The River House

‘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.

CHAPTER 6

The desk sergeant is young and angular, with gelled hair.