The River House (17 page)

Eva comes around with her Christmas presents. My house has a hot scent of pastry and spices; my mince pies are from the supermarket,
just heating up in the oven, but I always make my own mulled wine, loving its glamorous smells of cloves and brandy, and the
citrus peel that leaves its rich oil on my hands.

We sit in my kitchen, which is decorated with juniper branches cut from the garden and a trail of discreet magenta ribbon.
I know that Eva’s own decorations will be equally restrained; last year her tree was draped in ice-blue beads. Neither of
us really goes for red crepe paper and glitter—the early years of mothering expose you to enough primary colors to last a
lifetime. There are carols playing, my favorite CD of Christmas music, the women’s voices very high and clear.

Eva bites into a mince pie; a little flour sifts down and powders her sleeve.

“D’you ever miss those Christmases when our kids were little?” she says. “You know, drowning in waves of ripped-up wrapping
paper and someone always went ballistic because they were having some electronic toy, some Roller Blade Cindy or something,
and you’d forgotten to get the batteries. D’you miss them?”

“A bit, sometimes. Not very much.”

“I do,” she says. “I miss them. When you’re in the middle of it all, you think that’s how it’s going to be forever. Isn’t
that odd? All those lists and obligations and always so busy and needed. … You think it’s never going to end,” she says.

She hasn’t put on any makeup, and I see how pale her lips are and that there are purple smudges in the skin around her eyes.

“You look so tired,” I say.

She says her school’s just been inspected.

“Everyone’s stressed out and having tantrums. And the kids aren’t too good either,” she says. “And we had this god-awful staff
party, as usual, and in Surprise Santa I got a bottle of sake with a lizard in it. Not just a bit of lizard, the whole damn
animal.”

I smile and fill up her glass with mulled wine. She wraps a tissue around it because it’s too hot to hold.

“God, I’m fed up with teaching. Did I ever tell you?”

“Just possibly.”

“I hate it. The boys who say, Ooh, miss, are you a lesbian, miss, and the smell of the classrooms and the bitching in the
staff room and the endless, endless admin …”

“Couldn’t you move—do something different?”

She slumps a little, shakes her head. “I think it’s too late to change, quite honestly, Ginnie. And Ted could be made redundant.
The ad industry’s pretty cruel, they like to cull them at fifty.”

There are women’s voices singing a lullaby in Latin: The music is pure, perfect. The sweetness of the wine spreads through
me. Eva has her head down, her face in shadow.

“I mean, I only did it because it seemed so convenient when the kids were little—you know, with the long holidays. And you
think, Well, I can always change later on. And one day you wake and you think, Well, this is it, I’m stuck here, this is how
it’s going to be.”

She looks across at me, her face creased, as though she’s struggling to articulate something.

“D’you ever feel it’s hard to cope with how random everything is?” she says. “You know? You make all these little decisions—some
of them tiny decisions, very small stuff at the time—and where you are now is the sum of all those decisions. And somehow
you’ve ended up in a place where you can’t really change anything.”

Her voice is hesitant, thoughtful. I can only just hear her above the singing.

“You’ve followed a particular path,” she says, “and without thinking about it very much, you always imagined you could turn
off it—and now you find you can’t. …”

“I know what you mean,” I say.

We drink our wine and listen to the singing.

“The trouble is,” she says slowly, “you don’t know which the important bits are at the time. Life doesn’t come marked up with
highlighter pen to show you which are the things that really matter. You know—pay attention now, this bit’s important. …”

I don’t know how to make her happy. I put my hand on her wrist.

“There was this TV program,” she says, “about the Potters Bar rail crash. Did you see it?”

I shake my head.

“Christmas can be tough,” I say. “It gets to people. You’ll feel better once it’s all over.”

She doesn’t seem to hear.

“They had this CCTV footage,” she says, “all these people running for the train. And they thought they were going to miss
it, and they must have been so relieved when they got on, and they all got into the last carriage, and that was the one that
was crushed. So you knew what was going to happen to them. That they were all going to die. It was terrible—all these people,
thinking it was just an ordinary day.”

I fill up her glass again, but there’s nothing I can say.

I
SPREAD THE BLANKET OUT
on the floor of the river house.

“That’s good,” he says.

He reaches out and unbuttons my coat. But as we undress each other, I briefly wish I hadn’t brought the blanket. It adds something
new and awkward. We can’t just fling ourselves down on it, abandoned, like we do in my fantasies, sprawling out on the big
wide bed with its vast white softness and its canopy of silk; the floor is hard, and we have to lie down with care. Lying,
you’re so close to the smell of the place, the smell of wet and rot and growing things. I’m suddenly self-conscious. This
feels so much less tentative than when we usually make love: You can’t pretend it’s something that just happens. We lie side
by side, with my jacket for a pillow. On my back I feel the cool air from under the door.

“Hey,” he says. He moves a finger down the side of my face. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

He kisses me.

But then, as he starts to move his hands over me, it changes: I no longer notice the hardness of the floor. It feels so good,
stretched out against each other, skin against skin. The rhythm changes, we’re slower, everything unhurried, more complete.

“You come on top,” he says. “I don’t want to squash you.”

He enters me, with a sigh.

As we move together, so gently and slowly, I seem to enter a different place: as if I’ve passed some boundary where you normally
stop, and I can’t quite tell where I end and he begins.

Afterward I feel dazed. We lie there for a long time, wrapped around each other. When he gets up, it’s still too soon. I could
have lain there forever, his warmth and his smell all around me, his heartbeat against me, everything fluid, merged.

We pull on our clothes. A spider the color of apricots is crawling on my arm; I feel a surge of tenderness for this tiny creature,
and ease it onto the table. I fold up the blanket, folding the dirty side inward—concealing evidence, like someone who has
committed a crime. As soon as I get home I shall put it in the washing machine. He picks small dead leaves out of my hair,
that have blown in under the door.

We go out into the light, and he secures the catch. I watch him, his strong, dark hands twisting the wire together.

I say, “That was the best time.”

“The best time we’ve had?”

“The best time ever.”

He waits for a moment, turned toward me, as though he is surprised. He doesn’t say, For me too, and I feel a little thread
of embarrassment, like the first time you say I love you: as though I have given too much away.

I walk away from him. In the patch of ground that once was a garden, there are new shoots, little spears of sharp green. Bulbs—snowdrops
perhaps, they’re usually first. And the lumps on the red stems of the roses, which in spring will be leaves, are beginning
to swell. There’s a sense of things starting to happen, of the promise of the earth.

“Look,” I say. “It all happens so early nowadays. Spring comes so soon.”

He’s on the path, waiting for me, wanting to be off.

“Make the most of it,” he says. “It’s all going to stop. When the North Atlantic Conveyor switches off. In twenty years the
sea could cool and we’ll have another Ice Age.”

I know he wants to go, but I linger there for a moment. I wonder what else will come up here, whether there will be primroses.
I hope so. I love primroses, the perfection of their color, that yellow—pale, intense, like clotted cream.

“Ginnie, I really need to be getting back,” he tells me.

I slip my hand in his. We walk back along the sodden path, stepping around the puddles, which are metal-gray like the sky.

“D’you ever wonder what it was like?” I say. “When this place was just built? When people lived here and the garden was cultivated?”

He smiles as though I amuse him.

“Not really,” he says. “I just think it’s amazing it’s been left like this so long.”

But I imagine it. Walking back along the river path, in this languorous mood, my mind lazy, wandering. Imagining summer evenings
here, when the garden was cultivated and in flower—those heavy blooms on the hydrangeas that start to brown at the edges even
before they’ve fully flowered, and the lawn close-cropped and velvet, softly falling away. I imagine a party up at the house,
a jazz band playing. In the shade of the trees on the riverbank, everything will be blue. A man and a woman come here, to
the boat called
Sweet Bird of Youth:
They have left the party together; they are conspirators, seeking seclusion. She has a long dress of gauzy cloth, a shawl
around her shoulders; her skirts flutter mothlike across the shadowy grass. He wears a dinner jacket, his white tie hangs
loose, he has a bottle of wine. He holds the boat for her. She takes off her high-heeled shoes, but when she steps in, the
boat still rocks unnervingly. She settles on the bench, arranging her silk skirts to keep them out of the dampness in the
bottom of the boat, letting her shawl slip from her shoulders so he can see the curve of them: Her skin glimmers in the blueness.
He pushes out from the jetty, takes up the oars. She trails a white hand in the river, leaving a wake of brightness where
her fingers break the surface and the water catches the light. She’s looking at him, she loves to look at him, scarcely moving
her eyes from his face even when the heron, disturbed by them though they make so little noise, takes to the air with a fierce
rush of wings and a cry. There is no sound but the distant music and the dip of the oars and the heron and their breathing.
Perhaps she too is escaping from something—from the sameness of things, from everydayness and loss, from the things that cannot
be mended: imagining that it could all be different, stepping out into the boat and gliding free, leaving no trail but a wake
of broken gold.

The boat moves out of sight in my mind, into the dark around the island; the water is undisturbed, as though they had never
been.

When we get to the car, before we drive off, I lean across and brush my lips against his, resting my head on his shoulder
for a moment, breathing him in.

“When we don’t see each other anymore,” I say, keeping my voice light, playful, “I shall need to know the name of your cologne.
And when I’m missing you too much, I shall go to the chemist and smell it.”

He smiles and ruffles my hair. He needs to get to his meeting.

I don’t know why I said that.

A
MBER IS IN HER BEDROOM
, listening to some ferocious music and French-manicuring her nails.

I turn her music down. Her wardrobe is open; most of her clothes are in a heap at the bottom, because she hasn’t bothered
to put them on the hangers.

“Amber, didn’t you say you had an essay on
Othello?
”

She waves her fingertips in the air to dry them. There’s a thick, sweet smell of varnish remover.

“I’ll do it later,” she says.

Mrs. Russell is in my mind—her rumpled face, her purple lipstick, her thoughts on limit-setting.

“What’s wrong with now?” I say.

“I’m really not in the mood, Mum, to be honest,” she says. “I can’t do my best work unless I’m in the mood.”

She twists her hair up into a ponytail, holding her fingers out straight because of the varnish, then lets it fall. Her hair
glints in the light from the window; it has a scent of papaya.

“I’ll give you some help if you want,” I tell her.

You aren’t really supposed to help them with their course work, but lots of parents do. Though not always with the results
they might have hoped for. Ted, Eva’s husband, who’s a designer with a prestigious ad agency, once did a storybook for Lauren’s
Graphics project: The work was given a C.

“We can talk it over, at least,” I tell her. “Where’s your copy of
Othello?
”

She shrugs.

“I can’t, like, find it, exactly,” she says, with studied casualness. “I’m sure it’ll turn up. Don’t look at me like that,
Mum. It must be somewhere around.”

I hunt through the chaos on her desk, but the textbook isn’t there.

“Don’t worry, Mum,” she says, brightening. “I’ll go across to Katrine’s. We’ll do it together, I can use her copy. If you
could just run me over …”

She’s pulling on her sneakers, the wet nails forgotten.

But I know just what will happen at Katrine’s: lengthy experiments with Katrine’s new eyelash curler and an impassioned debate
about Catherine Zeta-Jones’s oily T-zone.

“I’m sure Dad’s got a copy,” I tell her.

“It won’t have my notes.”

“No. But nor will Katrine’s.”

I go up to the study. It’s empty; Greg must be downstairs. I go to the window. The color is all gone from the gardens, everything
dark or pale, except where little white narcissi with butter-yellow hearts are flowering far too early at the edges of my
lawn. I can see the river down at the end of the road. Starlings swirl in the sky, like leaves in a millpond.

Just for a moment, here in the stillness of his study, I feel how separate his life is and how far apart we have grown. I
wonder if Greg is happy: I wonder if this is the life he would have chosen. Perhaps he wasn’t really meant to be a married
man. Centuries ago he might have lived in a monastery, following his bliss, drawing dragons with fabulous inks in the margins
of a manuscript. I wonder whether, like Eva, he feels that a lot of little decisions have brought him to a place where he
doesn’t want to be.