‘Buscot Lodge?’ Helena came to a halt. She knew Buscot Lodge – a large house on a thrilling reach of the river. It had a long, broad stretch where the water was smooth and even, and a place where the river divided to flow around an island, and just before that, a spot where the water seemed to forget it was a river at all and idled, just like a little lake. There was a millwheel and St John’s Bridge and a boathouse … She had once rowed up close to the boathouse and, standing precariously in her one-man boat, peered in. There was plenty of room in it.
‘Would I be allowed to take my boat?’
‘Helena, this is a serious business. Marriage has nothing to do with boats and the river. It is a binding contract, both in law and in the eyes of God—’
But Helena was off, running at full tilt over the lawn to the door of the house.
When Helena burst into the study, her father’s eyes lit up at the sight of her. ‘What do you think of this daft notion, eh? If it’s a load of nonsense to you, just say the word. On the other hand, a load of nonsense can be just the thing if the fancy takes you … Upstream or down, Pirate? What do you say?’
Mr Vaughan had risen from his chair.
‘Can I bring my boat?’ she asked him. ‘Can I go on the river every day?’
Mr Vaughan, bemused, did not answer immediately.
‘That boat is at the end of its days,’ her father said.
‘It’s not very bad,’ she argued.
‘Holes in it last time I looked.’
She shrugged. ‘I bail.’
‘Like a sieve. Surprised you get so far in it.’
‘When it gets too low in the water, I come back to the bank and upturn it and then set out again,’ she conceded.
They discussed the boat like two immortals for whom drowning was impossible.
Mr Vaughan turned from father to daughter during this exchange. He began to perceive the importance of boats in the matter at hand.
‘I could get it mended for you,’ he suggested. ‘Or get you a new one, if you like.’
She thought. She nodded. ‘All right.’
Aunt Eliza, who had come late to the discussion, glanced sharply at Helena. Something appeared to be concluded, but what? Mr Vaughan took pity and enlightened her.
‘Miss Greville has agreed to allow me to buy her a new boat. With that business out of the way, we can now negotiate the lesser matters. Miss Greville, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’
Adventure either way …
‘It’s a deal.’ She nodded firmly.
Aunt Eliza felt that this was all falling far short of what a marriage proposal and acceptance ought to be, and opened her mouth to address Helena, but Helena got in first.
‘I know. Marriage is an important contract in the eyes of God and of the law,’ she parroted. She had seen people conclude important contracts before. Knowing how it was done, she held out her hand for Mr Vaughan to shake.
Mr Vaughan took her hand, turned it, and bowed to plant a kiss upon it. Suddenly it was Helena’s turn to be nonplussed.
Helena’s fiancé was as good as his word. A new boat was ordered and the old one mended ‘for the time being’. Before long she had two boats, a boathouse to put them in, a stretch of river to call her own – and a new name. A little later, her father died. Aunt Eliza went to live with her younger brother in Wallingford. And then a lot of other things happened and Helena Greville was swept clean away on the current and even Mrs Vaughan forgot about her.
Lately it was the old boat – Helena Greville’s – that she chose to take out. She did not go far. Upstream or down? No. She was not in search of adventure. She merely rowed to the far side and let the boat drift into the reeds.
‘Oh, this mist! Whatever will Mr Vaughan say?’ came the watery voice again.
Helena opened her eyes. The air was so full of water it was opaque and she looked at it through the liquid that pooled in the corner of her own eye. She could see nothing of the world – no sky, no trees; even the reeds that surrounded the boat were invisible. She rocked and bobbed with the river, inhaled wetness with the air, watched the mist that moved sluggishly like the current of a semi-stagnant sidestream, like the rivers she knew in her dreams. The whole world was drowned, leaving only her cold self and Helena Greville’s boat – and the river that shifted and pressed beneath her like a thing alive.
She blinked. The tear grew swollen, pooled and flattened, but held to itself in its invisible skin.
What a fearless girl Helena Greville had been. A pirate, her father had called her, and pirate she was. Aunt Eliza had despaired at her.
‘There is another side to the river,’ Eliza used to tell her. ‘Once upon a time there was a naughty little girl who played too close to the bank. One day, while she wasn’t looking, a goblin rose out of the water. He grasped the little girl by the hair and took her back, kicking and splashing, to his own goblin realm under the river. And if you don’t believe me …’ Had she believed her? It was hard to know, now. ‘If you don’t believe me, you have only to listen. Go on, listen now. Do you hear the water splashing?’
Helena had nodded. This was all wonderful to know. Goblins living under the river in their own goblin world. How marvellous!
‘Listen to the sounds between the splashes. Do you hear? There are bubbles, very, very small ones that rise to the surface and pop. Those are the bubbles that carry messages from all the lost children. If your ears are sharp enough you will hear the cries of that little girl and all the other homesick children who are weeping for their mothers and fathers.’
She had listened. Had she heard? She couldn’t remember now. But if the goblins had taken her away down into the water, her father would simply have come and got her back. It was so obvious that Helena Greville felt rather scornful of her aunt for not realizing it herself.
For years and years Helena Greville had forgotten the story about the goblins and their world on the other, deathly side of the river. But now Helena Vaughan remembered it. She came out in her old boat to remember it every day. The sound of the water was a semi-regular, uninsistent lapping, as the river licked and sucked at the boat. She listened to the sound and she listened to the spaces between the sound. It was not difficult to hear the lost children. She could hear them with perfect clarity.
‘Mrs Vaughan! You’ll catch your death! Do come in, Mrs Vaughan!’
The river lapped and the boat rose and fell, and a far-off little voice called without cease for its parents from the depths of the goblin world.
‘It’s all right!’ she whispered, white-lipped. She tensed her cold muscles, readied her trembling limbs to rise. ‘Mummy’s coming!’
She leant out of the boat and, as the vessel tilted, the teardrop spilt from her eye and dropped into the greater wetness of the river. Before she could shift her weight sufficiently to follow it, something righted the boat and she felt herself fall back into it. When she looked up, an indistinct grey figure was bending over the bow of her boat, gripping the cleat. The shadow in the mist then straightened and she saw it elongate like a man standing in a punt. It raised an arm in a motion that resembled the dropping of a pole to find the riverbed, and she then felt a powerful dragging sensation. The speed of progress through the water seemed oddly disconnected from the shadow’s ease of movement. The river loosened its grip and she was towed back towards the bank with a rapidity that surprised her.
A final propulsion brought the grey shape of the jetty into sight.