The River House

Acclaim for Margaret Leroy’s The River House

“In some ways The River House reads like a suspense novel written by Richard Yates. Leroy handles marriage and domestic life with the same graceful, precise, rueful style as the late novelist did, though with a warmer, more hopeful intelligence… Leroy elucidates Ginnie’s moral conundrum beautifully. Although there is never much doubt as to what Ginnie will do, it’s how she does it that provides considerable suspense.” — Washington Post

“Leroy delineates Ginnie’s diffidence in a deliberately hypnotic, masterly fashion. Her quiet, self-assured narrative voice delivers tremendous psychological depth and emotional resonance.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Leroy’s sensuously ethereal, subtly electric drama discerningly probes the affective fragility of a woman struggling to preserve all she holds dear, without losing herself in the process.”

—Booklist

“Margaret Leroy, who also wrote the excellent Postcards from Berlin, makes you care about her characters, who feel so real that you know they must be out there leading the lives she talks about… Settle down in a deep armchair or hammock with The River House, and make sure you’re comfortable—you won’t want to get up for a while.” —BookLoons

“This gripping suspense novel by British author Margaret Leroy is more about the complex relationships between people than it is about crime. Leroy expertly draws a picture of a woman and a family in crisis and the moral questions one sometimes has to face.”

— Toronto Sun

Acclaim for Margaret Leroy’s The Perfect Mother A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

“It’s a premise familiar from some of Hitchcock’s best movies: seemingly upright people, through no fault of their own, see their lives unravel before their eyes. Margaret Leroy’s [The Perfect Mother] taps the compelling emotions inherent in that storyline.” —Seattle Times

“Written with a wonderfully convincing authority… I was eager to find out what happened next. I dreaded the worst and I hoped for the best—and I won’t tell you which happens.”

—New York Times

“The novel reads like a thriller and is brilliant at portraying the slow, steady disintegration of a seemingly ordinary life when secrets are unearthed and dark suspicions spread.”

—Baltimore Sun

Acclaim for Margaret Leroy’s The Drowning Girl

“Margaret Leroy’s eerily lovely novel [The Drowning Girl] is one of those rare books you’ll sit with till your bones ache.” —Oprah Magazine

“This is a really special book. Sylvie’s vulnerability is so powerfully drawn, so flesh-and-blood real, that you want to reach into the pages and protect her yourself.”

—Louise Candlish

“Every once in a blue moon, a masterful writer dives into Gothic waters and emerges with a novel that—like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, or, more recently, Patrick McGrath’s Asylum—simultaneously celebrates and transcends the genre. Welcome Margaret Leroy to the clan. Haunted and haunting, [The Drowning Girl] is a wonderfully original, deliciously suspenseful mystery.” —Publishers Weekly

“This book is perfect for anyone wanting an intriguing story which is also well-written and moving.”

—Adele Geras

“This book was compelling from the first chapter. Margaret Leroy’s twists are carefully orchestrated so Grace had my sympathy and understanding. It is a book I will never forget. Read it—it is such a refreshing change from the usual frothy stories.”

—Candis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my wonderful editor, Maddie West, for her intelligence and empathy; to the brilliant team at MIRA, especially Catherine Burke and Oliver Rhodes; to Judy Clain, my editor at Little, Brown and Company, New York; and to my marvellous agents, Kathleen Anderson and Laura Longrigg. Brian Hook very generously enlightened me about the workings of the Metropolitan Police—any errors are, of course, mine alone. My thanks also to Lucy Floyd and Vicki Tippet for contributing contacts and insights; and as always to Mick, Becky and Izzie for their love and understanding.

In researching this story, I found these books especially valuable: “Men Who Batter Women”, by Adam Edward Jukes; “A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures,” by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson; and Peter Ackroyd’s “London: A Biography”.

CHAPTER 1

He’s building a wall from Lego. There’s no sound but the click as he slots the bricks together, and his rapid, fluttery breathing. His face is white as wax. I know he’s very afraid.

‘You’re building something,’ I say.

He doesn’t respond.

He’s seven, small for his age, like a little pot-bound plant. Blond hair and skin so pale you’d think the sun could hurt him, and wrists as thin as twigs. A freckled nose that would wrinkle if he smiled: but I’ve yet to see a smile.

I kneel on the floor, to one side of him, so as not to be intrusive. His fear infects me: the palms of my hands are clammy.

‘Kyle, I’m wondering what kind of room you’re building. I don’t think it’s a playroom, like this one.’

‘It’s the bedroom,’ he says. Impatient, as though this should be obvious.

‘Yes. You’re building the bedroom.’

His building is complete now—four walls, no door.

It’s a warm September afternoon, syrupy sunlight falling over everything. My consulting room seems welcoming in the lavish light, vivid with the primary colours of toys and paints and Play-Doh, and the animal puppets that children will use to speak for them, that will sometimes free them to say astonishing things. The walls are covered with drawings that children have given me, though there’s nothing of my own life here—no traces of my family, of Greg or my daughters, no Christmas or holiday photos: for the children who come here, I want to be theirs alone for the time that they’re with me. The mellow light falls across Kyle’s face, but it doesn’t brighten his pallor.

He digs around in the Lego box, looking for something. I don’t reach out to help him: I don’t want to distract him from his inner world. His movements are narrow, restricted; he will never reach out or make an expansive gesture. Even when he’s drawing he confines himself to a corner of the page. Once I said, Could you do me a picture to fill up all this space? He drew the tiniest figures in the margin, his fingers scarcely moving.

He finds the people in the box. A boy, and an adult that could be a man or a woman: just the same as last time.

‘The people are going into your building. I’m wondering what they’re doing there.’

He’s grasping the figures so tightly you can see his bones white through his skin.

I feel a slight chill as a shadow passes across us. Instinctively, I turn—thinking I might see someone behind me, peering in at the window. But of course there’s nothing there—just a wind that stirs the leaves of the elms that grow at the edge of the car park.

There’s a checklist in my mind. Violence, or sex abuse, or something he has seen—because I have learnt from years of working with these troubled children that it’s not just about what is done to you, that what is seen also hurts you. I know so little. His foster parents say he’s very withdrawn. His mother could have helped me—but she’s on a psychiatric ward, profoundly depressed, not well enough to be talked to. The school were certainly worried. ‘He seems so scared,’ said the teacher who referred him to the clinic.

‘Of anything in particular?’ I said. ‘Swimming lessons, storytime, male teachers?’

She had riotous, nut-brown hair and her eyes were puzzled. I liked her. She frowned and fiddled with her hair. ‘Not really. Just afraid.’

‘Perhaps a bad thing happened in the bedroom,’ I say now, very gently. ‘Perhaps the boy is unhappy because a bad thing happened.’

Noises from outside scratch at the stillness: the slam of a door in the car park, the harsh cries of rooks in the elms. He clicks the figures into place. The sounds are clear in the quiet, like the breaking of tiny bones.

‘You can talk about anything here,’ I tell him. ‘Even bad things, Kyle. No one will tell you off, whatever you say. Sometimes children think that what happened was their fault, but no one will think that here…’

He doesn’t respond. Nothing I say makes sense to him. Yet I know this must be significant, this room with the child and the adult, over and over. And no way out, no door.

Perhaps this is the detail that matters. I sit there, thinking of doors. Of going through into new, expectant spaces: of that image I love from Alice in Wonderland, the narrow door at the end of the hall that leads to the rose garden. Maybe he needs to experience here in the safety of my playroom the opening of that door. I feel a surge of hope. Briefly, I thrill to my imagery of liberation, of walking out of prison.

‘Perhaps the boy feels trapped.’ I keep my voice very casual. ‘Like there’s no way out for him. But there is a way. He doesn’t know it yet, but there is a way out of the room for him. He could build a door and open it. All that he has to do is to open the door.’

He turns so his back is towards me, just a slight movement, but definite. He rips a few bricks from his building and dumps them back in the box, like he’s throwing rubbish away. His face is blank. He stands by the sandpit and digs in the sand with his fingers and lets the grains fall through his hands. When I speak to him now, he doesn’t seem to hear.

After Kyle has gone, I stand there for a moment, looking into the empty space outside my window, needing a moment of quiet to try and make sense of the session. I watch as Peter, my boss, the consultant in charge of the clinic, struggles to back his substantial BMW into rather too small a space. The roots of the elms have pushed to the surface and spread across the car park: the tarmac is cracked and uneven.

The things that have to be done tonight pass briefly through my mind. Something for dinner. The graduates’ art exhibition at Molly’s old school. Soy milk for Greg, and buckwheat flour for his bread. Has Amber finished her Graphics coursework? Fix up a drink with Eva… A little wind shivers the tops of the elms: a single bright leaf falls. I can still feel Kyle’s fear: he’s left something of it behind him, as people may leave the smell of their cigarettes or scent.

I sit at my desk and flick through his file, looking for anything that might help, a way of understanding him. A sense of futility moves through me. I wonder when this happened—when my certainty that I could help these children started to seep away.

I have half an hour before my next appointment. I take the file from my desk and go out into the corridor.

CHAPTER 2

Light from the high windows slants across the floor, and I can hear Brigid typing energetically in the secretaries’ office. Clem’s door is open: she doesn’t have anyone with her. I go in, clutching the file.

‘Clem, d’you have a moment? I need some help,’ I tell her.

Her smile lights up her face.

Clem goes for a thrift-shop look. Today she looks delectable in a long russet skirt and a little leopardskin gilet. She has unruly, dirty-blonde hair: she pushes it out of her eyes. On her desk, there’s a litter of files and psychology journals and last week’s copy of Bliss, in which she gave some quotes for an article called My Best Friend Has Bulimia. We both get these calls from time to time, from journalists wanting a psychological opinion: we’re on some database somewhere. She gets the anorexia ones, and I get the ones about female sexuality, because of a study I once did with teenage girls, to the lasting chagrin of my daughters. In a welcoming little gesture, Clem sweeps it all aside.

‘It’s Kyle McConville,’ I tell her.

She nods. We’re always consulting one another. Last week she came to me about an anorexic girl she’s seeing, who has an obsession with purity and will only eat white food—cauliflower, egg white, an occasional piece of white fish.

‘We’ll have a coffee,’ she says. ‘I think you need a coffee.’

Clem refuses to drink the flavoured water that comes out of the drinks machine in the corridor: she has a percolator in her room. She gets up and hunts for a clean cup.

‘When does Molly go?’

‘On Sunday.’

‘It’s a big thing, Ginnie. It gets to people,’ she says. ‘When Brigid’s daughter went off to college, Brigid wept for hours. Will you?’

‘I don’t expect to.’

‘Neither did Brigid,’ she says. She pours me a coffee and rifles through some papers on a side table. ‘Bother,’ she said. ‘I thought I had some choc chip cookies left. I must have eaten them when I wasn’t concentrating.’

She gives me the coffee and, just for a moment, rests her light hands on my arms. It’s always so good to see her poised and happy. Her divorce last year was savage: there were weeks when she never smiled.Gordon, her husband, was very possessive and prone to jealous outbursts. She finally found the courage to leave, and was briefly involved with an osteopath who lived in Wesley Street. Gordon sent her photos of herself with the eyes cut out. About this time last year, on just such a mellow autumn day, I took her to pick up some furniture from the home they’d shared, an antique inlaid cabinet that had belonged to her mother. Gordon was there, tense, white-lipped.

She looked at the cabinet. She was shaking. Something was going on between them, something I couldn’t work out.

‘I don’t want it now,’ she said.

‘You asked for it, so you’ll damn well take it,’ he said.

As we loaded it into the back of my car I saw that he’d carved ‘Clem fucks in Wesley Street’ all down the side of the cabinet.

She sits behind her desk again, resting her chin on her hands. There are pigeons on her window sill, pressed against the glass: you can see their tiny pink eyes. The room is full of their throaty murmurings.

‘Are you OK, Ginnie? You look kind of shattered,’ she says.

‘It’s death by shopping. I’ve got this massive list of stuff that Molly seems to need.’

‘You need to treat yourself,’ says Clem. ‘A bit of self-indulgence.’

I sip my coffee. Clem likes to eat organic food,but the coffee she makes is satisfyingly toxic. I feel a surge of energy as it slides into my veins.

‘I did,’ I say. ‘I really tried.’

I tell her about the boots I bought, in a reckless moment out buying bedding with Molly. How they caught my eye in a shop window—ankle boots the colour of claret with spindly improbable heels. How Molly urged me on: Go for it, Mum. You look fab in them: and for a moment I believed her: I felt a shiver of possibility, a sense of something shifting. And then the moment of doubt when I handed over my credit card, wondering why I was doing this.

‘You haven’t worn them yet,’ says Clem sternly.

‘No. Well, I probably never will.’

She shakes her head at me.

‘Ginnie, you’re hopeless,’ she says, with affection. ‘So tell me. Kyle McConville.’

‘There’s something I’m missing,’ I tell her.

She waits, her fingers steepled in front of her face, like someone praying. She has bitten nails, and lots of silver rings engraved with runes, which she buys at Camden Market.

I take a breath.

‘He makes me feel afraid. Like there’s some threat there, something that’s happened or might happen. It sounds silly now, but I found myself kind of looking over my shoulder. I don’t know when I’ve had such a powerful feeling of dread—not even with kids we know have been abused. But there’s nothing in his case-notes.’

She nods. I know she’ll take my feeling seriously. We have a mantra, Clem and I: How someone makes you feel is information. We understand this differently. I’m more prosaic perhaps: I think we’re all more sensitive than we realise and respond unconsciously to one another’s signals; while Clem’s quite mystical about it, believing we’re all connected in ways we don’t understand.

‘He builds a bedroom from Lego,’ I tell her. ‘Over and over. I feel that he went through some trauma there. But maybe that’s too simplistic.’

‘So much is simple,’ she says.

‘I said that he wasn’t trapped, he could escape from the room. He just closed up completely when I said that. But it felt so right to me—you know, to walk out of your prison.’

Her eyes are on me. She has brown, full eyes, always a little dilated, that give her a childlike look. Now they widen a little.

‘Ginnie,’ she says tentatively. ‘Perhaps there was some other reason that it seemed to make so much sense.’ Her voice fades.

I sip my coffee.

‘I just can’t tell if it’s something to pursue. Given how he reacted.’

She leans towards me across the desk.

‘Ginnie, you need the story,’ she says. ‘You’re dancing in the dark here. You need a bit more background. Who else has been involved?’

‘There’s a note to say the police were called to the house.’

‘Well, there you are, then.’

‘But no one was charged. And no one told Social Services, so Kyle can’t have been thought to have been in any danger.’

‘So what?’ she says. ‘Maybe someone messed up. Go and talk to them, Ginnie.’ There are lights in her eyes: this amuses her. ‘Isn’t it what we’re all meant to be doing nowadays? I mean, it’s all about interfacing, isn’t it? Collaboration and interfacing and stuff. You need to go off and collaborate.’

She pulls the notes towards her, flicks open the cardboard cover. Her fingers with the runic rings move deftly through the file. I wait to see what she says. You can hear the murmuring of the pigeons, as though the air is breathing.

She pauses, her hand on the page. A shadow crosses her face.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s not what you’d choose exactly.’

‘What do you mean?’

She looks up at me, a little frown stitched to her forehead. ‘I’ve met this guy—the detective you need to talk to. He’s at Fairfield Street, he runs the Community Safety Unit. DI Hampden. I know him.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘Maybe it’s nothing,’ she says. ‘I mean, I could have got the wrong impression. He spoke at this conference I went to. Very energetic.’

‘You mean difficult.’

‘I didn’t say that, Ginnie. A bit combative, perhaps—but there were some pretty crass questions from the floor. What the hell. I’ll give you his number.’

She writes it down for me.

I feel tired suddenly. I know just how it will be, this encounter with Clem’s rather combative detective. A meeting like all the others, hurried and inconclusive, both of us distracted and rushing on to the next thing, in a room that smells of warm vinyl: trying to find a way forward for yet another troubled, damaged child.

‘I guess I could try him,’ I say.

The reluctance is there in my voice. She looks up sharply.

‘Ginnie, you are OK, aren’t you? I mean, should I be worried?’

‘I’m fine, Clem, really. Just shattered, like you said.’

She frowns at me with mock-severity.

‘This isn’t burnout, is it, Ginnie?’

‘Nothing so glamorous.’

I can’t quite tell her how I really feel. How I’ve lost the shiny hopefulness I used to have. How as you get older it changes. You learn how deep the scars go: you worry that healing is only temporary, if it happens at all. You know there’s so much that cannot be mended.

I take the number and walk back to my office. The bars of sunlight falling from the windows seem almost opaque, like solid things: as though if you put out your hand you might touch something warm and real.

CHAPTER 3

My house is half hidden behind tall hedges. It’s a house that belongs in the country—you’d never guess you were on the edge of London: a cottage, with a little sunken garden; and at night its crooked old walls and beams and banisters seem to stretch and creak as if they’re living things that are shifting and turning over and settling down to sleep. Sometimes I think how we’d all have loved this house if we’d moved here earlier, when the girls were little and we lived in a forgettable thirties semi. How it would have preoccupied me in my domestic days, when I thrilled to fabric catalogues and those little pots of paint you can try out on your walls. How the girls would have relished its secrets and hiding places: and how Amber especially would have loved that the river was down the end of the road, the Thames that runs on through London, with its willows and islands and waterbirds. Like in the poem she made me read each night when she was three:

Grey goose and gander

Clap your hands together

And carry the good king’s daughter

Over the one-strand river.

don’t know what it was about the poem. It made her think perhaps of the walks we sometimes took on weekend afternoons, when Greg was busy in his study preparing his lectures: driving down to the river, and parking on a patch of gravel where nobody seemed to come, and walking along the river path where in summer the balsam and meadowsweet grow higher than your head. Amber especially loved those walks, poking around with Molly in the tangle of bushes beside the path, and coming upon some tiny astonishing creature, a sepia moth with lacy wings, a beetle like a jewel, black and emerald. Or maybe it was just the sound of the words—maybe gander sounded to her a little like Amber—for when children are greedy for poetry, it’s often for the sound as much as the sense. There was a picture that went with the poem—the rush-fringed mudflats beside the glinting river: the princess a teenage girl in a cloak and a coronet with a look of perplexity: the soaring goose, wide-winged. I’d read it endlessly, till it had no meaning: but it always evoked a particular mood—lonely, a little melancholic, with bulrushes whispering and the smell of the river, the mingled scent of salt and rotting vegetation. This house would have been perfect for us in those days. But things don’t always happen at the right time in our lives, and I think my daughters now scarcely notice the house they live in, as they move towards independence and their centre of gravity starts to shift away.

Molly has begun packing, ready for Sunday and the start of her first term at Oxford: the hall is cluttered with boxes. I check my voicemail for messages. Amber must be already home: she leaves a trail behind her—her shoes kicked off, her grubby pink school bag with books spilling out, her blazer, still inside out, flung down on the floor. I remember she had the afternoon off for an orthodontic appointment.

I call to her. She appears at the top of the stairs. The light from the landing window shines on her and glints in her long red hair. She is drinking something electric blue from a bottle.

‘You shouldn’t drink that stuff,’ I say routinely. ‘It leaches the calcium out of your bones. Girls of twenty are getting osteoporosis….’

With a stagy gesture, she hides the bottle behind her.

‘You weren’t meant to see it,’ she says.

‘Nice day?’

‘OK,’ she says.

She pushes back the soft heap of her hair, tossing her head a little. Stray flyaway bits turn gold.