He called for a broom to sweep it all and when he heard running supposed it was his assistant, but to Vaughan’s surprise, it was a member of his domestic staff that appeared: Newman, his gardener. Though out of breath, the man began to speak; his words were so shaken about by the great gasps of breath he was obliged to take that his meaning was not easy to make out. Vaughan caught the word drowned.
‘Slow down, Newman, take your time.’
The gardener began again and this time something approximating the story of the girl who died and lived again emerged. ‘At the Swan at Radcot,’ he finished. And in a hushed voice, as though he hardly dared to say it, ‘They say she is about four.’
‘Christ in heaven!’ Vaughan’s hands rose halfway to his head, then he gathered himself. ‘Try not to let my wife hear about it, will you?’ he asked. But even before the gardener spoke again, he could see it was too late.
‘Mrs Vaughan has gone up there already, by herself. Mrs Jellicoe who does the laundry brought the news – she heard it from one of the Swan’s regulars last night. We couldn’t know what she was going to say – if we had we wouldn’t have let her near, but we thought she was going to hand in her notice. The next thing we knew, Mrs Vaughan was racing down to the boathouse and there was not a thing we could do to stop her. By the time we got there, she had took the old rowing boat and was almost out of sight.’
Vaughan ran home, where the stable boy, anticipating his need, had readied his horse. ‘You’ll have to fly to catch her,’ he warned. Vaughan mounted and took the direction of Radcot. For the first few minutes he galloped as fast as he could, then he slowed to a trot. Fly? he thought. I’ll never catch her. He had rowed with her in the early days of their marriage and she was as expert a rower as any man he knew. She was slim, which made her light, and she was strong. Thanks to her father, she had been in and out of boats since before she could walk, and her blades dipped without a splash into the water, rose out of it as cleanly as a leaping fish. Where others grew scarlet and sweated with effort, her cheeks simply took on a serene rose flush, and she gleamed with contentment, feeling the pull of the water. Some women softened with grief, but in Helena it had burnt away the little softness she was starting to develop since their daughter’s arrival, and honed her. She was all wire and muscle, fired with determination, and she had a half-hour head start. Fly and catch her? Not a chance. Helena was out of reach. She had been for a long time.
It was hope that had her always so far ahead of him. He had parted company with hope long ago. If Helena would only do the same, happiness might – he thought – eventually be restored to them. Instead of which she stoked her hope, fed it with any trifle she could lay her hands on, and when there was nothing to feed it, she nourished it with some stubborn faith of her own making. In vain he had tried to console her and comfort her, in vain offered images of other futures, different lives.
‘We could go and live abroad,’ he had suggested. They had spoken of it when they first married, it was a notion for the years ahead. ‘Why not?’ she had said then, before Amelia’s disappearance, before Amelia had existed at all. And so he had suggested it again. They might go to New Zealand for a year – two, even. And why come back? They needn’t. New Zealand was a fine place to work, to live …
Helena had been appalled. ‘And how will Amelia find us there?’
He had talked of the other children they had always expected. But future children were immaterial, mere abstractions to his wife. Only to him did they appear incarnate, in his dreams and in his waking hours. The marital intimacies that had ceased so abruptly the night their daughter disappeared had not been resumed in the two years since. Before Helena, he had lived unmarried and more or less celibate for many years. Where other men paid for women or took up with girls they could later abandon, he went to bed alone and fell back on his own devices. He had no desire to return to this mode of life now. If his wife could not love him, then nothing. The spirit faded. He no longer expected pleasure of his own body or hers. He had given up one hope after another.
She blamed him. He blamed himself. It was a father’s job to keep his children from harm, and he had failed.
Vaughan realized that he was stationary. His mount had its muzzle to the ground, exploring for something sweet among the winter bracken. ‘There’s nothing there for you. Nothing for me either.’ He was overwhelmed with a great weariness. For a moment he wondered whether he was ill, whether he could in fact go on. He remembered somebody saying something, quite recently … You can’t go on like this. Oh, it was the woman in Oxford. Mrs Constantine. What a foolish expedition that had turned out to be. But she was right about that. He couldn’t go on.
He went on.
There was an unusual number of people packed into the Swan, he thought, given the time of day and the season. They looked up at him with the curiosity of those for whom something is already underway and further interest can confidently be expected. He paid them no attention and made straight for the bar, where a woman took one look at him and said, ‘Follow me.’
She led him through a short panelled passageway to an old oak door. She opened it and stepped aside to let him enter first.
There were too many shocks: he could not separate one from another. Only afterwards was he able to tease out the many impressions that rushed upon him into separate strands and put words and an order to them. First there was the bewilderment of expecting to see his wife and failing to find her there. Second was the confusion of seeing a very familiar face that he had not seen for a long time. A young woman, scarcely more than a child really, whom he had once asked to marry him, and who had said Yes, with laughter, yes, if I can bring my boat. She turned a radiant face to him and smiled, her lips wide with easy happiness, her eyes brightly luminous with love.
Vaughan stopped dead in his tracks. Helena. His wife – bold, joyous and magnificent, as she had been. Before.
She laughed.
‘Oh, Anthony! What’s the matter with you!’
She looked down, took hold of something, speaking in a cajoling, sing-song voice that he remembered from another time. ‘Look,’ she said, though not to him. ‘Look who it is.’
The third shock.
She turned the little person to face him.
‘Daddy’s here!’
The Sleeper Wakes
MEANWHILE, A MAN with black-stained fingertips and a broken face lay sleeping in the pilgrims’ room of the Swan at Radcot. He lay on his back, his head on Margot’s feather pillow, and but for the rise and fall of his chest, he did not stir.
There are any number of ways you might imagine sleep, none of them likely to be accurate. We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete, the ability to commit it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.
When he was ten, Henry Daunt saw a picture of an ash tree whose roots plunged into an underground river in which lived strange mermaids or naiads, called the Maidens of Destiny. When he thought of the descent into sleep, it was something very like this subterranean waterway that he envisaged. He had a sense of his slumber as a lengthy swimming session, in which he navigated slowly through water that was thicker than usual, with effortless pleasant movements that propelled him in one direction or another with a kind of vivid aimlessness. Sometimes the skin of the water was only a little way above his head, and his daytime world, its troubles and pleasures, was still there, pursuing him from the other side. On those occasions he would wake feeling as though he had not slept at all. Most of the time, though, he slept easily, awoke refreshed, sometimes with the happy sense that he had met friends in his sleep, or that his mother (though dead) had communicated some loving message to him in the night. He didn’t mind this at all. He did mind waking just as the last traces of some interesting nocturnal adventure were lost to the tide.