Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “Was that the door?”

  He shrugged. “Nobody would come knocking at this time of night.”

  They returned to their ruminations, but then it came again, no louder, but lasting longer.

  “It is the door,” he said, rising. “What a night for it. I shall send them away, whoever they are.”

  He took the candle and crossed the hall to the great oak door and slid the bolts. Opening the door a fraction, he looked out. There was nobody there, and he prepared to close the door again, when a small voice stopped him.

  “Please, Mr. Armstrong . . .”

  He looked down. There at waist height was a pair of boys.

  “Not tonight, children,” he began. “This is a house of mourning . . .” And then he looked closer. He raised his candle and peered at the larger of the two boys. He was dressed in rags, shivering and thin, but he knew him. “Ben? Is it Ben, the butcher’s boy?”

  “Yes, sir . . .”

  “Come in.” He opened the door wide. “It is not the best of nights for visitors, but come, I cannot have you out of doors when it is so cold.”

  Ben carefully ushered in the second child ahead of him, and as the smaller boy passed into the candlelight, Armstrong’s breath caught in his chest.

  “Robin!” he exclaimed.

  He bent and held the candle so that its light fell to illuminate the boy’s face. It was a fine-boned face, made thinner by hunger; it had Robin’s fineness about the temple; the nostrils had Robin’s delicate flare.

  “Robin?” Armstrong’s voice trembled.

  How many times impossible was it? Robin was a man. Robin had died tonight, this very night, and he had seen it happen. This child could not be Robin, and yet . . .

  The eyes blinked and Armstrong saw that the child looking out of Robin’s face was not Robin but some other boy. His eyes were gentle and timid—and grey. In the midst of his astonishment, Armstrong heard a half murmur from Ben, and he turned to see the child falter and sway. He caught Ben as he fell, and called out for Bessie.

  “It is the butcher’s boy who went missing from Bampton,” he explained. “He was overcome by the warmth after being out so long.”

  “And he has gone short of food lately, by the look of him,” Bessie said, kneeling to support the child, who was returning to his senses after his faint.

  Armstrong stood aside so that his wife could see Ben’s companion and gestured with his hand. “He has brought this little fellow with him.”

  “Robin! But . . .” Bessie stared at the child. She could hardly drag her eyes away, but when she did, it was to turn to her husband. “How . . . ?”

  “It is not Robin.” Ben’s voice was feeble, but had not lost its habit of delivering words all in a rush with no pauses. “Sir, it is the little child you were looking for, it is Alice and I cut her hair—forgive me, I didn’t want to do it but we were on the road so long and it seemed safer to be two brothers than to be a boy and a girl and if I did wrong I’m sorry.”

  Armstrong stared. Robin’s features rearranged themselves in his eyes. He reached out a hand and laid it trembling on the child’s shorn head.

  “Alice,” he breathed.

  Bessie came to stand beside him. “Alice?”

  The child looked at Ben. He nodded. “It’s all right here. You can be Alice again.”

  She turned her face to the Armstrongs. Halfway into a smile, her mouth stretched instead into a large, exhausted yawn. Her grandfather gathered her into his arms.

  Later, after a midnight feast of soup and cheese and apple pie, they sat in the kitchen. Alice slept in her grandmother’s arms while her aunts and uncles, roused from their beds by the excitement in the house, clustered in their nightgowns around the kitchen hearth and they all listened to Ben’s account of how he found the child.

  “Soon after I last saw Mr. Armstrong, my father took a strap to me and beat me so long and so hard that the world went black and when I came round again I was sure I must be in heaven, but no, I was on the floor of the kitchen and I hurt to my bones and my mother crept to me and said she wondered I wasn’t dead and surely I would be next time, and I decided it was time to follow my plan of running away, which I had worked out a long time since, thinking it best to be prepared, and I did everything accordingly, which was to go to the bridge and climb onto the parapet and wait there for a boat, though in the dark a boat is not always easy to spot but you can always hear it, and so there I stood and never sat for fear of falling asleep, and I shook because a beating like that always sets up a trembling in a body, and at last there came a barge downstream in the darkness, and I clambered on top of the parapet and I lowered myself over it, dangling from my fingertips, and my shoulders and arms that were black-and-blue from the beating were aching terrible bad and I thought I might fall in the water, but I didn’t, for I clung on till the barge was right under me and then I let myself fall and hoped to fall onto something soft like fleeces and not onto something hard like barrels of liquor and in the end it was neither so good nor so bad as it might have been, for I fell onto cheeses which are between soft and hard, but still they jolted my bones and hurt where I was already hurting, but I didn’t cry out for fear of giving away that I had stowed away, but instead cried quietly and hid as best I could and tried not to fall asleep but fall asleep I did and woke up, being roughly shaken, and a bargeman standing over me was in a fury and he cried out over and over the same words, ‘Orphanage! Who do they take me for? I’m not a bloody orphanage!’ and at first I couldn’t understand what he was saying, being so dull with sleep, but then his words came clear as a bell into my ears and from there into my thinking where they met up with some other words already there about Alice who disappeared into the river and I asked the man, was it a little girl who dropped into his barge last time and what happened to her, and he was too furious to answer me or to listen to my questions and threatened to drop me overboard and let me swim for my life and I thought, ‘Is that what happened to Alice?’ and I asked him and he went on being furious for some little while yet and then all of a sudden he got hungry and opened a cheese and ate some, but he didn’t give any to me, and when he had eaten he was quiet and I asked him all over again and this time he told me that, yes, last time it was a little girl and, no, he didn’t make her swim for her life, but when he got to London left her in the care of some orphanage where they take the unwanted children, so I said, ‘What is the name of this place?’ and he didn’t know, but he told me the part of town where it was and I stayed with him and I helped him with the unloading and the loading and he gave me cheese for the help but not much, and when we got to London I scarpered and asked directions from a dozen people who sent me here and there and in all directions and eventually I came to the place and asked for Alice and they said they had no Alice and besides orphans weren’t there to be taken by anybody, and in the end they closed the door on me, so the next day at a different time I knocked again and it was a different person answered the door and I told them I was hungry and homeless and had no mother and no father and they took me in and set me to work, and all the time I kept my eye out for Alice and asked all the other boys, but the boys were kept separate from the girls so I never saw her until one day I was sent to paint the office of the director of the orphanage, and from the window I saw over the wall into the girls’ courtyard and that’s when I saw her and knew I was in the right place, and was glad it hadn’t all been a waste of time, not so far anyway, and I thought and thought how to get to her and in the end it was as simple as pie because a fine lady took a fancy for doing something good for the orphans and she sent a great hamper of food in to be shared out, and it was, but only the director and his fellows tasted it, and we never got none, but afterwards we was all taken to church to give thanks for the great goodness that was done to us, and when we had sat and stood and sat again and prayed for the virtuous lady, we was all marched out again, the girls from their side of the pews and we boys the other, and there she was, Alice, right by my side
and I whispered to her, ‘Do you remember me?’ and she nodded, and so I said, ‘When I say run, run, all right?’ and I took her hand and when I ran she ran with me, but not for long, for we hid behind a statue and nobody noticed then that we was gone and after everybody had passed out of the church we set off on our own, walking every day, following the river, and I did a bit of loading and unloading when I could and we ate what we could get, and I cut her hair when a bad lady tried to steal her away from me, thinking to be two boys together was safer, and it took a long time to get here because the bargemen wouldn’t take the two of us aboard because only I was big enough to work but the two of us would want feeding, so our feet were sore and we got hungry sometimes and cold others and sometimes hungry and cold together, and now—”

  He paused to yawn and at the end of the yawn they suddenly saw how dazed his eyes were and that he was on the verge of sleep.

  Mr. Armstrong wiped a tear from his eye.

  “You have done well, Ben. You couldn’t have done better.”

  “Thank you, sir, and thank you for the soup and the cheese and the apple pie, it was most excellent.”

  He slipped from his chair and saluted the family. “Now I had better be getting along.”

  “But where will you go?” asked Mrs. Armstrong. “Where is your home?”

  “I set out to run away, and run away I must.”

  Robert put both hands on the table. “We can’t have that, Ben. You must stay here and be one of the family.”

  Ben looked around at the girls and boys around the hearth. “But you have plenty here eating your profits already, sir. And now Alice too. Profits don’t grow on trees, you know.”

  “I know. But if we all work together, we make extra profit, and I can see you are a hardworking boy who will pull his weight. Bess, is there a bed for the child?”

  “He will sleep with the middle boys. He looks about the same age as Joe and Nelson.”

  “There, you see? And you will help with the pigs. All right?”

  And so it was settled.

  Once Upon a Time, a Long Time Ago

  Afterwards, but before the flood had entirely retreated, Daunt took Rita on Collodion back to her flooded cottage. They used the little rowboat to get to the door, and when Daunt stepped out of it to push the warped door with all his might, the water was up to his knees. Inside there was a line around the walls that showed the water had been three feet high there. All around the room the paint was peeling away from the walls. The receding water had left on the seat of Rita’s writing chair, as if there were some meaning in it, an arrangement of twigs, pebbles, and other less identifiable matter. She had had the forethought to raise the blue armchair on boxes; its feet had been in water, but the cushions were sound. The red rug could not make up its mind whether to float or sink; every motion of the water caused it to shift with weighty indecision. A dank and unpleasant smell was everywhere.

  Daunt stepped aside to let Rita see in. She waded through her front door and into the living room. He watched her face as she surveyed her home, admiring her impassivity as she contemplated the damage.

  “It will take weeks to dry out. Months, even.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Where will you go? To the Swan? Margot and Jonathan might be glad of your company when her girls go home. Or the Vaughans? They would be pleased to have you.”

  She shrugged. Her thoughts were on other more fundamental matters. This devastation of her home was a trivial detail.

  “The books first,” she said.

  He waded to the spot and saw that the lower shelves were empty. Above the waterline the upper shelves were double-stacked.

  “You were prepared.”

  She shrugged. “When you live by the river . . .”

  He handed her the books a few at a time; she passed them out of the window and placed them in the boat, that bobbed just below the level of the sill. They worked in silence. One volume she put aside, on the cushion of the blue armchair.

  When the first bookcase was empty and the boat was low in the water, he rowed it back to Collodion and unloaded there. On his return to the cottage, he found Rita in the blue chair, still on its boxes. The water from her skirt was darkening the color of the fabric.

  “I always wanted to photograph you in that blue chair.”

  She lifted her eyes from the book. “They’ve called off the search, haven’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s not coming back.”

  “No.” He knew it was true. He had the feeling that the world might easily stop turning without the girl in it. Every hour was arduous, and when it was over, you had to start again with a new one, no better. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it going.

  “Look,” he said. “You went to all that trouble to save the blue chair, and now your dress is making it wet.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The thing is, the world seemed complete before she came. And then she was here. And now she’s gone, there’s something missing.”

  “I found her in the river. I feel as if I should be able to find her again.”

  Rita nodded. “When I thought she was dead, I wanted so much for her to live. Instead of leaving her alone there, I stayed. I held her wrist. And she lived. I want to do the same now. I keep thinking about the story of Quietly and what he did to save his child. I understand it now. I would go anywhere, Daunt, I would suffer any pain to have my child in my arms again.”

  She sat in her wet skirt on the blue chair over the water, and he stood motionless in the water. They did not know what to do with their grief. Then wordlessly they set to packing books again.

  They emptied the second bookshelf, and he rowed again to Collodion to unpack.

  On his return, Rita was reading the book that she had separated from the rest.

  Although the sky was dismal and cast an indifferent light, the greyness was enlivened, even indoors, by a silvery shimmer: reflections from the endless water, that cast ripples of light over Rita’s reading face. He watched her features lighten and darken in the shifting illumination. Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this—that some things were only truly seen by a human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.

  Slowly, Rita brought the book down to her side. She continued to stare at the place where the book had been, as if the text continued there, written on the water light.

  “What is it?” he said. “What are you thinking?”

  She did not move. “The cressmen.” She still stared at nothing.

  He was nonplussed. He wouldn’t have thought cressmen capable of inspiring intensity like this. “From the Swan?”

  “Yes.” She turned her eyes to his. “I remembered it on solstice night. The baby was born in its caul.”

  “What’s a caul?”

  “It’s a sack of fluid. The baby grows inside it for the entire pregnancy. Usually it ruptures during labor, but sometimes—rarely—it survives labor and the baby emerges with the caul intact. I cut it open last night and out he swam on a wave.”

  “But . . . what has that to do with cressmen?”

  “Because of a strange thing I heard them say at the Swan. They were talking about Darwin and man being born of apes, and one of the cressmen reckoned he’d heard a story about men once being underwater creatures.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  She shook her head, raised the book, and tapped it. “It’s in here. Once upon a time, a long time ago, an ape became human. And once upon a time, long before that, an aquatic creature came out of the water and breathed air.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “And?”

  “And once upon a time, twelve months ago, a little girl who should have drowned didn’t. She entered the water and seemed to die there. You pulled her out; I found she
had no pulse, no breath, her pupils were dilated. Every sign told me she was dead. And then she wasn’t. How can that be? Dead people do not return to life.

  “Immersing the face in cold water slows the heart dramatically. Is it possible that sudden immersion in very cold water might slow the heart and constrict the blood flow so radically that a person might appear to be dead? It sounds too strange to be true. But if you remember that every one of us spent the first nine months of our existence suspended in a sac filled with liquid, perhaps that makes it a little less incredible. Remember next that our land-going, oxygen-breathing selves derive from underwater life—that we once lived in water as we now live in air. Think of that, and doesn’t the impossible start to edge closer to the conceivable?”

  She tucked the book into a pocket and put out a hand for Daunt to help her down from the chair. “I’ll get no further, I think. I’ve come as far as I can go. Ideas, notions, theories.”

  Rita packed her medicines, a bundle of clothes and linen, her Sunday shoes, and they left without attempting to close the door. They rowed to Collodion.

  “Where now?” he said.

  “Nowhere.” She flung herself on the bench and closed her eyes.

  “Which side of the river is that?”

  “It’s right here, Daunt. I’d like to stay here.”

  Later, on Collodion’s narrow bed and with the river cradling the boat, Daunt and Rita loved each other. In the dark his hands saw what his eyes could not: the curl of her loosened hair, the curve and point of her breasts, the shallow dip at the small of her back, the outward flare of her hips. They saw the smoothness of her thighs and the complicated fleshiness between them. He touched her and she touched him and when he entered her he felt a river rise in him. For a little while he mastered the river; then it grew and he abandoned himself to it. There was only the river then, nothing but the river, and the river was everything—until the current at last surged and broke and ebbed.