Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  He cried out, a painful cry, and knew what it was to feel your heart break.

  The ferryman launched his pole into the air and let it fall through his fingers.

  “Quietly!” called Armstrong after him. “Give him back to me! Please!”

  The ferryman did not appear to hear him. The punt disappeared swiftly into the rain.

  Armstrong and Fleet walked, man and beast, out of the water through the torrential rain to the shelter of the Swan. They went their way in silence for the most part, Armstrong weighed down by the intolerable burden of his grief. But from time to time, he spoke a few words to Fleet, and Fleet softly whinnied a reply.

  “Who would have thought it?” he murmured. “I know the stories about Quietly, but I have never believed them. To think the human mind is capable of producing visions like that. It seemed real at the time. Didn’t you think so?”

  And later: “There must be more to stories than you think.”

  And much later, when they were nearly there: “I could swear I also saw . . . in the punt—behind the ferryman . . . Am I mad? What did you see, Fleet?”

  Fleet whinnied, an unsettled and nervous sound.

  “Impossible!” Armstrong shook his head to dispel the image. “My mind is playing tricks on me. These visions must be the ravings of despair.”

  Lily and the River

  Cold. It was cold. And if she knew she was cold, then she was awake. Darkness was ebbing from the room, dawn was coming and—surely—something else too. She opened her eyes to the sting of cold on her eyeballs. What wasn’t right?

  Was it him? Returned from the river?

  “Victor?”

  No reply.

  That left one thing. Her throat tightened.

  This afternoon she had noticed that one of the floor tiles in the kitchen was sticking up. Tile edges had always protruded here and there. She was used to them shifting a little when she walked about. But this tile had seemed more uneven than before. She had nudged the high edge with her toe to straighten it; as it sank, a silvery line of water appeared round its edges. She had hurried to forget it. Now she remembered.

  Lily raised herself on one elbow and peered down to the kitchen.

  In the weak light her first impression was that everything had shrunk. The table was shorter than it ought to be and the sink was nearer the floor. The chair was stunted. Then she caught a movement: the tin bath rocked gently, like a cradle. The floor tiles in their dull terra-cotta had disappeared, and over them lay a broad flatness that shimmered like a thing making up its mind.

  Though she could not see it grow, it was growing, for at first it was inches from the bottom rung of the ladder, then it reached it, and later it swallowed it altogether. It crept slowly but persistently up the walls and pressed against the door.

  It occurred to Lily that the thing was perhaps not looking for her after all. It wants the way out, she thought. When it was nearing the second rung, her fear of action was overtaken by her fear of inaction.

  It’ll be no different from standing in a bathtub, she told herself as she descended the ladder, only colder, that’s all.

  Three-quarters of the way down, she gathered up her chemise into a bundle and tucked it in her armpit. Another step and then, with the next one—in!

  It came above her knees and, as she waded, resisted her. She pressed on, and her movement roused it into swirls and eddies around her body.

  The door was reluctant to open. The wood swelled in the wet; it warped the door and made it stick in the jamb. She put all her weight on it but nothing happened. In a panic she rammed it with her shoulder; it loosened from the frame to stand ajar but still was stiff. Lily let go of her chemise, which trailed in the water, and gave the door a great double-handed shove. It opened onto a new world.

  The sky had fallen into Lily’s yard. Its starlit black had come to earth and lain itself over grass, rocks, paths, and weeds. The moon floated at knee height. Lily stared in bewilderment. Where was the basket man’s flood post? Where was the new flood post? She lifted her gaze automatically to the river, but it was gone. A flat silver stillness lay over everything. Here and there a tree emerged out of it and was reflected in its polished finish along with the sky. Every dip and crevice in the landscape was flattened out, every detail concealed, every incline erased. All was simple and bare and flat, and the air was luminous.

  Lily swallowed. Tears welled in her. She hadn’t thought it would be like this. She had expected heaving masses of water, violent currents, and murderous waves, not this. It was serenity without end. Motionless, she stood in her doorway, staring at the fearful loveliness. It barely moved, just shimmered at times, peacefully alive. A swan came gliding across the clouds, after it, the trail it left in the clouds settled into flatness.

  Were there fish? she wondered.

  She stepped carefully out from her house, trying to disturb the water as little as possible. Her nightdress hem was already sodden, now the water crept up, plastering it to her legs.

  She took steps down the slope and the water rose to her thighs.

  Onwards. The water came to her waist.

  You could see shapes down there, flickering movements of things alive under the surface. Once your eye had worked out what to look for, you saw the slivers of motion everywhere, and with a thrill she felt it too in her own veins. Another step. Another. She came to a place and thought this was where the old post was. You could just see it, under the water. How strangely marvelous to be here on the bank, with the water higher than it had ever been, in the entire lifetime of the old post. Was this fear? She was in the grip of a great feeling, something many times vaster than fear—but she was not afraid.

  How odd I must look, she thought. A chest and a head above water, reflected upside down beneath her own chin.

  Grass and plants waved dreamily in their new world beneath the surface. Ahead of her, the silver gave way to a darker, shadowy place. This was where the bank fell away more steeply. This was where the current would be, still there, under the surface. I won’t go any further, she thought. I’ll stop here.

  There were lots more fish here, and also—Oh!—something larger, pinkly fleshy. It floated slowly and heavily in the water, was coming her way, but just out of reach.

  Lily stretched out an arm for the body. If she could just catch a limb with one hand and draw it to her—

  Was it too far? The little body drifted closer. In a moment it would be at its nearest point, but still out of reach.

  Without thought, without fear, Lily launched forwards.

  Her fingers closed on the pink limb.

  There was nothing beneath her feet but water.

  Jonathan Tells a Story

  “My own son!” Armstrong groaned, with a distraught shake of the head, when he had finished his story.

  “Not your son, though . . . ,” Margot reminded him. “He had his true father in him, I’m sad to say.”

  “I must make amends. How it can be done, I do not know, but I must find a way. And before that, there is a task I dread but must not put off. I must tell the Vaughans what happened to their daughter and my son’s part in it.”

  “It is not the time to tell Mrs. Vaughan about it now,” Rita told him gently. “When Mr. Vaughan returns, we will tell them together.”

  “Why is he not here?”

  “He is out with the other men, searching for the child. She is missing.”

  “Missing? Then I must search with them.”

  Seeing his dazed face and his trembling hands, the women tried to dissuade him, but he would not be stopped. “At this moment it is the only thing I can do to help them, so I must do it.”

  Rita returned to Helena, who was nursing her baby.

  “Is there any news?” she asked.

  “Nothing yet. Mr. Armstrong has joined the search. Try not to worry, Helena.”

  The young mother looked down at her newborn and some of the worry melted from her face as she lay her smallest finger against his ch
eek and stroked it. She smiled. “I can see my own dear father in him, Rita! Isn’t that a gift!”

  When no answer came, Helena glanced up. “Rita! Whatever’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know what my father looked like. Nor my mother, even.”

  “Don’t cry! Rita, dearest!”

  Rita sat down next to her friend on the bed.

  “You can’t bear that she’s gone, can you?”

  “No. Before you came to claim her—that night a year ago—and before Armstrong turned up—and before Lily White—during that long night, when Daunt was unconscious in this very bed and I was in that chair, over there—I took her on my lap. We fell asleep together. I thought then, that if it turned out she wasn’t Daunt’s, and if she had nobody in the world, that I—”

  “I know.”

  “You know? How?”

  “I saw you with her. You felt the same way we all did. Daunt feels it too.”

  “Does he? I just want to know where she is. I can’t bear her not being here.”

  “Nor can I. But it’s harder for you.”

  “Harder for me? But you—”

  “I thought I was her mother? I also thought I’d invented her. Do you remember I told you I sometimes wondered whether she was real?”

  “I do. Why do you think it’s harder for me?”

  “Because I have him.” Helena nodded at her baby. “My own real baby. Here. Hold him.”

  Rita put out her arms and Helena placed the baby into them.

  “Not like that. Not like a nurse. Hold him like I do. Like a mother.”

  Rita settled the infant in her arms. He fell asleep.

  “There,” whispered Helena after a silence. “How does that feel now?”

  The floodwater lapped around the Swan. It came to the very door but no further.

  When Collodion returned, and Armstrong soon after, the men shook their heads, grim-faced. Vaughan went directly to see his wife and the baby. Both were asleep. He found Rita there.

  “Anything?” she whispered.

  He shook his head.

  When he had gazed long enough in careful silence so as not to wake his son, and kissed his wife’s sleeping head, he joined Rita in the winter room. Wet boots had been tugged off, feet were stretched towards the fire, and socks steamed. The little Margots had put more logs on the fire and brought hot drinks for everyone.

  “Joe?” Vaughan asked, though he could guess the answer.

  “Gone,” his daughters said.

  Then nobody spoke and they breathed the minutes in and out till they made an hour.

  The door opened.

  Whoever it was did not rush to come in. The cold air made the candles flicker and brought the tang of the river more powerfully into the room. All looked up.

  Every eye saw yet none reacted. They were trying to understand what it was they were seeing, framed by the open doorway.

  “Lily!” Rita exclaimed. She was a figure from a dream. Her white nightgown ran with water, her hair was flat to her scalp, her eyes were wide with shock. In her arms she clutched a body.

  All those who had been there at solstice night a year ago were struck by the sight of her. First Daunt had arrived at that door with a corpse in his arms. Later that same night it was Rita who came in, clutching the girl in her arms. Now for a third time the scene replayed itself.

  Lily swayed on the threshold and her eyelids flickered. This time it was Daunt and Vaughan who leapt up to catch the new arrival as she fell, and it was Armstrong who stretched out his arms and received into them the wriggling body of a half-drowned piglet.

  “Good Lord!” Armstrong exclaimed. “It’s Maisie!”

  And so it was—the sweetest piglet from Maud’s litter, the one he had given to Lily, according to his promise, when he’d come to fetch Maud and take her back to the farm.

  The little Margots took kind charge of Lily, helping her into dry clothes and making hot drinks to stop the shivers, and, when she came back to the winter room, Armstrong complimented her on her courage in rescuing the little pig from the floodwater.

  On Armstrong’s lap the piglet warmed up, and when it had recovered its good spirits, it squealed and squirmed in lively fashion.

  The noisy surprise brought Jonathan out of the room where he had been keeping watch over the body of his father. Yawning, one of his sisters followed him.

  Daunt sat down heavily, and rubbed his eyes with an air of dejection.

  “You haven’t found her?” the little Margot asked.

  Daunt shook his head.

  “Found who?” Jonathan wondered.

  “The little girl who is lost,” Rita reminded him. It is late, she thought. He is too tired to remember. We must get him to sleep.

  “But she has been found,” he said, surprised. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Found?” They looked at each other quizzically. “No, Jonathan, we don’t think so.”

  “Yes.” He gave a nod that was quite certain. “I saw her.”

  They stared.

  “She came just now.”

  “Here?”

  “Outside the window.”

  Rita sprang up and ran to the room he had come from and the window, where she looked in agitation this way and that. “Where, Jonathan? Where was she?”

  “In the punt. That came for Father.”

  “Oh, Jonathan.” Despondently she led him back to the winter room. “Tell us just what you thought you saw, in order, from the start.”

  “Well, Father died and he was waiting for Quietly, and Quietly came. Like Mother said he would. He came right up to the window, in his punt, to take Father to the other side of the river, and when I looked out, there she was. In the punt. I said, ‘Everybody’s out looking for you,’ and she said, ‘Tell them my father came to fetch me.’ And then they went away. He’s very powerful in a punt, her father. I’ve never seen a punt go so fast.”

  There was a lengthy pause.

  “The child doesn’t speak, Jonathan. Do you remember that?” Daunt asked kindly.

  “She does now,” Jonathan said. “As they were going, I said, ‘Don’t go yet,’ and she said, ‘I’ll come back, Jonathan. Not for a long time, but I’ll come back, and I’ll see you then.’ And they went.”

  “I think you might have fallen asleep . . . Perhaps you were dreaming?”

  He thought about it hard for a moment and firmly shook his head. “She was sleeping”—indicating his sister. “I wasn’t.”

  “It’s too serious a thing for a boy to be telling stories about it,” suggested Daunt.

  Everybody present opened their mouths and said as one: “But Jonathan can’t tell stories.”

  In the corner, Armstrong shook his head in quiet wonderment. He’d seen her too. Sitting behind her ferryman father as he propelled the punt so powerfully between the worlds of the living and the dead, between reality and a story.

  A Tale of Two Children

  At Kelmscott farmhouse the flames burned bright in the hearth yet nothing they did could warm the pair of sitters in their armchairs, one each side of the fireplace.

  They had dried their eyes and now gazed into the flames with gravest sorrow.

  “You tried,” Bess said. “You could have done no more.”

  “At the river, do you mean? Or his whole life?”

  “Both.”

  He stared where she was staring, into the flames. “Would it have been different if I had been harsher with him at the beginning? Should I have whipped him when he stole for the first time?”

  “Things might have been different. Or they might not. You can never know. And if they were different, there is no telling whether they would have been better or worse.”

  “How could things be worse?”

  She turned towards him the face that had been hidden in shadow.

  “I Saw him, you know.”

  He looked up from the fire, wondering.

  “After the time with the bureau. I know we agreed I wouldn’t, but I coul
dn’t help it. I’d had the other boys by then, and I knew what kind of children they were by just looking at them with my ordinary eye. Their baby faces were open: it was plain who they were. But Robin was different. He was not like the other babies. He always kept himself concealed. He was not kind to the little ones. You remember how he pinched and bullied them. There were always tears when Robin was there, but without him they played as good as gold. So I often thought of it, but I had said I would not use my eye, and I thought it better to abide by it. Until the day of the bureau. I knew he had done it: he was not such a good liar then as he is now—as he became later, I should say—and I did not believe him when he said he’d seen a fellow running off down the lane and found the bureau forced open. So I took off my patch and I held him by the shoulders and I Saw him.”

  “What did you See?”

  “No more and no less than you saw tonight. That he was a liar and a cheat. That he had not one jot of care for any person in this world other than himself. That his first and last thought in life would be for his own comfort and his own ease, and he would hurt anybody, be it his own brothers and sisters or his own father, if it brought some small advantage to himself.”

  “And so none of this has ever surprised you.”

  “No.”

  “You said there is no telling if things would have been better or worse . . . Nothing could be worse than this.”

  “I did not like you following him tonight. Knowing he had the knife. After what he did to Susan, I was afraid of what he might do to you—and though he was my own flesh and blood, and though I was bound to love him no matter what, I tell you the truth when I say losing you would have been worse.”

  They sat then for a while in silence. Each pursued their own thoughts, and their thoughts were not so very different from each other.

  There then came a faint noise, a light tap from some distance away. Lost in their own reflections, they at first ignored it, but it came again. Bess looked up at her husband.