The River House
‘Have you finished your Graphics coursework? ‘
She shrugs. ‘I’m waiting to get in the mood.’
There’s a brief blare of music as she opens her door and goes back into her bedroom.
Molly, making the most of her last week of leisure, is sprawled on the sofa in the living room, her little pot of Vaseline lipsalve beside her. She’s already dressed and made up for the art exhibition; she’s put on lots of pink eyeshadow and she’s wearing one of her many pairs of embroidered jeans. She glitters against the dark colours of my living room, the kelims and patchwork cushions. My daughters dazzle me, with their long limbs, bright hair, and that sudden startling shapeliness that seems to happen between one day and the next. Molly once told me she could remember the precise day—she was just thirteen, she said—when she first looked at herself in the mirror with interest.
She fixes me now with her eyes that are dark and glossy as liquorice.
‘Hi, Mum. I don’t suppose there’s any food?’
I suppress a sigh. Molly is quite capable of complaining that there’s never anything to eat while standing in front of a fridge containing a shepherd’s pie, a cheesecake and six yogurts.
‘I’ll be cooking in a minute.’
‘OK.’ She turns to me then, her fingers tangled in the kelim on the sofa. Her lips are slick from the Vaseline. ‘Dad is coming, isn’t he? ‘
‘Yes,’ I say, a bit too emphatically. ‘Of course.’
I remember her as a little girl, one time when I had a case conference and couldn’t make it to her Harvest Festival: What’s the point of me learning all the words to these songs if you aren’t there to hear me?
‘Dad wouldn’t miss it,’ I tell her.
‘I want him to see it.’
‘Of course you do,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be there.’
I go to the kitchen to ring him, so that she won’t be able to hear.
My kitchen soothes me, with its warm red walls and its silence. It’s a jumble of things that don’t quite fit together, that almost seem to belong in different houses. There’s a clutter of mismatched flowered china on the dresser, and a mirror shaped like a crescent moon, and an apothecary cabinet that I loved the look of, though its many little drawers are really very impractical. I keep all sorts of oddments in the drawers, things that aren’t much use but that I can’t bear to get rid of—the wrist tags the girls were given in hospital just after they were born, and a piece of pink indeterminate knitting Molly did in infant school, and the tiny photos you get in the pack of assorted prints from the school photographer that are too small to frame but that I’d never throw away. On the wall by the sink, there’s a copy of my sister Ursula’s painting of the Little Mermaid, from one of the fairy-tale books she’s illustrated, the mermaid diving down through the blue translucent water, with around her the dark drenched treasure and the seaweed like curling hair. When Molly was a toddler, the picture used to trouble her, and she’d stare at it with widening liquorice eyes: ‘But won’t she drown, Mum, under all that water?’ On the window sill there are some leggy geraniums, and apples from the Anglican convent down the road. Passers-by were invited to help themselves to the apples: and I had some vague hope that, given their ecclesiastical origins, they might be specially nourishing. I see in the rich afternoon light that it all needs cleaning, that I haven’t wiped my window sills for weeks.
He’s slow to answer. I worry that he’s in the middle of a tutorial.
‘Greg, it’s me. It was just to check you hadn’t forgotten tonight.’
‘What about tonight?’
‘It’s Molly’s exhibition. The art show at the school.’
There’s a brief silence. Something tenses in my chest.
‘Hell,’ he says then.
‘I did tell you.’ I hear the irritation edge into my voice: I try to control it. ‘It matters, Greg.’ It depresses me how familiar this is: me always wanting more from him than he is willing to give. ‘She worked so hard,’ I tell him. ‘And she spent all yesterday stapling it up.’
‘Look, I’ll be there, OK? There’s no need to go on about it. Though it’s quite a pain, to be honest. I was hoping to get in a bit more work on my book.’
I sit there a moment longer. I should be making the dinner, but I just wait for a while and let the quiet knit up the ravelled bits of me and ease away the disturbance of the day. I see that a tiny fern is growing out of the wall behind the sink: this shouldn’t happen. An apple shoot once sprouted from a pip that had fallen behind my fridge. Sometimes I feel that if I relaxed my vigilance for too long, my house would rapidly revert to the wild.
I decide I will make a vegetable gratin, a concession to Amber’s incipient vegetarianism. I cut up leeks and cauliflower. I’m just at the delicate stage, adding the milk to the roux, when the phone rings.
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 that 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 till afterwards.’
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 flicker 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 burnt 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 window sill, 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 paediatrician 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 life line, 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 for ever to come, and afterwards he complained he was getting a cold and sent me out to buy Lemsip. When we said goodbye, 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 in the motorway service station that there were mascara smudges under my eyes and I looked like I was 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 top it up from the tap and start again with the sauce.
CHAPTER 4
Greg 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 colour. I’m dazzled by this marvellous 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 round 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 travelled widely, been to Haiti, Colombia—nothing seems to throw him.
‘To be honest, Ginnie, I never feel fear,’ he says.
‘You don’t know what fear is till 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 antenatal 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 towards it. I look round for Greg, but he’s met a woman from his department, an earnest woman with wild grey 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 heaped 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—me and Ursula 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 ask you. 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 shiny bar 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 colours 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, like an etching, the lines and structure of people’s faces exaggerated, so that they look older than they 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 lupins: 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 them 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 one another, 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 realise I’ve just been standing here, staring.
‘Molly. I love it. It’s wonderful.’ Instinctively, I put my arm around her, then realise 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 towards a gang of her friends.
I go to find Greg.
‘You have to come and see Molly’s work,’ I tell him.
He says goodbye 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 flicker 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 with 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 in 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 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 round 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 colour from her face, so you can’t see most of her make-up; her face looks rounder, more open, as though she is a child again. A bit of glittery eyeshadow has smudged under her eye.
‘He didn’t look at it, Mum,’ she says.
‘He did, sweetheart.’
She chews at a strand of her hair.
‘Not properly,’ she says. ‘He didn’t look through my sketchbooks or anything. I was watching. Well, why would he want to look at it anyway? It’s a load of crap.’
‘That’s nonsense, Molly.’
‘No, it’s true,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why I got such a good mark. It must have been a mistake.’
There’s a tug at my heart.
‘Don’t say that.’ I want to stop the car and reach out and hold her, but I know she’d hate it. ‘Sweetheart, you’ve got to have faith in yourself: everyone loves what you’ve done.’
But the shine has gone from the day for her, and I know she isn’t listening.
I wake in the night with a start, from some indeterminate dream, feeling the thickness of the dark against me. Greg is snoring quietly beside me: I can sense the sleep-warmth coming off his body. I press the button that illuminates the face of my alarm clock. 4.15. Shit. This happens over and over, this sudden waking at three or four, and the thoughts are always the same. Thoughts of dying, of endings, when death seems so real to me I almost believe that if I turned I would see him there behind me. Looking perhaps like the picture of Death in one of the girls’ old storybooks: Death who played dice with a soldier in The Storyteller, with green bulbous eyes and a sack and a look of cool composure. He lays it out before me, clinical, utterly rational. You’re forty-six, you’re over halfway through; even with luck, great blessings and longevity, you’re more than halfway through; and you’ve certainly had the best bit. He fixes me with his cool green stare, knowing and expectant.
I slip out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Greg, though nothing seems to stir him. I go downstairs. I haven’t drawn the curtains in my kitchen: outside, the yawn of a black night. I make myself some toast and flick through the heap of yesterday’s post on the table, a catalogue full of cardigans with little satin trimmings, an offer of a new credit card: seeking to ground myself in these safe and trivial things.
CHAPTER 5
It’s eight in the morning, and Amber isn’t yet up.
I go to her room.
‘Amber, you ought to be dressed.’
I pull back the curtains. She groans and hides under the duvet.
‘My braces hurt,’ she says. ‘I can’t go in.’
‘Amber, for God’s sake, you can’t stay home because your braces have been adjusted.’
‘Sofia always has a day off after her orthodontic appointments,’ she says, though without much hope, from under the bedclothes.
‘I don’t care what Sofia does,’ I tell her. I suspect a hangover. She went to the pub last night with the boy that she met at the art show, and he probably bought her one too many Malibus. ‘I’ll bring you a Nurofen, but you are going in.’
Then I find I have no clean work clothes. All my trousers have paint and Play-Doh on them, and the only thing that’s respectable is a short black skirt I hardly ever wear. It’s velvet, shapely, too smart for work really. I’m keeping it for best, I suppose. I do that with clothes, I probably do it with everything. It’s a pattern of mine—deferring gratification, saving things up for some brilliant future time. This is always thought to be a positive trait. There’s an experiment where you sit a three-year-old at a table with a single marshmallow, and you ask them not to eat the sweet while you go out of the room. You promise that if they don’t eat it, when you come back they can have two. The children who can wait do better at school and even later in life: there’s something fundamental about being able to postpone the small, immediate pleasure, in hope of achieving a greater one further down the line. But perhaps you can carry this too far. Perhaps there’s a time in life when you have to stop deferring. Sometimes I think that at forty-six I’m still waiting patiently for my two marshmallows.
I put on the skirt, but my usual flat boots look silly with it. My eyes fall on the wine-coloured boots I bought in a rash moment with Molly. I slip into them. High heels feel odd to me—it’s only rarely that I wear them: in spite of their sophistication they make me feel somehow childlike, as though I’m just trying on grown-up things. Like when Ursula and I would borrow our mother’s shoes and put a jazz record on the ancient wind-up gramophone she’d inherited from our grandmother and stomp around the living room. Conjuring up a life of unguessable glamour, of glasses of Martini with little umbrellas in them, and dancing under a pink-striped awning and the sound of the band.
I glance at myself in the mirror. I’m taller, thinner, more vivid. I look like somebody different.
Amber is dressed now, but she says her mouth is too painful to eat, and really she can only manage a can of Dr Pepper for breakfast: so she won’t be able to concentrate, so what’s the point of school. I don’t respond.
I’m late: I hate being late. I have a case conference at the hospital and I’ll only get there in time if there’s hardly any traffic. I go out to the road, into a sodden world of thick brown water-laden light. The traffic is always slower in the rain. I start up the car. In my unfamiliar shoes, the pedals seem to be at the wrong angle: and then I realise the problem isn’t the shoes. The grinding sound from under the car is louder than yesterday. I don’t know enough about cars to guess what’s wrong with the engine: perhaps the rain has got in.