‘I expect you’re right. My father would have been devastated to lose me. And Mr Armstrong seemed a very …’ She stopped and thought. ‘A very feeling sort of man. Wouldn’t you say?’
Rita remembered the pulse reading. ‘It’s hard to tell on a first meeting. Perhaps none of us were entirely ourselves. Have you seen anything of him?’
‘He came for another visit. To see her again, with a more settled mind.’
There was a note of something unresolved in her voice.
‘And did it work? Was he able to reach a fixed conclusion?’
‘I can’t say that he did,’ Helena answered thoughtfully, and then she flashed a sudden look at Rita and leant to speak in an undertone: ‘His wife drowned the child, you know. And then took poison. That is what they are saying.’ She sighed heavily. ‘They will find the body. That’s what I tell Anthony – they are bound to find it and Mr Armstrong will be certain then.’
‘It’s been quite a while. Do you think they are likely to find her now?’
‘They must. Until they do, the poor man will be in a sort of limbo. It’s hardly likely she’ll be found alive now, after all. How many weeks is it? Four?’ She totted up the weeks on her fingers like a child. ‘Nearly five. You’d think they’d have found something … My own idea – shall I tell you?’
Rita nodded.
‘My idea is that he cannot bear the knowledge that Alice is drowned and so he clings to the notion that Amelia might be Alice to spare himself the agony. Oh, the poor man.’
‘And you have seen no more of him since?’
‘We have seen him twice more. He returned ten days later, and again ten days after that.’
Rita waited expectantly and, as she had hoped, Helena went on.
‘It was unexpected, and it was just not possible to turn him away. I mean – how could we? He came in again and took a glass of port with Anthony and we talked about one thing and another, nothing much, and he didn’t mention Amelia, but when she came in he couldn’t take his eyes off her … But he didn’t say that is why he came. He arrived as if he just happened to be passing, and as we were acquainted … what could we do but invite him in?’
‘I see.’
‘And so now, I suppose, we are acquainted, and – well, that is just how it is.’
‘And he doesn’t talk about Amelia? Or Alice?’
‘He talks about farming and horses and the weather. It drives Anthony to distraction – he cannot bear small talk – yet what can we do? We can hardly turn him away when he is in such low spirits.’
Rita wondered. ‘It seems a bit strange to me.’
‘It is all a bit strange,’ Helena agreed, and with that, her smile returned and she turned again to the girl and wiped crumbs from her mouth. ‘What next?’ she asked. ‘A walk?’
‘I ought to go home. If anybody should be ill and come for me …’
‘Then we will walk you part of the way. It’s along the river, and we like the river, don’t we, Amelia?’
At the mention of the river, the child, who had sat lax in her chair since finishing her food, her eyes dreamy and far away, was filled with purpose. She gathered her attention from wherever it had wandered to and clambered down from her chair.
As they walked down the garden slope to the riverbank, the girl ran on ahead.
‘She loves the river,’ Helena explained. ‘I was just the same. My father too. I see a lot of him in her. Every day we come down here and she is always the same, racing ahead.’
‘She’s not afraid, then? After the accident?’
‘Not in the least. She lives for it. You’ll see.’
Indeed, when they came to the river, the girl was on the very edge of the bank, perfectly balanced and rooted, but as close as it was possible to be to the racing water. Rita could not quell the instinct to reach out and place a hand on the child’s collar, to hold her should she tip over. Helena laughed. ‘She is born to it. She is in her element.’
Indeed, the girl was intent on the river. She looked upriver, eyebrows slightly raised, mouth open, with an air that Rita tried to read. Was it expectation? The girl swivelled her head the other way and scanned the horizon downriver. Whatever it was she was hoping for wasn’t there. An expression of weary disappointment came over her, but she rapidly gathered herself and dashed ahead on her little legs towards the turn in the river.
Mrs Vaughan’s eyes never left the child. Whether she spoke of her husband or her father or anything else, her eyes stayed on the girl, and her gaze never altered. It was a flood of love, tender and joyful, and on those occasions when she lifted her eyes to look at Rita, the fleeting glances still brimmed with that love, it washed over Rita and everything it saw. The experience reminded Rita of looking into the eyes of a person to whom she had given a particularly strong draught to counter pain, or a man who had taken to drinking the cheap, unlabelled alcohol that was so easily available lately.
They started walking in the direction of Rita’s cottage. The child ran ahead and when she was out of earshot, Helena spoke.
‘This story they are telling at the Swan … that she was dead and then lived again …’
‘What of it?’
‘Anthony says they are a fanciful lot at the Swan, that they’ll take anything a little out of the ordinary and embroider it. He says it will all die down and be forgotten. But I don’t like it. What do you make of it?’
Rita thought for a little while. What was the point of worrying a woman already anxious about her child? On the other hand, she had never been the kind to practise glib lies in the reassurance of her patients. Her way was to find a means of telling the truth in a manner that allowed the patient to take in as much or as little as he or she wanted. The person might ask further questions or they might not. It was up to them. Now she adopted the same strategy. She disguised her thinking time by pretending to pay attention to the hem of her skirt as they walked through a particularly muddy patch. When she was ready she delivered her scrupulously truthful answer in her most objective fashion.
‘There were some unusual circumstances attached to her rescue from the river. They thought she was dead. She was waxen white. Her pupils were dilated – that means the black part in the centre of the iris was wide. She had no discernible pulse. There was no detectable sign of breath. When I got there, that is what I saw too. I didn’t at first locate a pulse, but later I did. She was alive.’
Rita watched Helena, guessing at what she might be making of this deliberately brief account. There were gaps in it that a person might or might not notice, fill in in any number of different ways, gaps that might arouse any number of additional questions. What kind of breath is it that is not detectable? was one. What kind of pulse is undiscernible? And the word later that she had used, the bland little cousin of the more expressive eventually: I couldn’t find a pulse, but later I did. If it implies a few seconds, the word is innocuous. But a minute? What is one to make of that?
Helena was not Rita, and she filled the gaps differently. Rita watched her forming her conclusions as she strode alongside her, her eyes on the girl a few yards ahead. The child walked sturdily, careless of the wind and the bursts of rain that stopped and started at random. Her aliveness was a fact all its own; Rita could see how it might easily overshadow all the others.
‘So they thought Amelia was dead, but she wasn’t. It was a mistake. And they made a story out of it.’
Helena did not seem to need confirmation. Rita did not give it.