Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a time when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.
Daunt finished his book of photographs and it enjoyed a modest success. He had intended to create a fine volume that would include every town and every village, every myth and every folk tale, every jetty and every water wheel, every turn and twist of the river, but inevitably the book fell short of its ambition. Still he had sold over a hundred copies already, enough to order a reprint, and the book pleased many, including Rita.
Standing at the helm as Collodion powered along, Daunt had to acknowledge that the river was too vast a thing to be contained in any book. Majestic, powerful, unknowable, it lends itself tolerantly to the doings of men until it doesn’t, and then anything can happen. One day the river helpfully turns a wheel to grind your barley, the next it drowns your crop. He watched the water slide tantalizingly past the boat, seeming in its flashes of reflected light to contain fragments of the past and of the future. It has meant many things to many people over the years – he put a little essay into the book about that.
He wondered, fancifully, whether there was a way of appeasing the spirit of the river. A way of encouraging it to be on your side and not dangerously against you. Along with the dead dogs, illegal liquor, rashly flung wedding rings and stolen goods that litter the riverbed, there are pieces of gold and silver down there. Ritualistic offerings whose meanings are hard to fathom so many centuries later. He might throw something in himself. His book? He considered it. The book was worth five shillings, and there was Rita now. There was a home to maintain, and a boat, and a business, and a nursery to be decorated. Five shillings was too much to sacrifice to appease a deity in which he didn’t really believe. He would take photographs of it. How many photographs could a man take in a lifetime? A hundred thousand? About that. A hundred thousand slivers of life – ten or fifteen seconds long – captured by light on glass. Somehow, in all that photography, he would figure out how to capture the river.
Rita grew round as the months passed and the baby inside her grew. She and Daunt discussed names for their child. Iris, they thought, like the flowers that bloomed on the riverbank.
‘What if it’s a boy?’ Margot asked.
They shook their heads. It was a girl. They knew.
Rita thought sometimes of the women who’d lost their lives giving birth and she thought often of her own mother. When she felt the baby turn in her underwater world she thought of Quietly. There were times when God, who had once disappeared, seemed not so very far away. The future was unfathomable, but with every heartbeat she carried her daughter towards it.
And the girl? What of her? Accounts emerged of sightings of her in the company of the river gypsies. She was quite at ease there, apparently. She had fallen overboard in the dark that first solstice night, it was said, and her parents hadn’t realized she was gone until the next day. They gave her up for dead, until word reached them of a child being looked after by wealthy people at Buscot. It sounded as if she’d be all right. No need to hurry back. They’d be passing that way the same time next year. She seemed happy to be back in her gypsy life, so it was said, after her year of being lost.
These stories came late in the day, from far afield, one- and two-line reports, lacking detail, without colour or interest. They were taken up briefly by the regulars at the Swan, considered and discarded. It wasn’t much of a story, they felt, but then they never liked other people’s stories as much as their own. Jonathan’s was the version they preferred by far.
There are those who see her still, on the river, in good and bad weather, when the current is treacherous or slow, when mist obscures the view and when the surface glitters. The drinkers see her when they mistake their footing, the worse for wear after one glass too many. Rash boys see her when they jump from the bridge on a fine summer’s day and discover how the serene surface stillness belies the pull of the current underneath. They see her when they find themselves out after twilight, and when they cannot bail as fast as they thought. For a time these reports were of a man and a child together in the punt. With the years the child grew until she did the punting herself, and then came the time – nobody can remember when exactly – when it was no longer the two of them, but she alone. Majestic, they say; strong as three men; insubstantial as the mist. She handles the punt with smooth grace and has all her father’s mastery over the water. If you ask where she lives, they will blow their cheeks out and shake their heads in mystification. ‘At Radcot, perhaps,’ they suggest at Buscot, but at Radcot they shrug and wonder if it’s not at Buscot.
At the Swan, if you press them, they will tell you she lives on the other side of the river, though they don’t know exactly where. But wherever she lives – if she does live anywhere, and I am inclined to doubt it – she is never far away, and when a soul is in danger she is always there. When it is not time to cross that border she will see that you keep on the right side of it. And when it is time, why, she will see you just as surely to that other destination, the one you didn’t know you were headed for, at least, not today.
And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, surely you have rivers of your own to attend to?
Author’s Note
THE RIVER THAMES irrigates not only the landscape but also the imagination, and as it does so, it alters. At times the demands of the story have called upon me to tinker with travel times and nudge locations up- or downstream by a few furlongs. If reading my book inspires you to go on a river walk (something I wholeheartedly recommend), by all means take this book with you – but you might want to take a map or guidebook too.
The character of Henry Daunt is inspired by the magnificent real-life photographer of the Thames, Henry Taunt. Like my Henry, he had a houseboat kitted out as a darkroom. During the course of his lifetime he took some 53,000 photographs using the wet collodion process. His work came close to being destroyed when, after his death, his house was sold and his garden workshop dismantled. On learning that many thousands of the glass plates stored there had already been smashed or wiped clean for use as greenhouse glass, a local historian, Harry Paintin, alerted E. E. Skuse, the city librarian in Oxford. Skuse was able to stop the work and arrange removal of the surviving plates for safekeeping. I note their names here out of gratitude for their swift actions. It is thanks to them that I have been able to explore the Victorian Thames visually and weave this story around Taunt’s images.
Do people really drown and come to life again? Well, not really, but it can seem so. The mammalian dive reflex is triggered when a person is suddenly submerged, face and body, into very cold water. The body’s metabolism slows as the reflex redirects circulation away from the limbs and routes blood between the heart, brain and lungs only. The heart beats more slowly and oxygen is conserved for essential bodily processes, so as to maintain life for as long as possible. Once recovered from the water, the near-drowned person will appear dead. This physiological phenomenon was first written up in the medical journals in the middle of the twentieth century. The dive reflex is thought to occur in all mammals, both terrestrial and aquatic. It has been observed in adult humans, but is believed to be most dramatic in small children.