Thinking about all this, and remembering the Maidens of Destiny, it occurred to him now to wonder what the nurse Rita Sunday looked like. He knew she was there, in the room with him. There was a chair diagonally left beyond the foot of the bed, by a window. He’d worked that much out. That was where she was now, silent, motionless – believing him to be asleep, no doubt. He tried to piece together an image of her. Her grip had been firm when she tried to draw his hands from his eyes. She was strong, then. He knew she was not short, for when she was standing her voice came from a high spot in the room. There was an assurance in her footsteps and movements that told him she was neither very young nor very old. Was she fair or dark? Pretty or plain? She must be plain, he thought. Otherwise she would be married, and if she were married she would not be here nursing a strange man alone in a bedroom. She was probably reading in the chair. Or thinking. He wondered what she was thinking about. This strange business with the girl, in all likelihood. He would think about it too, if he only knew where to start.
‘What do you make of it all?’ she asked.
‘How did you know I was awake?’ he asked when he had got over the fleeting notion that she could read his mind.
‘Your breathing pattern told me. Tell me what happened last night. Start with the accident.’
How had it happened?
It is a good thing to be solo on the river. There is freedom. You are neither in one place nor the other, but always on the move, in between. You escape everything and belong to no one. Daunt remembered the feeling: there was pleasure in the way his body organized itself with and against the water, with and against the air, pleasure in that quivering, precarious poise, when the river challenges and muscles respond. That was how it had been yesterday. He had been lost to himself. His eyes had seen only the river, his mind wholly engaged with predicting her caprices, his limbs a machine that responded to her every motion. There was a moment of glory, when body, boat and river combined in a ballet of withholding and giving, tension and relaxation, resistance and flow … It was sublime – and the sublime is not to be trusted.
It’s not that he hadn’t considered Devil’s Weir in advance. How to manage it, whether there would be someone about to help haul the boat out and drag it round. He had been aware of the other possibility too. It being winter and there being scarcely any fall to think of … He knew how to do it: draw the oars in, keep them ready to steady the boat the other side, and at the same time – rapidly, in a single smooth motion – throw yourself back and lie low. Get it wrong and you’ll either take a blow to the head or crack your blade, or both. But he knew. He’d done it before.
What had gone wrong? Seduced by the river, he’d fallen into that state of transcendence – that was his error. He might have got away with it, except that then – as he remembered it now – three things had come upon him at once.
The first was that, without his noticing it, time had passed and the light faded to a dim grey.
The second was that some shape – vague, hard to pin down – caught his eye and distracted him at just the moment he most needed to concentrate.
The third was Devil’s Weir. Here. Now.
The current had taken possession of the canoe – he flung himself back – the river surged, a great liquid limb rising beneath him, thrusting him up – the underside of the weir, black-wet, solid as a tree trunk, hurtling in the direction of his nose – not even the time to exclaim Oh! before—
He tried to explain all this to the nurse. It was a lot to say when his own mouth was a foreign country and every word a new and arduous route through the alphabet. At first he was slow, his speech clumsy, and he semaphored with his hands to fill the gaps in his account. Sometimes she chipped in, anticipating intelligently what he meant to say, and he grunted to indicate, Yes, that’s right. Little by little, he found ways of approximating the sounds he needed and became more fluent.
‘And is that where you found her? At Devil’s Weir?’
‘No. Here.’
He’d come round under the night sky. Too cold to feel pain, but knowing by animal instinct he was injured. Understanding that he needed warmth and shelter if he were to survive. He had clambered out of the boat carefully for fear of collapsing in the cold, cold water. It was then that the white shape had come drifting towards him. He’d known instantly that it was the body of a child. He’d stretched out his arms and the river delivered her neatly into them.
‘And you thought she was dead.’
He grunted yes.
‘Hm.’ He heard her take a breath, put the thought aside for later. ‘But how did you get from Devil’s Weir to here? A man with your injuries in a damaged boat – you can’t have done it alone.’
He shook his head. He had no idea.
‘I wonder what it was that you saw? The thing that distracted you at Devil’s Weir.’
Daunt was a man whose memory was made of pictures. He found one: the pale moon suspended above the river; he found another: the looming weir, massive against a darkening sky. There was something else too. It hurt his face to frown as he tried to make sense of it. Like a photographic plate, his mind usually registered clear outlines, detail, tones, perspectives. This time he found only a blur. It was like a photograph where the subject has moved, dancing through the fifteen seconds of exposure that are required to give the illusion of a single moment. He would have liked to go back and live that moment again if he could, open it up and stretch it out full length to see what it was that had left this blur on his retina.
He shook his head in uncertainty; winced at the movement.
‘Was it a person? Perhaps someone saw what happened and helped you?’
Was it? Tentatively, he nodded.
‘On the bank?’
‘River.’ That he was sure of.
‘Gypsy boats? They are never far away at this time of year.’
‘A single vessel.’
‘Another rowing boat?’
‘No.’
‘A barge?’
His blur was not a barge. It was slighter, a few lines merely … ‘A punt, perhaps?’ Now that he had heard himself suggest it, the blur resolved itself a fraction. A long, low vessel navigated by a tall, lean figure … ‘Yes, I think so.’
He heard the nurse half laugh. ‘Be careful who you tell. They will have it that you have met Quietly.’
‘Who?’
‘Quietly. The ferryman. He sees to it that those who get into trouble on the river make it safely home again. Unless it is their time. In which case, he sees them to the other side of the river.’ She pronounced those last words in a tone of half-comic gravity.
He laughed, felt the pull of pain at his split lip, and drew in breath sharply.
Footsteps. The firm and gentle press of cloth at his face, and the sensation of coolness.
‘Enough talking for a little while,’ she said.
‘Your fault. You made me laugh.’
He was reluctant to let the conversation come to an end. ‘Tell me about Quietly.’
Her footsteps returned to the chair and he pictured her there, plain and tall and strong, and neither young nor old.
‘There are more than a dozen versions. I’ll just begin and see what comes.
‘Many years ago, in the days when there were fewer bridges than there are today, the Quietlys lived on the banks of the river not very far from here. They were a family with one peculiarity: the men were all mute. That is why they were called Quietly, and nobody remembers their real name. They built punts for a living and for a reasonable price would ferry you across the river from their yard and come and collect you again when you hailed them. The yard passed down from grandfather to father to son, over many generations, along with the inability to speak.