The River House

‘I’d like that,’ he says.

I leave my whisky undrunk.

We drive there through the dull day. We talk about the traffic and the weather.

At the park by the river I stop the car. It’s raining again. It seems a bleak, forsaken place in the rain: there are puddles on the gravel, holding the grey of the sky, and a starling pecks at a litter bin. When I turn off the engine, all you can hear is the water on the roof, like drumming fingers. A single dark leaf with a rim of white light is pressed against the windscreen. I turn to him as he undoes his seat belt: I hope he will kiss me properly, but he just gets out of the car. I put on my mac but I leave my umbrella—some calculation that there’s something deeply unsexy about an umbrella. It’s as though I’m drugged or in a dream.

‘I’m sorry about the rain,’ I say. Then think how silly this sounds.

There’s one other car in the car park: a man sitting there, smoking, his newspaper propped against the steering-wheel. He stares at us, a cool unguarded stare. This makes me uneasy. I think how obvious we must be—a preoccupied man, a middle-aged woman in suede boots that are clearly all wrong for the weather, and both of us oblivious to the rain.

We walk to the left along the path by the river. Even on this dull day, the water has a faint shine, reflecting the opalescence of the sky. The river is running high and dimpled by the rain and full of movement, all its contrary surges and eddies and ripples. We can see Eel Pie Island to our right across the water, one of the biggest islands in the Thames. At either end there’s a nature reserve, huge gold willows reaching down to the water, but there are houses too, and from this bank we can see the back gardens of some of them, ending abruptly in a steep drop to the river. On the flagstones at the end of one garden sits a terracotta boy, one leg dangled over the edge, his head turned as if he’s looking down the river; he’s so precisely the colour of sunburnt flesh that you think for a moment he’s real. But there are no houses or gardens here on the bank where we walk—on one side of us the river, to the other side a tangle of bushes and trees.

Ahead there’s a noise and chaos of geese and swans on the path: an old man in a tattered coat is scattering bread from a bag, undeterred by the rain. With the birds all clustering round he’s a figure from an engraving, from one of Ursula’s fairy tales, at once grotesque and beneficent, the sort of man who might give you three gifts or three wishes. Scattering crusts, paying us no attention, around him the flurry of wings.

The river path curves. We’re out of sight of the car park and the old man. The trees hang low over the path here. A pigeon startles through the tree canopy above us, with a sound like something torn. Will takes my hand and pulls me after him, in under the trees. Bramble bushes catch at my legs. We go in a long way, so we’re hidden from the path. There’s a place where the bushes open out a bit, though the branches are low over our heads, catching at our hair. The rain doesn’t penetrate here, but it’s wet underfoot, a thick shiny mulch of dead bracken and earth and leaves.

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