Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “The girl. Do she talk?”

  He gave her a shake. Rita felt something jut into her back, just below the nape of her neck. A hat brim? Yes, his voice came from a place lower than her ear: for all his power, he was much shorter than she was.

  “The Vaughan child? No, she doesn’t speak.”

  “Is there medicine can make her speak again?”

  “No.”

  “So she won’t ever talk no more? Is that what the doctor says?”

  “She might recover her speech naturally. The doctor says it will happen in the first six months or not at all.”

  She waited for more questions but none came.

  “Drop your purse on the ground.”

  With shaking hands she took the cloth pouch from her pocket—it contained the money the Vaughans had given her—dropped it, and the next moment a great blow from behind sent her flying and she landed heavily on the rough ground with gravel digging into her palms. I’m not hurt, though, she reassured herself, but by the time she’d gathered herself and got to her feet, the man and her purse were gone.

  She hurried home, thinking hard.

  Which Father?

  Anthony Vaughan leant towards his looking glass, applied the blade to the soap suds on his cheek, and scraped. Meeting his eye in the mirror, he made one more effort to untangle his thoughts. He began where he always began: the child was not Amelia. That ought to have been the beginning and end of the question, but it wasn’t. One single certainty led not to the next stepping-stone but into a quagmire, no matter what direction he took. The knowledge wavered and faltered; it grew feebler and harder to maintain with every day that passed. It was Helena who undermined what he knew. Every smile on his wife’s face, every burst of laughter, every joyful word she pronounced, was reason to put his knowledge aside. She had grown prettier every day in the two months the child had been with them, put on the weight she had lost, recovered the gloss to her hair and the color in her cheeks. Her face was alive with love, not only for the child, but for him too.

  But it was not only Helena, was it? It was the girl too.

  Incessantly, Vaughan’s eyes were drawn to the little girl’s face. At breakfast as he spooned marmalade into her mouth, he traced the jut of her jaw; at noon it was the dip in her hairline at the front that obsessed him; when he came home from Brandy Island after work, he was incapable of dragging his eyes away from the coiled architecture of her ear. He knew these features better than he knew his wife’s or his own. He was tormented by something in them—in her—that seemed to mean something to him, if only he could work out what it was. Even in her absence he saw her. In the train, watching the landscape speed by, her face was superimposed on the fields and sky. In the office, her features were like a watermark in the paper on which he set out his lists of figures. She even haunted his dreams. All sorts of characters, known and somatic figments, bore the child’s face. Once he had dreamt of Amelia—his Amelia, the real one—and even she wore the child’s face. He had woken weeping.

  His ceaseless tracing of her features that began as an effort to find out who she was, gradually shifted focus, and became an attempt to explain his own fascination. It seemed to him that her face was the model from which all human faces were derived, even his own. The endlessness of his staring had worn her face so smooth, it was as if he saw his own reflection in it, and looking at her turned him back always to himself. This was something he could not tell Helena. She would hear only the thing he didn’t mean, that he saw himself in his daughter.

  Was there in fact something familiar about the child? He tried to tell himself that the sense of recognition her face aroused in him was nothing but the natural echo of that first time he saw her. His own intensity of looking was enough, surely, to explain the sense of familiarity? She looked quite simply like herself, and that is why he knew her. Yet honesty told him it was not at all so straightforward. The notion of memory failed to adequately capture the sensation. It was as if the child evoked in him something that had the size and shape of memory but inversed or turned inside out. Something akin to memory—its twin, perhaps, or its opposite.

  Helena knew that he did not believe the girl to be their daughter. She knew because he had told her so on the first day, as soon as they were alone after putting the child to bed. She had met the news with surprise, but was apparently little troubled by it.

  “Two years is a long time in the face of any little girl,” she’d told him gently. “You will have to be patient. Time will teach your heart to know her again.” She had put a hand on his arm, and it was the first time in two years that his wife had touched him in their drawing room and looked lovingly at him. “Until then, put your faith in me. I know her.”

  Now, when the issue arose, she treated his lack of faith with bemused tolerance: it was trivial, inconsequential, just her own dear, silly husband slow to catch up with events. She did little to try and persuade him. She still likes honey! she noted once at the breakfast table, and Well, that hasn’t changed! when the girl pushed the hairbrush away. But for the most part she just put blithe confidence in the likelihood that time would suffice to bring him to his senses. His doubts were lightweight, her manner implied, and sure to be swept away with the next strong current. He did not raise the matter himself. It wasn’t that he was afraid of worrying her but the contrary: “You see,” she would say, if he told her. “You do know her really. It is all coming back to you now.”

  It was the kind of tangle that you could easily make worse in your efforts to straighten things out, and more than once Vaughan found himself considering a very simple solution. Why not decide to believe it? With her coming, the girl had broken a curse, returned them to the enchanted days of happiness. The years of pain, when they were encased in misery and comfortless to each other, were gone. The child brought straightforward joy to Helena, and to him something more complicated that he treasured, though he did not know what to call it. In a very short time it had come about that he minded when the girl ate less than usual, fretted when she cried at night, rejoiced when she reached for him.

  Amelia was gone, and this girl had come. His wife believed her to be Amelia. She bore some resemblance to Amelia. Life, which had been unendurable before she came, was now pleasurable again. She had returned Helena to him and, more than that, she herself had found a place in his heart. It wasn’t going too far to say that he loved her. Did he want her to be Amelia? Yes. On the one side, love, comfort, happiness. On the other, every chance of a return to the way things had been . . . Well, then. What reason was there to cling so doggedly to his certainty when the current was pulling so hard in the other direction?

  There was only one reason. Robin Armstrong.

  “They will find the body,” Helena insisted. “His wife drowned the child—everybody knows it—and when they find the body, he will know.”

  But it had been two months and no body had been found.

  Vaughan had put off doing anything so far. He was a good man. Fair and decent. And he meant to be fair and decent now. There was himself and there was Robin Armstrong, but there were also Helena and the girl. It was important that the best outcome should be found for all concerned. The situation could not go on as it was indefinitely; that did nobody any good. A solution must be found, and he was taking the first step today.

  He rinsed briskly, toweled his face dry, and got ready. He had a train to catch.

  Generally known as Monty and Mitch, any suspicion that this was the name of a provincial traveling circus fell away at the sight of the brass plaque attached next to the door of the sober Georgian Oxford town house: Montgomery & Mitchell, Legal and Commercial. The Thames was quite invisible from its windows, and yet its presence was felt in every room. Not only every room, but every drawer and cupboard of every room, for this was the firm of solicitors used by anyone who had business interests relating to the river, from Oxford all the way upstream for many a mile. Mr. Montgomery himself was not a boating man, nor a fisherman, nor a painter o
f watery landscapes; in fact, he went from one year’s end to the next without setting eyes on the river, yet still it could be said without a word of a lie that he lived and breathed it. The way Mr. Montgomery pictured the Thames, it was not a current of water at all but an income stream, dry and papery, and he diverted a share of its bounty every year into his own ledgers and bank accounts and was very grateful to it. He spent his days contentedly drafting bills of carriage and negotiating the wording of letters of credit, and when a rare and valuable dispute involving force majeure came his way, which it sometimes did, his heart swelled with delight.

  On the steps, Vaughan had his hand to the bell, though he did not yet pull it. He was muttering to himself.

  “Amelia,” he said, a little hesitantly. Then, with perhaps too much energy, “Amelia!”

  It was a name he had constantly to practice, for it never came without having to leap over an obstacle, and the effort made it sound somewhat forced even to his own ears.

  “Amelia,” he said a third time, and, hoping that that was good enough, he rang the bell.

  Vaughan had written and was expected. The boy who answered the door and dealt with his coat was the same as always. He had been there on the day more than two years ago when Vaughan had come to deal with matters relating to the kidnapping of his daughter. The boy was even younger then and quite at a loss to know how to behave, faced with the wild sorrow and anguish that the visitor had displayed. Despite his strong feelings, Vaughan had wanted to reassure him, tell him that it was not his fault if he did not know how to look with calm deference into the eye of a madman who had lost his only child. Today the boy—for he was still a boy, if a bigger one—maintained his calm politeness as he took the coat and suspended it from the hook, but in turning back to Vaughan could no longer contain himself.

  “Oh, good news, sir! What a turn-up for the books! You must be overjoyed, you and Mrs. Vaughan, sir!”

  Hand shaking was not quite the done thing between a client of Monty and Mitch’s and the boy who took the coats, but such was the momentousness of the day—so far as the boy was concerned, anyway—that Vaughan allowed his hand to be taken and subjected to a vigorous shaking.

  “Thank you,” he murmured, and if there was any shortcoming in his acceptance of these hearty congratulations, the boy was too young to perceive it but only beamed as he showed Mr. Vaughan into the office of Mr. Montgomery himself.

  In the office Mr. Montgomery stretched out a professionally jovial hand.

  “How good to see you again, Mr. Vaughan. You look well, I must say.”

  “Thank you. You’ve had my letter.”

  “Indeed I have. Pull up a chair and tell me all about it. First, though, a glass of port?”

  “Thank you.”

  Vaughan saw the letter on Montgomery’s desk. It said little, really; the least he could get away with saying; but now, seeing it broken open and lying there, thoroughly perused, he wondered whether it was the kind of little that gave away more than it meant to. Vaughan’s hand was the open, fluent kind that anyone can read upside down, and as Montgomery busied himself with the glasses, some of the phrases he wrote yesterday caught Vaughan’s eye. “The child having been discovered . . . girl being now in our custody . . . may be necessary to retain your services in matters relating . . .” These were not, he now felt, the expressions of a man overjoyed at the return of his only child.

  A glass was placed before him. He took a sip. The two men discussed the port, as men of business must. Montgomery would not raise the matter first, he knew, but he did create a pause, which plainly he expected Vaughan to fill.

  “I realize that in my letter yesterday I set out recent events without clarifying the respects in which I may need your assistance,” he began. “Some things are better discussed in person.”

  “Quite right.”

  “The fact of the matter is, there is a chance—scarcely likely, I should say, yet worth attending to—that another party might make a claim to the child.”

  Montgomery nodded, as unsurprised as if he had been expecting this very eventuality. Although Mr. Montgomery must have been sixty, he had the unlined face of an infant. After forty years of practicing a poker face in the office, the muscles that twitch and tauten in response to doubt, worry, or suspicion had atrophied to the degree that it was now impossible to read any kind of expression in his face other than a general and permanent bonhomie.

  “There is a young man living in Oxford who claims—at least, I think he may claim—that he is the father of the child. His estranged wife died at Bampton and his own child’s whereabouts are unknown. His daughter, Alice, was just the same age, and she disappeared at more or less the same time as”—Vaughan saw the hurdle coming and was ready for it—“Amelia was found. An unfortunate coincidence that has permitted uncertainty to arise . . .”

  “Uncertainty . . .”

  “In his eyes.”

  “In his eyes. Yes. Good.”

  Montgomery listened, his face a picture of bland goodwill.

  “The young man—his name is Armstrong—had not seen his wife or child in recent times. Hence his inability to be immediately certain as to the identity of this child.”

  “Whereas you, on the other hand, are entirely certain of”—his level gaze was quite unaltered—“the child’s identity?”

  Vaughan swallowed. “Indeed.”

  Montgomery smiled benignly. He was far too well-mannered to press a client on a doubtful statement. “The child is your daughter, then.” It sounded for all the world like a statement, but Vaughan’s uncertainty heard the question in it.

  “It is”—the hurdle again— “Amelia.”

  Montgomery continued smiling.

  “There is no shadow of a doubt,” Vaughan added.

  The smile persisted.

  Vaughan felt the need to throw something in to make weight. “A mother’s instinct is a powerful thing,” he concluded.

  “A mother’s instinct!” exclaimed Montgomery encouragingly. “What could be plainer than that? Of course”—there was no fall in his face—“it is fathers to whom the custodial right to a child belongs, but still, a mother’s instinct! Nothing finer!”

  Vaughan swallowed. He took the plunge. “It is Amelia,” he said. “I know.”

  Montgomery looked up, round of cheek and smooth of forehead. “Excellent.” He nodded contentedly. “Excellent. Now, I have a good deal of experience in assessing competing claims to certain cargoes that occasionally go astray for one reason or another. Do not be offended if I use my experience—for the parallel is a useful one—to test for the strength of this Armstrong’s case against you.”

  “It is not yet a case against us. It is not yet a case at all. For two months we have had her now, and the fellow comes every so often to see us. He comes and he watches her and he neither claims her to be his nor relinquishes his claim. Every time he turns up, I am ready for him to state his mind one way or the other, but he remains silent on the issue. I am reluctant to press him on the matter—the last thing I want is to precipitate a claim and all the while he does not say ‘She is mine’ it is clearly an open possibility in his own mind that she is not. I prefer not to provoke him, but in the meantime it is unsettling. My wife—”

  “Your wife?”

  “My wife believed at the outset that the situation would last only so long as his own daughter was not found. We expected every day the report to come of a found child—a body, perhaps, found in the river—but we waited in vain and no such news has come. We are starting to feel unsettled by the fact that the matter remains unresolved after so long, but Helena is sorry for him, knowing all too well how heartbreaking the loss of a child is. She tolerates his continuing visits to our home, even though it has gone beyond the point where he can expect to reach any sense of certainty. His own child has vanished into the blue, and I fear that in the desperation of his grief it might not be beyond the machinations of his own mind to persuade him that Amelia”—the hurdle success
fully jumped: he was getting better at this!—“that Amelia is in fact his child. Grief is a powerful force, and who knows to what a man might be driven when his child is lost to him? A man is liable to think all manner of things rather than think his child—his only child—lost forever.”

  “You have a very acute understanding of his mind and his situation, Mr. Vaughan. Then we must test the facts of the matter, for facts are what matter in law, and see what is the power of his case in principle, in case he should think to make his claim, so as to be ready when the time comes. Incidentally, what does the child herself have to say about the matter?”

  “Nothing. She has not spoken.”

  Mr. Montgomery nodded serenely, as if nothing could have been more natural.

  “And before she was taken from your care, she had the power of speech?”

  Vaughan nodded.

  “And Mr. Armstrong’s daughter—did she have the power of speech?”

  “She did.”

  “I see. Now, do not be offended: Remember, if I appear to treat the little Amelia as if she were a cargo gone astray and returned to sight, it is the way my experience goes. Now, what I know is this: much weight is given to the last sighting of the cargo before it disappeared, and the first sighting when it reappeared. That is what will tell us as much as can be known about the cargo while it was out of sight. Taken together with as complete a description as possible of the cargo as it was before and as it was afterwards, it will generally be enough to cast a decent enough light into the muddle to ascertain ownership within the law.”

  He proceeded to ask a number of questions. He asked about Amelia before the kidnap. He asked about the circumstances in which the Armstrong girl was lost. He asked about the circumstances in which the cargo—“Amelia,” he said, more than once, with emphasis—was found. He noted all and nodded.

  “Armstrong’s daughter has, to all extents and purposes, disappeared into the blue. These things happen. Yours has returned from the blue. Which is more unusual. Where has she been? Why is it now that she has returned—or been returned? These are unanswered questions. It would be better to have an answer, but if there is no answer to be had, then instead we must rely on other evidence. Do you have photographs of Amelia from before?”