It’s not that he hadn’t considered Devil’s Weir in advance: how to manage it, whether there would be someone about to help haul the boat out and drag it round. He had been aware of the other possibility too. It being winter and there being scarcely any fall to think of . . . He knew how to do it: draw the oars in, keep them ready to steady the boat the other side, and at the same time—rapidly, in a single smooth motion—throw yourself back and lie low. Get it wrong and you’ll either take a blow to the head or crack your blade or both. But he knew. He’d done it before.
What had gone wrong? Seduced by the river, he’d fallen into that state of transcendence—that was his error. He might have got away with it, except that then—as he remembered it now—three things had come upon him at once.
The first was that, without his noticing it, time had passed and the light faded to a dim grey.
The second was that some shape—vague, hard to pin down—caught his eye and distracted him at just the moment he most needed to concentrate.
The third was Devil’s Weir. Here. Now.
The current had taken possession of the boat—he flung himself back—the river surged, a great liquid limb rising beneath him, thrusting him up—the underside of the weir, black-wet, solid as a tree trunk, hurtling in the direction of his nose—not even the time to exclaim “Oh!” before—
He tried to explain all this to the nurse. It was a lot to say when every word was a new and arduous route through the alphabet and his own mouth a foreign country. At first he was slow, his speech clumsy, and he semaphored with his hands to fill the gaps in his account. Sometimes she chipped in, anticipating intelligently what he meant to say, and he grunted to indicate “Yes, that’s right.” Little by little he found ways of approximating the sounds he needed and became more fluent.
“And is that where you found her? At Devil’s Weir?”
“No. Here.”
He’d come round under the night sky. Too cold to feel pain but knowing by animal instinct he was injured. Understanding that he needed warmth and shelter if he was to survive. He had clambered out of the boat carefully for fear of collapsing in the cold, cold water. It was then that the white shape had come drifting towards him. He’d known instantly that it was a body, a child’s body. He’d stretched out his arms and the river delivered her neatly into them.
“And you thought she was dead.”
He grunted yes.
“Hm.” He heard her take a breath, put the thought aside for later. “But how did you get from Devil’s Weir to here? A man with your injuries in a damaged boat—you can’t have done it alone.”
He shook his head. He had no idea.
“I wonder what it was that you saw? The thing that distracted you at Devil’s Weir.”
Daunt was a man whose memory was made of pictures. He found one: the pale moon suspended above the river. He found another: the looming weir, massive against a darkening sky. There was something else too. It hurt his face to frown as he tried to make sense of it. Like a photographic plate his mind usually registered clear outlines, detail, tones, perspectives. This time he found only a blur. It was like a photograph where the subject has moved, dancing through the ten seconds of the exposure that are required to give the illusion of a single moment. He would have liked to go back and live that moment again if he could, open up time and stretch it out full length to see what it was that had left this blur on his retina.
He shook his head in uncertainty; winced at the movement.
“Was it a person? Perhaps someone saw what happened and helped you?”
Was it? Tentatively he nodded.
“On the bank?”
“River.” That he was sure of.
“Gypsy boats? They are never far away at this time of year.”
“A single vessel.”
“Another rowing boat?”
“No.”
“A barge?”
His blur was not a barge. It was slighter, a few lines merely . . . “A punt, perhaps?” Now that he had heard himself suggest it, the blur resolved itself a fraction. A long, low vessel navigated by a tall, lean figure . . . “Yes, I think so.”
He heard the nurse half laugh. “Be careful who you tell. They will have it that you have met Quietly on the river.”
“Who?”
“Quietly. The ferryman. He sees to it that those who get into trouble on the river make it safely home again. Unless it is their time. In which case he sees them to the other side of the river.” She pronounced those last words in a tone of half-comic gravity.
He laughed, felt the pull of pain at his split lip, and drew in breath sharply.
Footsteps. The firm and gentle press of cloth at his face, and the sensation of coolness. “Enough talking for a little while,” she said.
“Your fault. You made me laugh.”
He was reluctant to let the conversation come to an end. “Tell me about Quietly.”
Her footsteps returned to the chair and he pictured her there, plain and middling height and strong and neither young nor old.
“There are more than a dozen versions. I’ll just begin and see what comes.
“Many years ago, in the days when there were fewer bridges than there are today, the Quietlys lived on the banks of the river not very far from here. They were a family with one peculiarity: the men were all mute. That is why they were called Quietly and nobody remembers their real name. They built punts for a living and for a reasonable price would ferry you across the river from their yard and come and collect you again when you hailed them. The yard passed down from grandfather to father to son, over many generations, along with the inability to speak.
“You might think that being unable to speak would be a difficulty in the matter of romance, but the Quietlys were dependable, kindly men, and there are women who like a peaceful life. It so happened that in every generation some woman was found who was content to live without conversation and bear the next generation of punt builders, and all the little girls could speak and none of the boys.
“At the time of this story, the Quietly of the day had a daughter. She was the apple of his eye, and doted upon by her parents and grandparents alike. One day she went missing. They looked everywhere for the child, alerted neighbors, and till night fell the riverbank rang with the sound of her mother and other people calling her name. She was not found, not that day, nor the next. But after three days her poor drowned body was recovered from a spot a little way downstream, and they buried her.
“Time passed. Through the rest of the winter and the spring and summer and autumn the girl’s father continued building punts as before, ferried people over the river when needed, and in the evenings sat smoking by the fireside, but his muteness altered. The silence that had once been warm, good-humored, and full of companionship grew dark and was filled with grey shadows. The year turned full circle and came to the anniversary of the day when the child had disappeared.
“On that day Quietly’s wife returned home from market to find a customer waiting. ‘If you need to cross the river, it is my husband you want. You will find him in the yard,’ she told him. But the customer, whose face she now saw was pale, said, ‘I have already found him. He took me halfway across the river, and when we were at the deepest place, he handed me the pole and stepped out of the punt.’ ”
Rita paused to take a sip of tea.
“And he haunts the river till this day?” Daunt asked.
“The story isn’t over yet. After three days Quietly’s wife was weeping by the fireside at midnight, when there came a knock at the door. She could not think of a single person likely to call on her at such a late hour. Could it be someone wishing to cross the river? She went to the door. Out of fear she did not open it, but only called, ‘It is too late. Wait till morning and my father-in-law will take you across.’
“The answer came: ‘Mama! Let me in! It’s cold outside.’
“With trembling hands she unlocked the door and in the porch found her own little girl,
the one she had buried a year ago to the day, alive and well. Behind the child was her husband, Quietly. She clutched the girl in her arms, wept to have her back, too overjoyed at first to wonder how such a thing had come to pass. Then she thought, It cannot be, and she held the child at arm’s length to stare at her, but it was unmistakably the very same daughter she had lost twelve months before.
“ ‘Where did you come from?’ she asked in wonderment, and the little girl answered, ‘From that place on the other side of the river. Daddy came to get me.’
“The woman turned her eyes to her husband. Quietly stood a little way back from the child, not in the porch but on the path.
“ ‘Come in, dear,’ she said, and opened the door wide and gestured to the hearth, where the fire was lit and his pipe was still on the mantel. But Quietly did not step forwards. She couldn’t help but notice he was altered, though it was hard to say exactly how. Perhaps he was paler and thinner than he had been before, or perhaps it was his eyes that were a darker version of the color they had been before.
“ ‘Come in!’ she repeated, and Quietly shook his head.
“She understood then that he would never be able to come inside again.
“The good woman drew her daughter inside and closed the door, and since that day any number of people on the river have met Quietly on the river. There was a price to be paid for the return of his daughter, and he paid it. For all eternity he must watch over the river, waiting for someone to get into difficulty, and then, if it is not their time, he sees them safely to the bank; and if it is their time, he sees them safely to that other place, the one he went to in search of his child, and there they must remain.”
They gave the story the silent pause it deserved, and when it was over, he spoke again.
“So it was not my time, and Quietly towed me to Radcot.”
“If the story is to be believed.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s a good story nonetheless. The devoted father rescuing his child at the price of his own life.”
“It cost him more than that,” she said. “It cost him his death too. There is no eternal rest for Quietly: he must exist forever in between the two states, policing its border.”
“You don’t believe that either,” he said. “Do they believe it here?”
“Beszant the boat mender does. He reckons he saw him, when he was a youth and slipped on the jetty. The cressmen think he keeps them safe when the river rises up the fields and turns them marshy. One of the gravel diggers was a skeptic till the day he got his ankle trapped underwater. He swears blind it was Quietly that reached down and freed him.”
The conversation put him in mind of the child. “I thought she was dead,” he told her. “She came drifting into my arms, white and cold and with her eyes closed . . . I would have sworn she was dead.”
“They all thought so too.”
“But not you.”
“I too. I was certain of it.” There was a thoughtful silence in the room. He thought of questions he might ask but stilled his tongue. Something told him there might be more to come if he waited, and he was right.
“You are a photographer, Mr. Daunt, which makes you a scientist. I am a nurse, which makes me a scientist too, but I cannot explain what I witnessed last night.” She spoke slowly and with great calm, choosing her words carefully. “The girl was not breathing. She had no pulse. Her pupils were dilated. The body was cold. The skin was white. According to every rule in the textbook, she was dead. I had no doubt about it. After I had checked for signs of life and found none, I might easily have come away. I don’t know why I stayed, except that I felt uneasy for reasons I could not explain to myself. For a short time—between two minutes and three, in my estimation—I continued to stand by the body. Her hand was between my hands; my fingertips were touching her wrist. In that position I felt something flicker between her skin and mine. It felt like a pulse. But I knew it couldn’t be—she was dead.
“Now, it is actually just possible to mistake your own pulse for the pulse of a patient, because there is pulse in the fingertips. Let me show you.” He heard the rustle of her skirts behind her footsteps as she approached the bed. She took his hand, laid it palm up on her own open palm, and placed her other palm over it so that his hand was enclosed in hers and her fingertips rested lightly at the inside of his wrist. “There. I can feel your pulse”—his blood lurched at her touch—“and I can also feel mine. It’s a very delicate pulse, but it’s mine.”
He murmured a note of understanding in his throat, and his senses jumped to attention to catch a flicker of her blood. It was too faint.
“So, to avoid all uncertainty, I did this—” Her hands slipped briskly away, his own left abandoned on the counterpane; his swell of disappointment ebbed when her fingertips alighted on the tender spot beneath his ear.
“This is a good pulse point. I pressed firmly, waited for another minute. There was nothing. Nothing, and nothing, and more nothing. I told myself I was mad to be standing in the dark and the bitter cold, waiting for a pulse to beat in a dead child. Then it came again.”
“How slow can a heart beat?”
“Children’s hearts are faster than adult hearts. A hundred beats a minute is quite ordinary. Sixty is dangerous. Forty is perilous. At forty you expect the worst.”
On the inside of his eyelids he saw his own thoughts rise in blue cloud-like shapes. Above them he saw her thoughts, deep maroon and green stripes, moving horizontally from left to right across his field of vision, like slow and intent lightning flashes.
“One beat per minute . . . I have never known the pulse rate of a child to fall to less than forty per minute. Except when it falls to zero.”
Her fingertip retained its connection with his skin. In a moment or two she would come out of her distraction and remove it. He tried to keep her in this train of thought.
“Below forty and they die?”
“In my experience, yes.”
“But she wasn’t dead.”
“She wasn’t dead.”
“She was alive.”
“At one beat a minute? It’s not possible.”
“But if it was impossible for her to be living and impossible for her to be dead, what was she?”
His blue clouds of thought dissolved. The leaf-green and plum stripes swelled with intensity and moved so far to the right that they were out of range. She exhaled a lungful of frustration, withdrew her fingers from his neck, and splinters of bronze shot up in his vision as from a falling coal in the fire.
It was he who broke the silence. “She was like Quietly. Between the two states.”
He heard a puff of exasperation that ended in a half laugh.
He laughed too. The stretching of his skin made him cry out in pain.
“Ow,” he cried. “Ow!”
It brought her attention back to him; brought the tips of her fingers back to his skin. As she held the cooling cloth against his skin, he realized that his vision of Rita Sunday had altered in the course of their conversation. She now looked not altogether unlike the Maidens of Destiny.
Is It Finished?
The winter room was alive with voices and tightly packed with drinkers, many of them standing, for there were not enough seats. Margot stepped out from the dim corridor and nudged the nearest backs, saying, “Step aside, please, make room.” They shuffled out of her way and she stepped into the fray. Close behind her, Mr. Vaughan appeared with the child wrapped in a blanket in his arms. Behind them came Mrs. Vaughan, delivering little nods of thanks to left and right.
At the sight of the child, those first drinkers hushed. Those who were a little deeper in the room caught the sudden drop of noise behind them, found Margot prodding them out of the way, and fell quiet in turn. The girl’s head rested on Vaughan’s shoulder, her face pressed into his neck, half-concealed. Her eyes were closed. The slump of her body told them she was asleep. The silence made faster progres
s than the Vaughans did, and before they were halfway to the door, the peace was as resounding as the din had been a few moments before. The crowd leant and rose on tiptoes and peered hungrily to secure a better view of the girl’s sleeping face, and at the back some clambered onto stools and tables to see her. Margot no longer needed to prod and nudge, for the mass of bodies parted of its own accord, and when they reached the door a bargeman stood ready to open it for them.
The Vaughans passed through the door.
Margot nodded at the bargeman to close it behind them. No one had moved. Where the crowd had parted, a curved line of floorboards was still visible. There was a moment of stillness when nobody spoke. Then there came a shuffling of feet, a clearing of throats, and in no time the crowd remassed and the boom of voices was louder even than before.
For another hour they talked. Every detail of the day’s events was gone over, the facts were weighed and combined, quantities of surmising, eavesdropping, and supposition were stirred in for flavor, and a good sprinkling of rumor was added like yeast to make it rise.
There came the sense that the story had now moved on. It was no longer here, at the Swan at Radcot, but out there, in the world. The drinkers remembered the rest of the world, their wives and children, their neighbors, their friends. There were people out there who did not yet know the story of the Vaughans and the young Armstrong. In ones and twos and then in a trickle that became a steady stream, the drinkers departed. Margot organized the more sober of the lingerers to escort the most drunken along the riverbank and see that they did not fall in.
When the door closed and the winter room was empty, Joe set to sweeping the floor. He made frequent pauses to rest on the broom and catch his breath. Jonathan carried in logs. There was an uncharacteristic air of melancholy in his angled eyes as he tipped them into the basket by the fire.
“What’s the matter, son?”
The boy sighed. “I wanted her to stay with us.”
Once Upon a River Page 15