‘To think she was so close to death. To think she was found and so nearly lost again.’ She drew her eyes from the girl for a brief second, spared a glance for Rita. ‘Thank heavens you were there!’
They were nearing Rita’s cottage. ‘We mustn’t be too late,’ Helena said. ‘The man is coming this afternoon to put locks on the windows.’
‘On the windows?’
‘I have the feeling someone is watching her. Better safe than sorry.’
‘There is a lot of curiosity about her … That is inevitable. It will die down in time.’
‘I don’t mean in public places. I mean in the garden and on the river. A spy.’
‘Have you seen anyone?’
‘No. But I can tell someone is there.’
‘There is nothing new about the kidnap, I suppose? Her return hasn’t loosened tongues?’
Helena shook her head.
‘Is there anything to give you an idea where she has been these last two years? There was talk about the involvement of the river gypsies, wasn’t there? The police searched their boats at one time, I think?’
‘They did, when they caught up with them. Nothing was found.’
‘And she appeared the night the gypsies were on the river again …’
‘To see her use a knife and fork, you might well think she’d been living with gypsies these last two years. But honestly, I cannot bear to think about it.’
The windblown waves cast a mixture of spume and droplets up into the air, from where it fell again, laying its own complicated pattern over the choppy texture of the water. While she watched the random alterations of the water, Rita puzzled over what reasons the river gypsies would have for stealing a child and returning it to the same place, apparently dead, two years later. She found no answer.
Helena had been pursuing thoughts of her own. ‘If I could, I would make those years disappear altogether. Sometimes I wonder whether I have imagined her … Or whether it is my longing that has – somehow – brought her back from whatever dark place she has been in. In all that pain, I would have sold my soul, given my life, to have her back again. All that agony … And now I sometimes wonder, what if I have? What if she is not altogether real?’
She turned to Rita and for a fleeting moment Rita caught a horrific glimpse of what the last two years had been. The desperation was so shocking that she flinched.
‘But then I only have to look!’ The young mother blinked and sought the child with her eyes. Her gaze was once again love-blind. ‘It’s Amelia. It’s her.’ Helena took a deep, happy breath before saying, ‘Time to go home. We must say goodbye, Rita, but you’ll come again? Next week?’
‘If you want me to. She is well, though. There is no need for you to be concerned.’
‘Come anyway. We like you, don’t we, Amelia?’
She smiled at Rita, who felt once again the tail end of that sweep of mother’s love, enchanting and radiant and more than a little troubling.
Continuing homewards, Rita came to the spot where a mass of hawthorn growing at a curve in the path made it hard to see ahead. An unexpected smell – fruit? Yeast? – roused her from her thoughts, and by the time her mind had interpreted the dark shadow in the undergrowth as a person concealed, it was too late. She had gone past, he had leapt out, her arms were gripped behind her back and a knife was at her throat.
‘I have a brooch – you can have it. The money is in my purse,’ she told him quietly, not moving. The brooch was only tin and glass, but he might not know that. And if he did, the money would console him.
But that wasn’t what he was after.
‘Do she talk?’ She could smell it more strongly now he was so close.
‘Who do you mean?’
‘The girl. Do she talk?’
He gave her a shake; Rita felt something jut into her back, just below the nape of her neck.
‘The Vaughan child? No, she doesn’t speak.’
‘Is there medicine can make her speak again?’
‘No.’
‘So she won’t ever talk no more? Is that what the doctor says?’
‘She might recover her speech naturally. The doctor says it will happen in the first six months or not at all.’
She waited for more questions, but none came.
‘Drop your purse on the ground.’
With shaking hands she took the cloth pouch from her pocket – it contained the money the Vaughans had given her – and dropped it, and the next moment a great blow from behind sent her flying and she landed heavily on the rough ground with gravel digging into her palms.
I’m not hurt though, she reassured herself, but by the time she’d gathered herself and got to her feet, the man and her purse were gone.
She hurried home, thinking hard.
Which Father?
ANTHONY VAUGHAN LEANT towards his looking glass, applied the blade to the soap suds on his cheek and scraped. Meeting his eye in the glass, he made one more effort to untangle his thoughts. He began where he always began: the child was not Amelia. That ought to have been the beginning and end of the question, but it wasn’t. One single certainty led not to the next stepping stone but into a quagmire, no matter what direction he took. The knowledge wavered and faltered, it grew feebler and harder to maintain with every day that passed. It was Helena who undermined what he knew. Every smile on his wife’s face, every burst of laughter, every joyful word she pronounced, was reason to put his knowledge aside. She had grown prettier every day in the two months the child had been with them, had regained the weight she had lost, recovered the gloss in her hair and the colour in her cheeks. Her face was alive with love, not only for the child, but for him too.
But it was not only Helena, was it? It was the girl too.
Incessantly Vaughan’s eyes were drawn to the little girl’s face. At breakfast, as he spooned marmalade into her mouth, he traced the jut of her jaw; at noon it was the dip in her hairline at the front that obsessed him; when he came home from Brandy Island after work, he was incapable of dragging his eyes away from the coiled architecture of her ear. He knew these features better than he knew his wife’s or his own. He was tormented by something in them – in her – that seemed to mean something to him, if only he could work out what it was. Even in her absence, he saw her. In the train, watching the landscape speed by, her face was superimposed on the fields and sky. In the office, her features were like a watermark in the paper on which he set out his lists of figures. She even haunted his dreams. All sorts of characters bore the child’s face. Once he had dreamt of Amelia – his Amelia, the real one – and even she wore the child’s face. He had woken weeping.
His ceaseless tracing of her features, which began as an effort to find out who she was, gradually shifted focus and became an attempt to explain his own fascination. It seemed to him that her face was the model from which all human faces were derived, even his own. The endlessness of his staring had worn her face so smooth it was as if he saw his own reflection in it, and looking at her turned him back always to himself. This was something he could not tell Helena. She would hear only the thing he didn’t mean: that he saw himself in his daughter.
Was there in fact something familiar about the child? He tried to tell himself that the sense of recognition her face aroused in him was nothing but the natural echo of that first time he had seen her. His own intensity of looking was enough, surely, to explain the sense of familiarity she aroused in him? She looked quite simply like herself and that is why he knew her. Yet honesty told him it was not at all so straightforward. The notion of memory failed to adequately capture the sensation. It was as if the child evoked in him something that had the size and shape of memory, but inversed or turned inside out. Something akin to memory – its twin, perhaps, or its opposite.