Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  She went to the parsonage, burst into the parson’s office in a great flurry of words and tears.

  “Take your time, Mrs. White,” he counseled, but she would not, and eventually he made out the gist of the story and eventually she fell silent and breathed again.

  “So she has been recognized by the deceased Mrs. Armstrong’s landlady, is that it? And the child is with young Mr. Armstrong now?” He shook his head, frowning. “If what you say is true . . . I don’t know how poor Mrs. Vaughan will take it. Are you quite certain of this, Mrs. White?”

  “As sure as day is day! I saw it. I heard it. Or as good as. But tell me, Parson, how can a young man like that have the care of a little girl? He won’t know. Suppose he don’t know how to sing her a lullaby when she wakes in the night? And does he have a guard on the fireplace? A lot of young men don’t, you know. What about her doll? Did she take that with her?”

  The parson did his best, but it was an anxiety no mortal could soothe entirely, and Lily was still distressed as she left the parsonage. Walking back along the riverbank, she was prey to the very worst thoughts and memories. All the while Ann had been in safety with the Vaughans, Lily had been able to take refuge in thinking of the child’s well-being whenever she felt afraid, for the child was with Mrs. Vaughan, but that comfort was lost to her now. Ann had been placed into the arms of a young man—a widower, without a wife—so who would take care of her now? Mothers could be trusted, but . . . The past came back to her with all the more force for having been held at bay for six months. She remembered the very beginning of it all.

  “Do you find it lonely living without a father?” her mother had asked one day. “Do you think it would be nice to have a father again?” Sometimes when adults asked questions, they already knew the answer they wanted you to give, and Lily liked to give the answer that made her mother smile. Her mother was smiling on the front of her face as she asked the question, but Lily could see the worry behind. Lily felt her mother’s scrutiny as she thought about her answer.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s nice, isn’t it, just us?”

  Her mother had seemed relieved. But sometime later the question had returned, so Lily thought she must have got it wrong the first time. She watched her mother’s face, wanting only to please her, and tried again. “Yes, I would like a daddy.”

  The look on her mother’s face then was one that was kept mostly on the inside, and Lily was no closer to knowing if it was the right answer.

  Soon after that, a man came to their rooms. “So you are little Lily,” he said, looming over her. His teeth seemed to slope backwards into his mouth, and after the first glance she knew she did not like looking at his eyes.

  “This is Mr. Nash,” her mother explained nervously. In response to a glance from the man, she rushed on: “He is going to be your new father.” She looked to him for approval and he nodded without smiling.

  The new father stood aside.

  “This,” he said, “is Victor.”

  Revealed behind him was a boy shorter than Lily but older. His nose was stunted, his lips so meager they were all but invisible. His eyebrows were as pale as his skin and his eyes were slits.

  A hole opened in the boy’s face. He is going to eat me was Lily’s first thought.

  “Smile at your new brother,” her mother’s voice prompted.

  Hearing a note of fear, she glanced up, caught a complicated to-and-fro of glances between her mother and the new father. It seemed to enmesh her mother in a tangle she was unable to escape from. Is it my fault? Lily wondered. What did I do wrong? She didn’t want to get things wrong. She wanted to make her mother happy.

  Lily turned to Victor and forced her lips into a nervous, obedient smile.

  When Lily arrived back at Basketman’s Cottage, she knew before she even opened the door. The river smell was never so strong it could cover the fruity, yeasty odor, nor could the rain wash it away.

  “I had to go to the parsonage,” she began, but before she could get her excuse out, the first blow landed on her upper arm. The next found the softness of her belly, and as she turned away from his fists, it was her back and shoulders that took the attack. Mr. White had battered her too, but he was a drinker, and though he was big, he had not the expertise of Victor nor half his strength. His blows had been weighty, but in comparison to this, lax, flabby. She’d been able to dodge Old Whitey’s poorly launched punches, deflect his knuckles, and when he did land a blow home, the bruises were gone in a week. Victor, though, had been beating her for nearly thirty years. He knew every one of her tiny repertoire of feints and ruses, teased her into moving one way so he could land a blow the other; he went about it with cold concentration, unmoved by pleas or tears. All she could do was let him.

  He never touched her face.

  When it was over, she lay on the floor until she heard him pull up a chair and sit down.

  She got to her feet, straightened her dress.

  “Are you hungry?” She tried to make her voice as ordinary as possible. He didn’t like a fuss afterwards.

  “I’ve eaten.”

  That meant he’d have left nothing for her.

  At the kitchen table, he exhaled with an air of satisfaction she recognized.

  “Have you had a good day, Victor?” she asked timidly.

  “A good day? A good day? I should say so.” He nodded with a secret air. “Things are coming on nicely.” She hovered on her feet. She would not sit down unless he told her to, but there being no food, she could not occupy herself with preparing a meal.

  He glanced towards the window.

  Will he go now? she hoped.

  But it was summer solstice night. Even in this rain, people would be about at all hours. Would he want to stay here all night?

  “River’s up. Scaring you silly, I expect. Giving you nightmares, is it?”

  In fact, the nightmares had ceased since Ann had arrived at the Swan. Her sister couldn’t be in two places at once, she supposed. But she needn’t tell Victor that. It would give him satisfaction to think she was still suffering from the visitations that had tormented her for so long. She nodded.

  “Fancy being afraid of water. It’s everywhere. Places you can see it. Places you can’t. Places you know about it and places you don’t. Funny thing, water.”

  Victor was a man who liked knowing. One of the best ways of avoiding his torments was to be ignorant about something and let him put you straight. Now he was enjoying his expertise and wanted to explain at length.

  “There’s as much water hidden underground as there is above,” he told her. “Enormous caverns of it, deep underground, vast as cathedrals. Think of that, Lily. Think of that church you like so much, full right up of water, deep and dark and still. Imagine that amount of water but underground, like a lake. All kinds of water down there, there is.”

  She stared. It couldn’t be true! Water underground? Whoever heard of such a thing?

  “Fountains and springs and wells,” he went on, watching her sharply through his narrow eyes. She felt her heart pounding. Her throat was dry. “Ponds too. Brooks and rivers and marshes.” She felt her knees weaken. “And lagoons. Bet you never even heard of lagoons, have you Lily?” She shook her head, pictured awful creatures like dragons that spewed water instead of fire.

  “It’s a marvelous fact of nature, Lily. There we go, about our business, on the surface of the earth, but beneath our feet, down there”—with a gesture to his feet—“there are great lakes underground.”

  “Where, exactly?” Her voice was full of fear and she was trembling.

  “Why, anywhere. Here, maybe. Right under your cottage.”

  She quivered with fear.

  His eye traveled up and down her body.

  It might not be over yet, she thought. He might want the other thing too.

  He did.

  Two Strange Things

  And how did the night end over in Kelmscott, at the Armstrong farm? They sat up late, later than th
e children had ever stayed up before. There were candles on the table and all were dressed for bed except Armstrong, but no one had any thought of sleeping. The child sat on the lap of the eldest daughter and the other children gathered round to pet her and offer their favorite toys as Armstrong and Bess looked on. The boys and girls were enchanted, exclaiming at her every movement, every blink of her tired eyes. The youngest, only a couple of years older than the girl herself, offered his new wooden toy bought that day at the fair, and, when she grasped it in her little fingers, exclaimed joyfully, “She likes it!” The older girls had brushed her hair and plaited it, washed her face and hands, and dressed her in one of their outgrown nightdresses.

  “Is she staying?” they asked a dozen times. “Is she going to live with us now?”

  “Is Robin coming home to be her daddy?” another little voice piped up, but with a note of worry about such a thing.

  “We’ll see,” said Armstrong, and his wife cast a sidelong glance at him.

  Coming away from the fair, as soon as they had put distance between themselves and the crowds, Robin had passed the child into his mother’s arms and gone his own way back to Oxford, giving no clear account of his intentions or when they might expect to see him at the farm again. There had not yet been a moment for Armstrong and Bess to consult each other about the events of the day out of the hearing of the children.

  The child’s eyes began to close and the children hushed around her. When she was on the brink of sleep, her fingers loosened their grip on the little toy, and it fell to the floor with a bump that woke her again. Looking dazedly around her, her face pulled into a weary frown, and before she could open her mouth to cry, Bess lifted her away and said, “Come on. Bed, all of you!”

  There was some arguing over the child, all wanting to have her sleep in their room, but Bess was firm: “She’ll sleep with me tonight. If you have her with you, nobody will close their eyes.”

  She set the older girls to making sure the little ones got to bed, and took the child to her own bedroom. Bess sang softly to her as she laid her down and tucked her in, and in moments the girl’s eyes fluttered and she inched into the shallows of sleep.

  Bess lingered over the bed, searching for a hint of her own features in the child’s. She sought Robin in the sleeping face. She looked for echoes of her other children there. She would not think of him, the one who had fathered Robin before Armstrong had married her. She had buried his face years ago, and would not disinter it now.

  She remembered the letter that had started it all, the torn fragments in Robin’s pocket that she and Armstrong had pieced so unsuccessfully together. “Alice, Alice, Alice,” she had repeated then. The name was available to her tongue tonight, but she hesitated to pronounce it.

  When the child’s light breathing told her she was deeply asleep, Bess crept away.

  Armstrong was in the armchair by the unlit hearth. There was an air of unreality about the scene, she in her nightclothes, he in his outdoor jacket, candles in the dark but no fire and the muggy softness of the day still lingering. Her husband looked grave as he turned the little wooden figurine in his hands abstractedly.

  She waited but he did not speak, too lost in his own thoughts.

  “Is it her?” she asked, after a time. “Is she Alice?”

  “I thought you might know. A woman’s instinct, or your Seeing eye.”

  She shrugged, touched the patch over her eye. “I’d like it to be her. She’s a dear little thing. They have taken to her.”

  “They have. But what about Robin? Is he up to something?”

  “If I know Robin, yes, more than likely. But you are usually his champion—what makes you think so?”

  “That woman. Mrs. Eavis. She led me there, to that spot, Bess. I’m as sure as it is possible to be. She deliberately let me see her, then she led me on a mad chase all around the fair till she came upon the Vaughans, and so timed it that I arrived just right to have the whole scene played out before me.”

  He fell to pondering, and Bess waited, knowing he would share his thoughts with her when he had them ordered.

  “What did she have to gain by acting as she did? It is nothing to her whose child it is. Money is what governs that woman, so somebody, somewhere, is paying her. Somebody paid for her to go away on her mysterious travels, so she was unavailable to identify the child one way or the other, and somebody has produced her now.”

  “And you think that person is Robin? But . . . I thought you said he didn’t even want the child.”

  He shook his head, in confusion. “I did say so. It is what I thought.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I don’t know what to think.”

  He brooded for a long minute, and Bess was about to say it was late and they should get at least a few hours’ sleep, when he spoke again. “There was another strange thing happened today.”

  He was staring at Freddy’s wooden toy, a carved figurine of a pig.

  “I went to see that photography stand at the fair. I thought we might have a photograph taken, all of us together, here at the farm. I was looking at the photographs for sale there—some were of fairs in recent times—and look what I found.”

  He reached into his capacious farmer’s pocket, took out the small photograph in the frame, and handed it to Bess.

  “A pig! Well, I never. And it can tell the time!” She squinted to make out the lettering on the placard beside the animal. “And it knows what age you are! Fancy that.”

  “Look closer. Look at the pig.”

  “A Tamworth. Like ours.”

  “Don’t you recognize her?”

  She looked again. Bess was familiar with the pigs, but still to her one pig was very like another. She knew her husband, though.

  “It’s not . . . ? Can it be . . . ?”

  “It is,” he said. “It’s Maud.”

  What Happened Next

  Two days after the summer fair, Daunt returned to Oxford, where he found himself distracted from his regular work by the oddity of the dramatic change in circumstances surrounding the child. He was uneasy about it for several reasons, and one, he realized, was that he missed her. It was ludicrous—all the while she had been at the Vaughans he had seen her only once, for the photographs. Yet there had been a connection between them: Daunt’s role in saving the girl had forged a link between himself and the Vaughans, created a door that could be knocked at and counted on to open at some point in the future. He had photographed the girl with her parents and found himself more than halfway to friendship with the family. For a short time he had enjoyed the expectation of seeing the child he had rescued grow up, had imagined he would see her changed from a little girl to a bigger one and then to adulthood. Now all that was gone and he felt bereft. He was reminded in his sorrow of that moment at the Swan when he had so unwisely and painfully pulled his swollen eyelids apart to see her and been subjected to a sort of violent recognition. He remembered how powerful had been the urge to claim her. His rational mind had got the better of him, but reason was no balm for this loss.

  When he was not thinking about the girl, he thought about Rita, and that was no better. If the girl had done one thing, it was to bring home to him how much he wanted a child. His wife had been the disappointed one when their marriage had not resulted in children; his own longing had been late in coming, but he felt it now.

  On the wall of his room over the shop he kept a collection of his favorite photographs. They were not framed but simply tacked up. Rita appeared in many of them. He gazed at them in painful perplexity. Were there ways of avoiding pregnancy? He had a notion that there were, but that they might not be altogether reliable. And in any case, since he wanted children . . . She couldn’t have made her feelings about the matter plainer, and though he had been surprised—he had seen her tenderness towards the girl, assumed too much—he knew he would be doing her an injustice to try to make her change her mind. Her knowledge of her own mind was what he admired about her. To expect her t
o bend to his wishes would be to expect her to be other than herself. No, she would not change, so he must.

  One by one he took the photographs of Rita down, indexed them according to the system, and filed them in the drawers in the shop. He would not forget her easily: he had exposed his gaze to her face for too long, and time had fixed it. It would not even be possible to avoid her in person; he could not disentangle himself from the story of the girl in which Rita was also involved. But he could at least refrain from seeking to spend time alone with her. He resolved that there would be no more photographs. He would have to teach himself not to love her.

  The consequence of this wise resolution was that the very next morning he left his assistant in charge, went upriver in Collodion with his camera, and knocked at her door.

  She met him with a weak smile. “Do you have news of her?”

  “No. Have you heard anything?”

  “No.”

  Rita was pale and there were shadows under her eyes. He set up a standard three-quarter-profile seated portrait, then went to prepare the plate. When he returned, a quick assessment of the light told him it would want twelve seconds. Rita settled herself in position and offered her face to the camera. In her usual direct fashion she hid nothing. Her gaze brimmed with grief. It would be a magnificent portrait, a portrait of her feelings that would be at the same time a portrait of his own feelings, but he felt none of his usual pleasurable anticipation.

  “I can’t bear seeing you so unhappy,” he said as he inserted the plate holder.

  “You are feeling no better than I am,” she said.

  He arranged the drape over himself, exposed the glass, and whipped the lens cap away, having never felt more miserable behind a camera in his life.