The River House

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.