None of these things happened in the Swan at Radcot. While life was at work in him, crusting blood over gashes and doing all manner of intricate work inside the skull box that had taken such a battering at Devil’s Weir, Henry Daunt sank, sank, sank to the darkest depths of his vast underwater cavern, where nothing ebbed and nothing flowed and all was as dark and still as the grave. He remained there for an unmeasurable length of time, and at the end of it, memory awoke and the still depths shivered and came to life.
A number of experiences then drifted into his mind and out again, in no particular order.
A dull sensation that was the disappointment of his marriage.
A stinging in his fingertips that was the cold he felt yesterday at Trewsbury Mead, when he had stopped the trickle that was the Thames with his forefinger and waited for the water to build up behind it till the volume became too great and it overspilt.
A whole body swooping and gliding – skating on the frozen Thames as a young man of twenty; he had met his wife that day and the gliding had continued for many weeks, all through the rest of the winter to a day at the beginning of spring that was his wedding day.
The slack-jawed astonishment, the fisticuffs in the brain, on seeing an empty space in the skyline where the roof of the old friary gatehouse used to be – he was six, it was the first time he realized the physical world could be subject to such change.
A crash of glass; his father, the glazier, cursing in the yard.
So the contents of the skull satisfied themselves that they were in place, complete, whole.
Finally came something different from all the rest. A thing that belonged in another category altogether. It was not unfamiliar – he had dreamt it before, more often than he knew. It was always out of focus, for he had never set eyes on it in the real world, only in his imagination. It was a child. Daunt’s child. The one he had failed to make with Miriam, and not tried to make with anybody else. It was his future child. The image drifted past, there and gone again, and it roused a response in the sleeping man, who attempted to lift his leaden limbs to grasp it. It drifted out of reach, not without leaving behind the sense that there had been something more urgent about the dream image this time. Was it not more vivid? It was a little girl, wasn’t it? But the moment had passed.
Now the scene in Henry Daunt’s mind altered once again. A landscape, unfamiliar and unsettling, deeply personal. A blasted terrain. Jagged, rocky outcrops. Churned-up gashes in the land. Bulbous protuberances. There must have been – what? A war? An earthquake?
Consciousness cast a dim illumination and thought began to stir in Henry Daunt. This landscape was not something seen, but something else … These were not images, no, but pieces of information passed to his brain … by his tongue … The rocks translated themselves into the broken rubble of teeth. The mess of disrupted earth was the flesh of his mouth.
Awake.
He stiffened in alarm. Pain shot through his limbs, took him by surprise.
What has happened?
He opened his eyes – to darkness. Darkness? Or … was he blindfolded?
In panic his hands rose to his face – more pain – and where his face ought to be, his fingers met something foreign. Some padding, thicker than skin, unfeeling, stretched over his bones. He sought the edge of it, desperate to pull it off, but his fingers were thick and clumsy …
A flurry of sound. A voice – a woman:
‘Mr Daunt!’
He felt his hands gripped by other hands, hands that were surprisingly strong and that prevented him from tearing off the blindfold.
‘Don’t scrabble! You are injured. I expect you’re feeling numb. You are safe. This is the Swan at Radcot. There was an accident. Do you remember?’
A word sprang nimbly from his mind to his tongue; once there it stumbled over the rubble in his mouth and when it emerged he didn’t recognize it. He had another go, more arduously:
‘Eyes!’
‘Your eyes are swollen. You knocked your head in the accident. You will be able to see perfectly well once the swelling has gone down.’
The hands brought his own away from his face. He heard liquid being poured, but his ears couldn’t tell him what colour the liquid was or what the pitcher was made of or what size the drinking vessel was. He felt the tilt that comes when a person sits on the edge of the bed, but could not tell what manner of person it was. The world was suddenly unknowable; he was marooned in it.
‘Eyes!’
The woman took hold of his hands again. ‘It is only swelling. You will see again as soon as it subsides. Here, a drink. It will feel clumsy, I expect you will have lost sensation in your lips, but I will tip it for you.’
She was right. There was no warning, no touch of rim on lip, only the sudden sensation of sweet wetness in his mouth. He indicated with a grunt that he would swallow more, but ‘Little sips, frequently,’ she said.
‘Do you remember arriving here?’ she asked.
He thought. His memory seemed unfamiliar to him. There were images reflected in fragmentary style on the surface of it that couldn’t really belong there. He made a noise, a gesture of uncertainty.
‘The little girl you brought in – can you tell us who she is?’
A tap on wood, a door opening.
A new voice: ‘I thought I heard voices. Here she is.’
The mattress returned to the level as the woman beside him stood up.
He raised his hand to his face, and this time, knowing that the insensate padding was his skin, detected a line of spikes. The tips of his eyelashes, their length half buried in the inflamed lids. He applied clumsy pressure above and below the line and pulled apart—‘No!’ the woman cried, but it was too late. Light pierced his eye, and he gasped. It was the pain, and something else besides: on its wave the light carried an image and it was the image he had dreamt. The drifting girl, his future child, infant of his imagination.
‘Is this your little girl?’ said the newcomer.
A child whose eyes were the colour of the Thames and as inexpressive.
Yes, said his leaping heart. Yes. Yes.
‘No,’ he said.
A Tragic Tale
ALL THROUGH THE hours of daylight the drinkers had been discussing events at the Swan. Everybody knew that Mr and Mrs Vaughan were in Margot and Joe’s private sitting room at the back, where they had been reunited with Amelia. Word had also got about that a rich Negro, Robert Armstrong from Kelmscott, had been there at first light and that his son was expected later. The name Robin Armstrong was broadcast.
A curtain was drawn back in every man’s inner theatre and their storytelling minds got to work. On the stage were the same four figures: Mr Vaughan, Mrs Vaughan, Robin Armstrong and the girl. The scenes that played out in the many heads were full of striking melodrama. There were seething looks, dark glances, calculating squints. Words were delivered in hisses, with stern decorum and in shrill alarm. The child was snatched from party to party, like a doll amongst jealous children. One farmhand of a counting disposition found his mind arranging an auction of the child, while the brawlers who had temporarily deserted the Plough indulged in fantasies in which Mr Vaughan drew a weapon from his inner pocket – revolver? dagger? – and set about Mr Armstrong with a true father’s determination. One ingenious mind returned the power of speech to the child at the moment of highest tension: ‘Papa!’ she called, lifting her arms to Mr Armstrong and dashing for ever the hopes of the Vaughans, who fell weeping into each other’s embrace. The role of Mrs Vaughan in these theatricals was confined largely to weeping, which she accomplished sometimes in a chair, frequently on the floor, and ending generally in a faint. One young cressman, in a flourish he was most proud of, imagined a role for the unconscious man in the bed: coming round from his long slumber and hearing an altercation in the next room, he would rise and enter the sitting room (stage left) and there, like Solomon, declare that the child must be sliced in two and given half to the Vaughans and half to Armstrong. That would do it.