The River House (3 page)

A woman’s voice, bright and vivid. “Am I speaking to Ginnie Holmes?”

“Yes.”

“Ginnie.
Great.
I’m so glad I managed to get hold of you.” She’s too polite; she wants something. Behind her, there are ringing phones, a
busy, clattery office. “I’m Suzie Draper,” she says, as though she’s someone I should know.

“Hi, Suzie.” I brace myself.

She’s ringing from
Cosmopolitan
, she says, and she’d be hugely grateful for my comments.

“I read that study you did on teenage sexuality—the one that was in
The Psychologist
,” she says. “I thought you made some great points.”

“Right,” I say.

“I’d love to have your perceptions for something I’m writing,” she says. “You know, as a psychologist. It’s a piece on one-night
stands. Would you have a few moments, perhaps, Ginnie?”

“Yes. Sure,” I tell her.

There’s a smell of burning. I reach across to pull the pan off the heat.

“It’s about a trend we’ve noticed, Ginnie. That more and more women are choosing one-night stands. You know, choosing just
to have sex? A bit less concerned about commitment and so on.”

I’m distracted because the sauce is ruined, and I don’t think there’s enough milk to make any more.

“The thing is,” I say without thinking, “you don’t always know it’s a one-night stand ’til afterward.”

There’s a little pause. This isn’t what she wants.

“Ginnie, would you like me to ring you back?” she says then, rather anxiously. “So you can have a bit of a think about it?”

“No. It’s fine. Really.”

“OK. If you’re sure.” She clears her throat. “So, Ginnie, d’you agree that lots of women today can enjoy sex without strings?
What I mean is—sex without love, I suppose. Without romance. Like men have always done?”

I take a deep breath and try to think up some intelligent insight. But I don’t really have to say much; she puts the words
in my mouth, and I only have to agree.

“That’s a good thing, surely—women taking initiatives, being clear in what they want? Rather than always fitting in with men?”

“Absolutely,” I say.

“I mean, to be honest, I’ve been there, Ginnie: I’m sure we’ve all been there—you know, letting men set the agenda. But what
we have now is women saying, I really want that guy, and I’m going to have him.”

I agree that this is a good thing.

The door opens and Amber comes in. She’s overheard some of the conversation and makes a vomiting face. I gesture at her to
go.

“Is it OK if I quote you on that, Ginnie? This idea that more and more women enjoy sex for itself and kind of keep it separate.
I can quote you?”

I tell her, yes, she can quote me.

She thanks me profusely and seems to be happy enough.

I put down the phone with a quick surge of guilt about the women who’ll read the things I’ve said—thought up at the end of
a tiring workday while the dinner was burning. They surely deserve better.

I open the window to let out the burned smell. A blackbird is singing in the pear tree in my garden. I stand there for a moment,
listening to the blackbird’s lavish song, leaning on the windowsill, thinking about the last time I had a one-night stand.
Quite a long time ago now. It was just before I met Greg: An attractive pediatrician I met at a conference on attention deficit
disorder seduced me by pretending to read my palm. I loved his touch as he made to trace out my lifeline, as if he’d discovered
a new erogenous zone—that was the best bit really. The sex was pleasant enough, but the next morning, when we made love again
before the plenary session, it took him forever to come, and afterward he complained he was getting a cold and sent me out
to buy Lemsip. When we said good-bye, I asked for his phone number—not really wanting to see him again, just feeling it was
only polite to ask—and he said, It’s in the phone book. I remember driving home down the motorway, tired and rather hungover,
and noticing in the mirror at a service station that there were mascara smudges under my eyes and I looked like I’d been crying.

I wonder if that was really why I married Greg—to get away from all those complications, the unfamiliar beds, mismatched desires,
awkwardness about phone numbers. It was such a relief for everything to be settled. And choosing Greg was surely a good decision.
I tell myself we have a solid marriage: that it really doesn’t matter that we haven’t made love for years.

I hunt in the fridge for milk. There’s just an inch left in the bottle. I add some water from the tap and start again with
the sauce.

G
REG IS THERE ALREADY
, parked outside the school. He gets out of his car. From a distance he seems the perfect academic—tall, thin, cerebral-looking,
with little wire-rimmed glasses. He never seems to age, though his hair, which was reddish, is whitening.

“Are you OK?” I ask him.

“Not exactly,” he says. He has a crooked, rueful smile. “It was the Standards and Provisions Committee this morning.”

The exhibition is in the art suite, up at the top of the building. We go into the first room. The place is crowded already,
and crammed with sculptures and paintings, the whole room fizzing with color. I’m dazzled by this marvelous multiplicity of
things—harsh cityscapes, bold abstracts, masks, pottery, flowers. Beside us a boy with a baseball cap and a laconic expression
is standing in front of a painting, his arm wrapped around his girlfriend. “Is this the one with me in?” he says. His face
is pink and proud. I feel an instant, surprising surge of tenderness, like when I used to weep embarrassingly at infant school
carol concerts. There are certain startling emotions—rage at whatever threatens your child, or this surging tenderness, or
fear—that you only really feel when you have children. I talk about this sometimes with Max Sutton, my lawyer friend from
university, when we meet up over a glass or two of Glenfiddich and compare lifestyles—mine, domestic, anxious, enmeshed; his,
bold and coolly promiscuous. He’s traveled widely, been to Haiti, Columbia—nothing seems to throw him. “To be honest, Ginnie,
I never feel fear,” he says. “You don’t know what fear is ’til you have children,” I tell him. “It’s your children who teach
you fear.”

We’re offered Chardonnay, and cheese straws made in Food Technology that crumble when you bite them. Mr. Bates, Molly’s art
teacher, comes to congratulate her; he has a single earring and looks perpetually alarmed. Cameras whir and flash as embarrassed
students are photographed.

Eva is there, in red crushed velvet from Monsoon.

“Molly! Your pictures are
wonderful.
Are you going to be like Ursula, do you think? You’ve certainly got the gene. Ginnie, I
love
Molly’s stuff!”

We hug. I’m wrapped in her capacious arms and her musky cedarwood scent. We’ve been close since the time we first bonded,
in a moment of delicious hysteria at prenatal class, when I was pregnant with Amber, and Eva was having Lauren and Josh, her
twins. It was during the evening when you could bring your partner, and some of the men, seeking perhaps to assert a masculine
presence in this too-female environment, were pronouncing on the benefits of eating the placenta: They claimed it was full
of nutrients. I saw that Eva was shaking with barely suppressed laughter, and I caught her eye and we had to leave the room.

I tell her about the
Cosmopolitan
journalist.

She grins. “I used to love
Cosmo
,” she says. “Now I buy those lifestyle magazines—you know, ‘Forty-nine things to do with problem windows.’”

“But, Eva, you haven’t got problem windows.”

“I’m working on it,” she says.

“Mum,” says Molly, “you’ve got to see my stuff.”

Her display is in the second room. She pulls Amber and me toward it. I look around for Greg, but he’s met a woman from his
department, an earnest woman with wild gray hair who lectures in Nordic philology; she has a daughter here. They’re having
an urgent discussion about spreadsheets.

“I’ll be right with you,” he tells me, but he shows no sign of following us.

“Mum, come
on
,” says Molly. “I want you to see my canvas.” She has a look she sometimes had as a child, when she would tug at me, especially
after Amber had arrived and she couldn’t get enough of me: intent, with deep little lines between her eyes.

We go into the second room. Her display is in the corner, facing us as we enter—her sketchbooks and pottery piled on the table,
and behind them the canvas, nailed up on the wall. I stare at the painting. It’s huge, taller than me, so the figures are
more than life-size. I don’t know how she controlled the proportions, how she made it so real. It’s based on a photo from
my childhood—Ursula and me and our mother and father, in the garden at Bridlington Road. I don’t know who took it, perhaps
a visiting aunt. It’s a rare photo of all of us together, and we look just like a perfectly normal family. It was one of a
heap of old photos that Molly found in the kitchen cabinet; she was hunting around for something to paint for her final A-level
piece. “It has to be about
change
,” she said. “I think it’s a freaky topic. Change is totally random. I mean, it could be
anything.
” She was pleased when she found the photos of me and Ursula; she loved our candy-striped summer frocks, our feet in strappy,
shiny shoes. The two of us would stand to attention with neat, cheerful smiles every time anyone pointed a Kodak in our direction.
“Look, you’ve got parallel feet,” said Molly. “Amber, look, it’s so cute. In every picture their feet are kind of
arranged.
”

The photograph was black and white, but the painting is in the strong acrylic colors Molly loves; our skin in the picture
has purple and tangerine in it. The photograph may have made her smile, but the picture she’s painted has an intensity to
it. She has quite a harsh style, the lines in people’s faces sketched in boldly, like an etching, so they look older than
they really are; and she’s seen so much that was only subtly there in the photograph, that was just a hint, a subtext. My
mother, her forehead creased in spite of her smile. My father, a looming presence, his shadow falling across us: my father,
who was a pillar of the community, a school governor, a churchwarden, a grower of fine lupines—and I think how shockingly
glad I was when he died. Ursula and me, eight and six, with our parallel feet in their shiny shoes, not wanting to step out
of line. I see myself then, my conscientious smile, my six-year-old hope that if I was good, stayed good, everything would
be all right. I wonder if Molly has brought to this painting some knowledge she has of my family. Yet I’ve told my children
so little, really, even though in my work I always maintain that families shouldn’t have secrets. Maybe Molly’s gleaned something
from the absolute rule I have that there’s no hitting in our family, or from the things I’ve said about marriage, the advice
I so often feel a compulsion to give. “The very worst thing in a man is possessiveness. … Don’t ever imagine that you can
change a man. … Promise me—if he’s cruel or hits you, that’s it, it’s over, you go straight out of that door.
Promise
me. …” “Yeah, yeah,” they’ll say, glancing at each other with a look of complicity, of There she goes again, indulging me:
“We
know
, Mum, you’ve
told
us.”

Molly turns to me, unsure suddenly. She’s never had Amber’s certainty.

“Is it OK? D’you like it, Mum?”

I realize I’ve just been standing here, staring.

“Molly, I love it. It’s wonderful.” Instinctively, I put my arm around her, then remember she will hate me doing this in public.
But she tolerates it for a second or two before she slides away.

“Mr. Bates asked if my grandparents were coming,” she says. “He kind of blushed when I said that grandad was dead. It was,
like, really embarrassing. … Mum, make sure Dad sees it.” She moves off with Amber toward a gang of her friends.

I go to find Greg.

“You have to come and see Molly’s work,” I tell him.

He says good-bye to the earnest philologist. I take him to see the canvas.

He has an appraising look, one eyebrow raised, the look he has when he’s reading a student’s essay.

“Goodness,” he says. “It’s quite in-your-face, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you like it, though?”

But I see that he doesn’t, that he wouldn’t.

“It’s rather raw,” he says.

“Yes. But isn’t that good? All that emotion? I love it.”

“Her plant drawings are great,” he says. “But it takes a bit of maturity to draw people. Maybe she should stick to plants
for now.”

“For God’s sake, don’t say that to her,” I tell him.

I feel a pulse of anger: Why can’t he just be generous?

I go to find the girls, to say it’s time to leave. Amber has moved away from her friends, from Jamila and Katrine, and is
talking to someone Molly knows, a boy about three years older; she’s standing close to him, her head on one side, and flicking
back her hair. She mutters to me that she’ll make her own way home.

“What about your Graphics?”

“Mum, for God’s sake.”

It’s dark on the street now. There’s an edge to the air, a smell of autumn, a hint of frost and bonfires. We stand by Greg’s
car in a pool of apricot lamplight.

“Did you like it, Dad?” says Molly.

I’m worried about what he’ll say.

“Sure, it was great,” he tells her.

I remember her when she was little, thrusting some drawing she’d done at me: “But d’you
really, really
like it, Mum? Say it as though you mean it. …”

Now, she doesn’t say anything.

“Mum, I’m coming with you,” she tells me.

We go to our separate cars. I notice how scruffy my Ford Escort looks beside all the other cars, and that moss is growing
in the rubber around the passenger window. When I turn the ignition, there’s a grinding sound from under the car, and it’s
hard to get into gear.

I glance at Molly. The lamplight leaches all the color from her face, so you can’t see most of her makeup; her face looks
rounder, more open, as though she is a child again. A bit of glittery eye shadow has smudged under her eye.