke, of course. She’s terribly sorry—but could we help her out, just ’til her next loan check comes? She’s had
to buy an awful lot of books. … Her eyes are large and liquid as she says this. Greg and I discuss whether to subsidize her.

“For Chrissake,” he says, “she’s spent a fifth of her money on phone calls.”

“But no one can manage on a student loan,” I tell him. “Shouldn’t we be glad we can help, so she doesn’t have to go off and
be a strippergram?”

It’s Christmas weather, cold and clear. One Saturday we wake to a powdering of snow; the world seems full of light, and there’s
a line of frozen snow down the side of the trunk of the pear tree, precise, immaculate, like a child’s attempt at drawing
light and shade. I wonder what it would be like at the river house. The grass that once was mown would be perfect under the
snow, untouched except for the delicate stitchery of birds’ footprints, smoothed out and perfected, like white velvet. I imagine
the quiet of it, and the dance of the light. Though when I glimpse the river from the window of Greg’s study, the brown of
the water looks soiled against the dazzle of the snow.

By midafternoon, it’s melting, and the world is full of the drip and glitter and rawness of the thaw. Amber is going out,
wearing just her leather jacket over a cotton milkmaid top. Her breath smokes in the open doorway. Her skin is pimpling with
cold.

“You can’t go out like that,” I say.

“You weren’t meant to see,” she says.

At my insistence she puts on a sweater; it has a very low neck.

“Can’t you choose a warmer one?” I say.

She shakes her head.

“I did what you said. I put on a sweater,” she says.

“Well, wear your scarf then.”

“I can’t,” she says, shocked, as though I’ve suggested something obscene. “I couldn’t possibly. Those colors together are
gross.
”

Molly overhears and lends Amber a scarf of her own, a stripy one from Gap.

“Funky,” says Amber. She tries it on and smiles at her reflection.

“I’ll kill you if you get anything on it,” says Molly, as an afterthought.

Amber is meeting friends tonight for a Mexican meal: I imagine a major scene, in which Amber hands back the Gap scarf with
a chilli salsa stain. So I give the scarf back to Molly and hunt out a scarf of my own, which Amber seems content with, though
it’s the exact same shade as the one she rejected. I wonder if all this negotiation was worthwhile, or if I should just have
let her shiver.

“Amber,” I call after her. “Have you got your keys and your phone?”

“Mum, you don’t need to go on about it. I never go anywhere without my phone.”

I go to the mall to start the Christmas shopping. There are massive queues in all the shops, and three large animated bears
that are switched on every half hour and sing along to Christmas songs. Teenagers sit on the rampart of the fountain in the
basement, eating crisps and texting their friends; the turquoise floor of the fountain glints with coins, and a notice says
that this is a wishing well, and your money will go to charity. I buy the shot glasses that Molly wants, and some books and
CDs for Greg, and a new short skirt for myself, thinking of Will, hoping that he will like it. There are new shops opening
for Christmas, candle shops and places selling charity cards, and a shop that looks more permanent, a rather classy sex shop
aimed at affluent women. It’s enticing, full of silk and mirrors. I wander inside, intrigued to reflect that I might have
a use for these things. There are camisoles and thongs in subtle colors, pale like underripe fruit or the colors of skin,
and satin blindfolds, and lubricants scented with passion flower, and leather restraints with a trim of blue glass beads.
It’s all rather lovely, but in the end I walk out again with nothing. It all seems so pale and perfect: You’d have to be so
young and unblemished to use or wear these things.

The health-food shop is more promising. They have a special Christmas promotion—a free plaid blanket or sports bag if you
spend more than twenty-five pounds. I shop with enthusiasm—ginkgo biloba to stave off Alzheimer’s, multivitamins for the girls,
some blackcurrant-and-ginseng tea because I like the packaging. I am effusively grateful for my gift; the shop assistant,
a cool, dark girl with a Central European accent, gives me a quizzical look. But in some crazy way, according to some eccentric
moral code I have invented, this isn’t the same as deliberately buying a blanket: I can pretend to myself that I didn’t choose
to do this. Yet I still feel troubled with the blanket in my bag, as though it binds the threads of my different lives together,
when everything depends on keeping them apart. Then I hear Will saying, I’d like to lie down with you, that would be wonderful,
and I feel desire move hotly through me. I think of spreading this blanket out on the floor of the river house: and just there,
walking past the families, the toddlers writhing in their buggies and clutching Rudolf balloons, the bears singing “White
Christmas,” I feel a shiver of longing, taking away my breath.

Leaving, I throw a coin into the fountain. I do this surreptitiously—embarrassed, looking over my shoulder in case I’m seen
by anyone who knows me. I close my eyes, but for a moment I don’t know how to articulate my wish, which is for everything
to go on being just the way it is. My family, my lover, secret and safe and separate: everything the same.

Greg is in the kitchen when I get back.

“Why the blanket?” he says as I unpack my shopping.

“They were giving them away in Millennium Foods if you spent over twenty-five pounds. It was either that or a sports bag.
I thought it might come in useful.” I hold his eyes; then, remembering I read somewhere that people do that when they lie,
I look away. “I mean, it’s quite good quality, and we could use it as a throw on the sofa. I’ve been thinking for a while
that the cover’s looking quite tatty.”

He shrugs, bemused at this elaborate explanation.

“I hope you remembered my aloe vera,” he says.

“Hell, I forgot.” Guilt seizes me. “Oh, Greg, I’m so, so sorry.”

“OK, OK,” he says. “There’s no need to go on about it.”

That night I dream about Will. I dream of lying with him on the blanket from Millennium Foods, stretched out on the floor
of the river house, feeling the pressure of his body against me, in some enthralled, sweet moment after making love. And then
the dream changes; I’m not part of the dream now, I’m just an observer, and Will is at home with his family, in a house with
elegant tall windows and a round dining table with a white damask cloth and a large jade teapot in the middle of the table.
I know it’s his house in the dream, though no one is there, just the table set for tea. It’s a child’s vision of domesticity,
really: a fifties family tea with angel cake and currant buns, a children’s picture book teatime. I have this dream again
and again in these cold, crowded days around Christmas. Sometimes the table is empty; sometimes he sits at the table with
his family. Always the quiet house, the perfect family, nothing to do with me.