The River House

‘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.