He became aware of a persistent, urgent whisper. ‘Fred!’
A woman was beckoning him to a lower-floor window at the next-door house. As he approached she leant forwards, candle in hand, yellow hair escaping from her nightcap.
‘What does she look like?’
He started again with the white skin and the nondescript hair, but she shook her head. ‘I mean, who does she look like? Does she look like the fellow?’
‘The state he’s in, I’d say there ain’t nobody on earth looks like him.’
‘Has he got the same hair? Limp and mousy?’
‘His is dark and wiry.’
‘Ah!’ She nodded meaningfully and left a dramatic pause while she gazed at him. ‘Did she remind you of anyone?’
‘It’s funny you should ask … I had the feeling she reminded me of someone, but I can’t think who.’
‘Is it …?’ She beckoned him closer and whispered a name in his ear.
When he stood back from her, his mouth was open and his eyes wide.
‘Oh!’ he said.
She gave him a look. ‘She would be about four now, wouldn’t she?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Keep it under your hat,’ she said. ‘I work up there. I’ll let them know in the morning.’
Fred was called then by the others. How did the man, the girl and a camera fit in a boat small enough to go under Devil’s Weir? He explained there was no camera in the boat. So how did they make the fellow out to be a photographer if he had no camera? Because of what was in his pockets. What was in his pockets, again?
He gave in to demand, telling the story once and again, and the second time he put more detail in, and the third time he anticipated the questions before they arose, and by the fourth time he had it just so. He left out the idea planted by the neighbour with the yellow hair. Finally, an hour after he arrived and frozen to the core, Frederick took his leave.
In the barn he told the story once more, in a mutter, to the horses. They opened their eyes and listened unsurprised to the beginning of the story. By the time he was halfway through they had returned to sleep, and before the end, so had he.
Back at his cousin’s cottage was an outbuilding, partly concealed by shrubs. Behind it, a pile of old rags with a hat on top organized itself into a man, albeit a scruffy one, and struggled to its feet. He waited to be sure that Frederick Heavins was out of the way, and then set off himself. Towards the river.
As Owen Albright followed the river downstream to reach the comfortable house he had bought in Kelmscott when he returned from his lucrative adventures on the sea, he didn’t feel the cold. Usually the walk home from the Swan was a time for regret – regret that his joints ached so badly, that he had drunk too much, that the best of life had passed him by and he had only aches and pains ahead of him now, a gradual decline till at the end he would sink into the grave. But having witnessed one miracle, he now saw miracles everywhere: the dark night sky his old eyes had ignored thousands of times before tonight unfolded itself above his head with the vastness of eternal mystery. He stopped to stare up and marvel. The river was splashing and chiming like silver on glass; the sound spilt into his ear, resonated in chambers of his mind he’d never known existed. He lowered his head to look at the water. For the first time in a lifetime by the river, he noticed – really noticed – that under a moonless sky the river makes its own mercurial light. Light that is also darkness; darkness that is also light.
A few things came home to him then – things he had always known but that had been buried under the days of his life. That he missed his father, who had died more than sixty years ago when Owen was still a boy. That he had been lucky in life and had much to be thankful for. That the woman waiting for him at home in bed was a kind and loving soul. And more: his knees didn’t hurt as much as usual, and there was an expansiveness in his chest that reminded him of how it had been to be young.
At home, he shook Mrs Connor’s shoulder before he had even undressed.
‘Don’t go thinking what you’re thinking,’ she grumbled. ‘And don’t bring the cold in with you either.’
‘Listen!’ he told her. ‘Just listen to this!’ And the story spilt out of him, the girl and the stranger, dead and alive.
‘What you been drinking?’ Mrs Connor wanted to know.
‘Hardly a thing.’ And he told her the story all over again, because she hadn’t grasped it.
She half sat up to see him properly, and there he was, the man she had worked for for thirty years and shared a bed with for twenty-nine, and he was still dressed, upright, a torrent of words pouring from him. She couldn’t make sense of it. Even when he had finished speaking, he stood there as if under a spell.
She got out of bed to help him off with his clothes. It wasn’t unknown for him to have such a skinful that he couldn’t manage his buttons alone. He wasn’t staggering though, nor did he lean on her, and when she unbuttoned his breeches she discovered him full of the kind of vigour that a drunk man is unlikely to sustain.
‘Look at you,’ she half chided him, and he embraced her with a kiss the like of which they had not shared since the early years of their time together. They rolled and tumbled in the bed for a little while, and when they were done, instead of turning over and going to sleep, Owen Albright kept her in his arms and kissed her hair.
‘Marry me, Mrs Connor.’
She laughed. ‘Whatever’s got into you, Mr Albright?’
He kissed her cheek, and she felt his smile in the kiss.
She was nearly asleep when he spoke again. ‘I saw it with my own eyes. It was me that held the candle. Dead, she was. That was one minute. And the next – alive!’
She could smell the breath from him. He wasn’t drunk. Mad, perhaps.
They slept.
Jonathan, still dressed, waited till he heard silence in the Swan. He let himself out of the upstairs room and came down the external staircase. He was underdressed for the weather, but he didn’t care. He was warmed by the story he held in his heart. He took the opposite direction from Owen Albright, turned upstream and walked against the river. His head was alive with ideas and he walked rapidly to deposit them with the person who would surely want to know all about it.
Arriving at the parsonage at Buscot, he rapped loudly at the door. There being no answer, he rapped again, and again, until he was knocking without cease, with no regard to the lateness of the hour.
The door opened.
‘The parson!’ Jonathan burst out. ‘I must speak to the parson!’
‘But Jonathan,’ said the door-opener, a figure clad in a dressing gown and nightcap, who was rubbing his eyes, ‘It is I.’ The man took off his nightcap, displaying an untidy mass of greying hair.
‘Oh. Now I know you.’
‘Is someone dying, Jonathan? Is it your father? Have you come to fetch me?’
‘No!’ And Jonathan, who wanted to explain that his reason for coming was the very opposite of that, fell over his words in his rush to tell, and all the parson could understand was that nobody was dead.
Sleepily, he interrupted. ‘You cannot rouse people from their sleep for no reason, Jonathan. This is no night for a boy to be out – too cold by far. You should be in bed yourself. Go home and sleep.’
‘But Parson, it is the same story! All over again! Just like Jesus!’