Читать книгу The River House - Margaret Leroy - Страница 9

Greg 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 colour. I’m dazzled by this marvellous 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 round 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 travelled widely, been to Haiti, Colombia—nothing seems to throw him.

‘To be honest, Ginnie, I never feel fear,’ he says.

‘You don’t know what fear is till 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 antenatal 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 things to do with problem windows.’

‘But, Eva, you haven’t got problem windows.’

‘I’m working on it,’ she says.

‘Mum,’ says Molly, ‘you’ve got to see my stuff.’

Her display is in the second room: she pulls Amber and me towards it. I look round for Greg, but he’s met a woman from his department, an earnest woman with wild grey hair who lectures in Nordic philology: she has a daughter here. They’re having an urgent discussion about spreadsheets.

‘I’ll be right with you,’ he tells me, but he shows no sign of following us.

‘Mum, come on,’ says Molly. ‘I want you to see my canvas.’ She has a look she sometimes had as a child, when she would tug at me, especially after Amber had arrived and she couldn’t get enough of me: intent, with deep little lines between her eyes.

We go into the second room. Her display is in the corner, facing us as we enter—her sketchbooks and pottery heaped on the table, and behind them the canvas, nailed up on the wall. I stare at the painting. It’s huge, taller than me, so the figures are more than life-size. I don’t know how she controlled the proportions, how she made it so real. It’s based on a photo from my childhood—me and Ursula and our mother and father, in the garden at Bridlington Road. I don’t know who took it, perhaps a visiting aunt. It’s a rare photo of all of us together, and we look just like a perfectly normal family. It was one of a heap of old photos that Molly found in the kitchen cabinet: she was hunting around for something to paint for her final A-level piece. ‘It has to be about Change,’ she said. ‘I ask you. I think it’s a freaky topic. Change is totally random. I mean, it could be anything.’ She was pleased when she found the photos of me and Ursula: she loved our candy-striped summer frocks, our feet in shiny bar shoes. The two of us would stand to attention with neat cheerful smiles, every time anyone pointed a Kodak in our direction. ‘Look, you’ve got parallel feet,’ said Molly. ‘Amber, look, it’s so cute. In every picture their feet are kind of arranged.’

The photograph was black and white, but the painting is in the strong acrylic colours Molly loves; our skin in the picture has purple and tangerine in it. The photograph may have made her smile, but the picture she’s painted has an intensity to it. She has quite a harsh style, like an etching, the lines and structure of people’s faces exaggerated, so that they look older than they are: and she’s seen so much that was only subtly there in the photograph, that was just a hint, a subtext. My mother, her forehead creased in spite of her smile. My father, a looming presence, his shadow falling across us: my father, who was a pillar of the community, a school governor, a churchwarden, a grower of fine lupins: and I think how shockingly glad I was when he died. Ursula and me, eight and six, with our parallel feet in their shiny shoes: not wanting to step out of line. I see myself then, my conscientious smile, my six-year-old hope that if I was good, stayed good, everything would be all right. I wonder if Molly has brought to this painting some knowledge she has of my family. Yet I’ve told them so little, really, even though in my work I always maintain that families shouldn’t have secrets. Maybe Molly’s gleaned something from the absolute rule I have that there’s no hitting in our family: or from the things I’ve said about marriage, the advice I so often feel a compulsion to give. The very worst thing in a man is possessiveness. Don’t ever imagine that you can change a man. Promise me—if he’s cruel or hits you, that’s it, it’s over, you go straight out of that door. Promise me. Yeah, yeah, they’ll say, glancing at one another, with a look of complicity, of ‘There she goes again’, indulging me: We know, Mum, you’ve told us.

Molly turns to me, unsure suddenly. She’s never had Amber’s certainty.

‘Is it OK? D’you like it, Mum?’

I realise I’ve just been standing here, staring.

‘Molly. I love it. It’s wonderful.’ Instinctively, I put my arm around her, then realise she will hate me doing this in public. But she tolerates it for a second or two before she slides away.

‘Mr Bates asked if my grandparents were coming,’ she says. ‘He kind of blushed when I said that Grandad was dead. It was, like, really embarrassing. Mum, make sure Dad sees it.’ She moves off with Amber towards a gang of her friends.

I go to find Greg.

‘You have to come and see Molly’s work,’ I tell him.

He says goodbye to the earnest philologist. I take him to see the canvas.

He has an appraising look, one eyebrow raised, the look he has when he’s reading a student’s essay.

‘Goodness,’ he says. ‘It’s quite in your face, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t you like it, though? ‘

But I see that he doesn’t, that he wouldn’t.

‘It’s rather raw,’ he says.

‘Yes. But isn’t that good? All that emotion? I love it.’

‘Her plant drawings are great,’ he says. ‘But it takes a bit of maturity to draw people. Maybe she should stick to plants for now.’

‘For God’s sake don’t say that to her,’ I tell him.

I feel a flicker of anger: why can’t he just be generous?

I go to find the girls, to say it’s time to leave. Amber has moved away from her friends, from Jamila and Katrine, and is talking to someone Molly knows, a boy about three years older: she’s standing close with her head on one side and flicking back her hair. She mutters to me that she’ll make her own way home.

‘What about your Graphics?’

‘Mum, for God’s sake.’

It’s dark in the street now. There’s an edge to the air, a smell of autumn, a hint of frost and bonfires. We stand by Greg’s car in a pool of apricot lamplight.

‘Did you like it, Dad?’ says Molly.

I’m worried what he’ll say.

‘Sure, it was great,’ he tells her.

I remember her when she was little, thrusting some drawing she’d done at me: But d’you really really like it, Mum? Say it as though you mean it.

Now, she doesn’t say anything.

‘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.