The River House (34 page)

“I was just coming home, it wasn’t a problem. I’ve told Megan,” he says.

I don’t ask what this means—what exactly he has told her.

He puts a hand on my arm. I’m glad for the warmth of his skin. I realize I am shivering.

“Tell me,” he says.

“We had a row,” I say. “I hit her. I shouldn’t have done but I did …”

“Ginnie, don’t beat yourself up. It happens.”

“It shouldn’t have happened.”

“Was she drunk?” he says.

“Not exactly. Well, a bit. She’d certainly been drinking. She might be a bit disinhibited.”

“Was she upset?”

“She only heard today—that Greg was leaving—and about us and everything …”

His face darkens.

“Has she ever done anything silly—you know, hurt herself?”

It’s as if he’s the psychologist now: I’m grateful for this, just to let him take over.

“Not really. Well, she took five aspirin once—when she was twelve. And she scratched herself with some scissors when she’d
broken up with a boy. I always try not to get too worked up about these things …”

He doesn’t seem reassured.

“Is there anywhere you can think of—places she might go to?”

“There’s a park where they meet sometimes in summer—Stoneleigh Gardens. Behind the gasworks.”

“We’ll try there first,” he says.

“I’m scared, Will.”

“Ginnie, lots of kids run off at some time. Almost all of them turn up safe and sound. You know that …”

His voice is controlled and quiet. But I see how fast he drives.

The first road he turns down toward Stoneleigh Gardens is closed because of the flood. He tries the next one. There’s a shriek
from the tires as he turns the wheel.

The park seems deserted—just a man walking his dog, moving in and out of the apricot pools of light from the streetlamps;
he’s holding a newspaper over his head to shield himself from the rain. We get out and walk past the picnic benches where
Amber’s group sometimes gathers on summer evenings, drinking Coke or smoking or texting friends, their talk and laughter and
vividness drifting across the gardens. Rain hisses on the gravel paths, and the grass is black and sodden.

We go back to the car.

“There’s a churchyard too, where some of them go,” I tell him, remembering what Amber once said about the gang that Lauren
knows. “Saint Dunstan’s.”

“I know the place,” he says.

As we drive, my phone rings. I scrabble in my bag for it. Relief surges through me, the sudden quick certainty that Amber
is safely home.

It’s Max.

“Ginnie, I know this must come as quite a shock to you.” His voice is rapid, shrill with discomfort. “But she knows what she’s
doing, Ginnie, she’s very mature for her years. I wouldn’t have dreamt of it, you know, if I hadn’t been sure she knew what
she was doing.”

“Max, it’s not that …”

“We didn’t want to upset you,” he says. “That’s why we didn’t tell you. I said we ought to tell you, but she was sure you’d
be upset …”

“Max.” I cut him short. “I just want to know if she’s with you, that’s all. Just tell me if she’s with you.”

“She’s not,” he says. He sounds relieved, perhaps because I’m not shouting at him. “She’s not here. She left at half past
eight. Look, we can talk about it, Ginnie …”

“She’s run off. I can’t find her,” I say. “Please, please ring if she turns up—ring me the moment she gets there. I just want
to know she’s safe. …”

The churchyard is dreary under the night and the rain. It looks neglected, with winter leaves drifted against the graves,
and the older stones all crooked with their writing worn away. The storm has spilled the vases of flowers that people have
left here. Hunched angels with pointy, extravagant wings with intricate feathered edges loom at us out of the night, their
stonework smeared with lichen that’s rust red in the torchlight. Clem’s angel comes into my mind, the voice she heard in the
darkness: and the angels like beautiful boys on the tomb in the Walsall church, and the Ave Maria we sang there, the hymn
to Mary.
Ora pro nobis. Pray for us.
There are lamps along the path to the door; you can see there’s nobody here.

We sit back in the car; he turns to me. His face is worn and strained.

“Somewhere else,” he says. “A place that means something to her. Maybe where she used to go when she was a little girl? Somewhere
significant.”

“We could drive along the river,” I say. It’s all I can think of.

The traffic is still heavy on the road by the river. Across the water you can see the lighted windows of the houseboats moored
on Taggs Island, their yellow warmth spilling onto the indigo water. I think of the long-ago morning when we came here—the
slight silver haze on the river, the water lapping, full of light, and the apple-green houseboat with its little blue dinghy
that Amber had wanted to live in. The river is up to the top of the bank in places, licking at the grass and seeping down
to the road.

We drive past the steep span of footbridge that leads onto the island.

“Will.” I grasp his arm. “There was a bike. Someone left a bike by the bridge.”

He does a swift three-point turn in the road, holding up both lanes of traffic, and drives rapidly back and pulls the car
up on the curb. We get out.

I know at once it’s hers: I know the make, the color, the scratch on the handlebars from the time last year when she came
off and sprained her wrist and we spent three hours in the ER. It’s just flung down, not locked, as though she didn’t care
what happened to it. It’s surprising it hasn’t been stolen already.

We look across at the island. Behind the houseboats there are no lights, just a dark mass of trees against the dark of the
river. Cold passes through me. He puts his hand on my arm.

“She liked this place,” I say. “We came here once, when she was a child. It was where she wanted to live then.”

He walks fast, and the bridge is steep—I only just keep up with him. He waits for me and takes my hand and pulls me after
him. At the top of the span, the wind is fierce, slamming into our faces. The river rushes below us. It’s not tidal here,
but it’s whipped and tugged by the wind.

At the other end of the bridge, there are gravel paths to our left and our right. There’s a board with a map of the island:
Will stops for a moment to look at it. I’m seized by a feverish energy: It’s all I can do to stand still.

“We’ll go left,” he says. “That way we can get almost all the way round. The other way there’s an inlet.”

The island isn’t like it was that long-ago summer Sunday, when we came trespassing in the silver morning mist. It’s very dark.
The light from the windows of the houseboats doesn’t reach here. There are occasional patches of thin light from the old-fashioned
streetlamps dotted along the path. By the light of Will’s torch, you can see that most of the island is flooded: Water is
everywhere, breaking up this horseshoe of land into many little islets, making its way wherever the land is low or there is
a cleft or channel, covering over these trim and extravagant gardens with their rockeries and pergolas, eating into everything
and messing everything up.

As we pass one of the gardens, a man comes out of a summer-house with some cushions under his arm, and a deck chair. He stares
at us; he seems a little hostile.

“I shouldn’t go that way.” He nods his head in the direction of our path. “It’s under water down there. Well, you can see
how it is. We’re clearing out,” he says.

“We’re looking for someone—a girl,” I tell him.

“Sorry.” He shakes his head.

In places the path goes close to the edge of the land—wooden posts are set there, to stop the earth from being eroded away.
You can hear the traffic from the road along the riverbank, but it seems very distant, cut off from us by the surge and swell
of the Thames. The wind blusters in the branches. There’s a crack like a rifle shot where it lashes at a tarpaulin on a boat
moored somewhere near. The island is full of the different sounds the water makes, its insistent seep and trickle and drip,
and the splash and suck of our feet where we have to walk through the flood.

Will moves his torch around, but we can’t see her. The beam catches in things—the eyes of an animal, glowing with an oily
green light; a string of crystals like glinting tears that hang from the branch of a tree; a makeshift pagoda, paper thin,
with a rusting dragon weather vane. There’s a dead duck flung down in a pool of water, its neck stretched out and crooked,
in its throat a bite mark, black and glossy with blood, a flurry of white feathers around it. My chest is tight: it hurts
to take in breath.

We come to the far end of the island. A picket gate opens onto a flooded garden that ends in a drop to the river. There’s
rubbish in the water on the lawn—a wheelbarrow, garden tools. He puts his hand on my arm.

“Look,” he says.

She’s standing on the grass at the tip of the island, looking out into the river. She has her back to us. She’s separated
from us by yards of shallow water. She must have walked through the flood to get there: or else the water has pushed in quickly,
cutting her off from such land as there is, from what is left of the island. Here there are no trees, and there’s more light,
from the headlamps of the cars on the river road, their beams broken up on the water like shards and splinters of glass. But
I can’t see her clearly: She’s a dark, dense shape against the glittery black of the water, her hair sleeked down by the rain,
her soaked clothes clinging to her. I sense rather than see that she is shivering violently.

She must have heard us come. She turns a little in our direction, then turns away again. She’s absolutely tense, I can tell
that, as she stands there looking out over the river. I know the dark mood that drove her out without her phone or raincoat
still has her in its grip. I sense the conflict in her—the pull of drama, of the desperate, wild gesture. She seems so small
against the rush of the water.

I’m very afraid. I know how easily I could get everything wrong, when it’s all so fragile.

“Let me do this,” says Will.

I let him. I wait on the wet grass.

He walks toward her through the water, talking to her; his voice is gentle, careful.

“Amber, it isn’t safe, you know you can’t stay here.”

I don’t know if she can hear him above the sound of the river.

He’s shining the torch toward her—she flinches, raises her hand to shield her face. He sees this; he points the torch down
so she won’t be dazzled.

“Amber, your mother’s sorry, she just wants you to be safe.”

I watch, my pulse skittering, as she moves a little nearer to the verge.

He’s halfway through the water, walking toward her. But as I watch, he staggers and falls. There could be any obstacle there—a
rockery, plant pots, anything. The flood is treacherous, concealing everything. He can’t walk on that way. He moves off to
his right, to the rim of the land, where the ground is banked up and the slippery verge of the lawn is exposed. The grass
glistens wet in the torchlight.

He’s only a few yards from her now. My heart thuds. She takes another step toward the brink. From where I’m standing, she
seems to be almost leaning over, staring into the river.

“Amber,” he says.

She makes a small, broken movement with her hands, as if she’s warning him off or trying to push him away. She says something
under her breath: I can’t hear what she says, just the tone of it, the despair. I think she is going to throw herself in.
I scream out her name.

Will lunges forward to grasp her arm, but he doesn’t reach her. The momentum of his gesture unbalances him. He slips, sways.
The torchlight, zigzagging crazily as his arms flail, catches his face, his look of surprise. He tips over, so easily, with
a kind of random grace: sinks down into the perilous dark and the pull and surge of the Thames. The water swallows the torchlight.
I can only see the river and the dark. Someone is screaming.

In that instant I feel nothing but a terrible cold clarity: I can’t reach him, can’t save him. I’m too slow, too old, it’s
too far, the water’s too heavy on me. I’m struggling through the night and the flood, but I know it’s too late—it’s over.

Amber spins around. I sense the flare of panic in her. Even in the dark I know her face has changed. She’s herself again—urgent,
present, her fear for him pushing all her wildness away. She flings herself down on the ground, at the brink of the land,
stretching down into the river. She’s reaching out, but I still can’t see him at all, just the glitter and surge of the water.
With her free hand she clutches at one of the logs that are set there; her hand grips, claw-like—the knuckles are sharp through
her skin. I hear the sob on her breath. As I come up closer, I see her forearm quiver, as every muscle in her body tightens:
And I hear her great shuddery sigh as she reaches and clings to his hand.

I
TAKE
A
MBER UP TO HER BEDROOM
. She sits down heavily on the bed. I sit beside her, holding her to me. There are ugly, berry-red bruises on her arm; you
can trace out the curve of the edge of the logs, where she pressed against them as she clung to Will’s hand. She’s crying
quietly. Her body is loose and shivery, sinking into me.

“Amber. I’m so sorry I hit you. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It really hurt.” She blows her nose noisily, scrubs at her face with a tissue. “I didn’t know you could hit that hard,” she
says. She gives me a small, wry smile through her tears.

I stroke her hair.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I say.

“Will Dad be back soon?”

“We’ll sort it out. I promise,” I tell her.

“You’ll ring him, won’t you? I want to speak to him.”

“Sweetheart, of course,” I say. “But we can do it in the morning. I want you to get some sleep now. You’ve been a total heroine,
but you still need to sleep.”

“OK,” she says. She yawns hugely. She’s so tired she can scarcely hold her head up.