“It is not with the first bleeding that your readiness to conceive commences, but in the few weeks before. If in that time a baby starts, the signs will not have a chance to begin again. This is what has happened in your case. In about half a year you will be a mother again.”
Helena blinked. It took time for the information to sink into a mind made turbulent with grief, but it finally happened and then she exclaimed, “Oh!” very gently and brought her hand to her belly and placed it there. A small smile pulled feebly at her lips, and the tear she shed was not the same kind of tear that had wetted her pillow before.
A faint frown crossed her face, and she said, “Oh!” a second time, in puzzlement, as though, following her initial surprise, enlightenment had been shed on some dark and distant aspect of her mind.
With that, she closed her eyes and fell into a deep and natural sleep.
Downstairs, Vaughan was standing in the dimness of his study, looking out of the window. He had not lit the lamps. He had not taken his jacket off. He had not moved, it seemed, for hours.
When Rita knocked and came in, she found Vaughan glazed, more than half-absent, a man too enmeshed in his previous thoughts to attend to the present. “Yes,” he told her in a hollow voice, when she said Helena was sleeping, and “No,” when she asked whether he himself needed a draft to help him sleep. “Yes,” he said when she stressed that Helena must be preserved from any further shocks.
“It’s particularly important,” she emphasized, “now that there is a new baby on the way.”
“Right,” he said dully, leaving her uncertain whether he had actually taken the news in. Plainly he believed the conversation to be at an end, for he turned back to the window and returned to whatever it was that held his mind hostage.
Rita let herself out into the garden, by the doors whose new locks were now painfully redundant, and went down to the river. The summer rain burst slackly on her shoulders in fat, warm drops that seemed to contain double their weight of water. Though it was evening, it was not yet dark, and the light fell on wet leaves and puddled paths, casting everything in glinting silver. The river’s gleam was lent a hammered finish by the incessant raindrops.
Rita felt a swelling in her own throat. For hours she had been preoccupied with medical matters, had taken refuge in the demands and challenges of her work. Now that she was alone, sorrow welled up in her, and she allowed tears to join the raindrops on her face.
She had never once visited Buscot Lodge without seeing the girl. At every visit she had taken the child on her knee, or thrown pebbles with her into the river, or watched ducks and swans sail by, reflected in the water. The child had sometimes put her hand in hers, and she had pretended to herself that her pleasure in this gesture of trust was a small and unimportant thing. But when she had seen the tall woman with the spike for a nose swing the child away from the Vaughans and into the arms of Robin Armstrong, the instinct that had caused Helena to reach out imploringly to the child had found an echo in her own breast.
Sobbing in a way that she scarcely recognized, Rita attempted to gather herself. “You are being very foolish,” she addressed herself. “This is not like you.” The stern words had no impact. “It’s not as if she were your child,” she continued, but at these words her tears only redoubled.
Leaning against a tree trunk, Rita gave way to her feelings; but after ten minutes of bitter weeping, there was no end in sight to her sorrow. She remembered the solace God had once brought her in the days when she had faith. “You see why I don’t believe in you?” she addressed him. “Because at times like this I’m on my own. I know I am.”
Her self-pity did not last long. “This is no good,” she exhorted herself. “Whatever’s the matter with you?” She rubbed her eyes with violent energy, cursing the rain in language that would have scandalized the nuns, and picked up her pace, throwing herself into a headlong dash along the path till the breathlessness of exertion replaced the heaving of emotion in her chest.
As she neared the Swan, the din of voices filled the air. The farmhands and the cressmen and the gravel diggers were exhilarated by the day of festivity in a long season of hard work, and intoxicated too. The endlessness of the light gave rise to all sorts of excess, and regulars and visitors alike were making the most of it. Despite the rain, some were outside on the riverbank. Soaked to the skin, they imbibed, not minding—not even noticing—the rain that diluted the liquor as they told each other rambling versions of the afternoon’s events.
Rita had no wish to be drawn into the throng. People had seen her leave the fair with the Vaughans, and if they saw her now, they would inevitably stop her and want the story. She had no intention of telling anyone what was the Vaughans’ private business, but getting that across to a crowd of curious drunks would be no easy matter. She turned up the collar of her cape, trying not to mind the rivulets of water it sent down her neck, and dipped her head so that her face was hidden. For the rest she would have to count on speed and the drunkenness of the crowd to get past unaccosted.
Because her head was down, she failed to spot one of the farmhands, relieving himself into the river. He turned, buttoning up rather haphazardly, and she almost ran into him. He was drunk but not too drunk to apologize—“Pardon me, Miss Sunday”—and staggered off to his fellow drinkers. He was bound to talk, and her chances of getting beyond the inn unaccosted were slight.
“Rita!” she heard, and sighed, bowing to the inevitable. “Rita!” the voice came again, low and urgent, and now she understood it did not come from the tables on the bank. It was from the river. There was Collodion, moored half concealed under the willow. And there was Daunt, beckoning her aboard. She reached the ladder, climbed the first rungs. His hand reached down; she put hers into it, felt herself hauled up, and was aboard.
Belowdecks, all the last boxes, bottles, and photographic plates had been stowed. The only sign of the business of the day was the paperwork on the table where Daunt had been logging the day’s plates and takings. There was a glass of hock on the table; he took down a second glass, filled it, and placed it in front of Rita.
They had last seen each other in the crowd that had gathered to witness the scene between the Vaughans and Robin Armstrong. They had parted there when Daunt, seeing the tall woman divide the mass of spectators to depart, had taken off in pursuit.
“Did you catch up with her?”
“The pace she was moving, I couldn’t close the distance. I was weighed down.” He gestured to the heavy box in which he carried extra plates. “She spoke to nobody. Stopped to look at nothing. Made directly for the far field, and when she got to the gate, someone was waiting for her with a pony and trap. She climbed up and away they went.”
“Back to her brothel at Bampton?”
“Presumably. Most polite people call it a lodging house. For an unmarried woman raised in a convent, you have a remarkable frankness about such a place.”
“Daunt, I spend a large part of my working life dealing with the consequences of those activities that take place between men and women and which polite language skirts around. If you knew half of what that job involves, you would understand why a mere word has no power to shock me. Bringing a child into the world is too bloody a thing to be photographed, and you will never see it, but I—I see it all the time.”
Rita had not touched her wine. but she took the glass now and drank the contents in a single draft. As she did this, lids lowered, Daunt noticed the swelling and pinkness around her eyes.
“You would make a good father, Henry Daunt. You will make a good father one day. They won’t tell you about the blood. You’ll be sent away, out of sight, out of hearing. By the time you are allowed back, they’ll have cleared it all away. Your wife will look pale and you’ll think it’s because she’s tired. You won’t know her blood is being wrung out of the sheets and into your drains. The housekeeper will scrub away at the stained bedsheets till it looks as innocuous as if someone spilled a cup of breakfast tea in bed about
five years ago. There’ll be cloves and orange peel in the room so you won’t notice the smell of iron. If there is a doctor, he might advise you man-to-man not to attempt marital intimacy for a time, but he won’t go into detail, so you won’t know about the tears and the stitches. You won’t know about the blood. Your wife will know. If she survives. But she won’t tell you.”
He refilled her glass. She drank it.
Daunt said nothing.
He drained his own glass.
“I know now,” he said carefully. “Now that you’ve told me.”
“Give me another, would you?” she asked.
Instead of refilling the glass that she held out to him, he placed it on the table and took her hand in his. “This is why you don’t have children? Why you don’t want to have children? Darling . . .”
“Don’t!”
She took a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose.
“When your wife has her baby, send for me. I’m named after Saint Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, remember. I’ll do my best for her. For the baby. And for you.”
She filled her glass herself, and this time she did not drink it in a single gulp but took a little sip, and when she looked at him again the fury had gone out of her and she had gathered herself.
“Helena Vaughan is pregnant,” she told him.
“Ah,” he said nervously. And “Ah” again.
“That’s more or less what she said. ‘Oh,’ and ‘Oh.’ ”
“Are they . . . pleased?”
“Pleased? I don’t know.” She frowned at the table. “What’s going on, Daunt? Did it really happen this afternoon?”
She looked at him for an answer.
“It didn’t feel real,” he said.
She nodded. “The way Mrs. Eavis delivered her lines. It seemed . . . rehearsed.”
“And she made sure everyone heard.”
“Robin Armstrong turning up at exactly the moment he did . . . not a second earlier or later; just in time for her to grab the girl and pass her to him.”
“Did you see the look she gave him when he first arrived?”
“Yes—as if she was expecting to see him—”
“—but was relieved he was there—”
“—a just-in-the-nick-of-time look—”
“—but gone again before anyone could really pay attention to it.”
“It was like something at the theater.”
“Orchestrated.”
“Planned. Right up to Mrs. Eavis’s departure with her transport waiting for her in the lane.”
“After you left in pursuit of Mrs. Eavis, Robin Armstrong made a great show of emotion. Overwhelmed by tender feelings. ‘Alice, oh, Alice,’ too quietly to be heard by anyone other than the nearest onlookers.”
Daunt pondered. “You think it wasn’t genuine? Yet, if it was said quietly, and not declaimed like Mrs. Eavis’s speeches . . . ?”
“It made him more plausible, and he could count on it being overheard and broadcast. He’s a much more talented actor than Mrs. Eavis.”
“I heard what everyone else was saying about him. They were all convinced.”
“They weren’t there when he pretended to faint when he first saw the girl. It was an act. His pulse was as steady and unflustered as any pulse I’ve ever taken.”
Daunt puzzled over it but came to no conclusion. “What about Vaughan? Why didn’t he do something?”
Rita frowned and shook her head. “He’s in a peculiar state. It’s as if he’s absent from himself. I told him Helena is pregnant and he barely replied. He seemed unable to take it in. He seems defeated.”
They sat in silence, and the river rocked beneath them, and the noise from the Swan carried, raucous and unruly, in the air.
“We might as well finish this, eh?” said Daunt, lifting the bottle again.
Rita nodded, yawning. It was dark now. The day had stretched her thin, to the point where she felt the boundary of herself dissolving into the atmosphere. Another glass and she might lose herself altogether. How she longed for the girl. She felt bereft. Daunt’s couch was there; she suddenly pictured herself stretched out upon it. Where would Daunt be in this fantasy? Before her imagination could answer the question, as Daunt uncorked the bottle for a last refill and was about to pour, Collodion dipped and tilted.
Rita and Daunt stared at each other in surprise. Someone had come aboard.
A knock at the cabin door. A woman’s voice: “Hello?”
It was one of the little Margots.
Daunt opened the door.
“It’s for Miss Sunday,” she said. “I spotted you coming here, and then when Dad was took bad, I thought . . . Sorry, Mr. Daunt.”
Daunt turned back into the cabin, while behind him little Margot ostentatiously looked in the other direction. Rita rose.
“Is there anything I . . . ?”
She shook her head and gave him a weary smile. “I’m sorry. About what I said. It’s not your fault.”
He took her hand, might have raised it to his lips, but instead gave it a squeeze, and she was gone.
All knew that Joe was unwell, and nobody tried to delay Rita as she followed little Margot up the bank and through the public rooms to Joe and Margot’s private quarters. The innkeeper lay on the improvised bed in the room that was furthest from the river. His chest rose and fell in an unmusical struggle, but his gaze was calm—so calm that the noisy effort of his lungs might have belonged to another person altogether. His limbs lay in patient stillness. With a twitch of the eyebrow, he communicated that his daughter could rejoin her mother at work; then, when they were alone, he smiled his mild smile at Rita.
“How many—more times—can I—do this?” he asked between gasps for breath.
She didn’t answer straightaway. It wasn’t a real question anyway. She put her ear to his chest and listened. She measured his pulse, assessed his pallor.
Then she sat down. She didn’t say, “There’s nothing I can do,” because this was Joe. He’d been keeping one step ahead of death for half a century. There was nothing about dying he didn’t know.
“I reckon—a few—more months . . .” he wheezed. He paused to concentrate on the job of siphoning oxygen out of the swampy air. “Half a year—maybe.”
“Something like that.”
Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people look at what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than family. She held his gaze with hers.
“I’d have liked”—another inadequate breath—“a better summer.”
“I know.”
“I shall miss—Margot. The family. This world has—marvelous things—I shall miss—”
“The river?”
He shook his head. “There will—always be—the river.”
He closed his eyes, and she watched the arduous heaving of his frail chest, planning the drafts she could make and bring to Margot tomorrow to aid his suffering without weakening him further. He fell into a slumber animated by presences visible only to him. Once or twice he uttered words, mostly indecipherable, but she thought she heard “river,” “Quietly,” “story.”
After a time he opened his eyes, blinked as he surfaced.
“Have you spoken to Margot?” she asked.
His eyebrows told her no.
“Wouldn’t it be better? Give her a bit of warning?”
The eyebrows indicated yes.
He closed his eyes, slipped back into sleep. She thought he might sleep longer this time, but as she was about to get up and slip out of the room, he opened his eyes again. He had the look he had when he was sinking.
“There are stories you have never heard on the other side of the river . . . I can only half remember them when I am this side . . . Such stories . . .”
“He’s very poorly,” she told Margot. “I’ll bring you something tomorrow that will make him more comfortable.”
“It’s this rain. He won’t pick up till the weather
improves.”
A customer called for cider and Rita didn’t need to answer. When Margot came back, she said, “You look worn-out yourself. The night is almost over and I bet you haven’t had a bite to eat since lunchtime. Sit here, where nobody can see you, and have a plate of something. You won’t be bothered and you can slip out the back afterwards.”
Gratefully, Rita sat down to bread and cheese. The door was ajar. There was a great din of conversation, and in it she heard Vaughan and Armstrong mentioned many times. She couldn’t think about it anymore. Thank goodness for the gravel diggers.
“There is this fellow,” she heard one say, “and he reckons—he reckons, I’m telling you—that humans, like you and me, are a kind of monkey!” He explained Darwin as best he could, to the hilarity of his mates.
“And I have heard another thing like that!” cried another. “That men once had tails and fins and lived beneath the water!”
“What? Under the river? I never heard such a thing!”
They disputed the matter back and forth, and the one who said it insisted that he had heard it in an inn ten miles upstream, and the other insisted he had made it up.
“It can’t be,” said another. “You’d ask Margot to fill your glass and all that’d come out’d be—” He completed his sentence with an impression of underwater speech that tickled the others so much, they all tried it. Very ingeniously, they then found the trick of blowing bubbles through the liquor left in their glasses. There was great laughter, much spluttering, and finally the sound of someone enjoying himself so much, he fell off his chair and floundered like a landed fish on the stone flags.
Rita passed her plate to the little Margot in the kitchen, let herself out the back door, and crept away. It was nearly morning. She might sleep for an hour.
Great Lakes Underground
Lily had seen the events of the afternoon from the back of the crowd, her view so obscured by the broad shoulders of workingmen and the summer hats of their companions that she had been able to make it out only with the help of her neighbors in the crowd. The taller spectators broadcast what they had seen, and the sharp-eared echoed what they had heard; but poor Lily, once she had struggled against the departing crowd to the spot where the encounter had taken place, found rain falling on an empty arena.
Once Upon a River Page 29