Armstrong became aware that the women were waiting for a response from him.
‘The difficulty is that I have not met my grandchild before. My son’s daughter lived at Bampton with her mother, apart from my own family. It was far from what I would have wished, but it was so.’
‘Family life … It is not always easy,’ Margot murmured charitably. After her initial trepidation she discovered she had quite come round to this large, dark man.
He gave her a half-bow in gratitude. ‘I was alerted yesterday to a crisis in the household and discovered early this morning that the young woman who was her mother—’
He broke off and glanced anxiously at the child. He was used to the stares of children, but this one’s eyes drifted towards him and didn’t stop but kept on going, past, past, as if she hadn’t seen him. Perhaps it was a form of shyness. Cats also did not like to meet an unfamiliar person’s eye – they looked in your direction and then away again. He kept a length of string in his pocket to which was tied a feather; it was marvellously effective with kittens. For little girls he had a small doll made of a coat peg with a painted face and a rabbit-skin coat. He took it out now and put it in the child’s lap. She felt it placed there, and looked down. Her hand closed around the doll. Rita and Margot watched her with the same attentiveness as the man and exchanged glances.
‘You were saying, about the poor mite’s mother …’ Margot then prompted in a low voice, and while the child was occupied with the doll, Armstrong went on in a low murmur.
‘The young woman passed away yesterday evening. Nothing was known of the whereabouts of the child. I enquired of the first man I met on the towpath and he told me to apply to you here. Though he had the story entirely upside down and I arrived believing her to be drowned.’
‘She was drowned,’ said Margot. ‘Till Rita brought her in again and then she was alive.’ No matter how many times her tongue repeated it, it still sounded wrong to her ears.
Armstrong frowned and turned to Rita for clarification. Her face gave little away. ‘She appeared dead, but wasn’t,’ she said. The briefness of the formulations elided the impossibilities better than any other, and for the moment this was her version. It was laconic, but it was true. As soon as you started to put more words in, you came to unreason.
‘I see,’ said Armstrong, though he didn’t.
The three of them looked at the girl again. The doll was lying abandoned at her side and she had returned to a state of listlessness.
‘She is a droll little thing,’ Margot admitted unhappily. ‘Everybody finds her so. And yet, in a way that is hard to explain, you cannot help but take to her. Why, even the gravel-diggers last night – and they are not known for being soft-hearted – were won over. Weren’t they, Rita? If nobody had claimed her, that Higgs would have taken her home like a lost puppy. And even with all the children and grandchildren I’ve got to worry about, I’d keep her, if she had nowhere else to go. And so would you, wouldn’t you, Rita?’
Rita did not reply.
‘We did think he was the father, the man who brought her in,’ Margot said. ‘But from what you say …’
‘How is he? This Mr Daunt?’
‘He will be all right. His injuries look worse than they are. His breathing does not falter and his colour improves with every hour that passes. I think it will not be long before he awakes.’
‘I will go to Oxford and find my son, then. By dusk he will be here and by nightfall this matter will be settled.’
He put on his hat and took his leave.
Margot set about readying the winter room for the day ahead. Word would have got out and she expected to be busy. She might even have to open the large summer room. Rita moved between the child and the man asleep in the bed. Joe came in for a time. The little girl turned her eyes to him and watched his every move as he poured tea into Rita’s cup and arranged the curtain so that the light did not disturb the sleeper in the bed. When he had done these things and came to see the child herself, she stretched out her arms to him.
‘Well!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a funny little girl you are! Fancy being interested in old Joe.’
Rita stood to let him sit and placed the child on his lap. She stared up into his face.
‘What colour would you say her eyes are?’ he wondered. ‘Blue? Grey?’
‘Greeny-blue?’ Rita suggested. ‘Depends on the light.’
They were considering the matter together when there came a sudden hammering at the door for the third time that day. It made them both start.
‘Whatever next!’ they heard Margot exclaim, as her feet trotted hastily across the floor to the door. ‘Who can it be this time?’
There came the sound of the door opening. And then—
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Margot. ‘Oh!’
Daddy!
MR VAUGHAN WAS on Brandy Island, at the vitriol works, where he was making an inventory of every item that appertained to the factory in preparation for the auction. It was painstaking work and he could have delegated the job, but he liked the repetitive nature of the task. In any other circumstances the abandonment of his brandy business might have been a painful thing. He had invested so much in it: the purchase of Buscot House with its fields and its island, the planning, the research, the construction of the reservoir, the planting of acres of beet, the building of the railway and the bridge to bring the beet over on to the island, all that plus the work on the island itself: the distillery and the vitriol works … An ambitious experiment that he’d had energy for when he was single and later a newly married man and after that a new father. To tell the truth, it wasn’t really that the enterprise hadn’t worked; it was simply that he couldn’t be bothered with it any more. Amelia had disappeared and so had his zest for the work. There was profit enough in his other enterprises – the farms were doing well and his shares in his father’s mining operation made him wealthy. Why rack his brains solving one problem after another, to make a success of this, when it was so much easier to let it go? There was a peculiar satisfaction in the dismantling, auctioning off, melting down and dispersal of the world he had spent so much time and money building up. Making his meticulous lists was an opportunity to forget. He counted, measured, listed, and felt soothed in his boredom. It helped him forget Amelia.
Today he had woken grasping after the tail end of a dream, and though he could not remember it, he suspected it was the dream – too terrible to speak of – that he had suffered frequently in the first days of their loss. It left him feeling hollowed out. Later, as he crossed the yard, the wind had delivered to his ears a snatch of a child’s high-pitched voice picked up some distance away. Of course, all little children’s voices sound the same from afar. They just do. But the two things had unsettled him and put him in need of this dulling occupation.
Now, in the store room, his eye alighted on something that opened a chasm into the past and made him flinch. It was a jar of barley-sugar canes in a dusty corner. Suddenly she was there – fingers reaching into the mouth of the jar, delighted when two canes came out so tightly welded together that they could not be separated and she was allowed to eat them both. His heart beat painfully and the jar slipped through his fingers and smashed on the concrete floor. That had done it. He would not regain his peace of mind today, not now she had materialized here in the store room.