Kitabı oxu: «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

The

River
House

MARGARET LEROY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

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.

‘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.

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.