“I will go to Oxford and find my son, then. By dusk he will be here and by nightfall this matter will be settled.”
He put on his hat and took his leave.
Margot set about readying the winter room for the day ahead. Word would have got out and she expected to be busy. She might even have to open the large summer room. Rita moved between the child and the man asleep in the bed. Joe came in for a time. The little girl turned her eyes to him and watched his every move as he poured tea into Rita’s cup and arranged the curtain so that the light did not disturb the sleeper in the bed. When he had done these things and came to see the child herself, she stretched out her arms to him.
“Well!” he exclaimed. “What a funny little girl you are. Fancy being interested in old Joe.”
Rita stood to let him sit and placed the child on his lap. She stared up into his face.
“What color would you say her eyes are?” he wondered. “Blue? Grey?”
“Greeny-blue?” Rita suggested. “Depends on the light.”
They were considering the matter together, when there came a sudden hammering at the door for the third time that day. It made them both start.
“Whatever next?” they heard Margot exclaim as her feet trotted hastily across the floor to the door. “Who can it be this time?”
Then came the sound of the door opening. And then—
“Oh!” exclaimed Margot. “Oh!”
Daddy!
Mr. Vaughan was on Brandy Island, at the vitriol works, where he was making an inventory of every item that appertained to the factory in preparation for the auction. It was painstaking work and he could have delegated the job, but he liked the repetitive nature of the task. In any other circumstances the abandonment of his brandy business might have been a painful thing. He had invested so much into it: the purchase of Buscot Lodge with its fields and its island, the planning, the research, the construction of the reservoir, the planting of acres of beet, the construction of the railway to bring the beet over onto the island—all that plus the work on the island itself: the distillery and the vitriol works . . . An ambitious experiment that he’d had energy for when he was single and later a newly married man and after that a new father. To tell the truth, it wasn’t really that the enterprise hadn’t worked; it was simply that he couldn’t be bothered with it anymore. Amelia had disappeared and so had his zest for the work. There was profit enough in his other enterprises: the farms were doing well and his shares in his father’s mining operation made him wealthy. Why rack his brains solving one problem after another, to make a success of this, when it was so much easier to let it go? There was a peculiar satisfaction in the dismantling, auctioning off, melting down, and dispersal of the world he had spent so much time and money building up. Making his meticulous lists was an opportunity to forget. He counted, measured, listed, and felt soothed in his boredom. It helped him forget Amelia.
Today he had woken grasping after some tail end of a dream, and though he could not remember it, he suspected it was the dream—too terrible to speak of—that he had suffered frequently in the first days of her loss. It left him feeling hollowed out. Later, as he crossed the yard, the wind had delivered to his ears a snatch of a child’s high-pitched voice picked up some distance away. Of course, all little children’s voices sound the same from afar. They just do. But the two things had unsettled him and put him in need of this dulling occupation.
Now, in the storeroom, his eye alighted on something that opened a chasm into the past and made him flinch. It was a jar of barley sugar canes in a dusty corner. Suddenly she was there—fingers reaching into the mouth of the jar, delighted when two canes came out so tightly welded together that they could not be separated and she was allowed to eat them both. His heart beat painfully and the jar slipped through his fingers and smashed on the concrete floor. That had done it. He would not regain his peace of mind today, not now she had materialized here in the storeroom.
He called for a broom to sweep it all and, when he heard running, supposed that it was his assistant; but to Vaughan’s surprise it was a member of his domestic staff that appeared: Newman, his gardener. Though out of breath the man began to speak; his words were so shaken about by the great gasps of breath that he was obliged to take that his meaning was not easy to make out. Vaughan caught the word “drowned.”
“Slow down, Newman, take your time.”
The gardener began again and this time something approximating the story of the girl who had died and lived again emerged. “It happened at the Swan at Radcot,” he said, and pressed his lips together as though he would rather say no more, but after an awkward pause added with hushed reluctance, “They say she is about four.”
“Christ in heaven!” Vaughan’s hands rose halfway to his head, then he gathered himself. “Try not to let my wife hear about it, will you?” he asked. But even before the man spoke, he could see it was too late.
“Mrs. Vaughan has gone up there already, by herself. Mrs. Jellicoe who does the laundry brought the news; she heard it from one of the Swan’s regulars last night. We couldn’t know what she was going to say—if we had, we wouldn’t have let her near—but we thought she was going to hand in her notice. The next thing we knew, Mrs. Vaughan was racing down to the boathouse and there was not a thing we could do to stop her. By the time we got there, she had took the old rowing boat and was almost out of sight.”
Vaughan ran home, where the stableboy, anticipating his need, had readied his horse. “You’ll have to fly to catch her,” he warned. Vaughan mounted and took the direction of Radcot. For the first few minutes he galloped as fast as he could, then slowed to a trot. Fly? he thought. I’ll never catch her. He had rowed with her in the early days of their marriage and she was as expert a rower as any man he knew. She was slim, which made her light, and she was strong. Thanks to her father, she had been in and out of boats since before she could walk, and her blade dipped without a splash into the water, rose out of it as cleanly as a leaping fish. Where others grew scarlet and sweated with effort, her cheeks simply took on a serene rose flush, and she gleamed with contentment feeling the pull of the water. Some women softened with grief, but in Helena it had burned away the little softness she was starting to develop since their daughter’s arrival, and honed her. She was all wire and muscle, fired with determination, and she had a half hour head start. Fly and catch her? Not a chance. Helena was out of reach. She had been for a long time.
It was hope that had her always so far ahead of him. He had parted company with hope long ago. If Helena would only do the same, happiness might, he thought, eventually be restored to them. Instead of which she stoked her hope, fed it with any trifle she could lay her hands on, and when there was nothing to feed it, she nourished it with some stubborn faith of her own making. In vain he had tried to console her and comfort her, in vain offered images of other futures, different lives.
“We could go and live abroad,” he had suggested. They had spoken of it when first married; it was a notion for the years ahead. “Why not?” she had said then, before Amelia’s disappearance, before Amelia had existed at all. And so he had suggested it again. They might go to New Zealand for a year—two, even. And why come back? They needn’t. New Zealand was a fine place to work, to live . . .
Helena had been appalled. “And how will Amelia find us there?”
He had talked of the other children they had always expected. But the future children were immaterial, mere abstractions to his wife. Only to him did they appear incarnate, in his dreams and in his waking hours. The marital intimacies that had ceased so abruptly the night their daughter disappeared had not been resumed in the two years since. Before Helena he had lived unmarried and more or less celibate for many years. Where other men paid for women or took up with girls they could later abandon, he went to bed alone and fell back on his own devices. He had no desire to return to this mode of life now. If his wife could not love him, then nothing. The spirit faded. He no longer expected pleasure o
f his own body or hers. He had given up one hope after another.
She blamed him. He blamed himself. It was a father’s job to keep his children from harm, and he had failed.
Vaughan realized that he was stationary. His mount had its muzzle to the ground, exploring for something sweet among the winter bracken. “There’s nothing there for you. Nothing for me either.” He was overwhelmed with a great weariness. For a moment he wondered whether he was ill, whether he could in fact go on. He remembered somebody saying something, quite recently . . . You can’t go on like this. Oh, it was the woman in Oxford. Mrs. Constantine. What a foolish expedition that turned out to be. But she was right about that. He couldn’t go on.
He went on.
There was an unusual number of people packed into the Swan, he thought, given the time of day and the season. They looked up at him with the curiosity of those for whom something is already under way and further interest can confidently be expected. He paid them no attention and made straight for the bar, where a woman took one look at him and said, “Follow me.”
She led him through a short paneled passageway to an old oak door. She opened it and stepped aside to let him enter first.
There were too many shocks: he could not as it happened separate one from another. Only afterwards was he able to tease out the many impressions that rushed upon him into separate strands and put words and an order to them. There was first the bewilderment of looking for his wife’s gaunt face and strained eyes and failing to see her. Second was the confusion of seeing a very familiar face that he had not seen for a long time. A young woman, scarcely more than a child, really, whom he had once asked to marry him, and who had said “Yes” with laughter, “Yes, if I can bring my boat.” She turned a radiant face to him and smiled, her lips wide with easy happiness, her eyes brightly luminous with love.
Vaughan stopped dead in his tracks. Helena. His wife, bold, joyous and magnificent, as she had been. Before.
She laughed.
“Oh, Anthony! What’s the matter with you?”
She looked down, took hold of something, speaking in a cajoling, singsong voice that he remembered from another time. “Look,” she said, though not to him. “Look who it is.”
The third shock.
She turned the little person to face him.
“Daddy’s here!”
The Sleeper Wakes
Meanwhile a man with black-stained fingertips and a broken face lay sleeping in the pilgrims’ bedroom of the Swan at Radcot. He lay on his back, head on Margot’s feather pillow, and but for the rise and fall of his chest, he did not stir.
There are any number of ways you might imagine sleep, none of them likely to be accurate. We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete the ability to register it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.
When he was ten, Henry Daunt saw a picture of an ash tree whose roots plunged into an underground river in which lived strange mermaids or naiads called the Maidens of Destiny. When he thought of the descent into sleep, it was something very like this subterranean waterway that he envisaged. He had a sense of his slumber as a lengthy swimming session, in which he navigated slowly through water that was thicker than usual, with effortless pleasant movements that propelled him in one direction or another with a kind of vivid aimlessness. Sometimes the skin of the water was only a little way above his head, and his daytime world, its troubles and pleasures, were still there, pursuing him from the other side. On those occasions he would wake feeling as though he had not slept at all. Most of the time, though, he slept easily, awoke refreshed, sometimes with the happy sense that he had met friends in his sleep, or that his mother, though dead, had communicated some loving message to him in the night. He didn’t mind this at all. He did mind waking just as the last traces of some interesting nocturnal adventure were lost to the tide.
None of these things happened in the Swan at Radcot. While life was at work in him, crusting blood over gashes and doing all manner of intricate work inside the skull box which took such a battering at Devil’s Weir, Henry Daunt sank, sank, sank, to the darkest depths of his vast underwater cavern where nothing ebbed and nothing flowed and all was as dark and as still as the grave. He remained there for an unmeasurable length of time, and at the end of it memory awoke and the still depths shivered and came to life.
A number of experiences then drifted into his mind and out again, in no particular order.
A dull sensation that was the disappointment of his marriage.
A stinging in his fingertips—that was the cold he’d felt yesterday at the Trewsbury Mead, when he had stopped the trickle that was the Thames with his forefinger and waited for the water to build up behind it till the volume became too great and it overspilled.
A whole body swooping and gliding—skating on the frozen Thames as a young man of twenty; he had met his wife that day. The gliding had continued for many weeks, all through the rest of the winter and to a day at the beginning of spring that was his wedding day.
The slack-jawed astonishment, the fisticuffs in the brain, at seeing an empty space in the skyline where the roof of the old friary gatehouse used to be. He was six, and it was the first time he realized the physical world could be subject to such change.
A bed, one side of it—his side—all rumpled sheets, the other—his wife’s—smoothly empty, after her swift illness and decorous death.
A crash of glass; his father, the glazier, cursing in the yard.
So the contents of the skull satisfied themselves that they were in place, complete, whole.
Finally came something different from all the rest. A thing that belonged in another category altogether. It was not unfamiliar—he had dreamt it before, more often that he knew. It was always out of focus, for he had never set eyes on it in the real world, but only in his imagination. It was a child. Daunt’s child. The one he had failed to make with Miriam, and not tried to make with anybody else. It was the child he wished for. His future child. The image drifted past, there and gone again, and it roused a response in the sleeping man, who attempted to lift his leaden limbs to grasp after it. It drifted out of reach, not without leaving behind the sense that there had been something more urgent about the dream image this time. Was it not more vivid? It was a little girl, wasn’t it? But the moment had passed.
Now the scene in Henry Daunt’s mind altered once again. A landscape, unfamiliar and unsettling, deeply personal. A blasted terrain. Jagged, rocky outcrops. Churned-up gashes in the land. Bulbous protuberances. Had there been a war? An earthquake?
Consciousness cast a dim illumination and thought began to stir. This landscape was not something seen, but something else . . . These were not images, no, but pieces of information passed to his brain . . . by his tongue . . . The rocks translated themselves into the broken rubble of teeth. The mess of disrupted earth was the flesh of his mouth.
Awake.
He stiffened in alarm. Pain shot through his limbs, took him by surprise.
What has happened?
He opened his eyes—to darkness. Darkness? Or . . . was he blindfolded?
In panic his hands rose to his face—more pain—and where his face ought to be his fingers met something foreign. Some padding, thicker than skin, unfeeling, stretched over his bones. He sought the edge of it, desperate to pull it off, but his fingers were thick and clumsy . . .
A flurry of sound. A voice—a woman:
“Mr. Daunt!”
He felt his hands gripped by other hands—hands that were surprisingly strong and that prevented him from tearing off the blindfold.
“Don’t scrabble! You are injured. I expect you’re feeling numb. You are safe. This is the Swan at Radcot. There was an accident. Do you remember?”
A word sprang nimbly from his mind to his tongue; once there, it stumbled over the rubble in his mouth, and when it emerged he didn’t recognize it. He had another go, mo
re arduously:
“Eyes!”
“Your eyes are swollen. You knocked your head in the accident. You will be able to see perfectly well once the swelling has gone down.”
The hands brought his own away from his face. He heard liquid being poured, but his ears couldn’t tell him what color the liquid was or what the pitcher was made of or what size the drinking vessel was. He felt the tilt that comes when a person sits on the edge of the bed, but could not tell what manner of person it was. The world was suddenly unknowable, he was marooned in it.
“Eyes!”
She took hold of his hands again. “It is only swelling. You will see again as soon as it subsides. Here, a drink. It will feel clumsy—I expect you will have lost sensation in your lips—but I will tip it for you.”
She was right. There was no warning, no touch of rim on lip, only the sudden sensation of sweet wetness in his mouth. He indicated that he would swallow more with a grunt, but “Little sips, frequently,” she said.
“Do you remember arriving here?” she asked.
He thought. His memory seemed unfamiliar to him. There were images reflected in fragmentary style on the surface of it that couldn’t really belong there. He made a noise, a gesture of uncertainty.
“The little girl you brought in—can you tell us who she is?”
A tap on wood, a door opening.
A new voice: “I thought I heard voices. Here she is.”
The mattress returned to level as the woman beside him stood up.
He raised his hand to his face and this time, knowing that the insensate padding was his skin, detected a line of spikes. The tips of his eyelashes, their length half-buried in the inflamed lids. He applied clumsy pressure above and below the line and pulled apart—
“No!” the woman cried, but it was too late. Light pierced his eye, and he gasped. It was pain, and something else besides: on its wave the light carried an image and it was the image he had dreamt. The drifting girl, his future child, infant of his imagination.
Once Upon a River Page 13
