Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  He felt himself smiling at the memory.

  “Can you see her now?” Mrs. Constantine’s voice was so low and soft that it barely rippled the air.

  Vaughan saw Amelia. He saw the strand of hair that went the wrong way, the indistinct color of her lashes and their perfect curve, the speck of sleep dust in the corner of her eye, the precise curve of her cheek and the flush of the skin over it, the padded swell of her lower lip, the stubby fingers and their fine nails. He saw her not here in this room and not now in this hour but in the infinity of memory. She was lost to life, but in his memory she existed, was present, and he looked at her and her eyes met his and she smiled. He met her eyes again, felt the meeting of their gaze, father and daughter. He knew that she was dead, knew that she was gone, yet he saw her, and knew that this far—and this far only—she was restored to him.

  “I see her,” he said, nodding, smiling through tears.

  His lungs were his own again; the weight of his head no longer made his shoulders ache. The beat of his heart in his chest was steady. He did not know what the future held, but he knew it existed. He felt a stirring of interest in it.

  “There is to be a new baby,” he told Mrs. Constantine. “At the end of the year.”

  “Congratulations! That is good news.” He felt the pleasure of it all over again in her response.

  He took a great, deliberate lungful of air and, when he had expelled it, put his hands on his knees and made ready to rise.

  “Oh,” exclaimed Mrs. Constantine mildly. “Have we finished?”

  Vaughan arrested the movement and wondered. Was there something else? It all came back to him. How could he have forgotten?

  He told her about the fortune-teller at the fair, the opportunity to buy Robin Armstrong’s interest in the child, the implied threat that his knowledge of Amelia’s death might be shared with his wife.

  She listened closely. When he came to an end, she nodded. “That isn’t what I was expecting when I asked whether we were finished. I was remembering that when you first came to me, there was a particular difficulty you wanted to resolve . . .”

  He thought back to their first meeting. It was such a long time ago. What had prompted him to come then?

  “Relating to your wife . . . ,” she prompted.

  “I asked you to tell Helena that Amelia was dead.”

  “That’s right. You invited me to name my price, I seem to remember. And now you are considering paying a stranger a very large sum of money indeed to stop him telling Helena the very same thing.”

  Oh. He sat back in his chair. He hadn’t thought of it in that light.

  “I wonder, Mr. Vaughan . . . How much would it cost if you were to tell your wife what happened that night?”

  Later, when he had drunk the clear liquid that tasted of cucumber and rinsed his face in the water that was neither too hot nor too cold, and dried it again, he said farewell to Mrs. Constantine. “This is what you do, isn’t it? I understand now. I thought it was all smoke and mirrors. Trickery. And you do bring back the dead, but not in that way.”

  She shrugged. “Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or a companion in grief. My husband and I studied together in America. There is a new science over there; it can be explained in complicated ways, but you won’t go far wrong in thinking of it as the science of human emotion. He got a job here in Oxford, at the university, and I apply my learning in the field. I help where I can.”

  He left her remittance on the hall table.

  On leaving the house, Vaughan felt an unexpected coolness about his knees and collar. It was apparent too at his wrists. His clothing was damp still where his tears had trickled into his cuffs and onto his collar and dripped onto his knees. It’s amazing, he thought. Whoever would think a human body could have so much water in it?

  Photographing Alice

  Collodion carried Rita and Daunt downriver to the farmhouse at Kelmscott, and on the way their conversation—about the Vaughans, the Armstrongs, but mostly about the child herself—effectively masked their constraint in dealing with each other. But when each one knew the other was looking elsewhere, when they were sure of not being seen, they cast quick glances of love and sorrow, bailing out the excess feeling that threatened otherwise to capsize them.

  At Kelmscott the younger children were waiting for them on the bank. They waved as soon as they saw the smart navy-and-white houseboat decorated with its vivid yellow-orange flourishes. Rita, looking out avidly, was quick to spot the girl. She was with them, waving; then another child, a boy, the youngest one and close to her in age, took her hand and they ran together away and back to the farmhouse.

  “Where has she gone to?” Daunt asked, distracted by her absence as he tried to concentrate on mooring.

  “Back to the house,” she said, anxiously, but then: “Here she is! They just went to fetch the older ones.”

  All the Armstrong children made themselves useful in sensible ways, from the big boys who listened to Daunt carefully before lifting the heavy equipment with care, to the little ones who were all given something light and unbreakable by Rita, which they then carried with a great sense of self-importance over the field and to the house. The unloading was complete in record time.

  Rita was always conscious of the girl. Whatever she was doing, she had one eye on her, and noticed how the other children treated her affectionately, how the older ones were patient with her and the smaller ones went slowly in order not to leave her behind. It occurred to her to wonder whether she had lacked the companionship of other children at the Vaughans, and couldn’t help feeling that the kindness of these children must be good for the little girl.

  Bess showed them into the dining room, and there was more busyness as Armstrong and his big sons moved the table and arranged chairs according to Daunt’s instructions.

  “We don’t want a photograph of me,” Bess said. “Why, I’m here all the time if anybody needs to know what I look like!”

  But Armstrong insisted and the children backed him up, and soon the photographs were all set up: the first was to be of Armstrong and Bess; they would take the whole family portrait later.

  “Where is Robin?” fretted Armstrong. “Half an hour ago he should have been here.”

  “You know what young men are. I told you not to count on him,” murmured his wife.

  Robin’s contrition that had so affected her husband had not removed her own doubts about her son. “He was always better in words than in acts,” she’d often reminded him, but when Armstrong chose to forgive—as he always did—she did not press the matter. Then, seeing him with the child in his arms at the fair, she discovered to her own surprise that hope had rooted faintly in her heart. She kept an eye on it, with the painful curiosity of a gardener who watches the frail progress of a plant out of its proper environment that cannot possibly thrive. The rarity of her son’s visits to the child did not pass unnoticed. Armstrong had written to let Robin know the day and time of the photography session, as though his presence was a thing he could now take for granted, but there had been no answer, and she for one was unsurprised at his absence.

  “We’ll take you and Mrs. Armstrong first,” said Daunt. “That will give him plenty of time, if something has held him up.”

  He seated Bess on the chair and placed Armstrong behind her, then slid the plate into position while he explained again the need to keep still. When all was ready, he ducked under the dark cloth and removed the cover as Rita stood behind the camera and encouraged the pair of sitters to look consistently in the one direction. In ten seconds the Armstrongs had time to feel all the things that people felt when they were having their photograph taken for the first time: abashed, stiff, nervous, significant, and rather foolish. But an hour later, when they were looking at the finished article, developed and washed and dried and framed, they saw themselves as they had never seen themselves before: eternal.

  “Well . . .” said B
ess wonderingly, and it seemed that she was going to complete the sentence; but she fell into silence instead while her eyes flickered all over the photograph of a neat middle-aged woman wearing an eye patch and the dark, stern man behind her with one hand on her shoulder.

  Meanwhile, Armstrong looked over her shoulder at the photograph and told her how beautiful she looked in it, but his eyes returned time and time again to his own grave face. His mood seemed to turn somber as he looked at himself.

  The interest in the photograph had distracted them all, but eventually it was time to prepare for the second group and Robin had not come. No horse had been heard on the cobbles, no door opening in the hall. Armstrong went to find the maid anyway, to see whether he might have come quietly in at the back, but no. He was not there.

  “Come, now,” Bess said firmly. “If he’s not here, he’s not here, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Living in Oxford as he does, he can go to Mr. Daunt’s studio anytime and have his photograph taken. It will be a hundred times easier for him.”

  “But it would have been such a thing to have all the children together! And there is Alice!”

  Indeed, there was Alice.

  Bess sighed and took her husband’s arm encouragingly. “Robin is a man now, and not a child to do as his parents tell him. Come, let us make the best of it. Here are the others, all six of them, eager and happy to take their place alongside us and Alice. Come.”

  She coaxed Armstrong into taking his place in the grouping. All the children shuffled a little left or right to fill the space vacated by their missing brother.

  “All set?” Daunt asked, and Mr. Armstrong gave one last glance in the direction of the window, just in case.

  “All set,” he answered with a sigh.

  For ten seconds Armstrong, his wife, and their six younger children gazed into the eye of the camera, of time, of the future, and cast themselves into immortality. Rita, watching from the corner of the room, noticed that the one they called Alice fixed her gaze on a point still further off, beyond the camera, beyond the walls, beyond Kelmscott, somewhere so far-flung it might be beyond eternity.

  While Daunt was developing the photograph, Mrs. Armstrong and her daughters prepared the table for tea, and the boys changed into their work clothes to feed the animals. Rita found herself alone with Armstrong just as the sun came out and the rain stopped.

  “Would you like to see the farm?” he invited.

  “I would.”

  He picked up the little girl and hardly seemed to feel her weight on his arm as they went outside.

  “How is she?” Rita asked. “Do you find her well?”

  “I’m not sure I can tell you. Ordinarily I am pretty good at knowing living creatures, whether they be human or animal. It’s a matter of observation. With chickens you can see restlessness in their feathers. A cat can tell you a lot by the way it breathes. Horses—well, they’re a bit of everything. Pigs look their meaning at you. This little one is hard to know. A mystery, aren’t you, piglet?” He gave her hair a fond stroke as he looked tenderly at her.

  The girl glanced at him, then at Rita, not with any particular sign of recognition, but as though she had never seen her before. Rita reminded herself that this had always been the case, even at the Vaughans, where she had been a regular visitor.

  As they walked, Armstrong pointed out things that might interest Rita or the child and the girl looked where she was bid and in between times rested her head on the man’s broad shoulder and drew in her gaze, to contain herself in her own inner world again. Rita sensed that behind the farmer’s talk of the farm, his mind was turning over some private unhappiness and took it to be the absence of his son. She did not make idle conversation but walked along beside him until her quiet presence encouraged him to unburden confidences.

  “A man like me gets used to recognizing himself from the inside. The inside is what I am familiar with. Nor am I much given to studying my outward appearance in the looking glass. It is a curious thing, to see oneself in a photograph. It is a meeting with the outer man.”

  “True enough.”

  When Armstrong spoke again it was to ask a question: “You do not have children, I think?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “May it come to you. I have known no happiness to compare with my wife and my children. Nothing means so much to me as my family. You will have guessed something, I suppose, of my story?”

  “I don’t like guessing. But I know what they say at the Swan, that your parents were a prince and a slave girl.”

  “That is fanciful, but there is a little truth in it. My father was a rich man, my mother a black servant. They lived in the same household when they were very young, not much more than children, and I was conceived out of love and ignorance. I suppose you could say I was lucky—my mother too. Most families would have thrown her out, but my father owned his part in it. He wanted, I believe, to marry her. Such a thing was impossible, of course. But the family was a compassionate one, and they did their best. My mother was cared for until I was born and weaned, then she was moved to another town and suitable work was found so that she could meet her needs respectably until she married—which a few years later she did, with a man of her kind. I was placed in a home for children who, for one reason or another, could not live with their families but had some money behind them, and later sent to school. A rather good one. Thus I was raised on the edge of two families, one rich and one poor, one black and one white, and never at the heart of either. I grew up largely outside of family life. Most of my early memories are of school, but I knew both my parents. Twice a year my father would come and take me out of school for a day. Once I remember climbing up into the carriage where he was waiting for me, and being very surprised to find another boy, rather smaller than me, already there. “What do you make of this little chap, then, Robert?” my father said to me. “Shake hands with your brother!” What a day that was! I remember a place—I have no idea where it was, to be honest—with grass lawns. I threw a ball endlessly to my brother and eventually he managed to catch it once or twice and how he danced for joy at that. I shall never forget it. Later on, while my father stood below to catch us if we should chance to fall, I showed him where to put his feet to get up into a tree. It was not a very big tree, but then, he was not a very big boy. We were both of us too young to know what difference lay between us, but I started to know it when we returned to school and I climbed down from the carriage and the two of them went off—together—to a place called home. I don’t know what happened after that. I never saw that boy again, though I know his name and that there were other brothers and sisters that followed him. Perhaps my father was not supposed to encourage us to know one another and was found out. Perhaps he just thought better of it. Whatever the reason, I never saw my brother again. I don’t suppose he even remembers me. I cannot even be sure he knows of my existence. So much for my father’s family.

  “I was not altogether a stranger in my mother’s house. I was allowed sometimes to make brief visits in the holidays. I have good memories of those times. Her home was full of talk and movement, laughter and love. She was as good a mother to me as she dared to be; more than once she put her arms around me and told me she loved me, though I was so unused to such treatment that my tongue tied in knots and I scarcely knew how to embrace her in return. Her husband was not an unkind man either, though he was always telling my brothers and sisters to mind what they said in my presence. “Robert’s not used to your scallywaggery,” he used to say whenever the chatter grew too boisterous. I never wanted to come away from that house. I always thought that the next time I went would be the time I would be allowed to stay, and every departure was a disappointment. Eventually I noticed that with every visit I was less and less like my brothers and sisters and not more. There came a time when these holiday visits, already infrequent, stopped altogether. It was not a sudden end. There was no word to say it would not happen again. Just several holidays in a row when the vi
sit didn’t happen and the dawning knowledge that it was over. The borderline between myself and my brothers and sisters had become a solid wall.

  The girl began to fidget and Armstrong paused to put her on her feet.

  “When I was seventeen my mother sent a message asking for me. She was dying. I went back to the house. It was much smaller than I remembered. I entered her bedchamber and the room was full of people. My brothers and sisters were already there, of course, sitting at the bedside, kneeling on the floor to be close to her. I could have asked to stand beside her and hold her hand for a moment, and if she had been in possession of her senses and known my presence, I’m sure I would have, but it was too late for that. I stood just inside the door, while my siblings sat and knelt at the bedside, and when she had breathed her last, one of my sisters remembered me and said that perhaps Robert would read—‘for he do read so beautiful,’ she said—so I read some verses from the Bible in my white man’s voice and once that was done there seemed to be no reason to remain. I asked my stepfather on my way out whether I could help in any way and he said, ‘I can look after my children, thank you, Mr. Armstrong.’ He had always called me Robert before, but I suppose I was a man now, and he gave me that name instead, the name that came from nowhere, plucked from the blue, belonging to neither of my parents, but mine alone.