Free The River House by Margaret Leroy Page A

on the pavement in the dark of the evening: And this time no one disturbs us, and
     he pulls me toward him and holds me to him, the whole warm length of his body pressing into mine. The sensation overwhelms
     me, and for a moment I sit on the bed and just let myself feel it—and the smell of his skin and the touch of his hands are
     almost as real as if these things are happening. As though it’s this room and my life here that are imagined. But mixed in
     with the longing, I feel a kind of fear. Yet what is it I’m so afraid of? That something will happen between us? That I could
     imperil everything? Or do I fear that nothing at all will happen, that nothing will be imperiled, that my life will just carry
     on, quite calmly, like before?
    I Hoover under the bed, and the noise brings Greg downstairs.
    “How long is this going to take?”
    “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’ll just be a moment or two.”
    Next to the fireplace there are bookshelves that stretch to the ceiling. It’s a kind of archaeology, these layers of the past—A-level
     and GCSE textbooks and, from further back, the books the girls liked as children. There have always been loud protests if
     I threatened to give them away. “The Storyteller” is here—and Death who played dice with a soldier, with his bulbous eyes
     and his sack, the drawing that haunts me—and Amber’s book of nursery rhymes. I turn to “Gray Goose and Gander,” the poem I
     had to read each evening, feeling a mix of tenderness and tiredness, remembering the countless repetitions of early mothering,
     the things that always had to be done the same. Eva can get quite poignant about this sometimes, in the Café Matisse after
     one too many Bloody Marys, resting her chin in her hands, her splendid cleavage gleaming, the candle flames reflecting in
     her eyes. “What happened, Ginnie?” she’ll say. “D’you ever think—what happened to those children? The little children you
     bathed and read all those stories to? Don’t you sometimes want to be back there? You know—when you could make them perfectly
     happy by buying a chocolate muffin. … And you’re so scared for them—you fear for them, that it’s all so fragile, that something
     awful could happen, that they’ll stick their fingers in an electric socket or something. But the thing is, you lose them anyway.
     You don’t think about that, you think it’ll go on forever.” She’ll look down into her glass and slowly shake her head. “Sometimes
     I wonder—where have those little children gone?” I always tell her that I don’t share her nostalgia—that I like the teenage
     years; but now as I pile these books into boxes, ready to go to the secondhand bookshop in Sunbury, it seizes me for a moment,
     that sense of something lost and irreplaceable.
    Right at the top of the bookcase there’s a shelf of Ursula’s books. Leaves and tendrils from her drawings decorate the spines.
     Ursula draws such wonderful plants—extravagant, Italianate—that she sometimes gets letters from fans: “Ursula, I would so
love
to see your garden.” But the plot at her Southampton home is a few square yards of decking and a cactus—the enchanted gardens
     she draws are all from her imagination. I run my finger along the spines, feeling a flicker of envy; it must be good to have
     achieved something as solid as this whole shelf of books. The one that made all the difference for her is here—the volume
     of Hans Andersen fairy tales she illustrated.
    She wasn’t always successful. She’d been struggling for years, largely living off Paul, her husband, wondering if it was worth
     it, or whether she should perhaps go back to primary teaching, when she did this book. I remember when she showed it to me—hesitant,
     self-deprecating—she used to be hesitant then. I could see at once it was special. There was something about these stories
     that suited her wayward imagination—these white-fleshed girls with their voluptuous