While he spoke, her grey eyes rested patiently on his face, and though she was not smiling, he felt gentle encouragement in the lines that surrounded her eyes so expressively. At last he ran out of words.
‘I see,’ she said, nodding. ‘You didn’t mean to disturb me today, you were just passing and wanted to check the address …’
‘That’s right!’ Relieved to be so easily let off, he waited for her to initiate a farewell. Already he saw himself reclaiming his hat and case from the hall and taking his leave. He saw his feet on the chequered path to the house. He saw his hand reach for the latch on the painted gate. But then he saw the steadiness of the tranquil grey eyes.
‘Yet after all that, here you are,’ she said.
Here he was. Yes. He suddenly felt his hereness very acutely. In fact, the room seemed to pulse with it, and so did he.
‘Why don’t you sit down, Mr …?’
‘Vaughan,’ he said, and her eyes did not give away whether or not they recognized the name, but only continued their easy watchfulness. He sat.
Mrs Constantine poured some clear liquid from an etched decanter into a glass and placed it by his side; then she too sat down, in an armchair placed at an angle to the sofa. She smiled expectantly.
‘I need your help,’ he admitted. ‘It’s my wife.’
Her face softened into sad sympathy. ‘I am sorry. May I offer you my condolences?’
‘No! I don’t mean that!’
He sounded irritated. He was irritated.
‘Forgive me, Mr Vaughan. But when a stranger appears at my door, it is usually because somebody has died.’ Her expression did not change; it remained steady and was not unfriendly, in fact it was distinctly kind, but she waited with a firmness of purpose for him to come to the point.
He sighed. ‘We have lost a child, you see.’
‘Lost?’
‘She was taken.’
‘Forgive me, Mr Vaughan, but we use so many euphemisms in English when we speak of the dead. Lost, taken … These are words that have more than one meaning. I have already misunderstood you once, regarding your wife, and I should not like to do so again.’
Mr Vaughan swallowed and looked at his hand, which was resting on the arm of the green velvet sofa. He drew a nail along the fabric, raising a line in the pile. ‘You will probably know the story. I expect you read the newspapers, and even if you don’t, it was the talk of the county. Two years ago. At Buscot.’
Her eyes detached from him and looked into the middle distance while she consulted her memory. He ran a fingertip along the velvet, smoothing the pile flat again so that the line disappeared. He waited for her to acknowledge that she knew.
Her gaze returned to him. ‘It would be better if you told me in your own words, I think.’
Vaughan’s shoulders stiffened. ‘I can tell you no more than is known.’
‘Mmm.’ The sound was neither here nor there. It did not agree with him exactly, but nor did it disagree with him. It indicated that it was still his turn.
Vaughan had expected that the story would not need retelling. After two years, he assumed that everybody knew. It was the kind of story that spread far abroad in a surprisingly short space of time. On numerous occasions he had walked into a room – a business meeting, an interview for a new groom, a social occasion with neighbouring farmers, or a grander event in Oxford or London – and seen in the glances from people he had never met that they not only knew him, but knew the story. He now expected it – though he had never grown used to it. ‘Dreadful thing,’ some stranger would mutter over a handshake, and he had learnt a way of acknowledging it that also indicated, ‘Let no more be said about it.’
In the early days, he had had to give endless accounts of the events. The very first time, rousing the male servants, he had told them first in wild flurries of sound, fast and furious, as if the words themselves were on horseback, racing after the intruders and his missing daughter. He had told it to the neighbours who came to join the search in panting phrases, his chest contracting painfully. He told it over and over again, to every man, woman and child he met in the next hours, as he rode the country roads: ‘My daughter has been taken! Have you seen strangers, anyone, making their way in haste, with a small girl of two?’ The following day he told it to his banker when he went urgently to raise the ransom money, and again to the policeman who came out from Cricklade. This was where the order of events had been set down properly. They were still in the grip of things then, and this time Helena was doing the telling too. They had paced and sat down and then risen to pace again, talking one at a time or, often, at the same time, and sometimes they both lapsed into silence and stared at each other, lost for words. There was one moment that he made a particular effort to forget. Helena, describing the moment the discovery was made: ‘I opened the door and went in, and she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there! She wasn’t there!’ Wonderingly, she repeated the words ‘She wasn’t there,’ and as her head turned this way and that, her eyes sought the upper corners of the room as though their daughter might be concealed in the joint of the cornicing, or beyond it, perched in the angle of a roof joist, but the absence went on and on. It had seemed then that her daughter’s absence had flooded Helena, flooded them both, and that with their words they were trying to bail themselves out. But the words were eggcups and what they were describing was an ocean of absence, too vast to be contained in such modest vessels. She bailed and she bailed, but no matter how often she repeated the effort, she could not get to the end of it. ‘She wasn’t there,’ repeated endlessly in a voice he had not known a human being to be capable of, as she drowned in her loss, and he remained in a sort of paralysis, unable to do or say anything to save her. Thank God for the policeman. It had been he who threw her a line she could grab hold of, he who hauled her in with his next question.
‘The bed had been slept in, though?’
The noise of his words reached her. Dazed, she seemed to come to herself, and nodded. In a voice that was her own again, though weak with exhaustion, she said, ‘Ruby put her to bed. Our nursery maid.’
Then she had lapsed into silence and Vaughan had taken over the narrative.
‘Slow down, Sir, if you don’t mind,’ the fellow had said, as he bent over his notebook, pencil in hand, copying it all down like a zealous schoolboy. ‘Start that bit again, would you?’ Every so often he stopped them, read back what he had down, and they corrected him, remembered details they had left out, discovered discrepancies in what they both knew, compared notes to get it right. Any detail might be the one to bring her back. Hours it had taken, to get down the events of a few minutes.
He had written to his father in New Zealand.
‘No, don’t,’ Helena had protested. ‘What’s the point in upsetting him, when she’ll be home tomorrow, or the day after?’
But he wrote the letter. He remembered the account they had given to the policeman and based his explanation on that. He wrote it out carefully. The letter contained all the facts of the disappearance. Unknown villains came in the night, the letter said. They put up a ladder and entered the house by the nursery window; they left, taking the child with them. New paragraph: Though a ransom demand was received early the following morning and the ransom was paid, our daughter has not been returned to us. We are looking. Everyone is doing their utmost and we will not rest until she is found. The police are pursuing the river gypsies and will search their boats. I shall send further news as soon as there is some.