The River House (36 page)

“I suppose so.”

His voice is sleek, emollient.

“Would you say you were in love with this man?”

My throat is thick.

“Yes, I would,” I say.

“So, Mrs. Holmes,” says the barrister, “you were there to engage in illicit sexual intercourse with this man whom you were
passionately in love with. I put it to you that this is a situation in which a woman’s powers of observation might be less
than acute.” Again that regretful shake of the head. “You were completely distracted, weren’t you? You can’t possibly remember
with any accuracy what you saw on the river path.”

“I know it was Sean Faulkner I saw,” I say.

He has his head on one side now, with the perplexed air of someone who genuinely seeks to be enlightened.

“There are just one or two other things that puzzle me,” he says. “Why has the friend you were with not come forward, Mrs.
Holmes? Presumably if there was something strange to be seen on the river path, he would have seen it also?”

“He had his back to the path. He didn’t see.”

“And did you always conduct your liaison on the riverbank?”

“Yes.”

“You never went anywhere rather more conventional—a hotel room, for instance?”

“We just went to the river.”

He gives a deep sigh.

“You are a married woman,” he says, “a woman with two daughters aged nineteen and sixteen. You are a woman who, at an age
when many women are contentedly helping out with their grandchildren, conducts an illicit affair in a semipublic place. You
like excitement. You’re something of a thrill seeker.”

“No. Not really.”

“Coming to the police was just another thrill, wasn’t it? A way of getting attention?”

“No. It wasn’t,” I say. But I can scarcely form the words.

He waits for a moment. He straightens up. He’s looking sternly at me.

“Mrs. Holmes, you were on property where you shouldn’t have been, with a man you shouldn’t have been with.” There’s a new
severity in his voice. “You were about to have sexual intercourse with this man who is not your husband, and you’d lied about
this relationship to your husband and your children. Yet you ask this court to believe what you say you saw. You ask us to
believe that you can remember clearly a man you’d never seen before, whom you glimpsed for a second or two in the distance,
when you were in the embrace of your illicit lover. The river path is a right of way. Anyone can go there. The man you saw
could have been anyone. I put it to you that it wasn’t Sean Faulkner that you saw.”

I take a deep breath.

“I saw him clearly,” I say again. “I’m sure it was Mr. Faulkner.”

“That will be all, Your Honor.”

The judge nods in my direction.

“Thank you, Mrs. Holmes. You are free to stay in court, or to go about your business.”

After the hush of the court, the noise in the street slams in my face. I stand at the top of the white curved steps that lead
down to the pavement. I cling to the handrail like somebody blind. I feel worn away, hammered thin. I stand there for a long
time. People pass on the pavement below me—a worried woman with a baby in a buggy, a boy with his arm around his girlfriend—ordinary
people, busy, preoccupied, getting on with their lives. There’s a smell of smoke and petrol, but I breathe in gratefully,
taking big gulps of air.

After a while, I start to notice the heat of the sun on my arms. I turn my face to the sun. I breathe more deeply. I think,
I am free to go. I think, That will be all. I tell myself this, over and over. I am free to go now.

With my hand tight around the rail, I walk carefully down to the street.

Ten days later, on Saturday, it’s in the national press: The jury has reached its verdict. Amber points it out to me. I read
it over her shoulder.

An estate agent who murdered his wife and dumped her body in a river was jailed for life yesterday. Sean Faulkner, thirty-two,
strangled his wife, Maria, at their home in Caterham, and then dumped her body in the Thames. A jury at Kingston Crown Court
heard how Sean Faulkner calmly reported the disappearance of his wife from their home in February of this year. … The senior
investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Roger Prior, said after the trial, “This was a ruthless and cruel act, probably
motivated by pathological jealousy.”

The report traces out the case against Sean Faulkner, much as Roger told it to me. Detectives were suspicious of him from
the start. He claimed he hadn’t washed any clothes, but the washing machine had recently been used. Traces of river water
were found on his sneakers. A witness on the river path saw him returning to the place where Maria’s body had been dumped,
the morning after the murder and several days before the body was discovered. The jury took six hours to reach its verdict.

“See, Mum, that’s you. The witness on the river path,” says Amber.

There’s the photo of Maria that Roger showed to me; the print is grainy and blurred.

“So that’s what she looked like.” Amber stares at the photo. “It’s weird to see a picture of someone and know they’re dead,”
she says. “It’s just so hard to believe in.” She runs her finger gently across the photograph. “She was ever so pretty, wasn’t
she? I’m glad they got a result.” She looks up at me; her washed blue eyes have a thoughtful look. “I bet you’re glad too,
Mum, after being a witness and everything.”

“Yes. I’m glad,” I say.

After lunch Amber goes into town to meet Jamila at Starbucks. I decide I will give my kitchen a comprehensive clean. I scrub
away all the smudges of mold from the insides of my cupboards, and wipe my windows with vinegar, and remove a sprouting and
rotten potato from underneath the fridge. Then I ring Eva, who last week shocked everyone by telling Ted she thinks they ought
to separate. She sounds very tired but otherwise OK. She knows people won’t understand; she doesn’t expect that they would,
she scarcely understands it herself—it was just something that she knew she had to do. We talk for a long time.

Amber is back at three with lots of shopping bags. She comes into the kitchen and dumps her purchases on the table. It’s hot,
and she’s tied the sleeves of her sweater around her waist. She’s wearing a flimsy T-shirt that says
Oui
in sparkly letters.

“There were these builders,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like saying, Would it still be such a lovely day if I was fat and
ugly?”

She shows me what she’s bought. A Popsicle maker for Katrine’s birthday. A velvet picture frame. A flippy, silky skirt, because
Max is taking her to the ballet. She holds it up against herself. “I thought with my black pointy boots—d’you think that would
be OK?” I tell her it will look lovely. And she has a book about Hare Krishna that someone was selling in the street—she isn’t
going to read it, she just felt sorry for him—and some earrings like licorice allsorts, and a bunch of freesias in white paper.
She’s pink and happy; she loves shopping. The freesias are palest green with a delicate purple veining, and the room is sweet
with their scent.

“You’ve bought yourself some flowers.”

“I thought …” She nibbles her lip; she’s a little embarrassed. “It seems silly now, but there was this flower stall, and I
thought perhaps we could take them to the river. For Maria. Now it’s all over. D’you think freesias are OK? The roses were
pretty too, but I didn’t have enough money.”

“I’ve always loved freesias,” I say.

“Shall we?”

“Yes.”

“We ought to do it now,” she says, “or they’ll go all brown and horrible.”

We drive there through the bright afternoon.

The river path is beautiful in the lavish afternoon light. In the warm summer wind, the river crinkles like silk, holding
the colors of the trees and the sky. Cyclists in Lycra pass us, talking in some language I don’t recognize, and then a small
helmeted girl, pedaling with great concentration. You can smell the winey sweetness of elder and the fruit-gum scent of balsam,
and white dust rises from our feet as we walk. We look across the water to the house on Eel Pie Island and the terra-cotta
boy. As always, just for a moment I think he’s a living child.

As we near the place where they found Maria’s body, you can see there’s a woman sitting there, on the grass on the riverbank.
She’s in a black splash of shade, so still that I think for a moment that she too is a statue. It’s an odd thing to be doing—perhaps
a bit disinhibited: Women don’t usually sit here all alone on the grass. She turns her head as we approach, and I recognize
her at once—the Mediterranean coloring, her hair pulled back, the lines driving deep in her face. It’s too late to go back
now.

She looks up at me: I know she recognizes me. I feel a little afraid. It’s her grief that frightens me—and that I am here
with my daughter, and she doesn’t have hers.

“You were at the trial,” she says. Her voice is quiet, and I can only just hear her.

“Yes,” I tell her.

There are many bunches of flowers against the trunk of the willow, their reds and yellows vivid in the sun; the ink on the
cards is clear still, not yet blurred by rain. They’ve only just been put here. Because of the trial and the verdict, other
people, strangers like us or family, have come here, to the place where Maria’s death is remembered. I stand by the woman
and watch as Amber takes her bunch of freesias and places them carefully there.

She looks back at me uncertainly.

“We didn’t put a message on. We should have put a message.”

“They’re very pretty,” the woman says to Amber.

Amber bends for a moment, to read all the words on the cards.

The woman turns to me.

“It’s strange you’re here,” she says. “Because I wanted to see you. I tried to find you after the trial, but I couldn’t find
you anywhere.”

“I just went home,” I say.

Amber straightens, looks across at us, working out what to do now.

“Mum. I thought I’d go for a walk,” she says, with studied casualness. “I thought I could look for the heron.”

She goes off down the path.

I sit on the grass beside Maria’s mother. In the shade the ground still has a slight dampness to it, in spite of the heat
of the day. We’re close to the richness of earth and sap, and the mingled scents of the riverbank. The wind breathes softly.

“I wanted to find you to thank you,” she says.

“You don’t need to thank me,” I tell her. “Anyone would have done the same.”

“No, I don’t think they would have,” she says. “Not in your situation. He gave you a very tough time. It must have been horrible
for you.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” I tell her.

“I’m very grateful,” she says.

We sit in silence for a while. A fleet of slow swans passes.

“I come here quite often,” she says then. Talking as though we know each other well. “I feel nearer to her here. Each time
I come, I think I’m going to reach her, to touch her. But of course I can’t.”

I don’t say anything.

“I blame myself,” she says. She has her head down; she isn’t looking at me. “I saw things happening. There are only so many
times you can walk into a wall.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” I say.

“It’s so difficult, with children, to know how far to interfere,” she says. “They have to lead their own lives. Well, you’re
a mother. You’ll understand. … Though if I could do it again, there’s so much I would do differently. Everything.”

“Yes,” I say.

“It’s sometimes the hardest thing to know what’s right,” she says.

A barge glides slowly past us, with pots of begonias on top, and a man at the back holding a striped umbrella. Three geese
take off from the water with a great clatter of wings. We gaze out over the river and all the things it carries and contains,
its barges, water-birds, rowing teams, pleasure boats, its litter of tires and garbage bags and polystyrene boxes: and its
plants that move so sinuously as the water covers them, as though they are stirred by a secret wind.

Amber has come back now. She sits on the grass a few yards from us, hugging her knees, tactfully turned away.

“I guess you need to go,” says the woman.

“Yes, we probably should.”

“I’m glad I met you,” she says.

She reaches out both hands and holds my hands for a moment. Her skin is so cold, in spite of the warmth of the day.

“I wish you well,” she says.

We walk back to the car.

“Was that Maria’s mother?” says Amber.

“Yes,” I tell her.

“I’m glad we did that,” she says. “I felt a bit embarrassed, but I’m sure we did the right thing.”

It’s hot in the car. We wind the windows down and the breeze comes in, smelling of salt and elderflowers.

Amber takes some jelly sweets out of the pocket of her jeans. They’re a disturbing blue color.

“Amber, those sweets look like they’re made from nuclear waste,” I say.

She ignores this.

“Mum,” she says, “when’s Molly coming home?”

“Saturday. It’s the end of term. We’re bringing all her stuff home.”

“I miss her,” she says.

“I know you do.”

She looks around doubtfully at my car.

“We’ll never get all her stuff in here.”

“We’ll manage,” I tell her. “Dad’s coming over, we’re going in his car.”

“Just like we used to,” she says.

The yearning in her voice hurts me. I put my hand on her arm.

“It’s OK, Mum.” She unwraps a sweet and sticks it into her mouth. “I can live with it,” she says, through the sweet. “You
don’t have to worry about me.”

We come to the high brick wall that runs around the grounds of the convent. There are seedlings on the table in the gateway.
I pull up at the curb.

“Honestly, Mum. You and your plants,” says Amber. “You always have to have something to look after.”

I get out of the car. The handwritten label says that they are Iceland poppies, and you can put donations in the Cadbury biscuit
tin.

I choose a boxful. I shall plant them out in the border under the pear tree: I know just where they can go. In my mind’s eye,
they’re flowering there already: I can see their sooty stamens, the sheen on their petals, the colors so true that you feel
they might come off on your hand. Poppies fall quickly—they’re such ephemeral things— you can’t expect weeks of flowering:
but for those few days they’re so lovely. And they seed themselves, and next year perhaps they’ll come up all over the garden.