The River House
Where the side road joins the main road, I pull out in front of a bus and press on the accelerator, and there’s no response from the car—no power, nothing. The car creeps forward, the bus driver hoots aggressively. Panicked, I pull in to the side of the road and switch on my hazard flashers and crawl to the nearest garage, where a stooped and rather smug man who smells of engine oil informs me sombrely that my gearbox has gone.
I know my hair will be frizzing in the rain. My new red boots have mud on. I ask tentatively what kind of money we’re talking about.
‘I could do a reconditioned one for about five hundred quid,’ he says. ‘New, we’d be talking seven.’ He casts a pitying eye over my car, taking in the rust marks and the moss round the passenger window. ‘But, to be honest, love, there’s no point putting a new one into this, now, is there?’
Briefly, I feel ashamed, as though my mossy car is a moral failing.
It will take two days, he tells me. I manage to get a taxi, but I am still late for my meeting. I arrive with mud on my legs, self-conscious in my new boots.
At lunchtime, looking through my To Do list, I see where I have written the number of Fairfield Street police station, and Will Hampden’s name.
I ring.
A woman’s voice, brisk and sibilant. ‘Sorry, he’s in a meeting. Can I take a message?’
I leave my number and say it’s about a patient—nothing current, I just need some information.
At the corner shop I buy baguettes for Clem and for me. It’s still raining. We eat in Clem’s office.
‘The boots are fab,’ she says. ‘You ought to wear things like that more often.’
Clem’s in a rather mournful mood. She’s just had a date with a rather hunky medical insurance broker who explained between the sorbet and the espresso that he really enjoys her company but she has to know commitment isn’t his thing.
After lunch there is a team meeting. Peter lectures us on the vexed subject of the waiting list, and how cutting patient waiting times really has to be our priority. Brigid talks with passion about the coffee fund. Rain traces out its spider patterns on the windows: pigeons, plumped-up, pink-eyed, huddle on the sills. Bad temper has its claws in me.
The phone rings as I go back to my office and I hope it will be Will Hampden, but it’s the man from the garage, saying he needs to revise his estimate upwards.
I try the police station again. It’s the same woman.
‘Like I said, he’ll ring you back. You must understand, he has to prioritise, he’s very busy,’ she says.
There’s an edge to her voice, but I know she’s probably responding to some crossness in my own.
There are days that you can’t make right or mend. I make more calls but no one is in. I have a desultory session with Kerry James, a ten-year-old girl who’s been referred with suspected depression: she draws immaculate little pictures of cats, and nothing I say gets near her. In the end I just leave, rather early. The rain has stopped. I’ll walk for part of the journey and pick up the bus when I’m tired. Perhaps the walk will calm me.
I need my street plan, I have to go down roads where I’ve never been. These streets are dreary, with bleak terraced houses with grimy curtains and gardens full of old motorbikes. I turn into Acton Street, where there’s an ugly purple-painted pub with advertisements for Sports Night and a wide-screen television. I pass a grim tower block, where the playground has a high wire fence, like an exercise yard in a prison. But over all this there’s a wide washed sky, and a light that makes distant things seem near, so you feel you could see for ever. Birds fly over, grey geese like in Amber’s poem, clapping their wings together: six of them, in a black ragged V, against the shining sky. I watch them till they’re out of sight and their creaking cries have faded in the distance. I feel the day’s irritations start to seep away.
As I study my map on a street corner, I see that my route will take me near to Fairfield Street. And something perhaps can be retrieved from the general mess of my day.
CHAPTER 6
The desk sergeant is young and angular, with gelled hair.
‘Is it possible to speak to Detective Inspector Hampden?’
‘It should be. Who shall I say it is?’
I tell him. ‘I did try ringing earlier. I just wanted some information about a case.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says. He speaks into his phone. ‘He isn’t answering,’ he says, ‘but I know he’s somewhere around.’
Suddenly I wonder why I’m here.
‘Don’t worry,’ I tell him. ‘Not if he’s busy. I can ring him. I just dropped in on the off chance. You know, as I was passing.’
‘You might as well see him now you’re here,’ he says. ‘I’m sure I can get hold of him. Why don’t you sit down for a moment, Mrs Holmes?’
In the waiting area there are metal seats fixed to the wall. The only other person waiting is an elderly woman: a faint smell of urine hangs about her and she has three bulging Aldi bags and many large safety pins fixed to the front of her coat. A voice crackles over an intercom: it sounds like traffic information. The woman shuffles sideways towards me, catching her capacious skirts in the space at the back of the seats.
She reaches out and puts her hand on my arm. ‘You’re pretty, aren’t you?’ she says. Her voice is surprisingly cultured. There’s a fierce scent of spirits on her breath.
‘Mrs Holmes,’ says the desk sergeant. I get up, go to him. ‘Let me take you through,’ he says. ‘I’m sure he won’t be long.’
He takes me down a corridor; through the open doors on either side, you can hear phones shrilling and cut-off scraps of conversation. He shows me into an empty office, which smells of tuna and of illicit cigarette smoke.
‘I thought you might prefer to wait in here,’ he says. ‘Maureen does go on a bit.’
‘Thanks,’ I say.
He closes the door behind him.
It’s a cluttered, disorderly office: on the desk a computer, a litter of papers, a heap of blue ring-binders: and the more personal stuff, framed photos, a mug with pens and highlighters in. My eye is drawn to the photographs. A little blond boy, rather serious: a woman with a fall of straight dark hair. I think idly of something I once read in a novel by Milan Kundera, which I thought to be rather wise: that women aren’t essentially drawn to the most beautiful men—that the men we desire are the ones who have slept with beautiful women. There’s a half-drunk cup of coffee on the desktop and discarded sandwich wrappings in the bin.
The phone on the desk rings, and I have a brief instinctive urge to answer it. The voice over the intercom makes a new announcement, giving the number of a car that’s been abandoned, and inside it the body of an unidentified male. Above the sounds of phones and footsteps from the corridor, I can hear shouting, a man’s voice harsh with anger: I can only make out certain phrases—For fuck’s sake, repeated several times—and then a softer voice, a woman, seeking to placate. The anger in the first voice makes my pulse race. I sit there for what feels like an age in the smells of smoke and tuna, hearing the distant shouting.
The shouting stops, there are rapid footsteps along the corridor. The door bangs as it is pushed back. He comes into the room, then stops quite suddenly when he sees me.
‘What are you doing here?’ he says, as though I’m someone he knows, and I shouldn’t be there.
He’s a little taller than me, with cropped greying hair and a lived-in face. Forty-something. I see in a theoretical kind of way that he is quite attractive: that other women may like the way he looks.
‘I’m sorry.’ I feel an acute, disproportionate embarrassment about everything—hearing the quarrel, that I’m here at all.
He’s staring at me still, as though he finds me perplexing.
‘I’m Ginnie Holmes from the Westcotes Clinic,’ I tell him.
‘Hi, Ginnie,’ he says. He reaches out, as though he’s remembering how he ought to behave. I half get up, unsure what to do. He shakes my hand, and I notice the warmth of his skin.
‘The desk sergeant showed me through,’ I say.
‘He could have told me,’ he says.
I decide that Clem was right: that he is a difficult man.
He’s restless, the energy of his anger still hanging around him. He sits at the desk and takes out his cufflinks and pushes up his sleeves.
‘So, Ginnie, how can I help you?’ His gaze is hard, puzzled.
‘I’ve been trying to ring you,’ I tell him. ‘I couldn’t get through.’
‘That happens, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘It’s been crazy here. Tell me what I can do for you.’
I tell him I’m a psychologist, that I’m working with a child that I don’t understand.
He’s leaning forward across the desk, his hands loosely clasped in front of him. His hands are close to mine. I notice the pale skin, the dark hairs on the backs of his fingers, the lilac web of veins inside his wrists.
I tell him about Kyle, how I feel he’s been through some trauma but I don’t know what it was. Will Hampden has his eyes on me, dark eyes, with red flecks in. As I talk I’m very conscious of his intent, puzzled gaze. I decide he doesn’t like me. I think how I must seem to him, prissy, bland, ineffectual; my skin reddened from walking here, my hair all messy from the morning’s rain.
‘I don’t remember the name,’ he says, ‘but that doesn’t mean a thing. I’ll have a look on Crim Int. Let’s see what we can find out for you.’
He searches on his computer and gives me the dates the police were called to the house. He says he’ll have a word with the officer involved.
‘Where can I find you, Ginnie?’
I give him my cell phone number.
‘I’ll see what I can do for you,’ he says.
I know this means that our conversation is over. I get up, pull my jacket round my shoulders. I have an odd, incomplete feeling, but there’s no reason to stay.
‘OK, then. Thanks.’
‘My pleasure,’ he says. He sits there for a moment, looking me over. There’s something unequal about this, the way he doesn’t stand although I’m standing, as though he’s breaking some unspoken rule.
‘I like the shoes,’ he says.
‘Thanks.’ I make a little dismissive gesture, unnerved by this, not knowing what to say. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure they’re really me,’ I tell him. Then wonder why I said that.
His eyes hold mine.
‘What is really you, Ginnie?’ he says.
My stomach tightens. I don’t say anything.
There’s a little silence while he just sits there looking at me. I can hear my breathing.
‘Well,’ he says then. He pushes back his chair: he’s brisk again, full of purpose. ‘I’ll show you out, Ginnie. Where did you leave your car?’
‘I didn’t,’ I tell him. ‘It’s in the garage. They told me the gearbox had packed up. It’s been one of those days.’
‘For me too,’ he says. He smiles at me, a sudden vivid smile.
He takes me out through the back of the station, down a long white corridor lit by harsh tubular lighting that shines into all the corners. The walls are scuffed in places, as though they have been kicked. We hear the shriek of a siren as a police car pulls away from the car park at the back of the building. I hunt around for something to say—some light appropriate comment—but my mind is blank, as though all thoughts have been erased.
‘I’d give you a lift,’ he tells me, ‘but there’s someone I’ve got to see. Some crap meeting that got set up and nobody bothered to tell me. I’d like to have given you a lift.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I tell him.
We come to the door that opens onto the car park.The doorway is quite narrow and he’s standing close to me: he smells of rain and smoky rooms, and some faint spicy cologne.
He looks at me in a serious way, unsmiling now.
‘Sorry about the shouting,’ he says. ‘Someone messed up. Sorry. You shouldn’t have heard that.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I say blandly.
‘I wouldn’t like you to think I’m always shouting at people,’ he says.
I put my hand on his arm. It’s happened without thought, an instinctive gesture of reassurance. But his sleeve is rolled up and I touch his skin. It’s inappropriate, far too intimate, and I know he likes it. He turns to me: his face is close to mine. It would be the easiest thing in the world to reach out and trail my finger down the side of his face. It enters my mind that this is how it will be. The thought astonishes me.
The voice comes on the intercom again: the registration number, the body they need to identify, repeated over and over. This is how it happens, with the news of a death, with someone’s story ending.
I turn and walk across the car park between the lines of police cars, quickly, without looking back. I feel how his gaze follows me. In my new red shoes, the ground feels insubstantial under my feet, as though it could slide away from me.
That night I have a dream about Will Hampden. It’s a sexual dream—which is not in itself unusual, I have such dreams quite often. But usually they’re rather vague—as though my unconscious mind demurely follows the conventions of between-the-wars Hollywood movies. In these dreams, some indeterminate man, a stranger whose face I don’t see, might hold me or kiss me, or stand behind me and run his hand through my hair. Or the sexual feeling might be allied to some entirely neutral image: I might simply be swimming in a sunlit sea. And these images will be transient, rapidly merging with some other blurry narrative.
This dream is different. A dream of penetration, first his fingers, then his cock, gentle, slow, insistent. And it’s quite precise and vivid. I’m on top of him in the dream, I’m gazing down at him, seeing his face quite clearly, my eyes on his as he moves so deeply inside me: and it seems to go on for a very long time, though the end still comes too soon.
CHAPTER 7
We park near the restaurant in a wide mellow street. The girls extricate themselves from the back of the car: they have bags of clothes wedged round their feet, and boxes on their knees.
Honeyed autumn sunlight falls on Molly as she steps out onto the pavement. She’s wearing her flimsiest top, her most flamboyantly embroidered jeans. Her face is creased with worry.
‘What if someone nicks the car while we’re having lunch?’ she says. ‘All my stuff’s in there.’
She chews absently at a tendril of hair that’s slipped out of her hairband.
‘For God’s sake, Molly, no one will steal it,’ says Greg.
‘We’ll sit in the window,’ I tell her. ‘Then you can keep an eye on it.’
Greg raises his eyebrows.
Molly’s nervousness is like a glittery sheen on her. She moves on to her next worry.
‘Are you sure other people will have their parents with them?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I tell her. ‘Everyone will have their parents.’
‘They won’t,’ she says. ‘I bet they’ll all come with their mates in a van. They won’t have their parents. And, Mum.’ Her frown deepening as another fear comes rushing in. ‘What if they all know each other already? What if half of them come from the same school and they’ve known each other for years?’
‘Molly, stop freaking,’ says Amber severely.
The restaurant is crowded, but we manage to get a table by the window. Molly takes out her lipsalve. When her chicken pie comes, she just dips a chip in the sauce and sucks at the end of the chip. I terribly want her to eat, as though I have some unexamined idea that we’re feeding her up for weeks, as though this final family meal will magically sustain her.
She feels my gaze on her.
‘Sorry, Mum, I’d normally like it. I just can’t eat today.’
She’s hunched in on herself, as though she’s shrunk a little. I wonder how well I have prepared her for this moment of moving on, the ultimate test of my mothering. Maybe I should have pushed her more towards independence—right from when she was tiny and I used to go on feeding her, when I should perhaps have urged her to take the spoon. She was always rather too willing then to let me look after her. Whereas Amber would grab the spoon from the moment she could clasp it, mashed pears and custard flying exuberantly everywhere. Amber would grab whatever she wanted however much mess it made.
Another family comes to a table near us, two parents and a serious young man in a stylish denim shirt. He has a chiselled face and fine dark hairs on his arms. Amber glances at him, then away. She has an intent look.
She catches Molly’s eye.
‘Mmm,’ she says, thoughtfully. ‘I hope he’s going to your college.’
‘For Chrissake, shut up,’ hisses Molly.
Amber’s lips curve in a small secret smile.
We have crème brulée for pudding. Amber wolfs hers, then takes herself off to the cloakroom; and comes back by a devious route, brushing past the boy’s table, catching his eye and smiling slightly, keeping her lips pressed together to hide her braces. I love it that it comes so easily to her, this intuitive choreography that I’ve always found so perplexing.
I murmur to Greg, ‘Perhaps she’ll work a bit harder now. Maybe she’ll see the benefits.’
He shrugs. He gives me a puzzled look. Perhaps he didn’t see.
‘We need to get back to the car,’ he says. ‘We’re out of time on the meter.’
He pays the bill.
‘OK?’ I say to Molly.
She nods. She puts on more lipsalve.
We park at Molly’s college and she goes to the porter’s lodge and is given her key. Two o’clock chimes across the city: we hear the hollow sounds of many clocks and bells. We’re directed round the back; there’s a patch of gravel to park on, a tangled herbaceous border, a decrepit potting shed. The plants in the border are drying out and dying back with autumn—shaggy heads of chrysanthemums, and tatty Michaelmas daisies, their colours fading as though they’ve been left too long in water. The thin white stalks of some of the flowers have a calcified look, like tiny bones. Rich sunlight lies over everything. Around us, other families are unpacking their cars.
We go through the open fire door, along a brown corridor with many photographs of academic women, who all have solemn expressions and mildly unkempt hair. White rose petals have blown in through the open door onto the carpet. Someone has drawn genitals in black felt tip on the figure on the door of the men’s cloakroom.
Molly unlocks her door. The room has that immediate bleakness of all uninhabited student rooms; it’s under-furnished and nothing matches, the purple curtains ugly against the mustard walls. The ceiling is high. Our voices echo.
A brief panic flickers over her face, now it’s really happening.
‘I like the view,’ she says determinedly.
We go to the window. The gardens are spread out before us: a velvet lawn, an ancient beech tree, its massive limbs propped up with wooden struts, a round flowerbed with a sundial in the middle. It all has a subtle dishevelled loveliness, nothing too neat or ordered, no gravel path without its casual edging of lavender or sprawl of yellow daisies. Some autumn cyclamen, frail as moth wings, are flowering in the bare earth under the beech tree.
‘God, Molly,’ says Amber. ‘I wish I was a geek.’
We bring the boxes in, while Molly starts to unpack. I tip out cosmetics into a drawer, and the vitamins I bought for her. Her bath oil isn’t properly fastened and spills as I unpack it. I bite back the urge to tell her off. I go to the bathroom to wash the oil from my hands. The basins are swarming with green gauzy flies, and word-processed posters urge the ecological advantages of showers: ‘If you’re gagging for a bath, share one with a friend.’
The window is open, looking out over the gardens. I linger there for a moment, resting my arms. Nostalgia floods me. I’m eighteen again, walking a sepia corridor much like this one. Memories pass through me, a kaleidoscope of images. Men I went out with, tutors who scared me. The choir I used to sing in with Max, performing very old music in some chill college chapel: and afterwards there’d be a party where everyone got drunk because the medical students had doctored the punch with ethanol. I think of a tight black velvet dress I wore for one of those concerts, and, at the party afterwards, a stranger who came up behind me and ran his hands quite slowly down my sides, his palms curved into me, his fingers just missing my breasts. And I remember how I felt then that life was a quest or journey, a movement onwards towards some ultimate attainment: that at some point you’d get there, there’d be a kind of clarity. And here I am, years later: yet the present remains tentative, far too full of traffic jams and compromise: and the thing I thought I was moving towards continues to elude me.
I take the final suitcase to Molly’s room. There are urgent lists in my head, things I need to tell her: This is how your heater works, and if you leave your radio there on the window sill somebody could steal it, and promise you’ll take your vitamins. Amber is pinning Molly’s postcard collection to the pinboard.
Molly unpacks an alarm clock. It’s frivolously pink and was a present from a friend: she’s never used it.
‘I want to know you can set that thing,’ I tell her.
‘For God’s sake, Mum, I’ll manage.’
I insist. She tries, but it’s complicated.
‘I’ll be OK,’ she says. ‘I can set the alarm on my phone.’
‘But then you have to leave it on all night—and what if somebody rings and wakes you?’ My voice is shrill: all my anxiety about her focused onto this clock.
She puts her hand on my arm.
‘Mum, it’s OK. Really.’
She comes to the car park with us. It’s colder now.The wind stirs the leaves of the beech tree: the leaves are drying though they haven’t fallen yet, and there’s a rattle to the sound, a harshness that makes you think of winter. Behind us a girl with a sleek black bob is weeping as her parents’ car drives off. We stand there for a moment. Molly seems so small, suddenly. I put my arms all round her.
‘I’ll be fine, Mum,’ she says.
I realise I am utterly unprepared for this moment. I hold her for a moment and then she pulls away.
Amber wraps herself round her sister.
‘Go, girl,’ she says.
Greg gives Molly a rare hug. She holds him a little stiffly.
We get into the car and Molly turns and walks away. As we crunch out over the gravel, past the borders where the flower stalks are pale and fine as bones, I turn to watch her. She’s on the steps to the fire door, talking excitedly to the girl with the shiny bob, who a moment ago was crying and wanting her mother, and who is laughing now and flicking back her hair.
CHAPTER 8
We drive slowly out of the city, through heavy traffic. The car feels lighter without all Molly’s stuff in it.
‘I wonder how she’ll get on,’ I say to Greg.
‘Don’t worry, she’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘Molly always copes. Look, I don’t suppose you could dig me out a Milk of Magnesia, could you? I shouldn’t have had that crème brulée.’
There’s a packet he keeps in the glove compartment. I tip out a pill and hand it to him. The jasmine scent of Molly’s bath oil is still all over my hands. We have to wait for a long time at the roundabout on the ring road. I feel as if there’s something lurking just round the corner of my mind: some grief, skulking there, waiting to grab me.
Amber is hunting in her bag for her iPod.
‘It’s weird,’ she says. ‘You feel you haven’t said goodbye properly—that there’s something you should have said which you forgot to say.’
‘I feel the same,’ I tell her.
She takes out the iPod and chooses a song.
‘I’ll miss her,’ she says, her voice a little husky.
‘I know you will, sweetheart. We all will.’
She isn’t listening any more; she has her earphones in.
‘Greg, I’m worried Molly won’t wake in time in the mornings,’ I say. ‘I thought I’d send her our alarm clock—you know, just to tide her over till she can get to the shops.’