Helena’s fiancé was as good as his word. A new boat was ordered and the old one mended “for the time being.” Before long she had two boats, a boathouse to put them in, a stretch of river to call her own—and a new name. A little later and her father died. Aunt Eliza went to live with her younger brother in Wallingford. And then a lot of other things happened and Helena Greville was swept clean away on the current and even Mrs. Vaughan forgot about her.
Lately it was the old boat—Helena Greville’s—that she chose to take out. She did not go far. Upstream or downstream? No. She was not in search of adventure. She merely rowed to the far side and let the boat drift into the reeds.
“Oh, this mist! Whatever will Mr. Vaughan say?” came the watery voice, again.
Helena opened her eyes. The air was so full of water, it was opaque, and she saw it through the liquid that pooled in the corner of her own eye. She could see nothing of the world—no sky, no trees; even the reeds that surrounded the boat were invisible. She rocked and bobbed with the river, inhaled wetness with the air, watched the mist that moved sluggishly like the current of a semi-stagnant side stream, like the rivers she knew in her dreams. The whole world was drowned, leaving only her cold self and Helena Greville’s boat—and the river that shifted and pressed beneath her like a thing alive.
She blinked. The tear grew swollen, pooled, and flattened, but held to itself in its invisible skin.
What a fearless girl Helena Greville had been. A pirate, her father had called her, and a pirate she was. Aunt Eliza had despaired at her.
“There is another side to the river,” Eliza used to tell her. “Once upon a time there was a naughty little girl who played too close to the bank. One day while she wasn’t looking a goblin rose out of the water. He grasped the little girl by the hair and took her back, kicking and splashing, to his own goblin realm under the river. And if you don’t believe me”—had she believed her? It was hard to know now—“if you don’t believe me, you have only to listen. Go on, listen now. Do you hear the water splashing?”
Helena had nodded. This was all wonderful to know. Goblins living under the river in their own goblin world. How marvelous!
“Listen to the sounds between the splashes. Do you hear? There are bubbles, very, very small ones, that rise to the surface and pop. Those are the bubbles that carry messages from all the lost children. If your ears are sharp enough, you will hear the cries of that little girl and all the other homesick children who are weeping for their mothers and fathers.”
She had listened. Had she heard? She couldn’t remember now. But if the goblins had taken her away down into the water, her father would simply have come and got her back. It was so obvious that Helena Greville felt rather scornful of her aunt for not realizing it herself.
For years and years Helena Greville had forgotten the story about the goblins and their world on the other, deathly side of the river. But now Helena Vaughan remembered it. She came out in her old boat to remember it every day. The sound of the water was a semi-regular, uninsistent lapping as the river licked and sucked at the boat. She listened to the sound and she listened to the spaces between the sound. It was not difficult to hear the lost children. She could hear them with perfect clarity.
“Mrs. Vaughan! You’ll catch your death! Do come in, Mrs. Vaughan!”
The river lapped and the boat rose and fell, and a far-off little voice called without cease for its parents from the depths of the goblin world.
“It’s all right!” she whispered, white-lipped. She gathered her cold muscles, readied her trembling limbs to rise. “Mummy’s coming!”
She leant out of the boat, and as the vessel tilted, the teardrop spilled from her eye and dropped into the greater wetness of the river. Before she could shift her weight sufficiently to follow it, something righted the boat and she felt herself fall back into it. When she looked up, an indistinct grey figure was bending over the bow of her boat, gripping the cleat. The shadow in the mist then straightened and she saw it elongated like a man standing in a punt. It raised an arm in a motion that resembled the dropping of a pole to find the riverbed, and she then felt a powerful dragging sensation. The speed of motion through the water seemed oddly disconnected from the shadow’s ease of motion. The river loosened its grip and she was towed back towards the bank with a rapidity that surprised her.
A final propulsion brought the grey shape of the jetty into sight.
Mrs. Clare was waiting and the gardener was by her side. He reached for the rope and secured the boat. Helena rose and, with Mrs. Clare’s hand to steady her, climbed out.
“You are frozen to the bone! Whatever possessed you, dear?”
Helena turned back towards the water. “He’s gone . . .”
“Who’s gone?”
“The ferryman . . . He towed me back.”
Mrs. Clare looked into Helena’s dazed face in perplexity.
“Did you see anybody?” she asked the gardener in an undertone.
He shook his head. “Unless—do you suppose it were Quietly?”
Mrs. Clare frowned and shook her head at him. “Don’t go putting fancies in her head. As if things weren’t bad enough already.”
Helena gave a sudden, violent shiver. Mrs. Clare shrugged off her coat and wrapped it around her shoulders. “You worry us all half to death,” she scolded. “Come on in.”
Mrs. Clare took an arm firmly, and the gardener took the other, and they made their way without stopping through the garden and back to the house.
On the threshold of the house Helena halted confusedly and looked back over her shoulder to the garden and the river beyond. It was that time of the afternoon when the light drains rapidly from the sky and the mist was darkening.
“What is it?” she murmured, half to herself.
“What’s what? Did you hear something?”
Mrs. Vaughan shook her head. “I didn’t hear it. No.”
“What, then?”
Helena put her head on one side and a new focus came into her eyes as if she was extending the range of her perceptions. The housekeeper sought it too, and the gardener also cocked his head and wondered. The feeling—expectation, or something rather like it—came upon all three of them, and they spoke in unison: “Something is going to happen.”
A Well-Practiced Tale
It was here. Mr. Vaughan came to a hesitant halt in the street of Oxford town houses. He looked left and right but the curtains in the windows of the respectable-looking houses were too thick to tell whether anybody was standing, looking out. But still, wearing his hat and with the light wateriness of the air, nobody would recognize him. In any case, it wasn’t as if he were going to go in. He fidgeted for a moment with the handle of his case, to give himself a reason to have stopped, and looked from under his brim at number 17.
The house shared the trim, correct air of its neighbors. That was the first surprise. He had thought there would be something to set it apart. Every house in the street was a little different from its neighbors, of course, for the builder had taken the trouble to make it so. The one he had stopped in front of had a particularly attractive light set over the front door. But that wasn’t the kind of difference he meant. He had expected a gaudy color to the front door, perhaps, or something faintly theatrical in the drape of the curtain. But there was nothing of the kind. They are not fools, these people, he thought. Of course they will want to make it look respectable.
The fellow who had mentioned it to Vaughan was a mere acquaintance and it was something he himself had heard from a friend of a friend. From what Vaughan could remember of the thirdhand tale, some man’s wife had been so distraught following the death of her mother that she became a shadow of her former self, barely sleeping, unable to eat, deaf to the loving voices of her husband and children. Doctors were powerless to arrest her decline, and at last—dubious of any value to it, yet having exhausted all other possibilities—her husband took her to see a Mrs. Constantine. After a couple of meetings with this mys
terious person, the woman in question had been restored to health and returned to her domestic and marital responsibilities with all her old vigor. The story as Vaughan had heard it was at so many removes, it probably bore only the most tangential relation to the truth. It sounded like a lot of mumbo-jumbo to Vaughan, and he had no belief in psychics, but—so he remembered the acquaintance telling him—whatever it was this woman did, it worked “whether you believed in it or not.”
The house was impeccable in its correctness. The gate and the path and the door were neatness itself. There was no peeling paintwork, no tarnished doorknob, no dirty footprints on the step. Those who called here, he supposed, were to find nothing to encourage them in any reluctance, nothing to cause them to hesitate or draw back. All was spick-and-span, nowhere for doubt to take root. The place was neither too grand for the ordinary man nor too humble for the wealthy. Why, you have to admire them, he concluded. They have it all just so.
He put his fingertips on the gate and bent to read the name on the brass plaque next to the door: Professor Constantine.
He couldn’t help but smile. Fancy passing themselves off as university people!
Vaughan was about to lift his fingers from the gate but hadn’t quite done so—in fact his intention to turn and depart was mysteriously slow to take effect—when the door to number 17 opened. In the doorway there appeared a maid carrying a basket. She was a neat, clean, and ordinary maid, of exactly the kind he would like to employ in his own house, and she spoke to him in a neat, clean, and ordinary sort of voice.
“Good morning, sir. Is it Mrs. Constantine you are looking for?”
No, no, he said—except that the words failed to sound in his ears and he realized that it was because they had not reached his lips. His efforts to explain away his appearance of being a visitor to the house were confounded by his own hand that opened the latch on the gate, and his legs that stepped up the path to the front door. The maid put down her shopping basket and he watched himself hand her his case and his hat that she placed on the hall table. He smelled beeswax, noticed the gleam of the staircase spindles, felt the warmth of the house envelop him—and all the while marveled that he was not where he ought to be, striding away down the street, after a chance pause outside the gate to check the fastening of his case.
“Would you like to wait for Mrs. Constantine in here, sir?” the maid said, indicating a doorway. Through the doorway he saw a fire blazing, a tapestry cushion on a leather armchair, a Persian rug. He stepped into the room and was overwhelmed with the desire to stay. He sat at one end of the large sofa and felt the deep cushions mold themselves around him. The other end of the sofa was occupied by a large ginger cat that roused itself from sleep and began to purr. Mr. Vaughan put out a hand to stroke it.
“Good afternoon.”
The voice was calm and musical. Decorous. He turned to see a woman in her middle years, with greying hair pulled back from a wide, even forehead. Her dress was dark blue, which made her grey eyes almost blue, and her collar was white and quite plain. Mr. Vaughan was pierced by a sudden memory of his mother, which took him by surprise, for this woman was not at all like her. His mother, when she died, had been taller, slimmer, younger, of a darker complexion, and never so plainly neat.
Mr. Vaughan rose and began to make his apologies. “You must think me an awful fool,” he began. “Awfully embarrassing, and the worst of it is I hardly know how to begin to explain it. I was outside, you see, and I had no intention of coming in—not today, at any rate, I have a train to catch . . . well, what I’m not explaining very well is that I cannot abide a railway waiting room, and, having some time to kill, it seemed I might as well just come and see where you were, for another time. That was my intention, except that your maid happened to open the door at that very moment and naturally she thought—I don’t blame her in the least, bad timing, that’s all, easy mistake to make . . .” On and on he went. He snatched at reasons, grasped for logic, and sentence by sentence it all evaded him, and he felt that with every word he was talking himself further and further away from what he meant to say.
While he spoke, her grey eyes rested patiently on his face; and though she was not smiling, he felt gentle encouragement in the lines that surrounded her eyes so expressively. At last he ran out of words.
“I see,” she said, nodding. “You didn’t mean to disturb me today; you were just passing and wanted to check the address . . .”
“That’s right!” Relieved to be so easily let off, he waited for her to initiate a farewell. Already he saw himself reclaiming his hat and case from the hall and taking his leave. He saw his feet on the checkered path to the house. He saw his hand reach for the latch on the painted gate. But then he saw the steadiness of the tranquil grey eyes.
“Yet, after all that, here you are,” she said.
Here he was. Yes. He suddenly felt his hereness very acutely. In fact, the room seemed to pulse with it, and so did he.
“Why don’t you sit down, Mr. . . . ?”
“Vaughan,” he said, and her eyes did not give away whether or not they recognized the name, but only continued their easy watchfulness. He sat.
Mrs. Constantine poured some clear liquid from an etched decanter into a glass and placed it by his side, then she too sat down in the armchair placed at an angle to the sofa. She smiled, expectantly.
“I need your help,” he admitted. “It’s my wife.”
Her face softened into sad sympathy. “I am sorry. May I offer you my condolences?”
“No! I don’t mean that!”
He sounded irritated. He was irritated.
“Forgive me, Mr. Vaughan. But when a stranger appears at my door it is usually because somebody has died.” Her expression did not change; it remained steady and was not unfriendly, in fact was distinctly kind, but waited with a firmness of purpose for him to come to the point.
He sighed. “We have lost a child, you see.”
“Lost?”
“She was taken.”
“Forgive me, Mr. Vaughan, but we use so many euphemisms in English when we speak of the dead. Lost, taken . . . These are words that have more than one meaning. I have already misunderstood you once regarding your wife, and I should not like to do so again.”
Mr. Vaughan swallowed and looked at his hand that was resting on the arm of the green velvet sofa. He drew a nail along the fabric, raising a line in the pile.
“You will probably know the story. I expect you read the newspapers, and even if you don’t, it was the talk of the county. Two years ago. At Buscot.”
Her eyes detached from him and looked into the middle distance while she consulted her memory. He ran a fingertip along the place, smoothing the pile flat again so that the line disappeared. He waited for her to acknowledge that she knew.
Her gaze returned to him. “It would be better if you told me in your own words, I think.”
Vaughan’s shoulders stiffened. “I can tell you no more than is known.”
“Mmm.” The sound was neither here nor there. It did not agree with him exactly, but nor did it disagree with him. It indicated that it was still his turn.
Vaughan had expected that the story would not need retelling. After two years, he assumed that everybody knew. It was the kind of story that spread far abroad in a surprisingly short space of time. On numerous occasions he had walked into a room—a business meeting, an interview for a new groom, a social occasion with neighboring farmers, or a grander event in Oxford or London—and seen in the glances from people he had never met that they not only knew him but knew the story. He now expected it—though he had never grown used to it. “Dreadful thing,” some stranger would mutter over a handshake, and he had learned a way of acknowledging it that also indicated “Let no more be said about it.”
In the early days he had had to give endless accounts of the events. The first time was to the male servants: he had told them in wild flurries of sound, fast and furious, as if the words themselves were on horseback, rac
ing after the intruders and his missing daughter. He had told it to the neighbors who came to join the search, in panting phrases, his chest contracting painfully. He told it over and over again—to every man, woman, and child he met in the next hours—as he traveled the country roads, “My daughter has been taken! Have you seen strangers—anyone—making their way in haste with a small girl of two?” The following day he told it to his banker when he went urgently to raise the ransom money, and again to the policeman who came out from Cricklade. This was where the order of the events had been set down properly. They were still in the grip of things then, and this time Helena was doing the telling too. They had paced and sat down and then risen to pace again, talking one at a time or, often, at the same time, and sometimes they both lapsed into silence and they stared at each other, lost for words. There was one moment that he made a particular effort to forget. Helena, describing the moment the discovery was made: “I opened the door and went in, and she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there! She wasn’t there!” Wonderingly, she repeated the words, “She wasn’t there,” and as her head turned this way and that, her eyes sought the upper corners of the room as though their daughter might be concealed there in the joint of the cornicing, or beyond it, perched in the angle of a roof joist, but the absence went on and on. It had seemed then that her daughter’s absence had flooded Helena, flooded them both, and that with their words they were trying to bail themselves out. But the words were eggcups, and what they were describing was an ocean of absence, too vast to be contained in such modest vessels. She bailed and she bailed, but no matter how often she repeated the effort, she could not get to the end of it. “She wasn’t there,” she repeated endlessly in a voice he had not known a human being to be capable of as she drowned in her loss, and he in a sort of paralysis, unable to do or say anything to save her. Thank God for the policeman. It had been he who threw her a line she could grab hold of; he who hauled her in from her drowning with his next question.
Once Upon a River Page 8
