The River House Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 pile of yesterday’s
     post on the table—a catalog full of cardigans with little satin trimmings, an offer of a new credit card: seeking to ground
     myself in these safe and trivial things.

C HAPTER 5
    I T’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-colored 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—and 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 martinis with little umbrellas in them, and of dancing under
     a pink-striped awning to the sounds 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