There was some truth in what people imagined about Lily White. In law and in the eyes of God, she was no missus at all. There had been for some years a Mr White, and she had performed for him all those duties a wife customarily performs for a husband: she had cooked his meals, scrubbed his floors, laundered his shirts, emptied his chamber pot and warmed his bed. He in return had performed the normal duties of a husband: he kept her short of money, drank her share of the ale, stayed out all night when he felt like it, and beat her. It was like a marriage in every detail in Lily’s eyes and so, when he had disappeared five years ago in circumstances that she tried not to think about, she had not hesitated. With all his thieving and drinking and other bad ways, White had been a better name than he’d deserved. It was a better name than she deserved too, she knew that, yet out of all the names she could have had, this was the one she most wanted. So she took it. She had left that place, followed the river and come, by chance, to Buscot. ‘Lily White,’ she had muttered under her breath all the way. ‘I am Lily White.’ She tried to live up to it.
Lily gave the yellow goat some rotten potatoes, then went to feed the pigs. The pigs lived in the old woodshed. It was a stone building, halfway between the cottage and the river, with a tall, narrow opening on the cottage side for a person to go in and out, and a low opening on the other, so that the pigs might come and go between their enclosure and their mud patch. Within, a low wall separated the two ends. At Lily’s end, chopped wood was stacked against the wall, next to a sack of grain and an old tin bath half full of swill. There were a couple of buckets, and on a shelf apples were slowly mouldering.
Lily lifted the buckets and carried them out and round to the pigs’ outdoor mud patch. She tipped a bucketful of half-rotten cabbages and other vegetable matter too brown to identify over the fence and into the trough, then filled the old sink with water. The boar came out of the straw-lined woodshed and, without a glance at Lily, lowered his head to eat. Behind him came the sow.
The female rubbed her flank against the fence, as was her way, and when Lily scratched behind her ears, the sow blinked at her. Beneath her ginger lashes the sow’s eyes were still half full of sleep. Do pigs dream? Lily wondered. If they do, it is about something better than real life, by the look of things. The sow came into full wakefulness and she fixed Lily with a peculiarly poignant gaze. Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human, the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, Lily realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as if she were recollecting some happiness now lost, so that joy remembered was overlaid with present sorrow.
Lily had been happy once, though it was painful to recall it. Her father had died before she could remember, and until she was eleven she and her mother had lived quietly together, just the two of them. There had been little money and food was scant, but they scraped by, and after their soup in the evening they would lean close together with a blanket round them to save the fire, and at her mother’s nod Lily would turn the pages of the children’s Bible while her mother read aloud. Lily was no great reader. She could not tell b from d and the words quivered on the page as soon as they felt the brush of her gaze, but when her mother read aloud in her gentle voice, the words grew still and Lily found she could follow the thread after all, mouthing the words silently in time. Sometimes her mother told her about her father – how he had loved his baby daughter, watched her endlessly and, as his own health faded, said, Here is the best of me, Rose. It lives on in this child we made together. In time, Jesus and her father came to seem like different faces of the same man, a presence that surrounded Lily and protected her and was no less real for being invisible. That blanket, and that book, and her mother’s voice and Jesus and her father who had loved her so – these happy memories only sharpened the hardship of her existence since. She could not think of those golden days without despair, came close to wishing she had never lived them. That hopeless longing for lost happiness in the eye of the pig must be how she herself looked when she remembered the past. The only God that watched over Lily now was a severe and angry one, and if her father were to look down from heaven on to his grown daughter, he would turn his face away in an agony of disappointment.
The sow continued to stare at Lily. She pushed its snout roughly away and muttered, ‘Stupid sow,’ as she walked up the slope to the cottage.
Inside she got the fire going and ate a bit of cheese and an apple. She eyed the candle, a short stub melded by its own wax to a scrap of broken tile, and decided to do without it for a bit longer. Next to the fire was a sagging chair, the upholstery much mended with patches of unmatching wool, and she sat wearily in it. She was tired, but nerves kept her alert. Was it one of those nights when he was going to come? She had seen him yesterday, so perhaps not, but you could never tell. For an hour she sat, on the alert for footsteps, and then gradually Lily’s eyelids closed, her head began to nod and she fell into sleep.
The river now exhaled a complicated fragrance and blew it through the gap under the door of the little cottage. Lily’s nose suddenly twitched. The odour had an earthy base with live notes of grasses, reeds and sedges. It contained the mineral quality of stone. And something darker, browner and more decomposed.
With its next breath, the river exhaled a child. She floated into the cottage, glaucous and cold.
Lily frowned in her sleep and her breathing grew troubled.
The girl’s colourless hair clung slickly to her scalp and shoulders; her garment was the colour of the dirty scum that collects at the river’s edge. Water ran off her; from her hair it dripped into her cloak, from the cloak it dripped to the floor. It did not drip itself out.
Fear put a choking whimper in Lily’s throat.
Drip, drip, drip … There was no end to the water: it would drip for an eternity, it would drip until the river ran dry. The hovering child turned a malevolent gaze on the sleeper in the chair and slowly – slowly – raised a hazy hand to point at her.
Lily woke with a sudden start—
The river child evaporated.
For a few moments, Lily stared in alarm at the spot in the air where the girl had been.
‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘Oh! Oh!’ She brought her hands to her face as if to hide the image, but also peeped between her fingers to reassure herself that the girl was gone.