Margaret Leroy - The River House

Nothing much happened to start with—she sold the usual few thousand copies; and then it was chosen by children’s BBC, to illustrate a series of fairy tales read by celebrities—and suddenly everyone was buying it. Not just children either, for her books inhabited that sought-after terrain—books for children that adults also enjoy. One drawing was even reproduced in Vogue, in a piece on the New Romantics—the picture of the Little Mermaid that I have in my kitchen, that Molly found so troubling as a little girl. I remember when Ursula visited, just after the arrival of her first fat royalty cheque. She looked different. Still hardly any make-up, and her hair severely tied back, but with a new coat of the softest buttery suede. Though it wasn’t just the money. There was a new certainty about her: she knew what she was for.

My phone rings. It’s Molly.

‘Sweetheart, how are you?’

‘Well…my pimp beat me and then I got raped and I’ve started shooting up.’ She can’t quite suppress a giggle. ‘Fine otherwise.’

‘Tell me what’s happening.’

The Freshers’ Fair was great, she says, she’s joined at least thirty societies. Even the Blonde Society—you don’t have to be blonde, they just go round all the cocktail bars. And can she have a long denim skirt and some shots glasses for Christmas? And thanks for the alarm clock, but she didn’t really need it, she’s using the clock on her mobile.

‘Molly, are you eating OK? Can you manage all right with the cooker?’

‘I don’t cook much really,’ she says. ‘If I miss a meal I have Pringles.’

I question whether Pringles are a satisfactory meal.

Molly sighs extravagantly over the phone.

‘Mum, d’you ever listen to yourself? You been on one of those parenting courses or something? Look,I’m fine, OK? I’ve just joined thirty societies and I’m fine.’

‘Have you got everything you need? D’you want me to send you anything? I could send you some echinacea.’

‘OK, Mum, if you want to…’

‘Are you making plenty of friends? ‘

‘They’re really nice in my corridor. We’re going out for corridor curry tomorrow.’

‘Any men you like the look of? ’ I say tentatively.

‘Just don’t go there, Mum, OK? Anyway, half the guys in my college are gay—that’s why they have such nice trainers. Look, my phone needs recharging,’ she says. ‘I’ve really got to go.’

I finish the room. I box up the books and dust everywhere. I strip the bed and heap up the linen to take to the kitchen to wash.

It’s raining more heavily now: there’s a thick brown light in my kitchen. I make a coffee and sit at my kitchen table. Suddenly, after talking to Molly, I feel ashamed; the things I’ve been thinking astound me. All the desire has left me. I can’t believe I considered getting involved with this man, this stranger: took it seriously, half imagining it would actually happen. My family and their needs are all that seem real to me now: Amber, struggling with school work, needing stability: Molly just starting out, eager but brittle, tense with the newness of everything, joining thirty societies: Greg and the Celtic anthology that he works on with such diligence, for which he has such hopes. How could I have imagined I would put this life at risk?

I make plans. I shall put more energy into my home, my family. I shall get a private tutor to help with Amber’s Maths and one of those French courses she can do on the computer. I shall hold a dinner party; if Greg won’t take me out to dinner, then I shall ask people here: Clem and Max, perhaps—they might get on well together. I shall redecorate my kitchen, which looks so gloomy in this dull brown light. These colours I’ve loved—deep russet red, and the sort of green that has a lot of blue in it—are all too dark, too dreary. I shall paint this room a brisk cheerful colour, cream, or the yellow of marigolds. I shall have a lot of effect in my life.

I sip my coffee, hearing the rain on the gravel, like many people walking outside my window.

My phone rings and I jump. I take it out of my pocket, expecting Molly again.

‘Ginnie, it’s Will.’

My body changes when I hear his voice, something opening out in me.

‘Oh. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘It was good to see you,’ he says.

‘Yes, it was good,’ I say.

There are moments when we choose. Maybe this is the moment: here in the silence, waiting, hearing his breathing the other end of the line.

‘Will.’ I hear how my voice is hushed now. ‘Look, I’m at home at the moment, so.’

I leave the rest of the sentence unsaid. In that moment we become conspirators.

‘OK,’ he says evenly. ‘We won’t talk long. I only wanted to ask if you’d like to have lunch some time? There’s a bar in Sheffield Street—it’s a little further from where I work, we shouldn’t be interrupted.’

He says we could meet at twelve-thirty. He tells me how to get there. We both know I have said yes already.

The bar is empty. It has cream walls and big mirrors on the walls with elaborate gilt frames, like in an old-fashioned ballroom. As I walk in I am surrounded by reflections of reflections. There are hanging baskets full of ivies that curl and reach out like hands. The back wall is all glass, wide French windows that look out into the garden, letting in lots of light: but today the light is dull, thick, like in an old photograph. Soon it will rain again.

A barmaid is wiping glasses at a sink behind the bar: she’s young, with sharp, pretty features, her hair tied up with string. There are baguettes in a glass case. I order a whisky and go to sit by the windows on a flimsy bentwood chair. There are only one or two other people drinking here. Outside there’s a wet grey sky and eddies of starlings, and the lawn is covered in drifts of fallen leaves, soaked through and shiny as mahogany, everything fading, sifting down, except in the flowerbed where a random rose still clings to a blood-red stem. A saxophone is playing a song on the edge of memory, something I know but can’t name.

I sip my drink and read my newspaper, the same paragraph over and over, none of it making sense. My other world doesn’t exist—my children, my home, my husband: there’s just here, now, the sepia garden, the saxophone, in my mouth the taste of whisky.

Half twelve passes and Will doesn’t come. Perhaps he will never come. I was crazy, deluded, to think that he meant what he said. Undoubtedly, he has been prudent and thought better of it. What did I expect? I’m not the kind of woman men take risks for. I would like to be someone different, to be confident, at ease: a woman skilled in the way she moves her body, the way she touches a man. I would like to be balanced on one of the slender barstools, poised, rather louche, a woman who expects to be looked at: or leaning on my elbow at the bar, wearing a short black dress and vanilla-pale stockings and dazzlingly high heels, the sort of heels that make your pelvis tip and your body arch a little: a woman perhaps who has a vibrator discreet as a silvery lipstick hidden in her handbag.

The barmaid changes the CD. A lazy beat, a pensive muted trumpet. Maybe like me she only likes slow music.

I can see how it will happen, the whole thing spooling out in front of me, filmic, vivid, as though I am watching myself. How I sit here, drinking whisky, studying my paper, not looking up too often, and still he doesn’t come: and then at last I shrug and gather up my things and walk away—not very embarrassed, because I’m too old for that, but a little: watched by the barmaid with string in her hair, who has seen this before, who immediately comprehends the whole scenario. Feeling a surge of shame—the shame of having so longed for something that I have no right to, no claim on.