The River House Read Online Free

complained he was getting a cold and sent me out
     to buy Lemsip. When we said good-bye, 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 at a service station that there were mascara smudges under my eyes and I looked like I’d been 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 add some water from the tap and start again with
     the sauce.

C HAPTER 4
    G REG 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 color. I’m dazzled by this marvelous 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 around 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 traveled widely, been to Haiti, Columbia—nothing seems to throw him. “To be honest, Ginnie,
     I never feel fear,” he says. “You don’t know what fear is ’til 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 prenatal 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