Helena knew that he did not believe the girl to be their daughter. She knew because he had told her so on the first day, as soon as they were alone after putting the child to bed. She had met the news with surprise, but was apparently untroubled by it.
‘Two years is a long time in the face of any little girl,’ she’d told him gently. ‘You will have to be patient. Time will teach your heart to know her again.’ She had put a hand on his arm, and it was the first time in two years that his wife had touched him in their drawing room and looked lovingly at him. ‘Until then, put your faith in me. I know her.’
Now, when the issue arose, she treated his lack of faith with bemused tolerance: it was trivial, inconsequential, just her own dear, silly husband slow to catch up with events. She did little to try to persuade him. ‘She still likes honey!’ she noted once at the breakfast table, and ‘Well, that hasn’t changed!’ when the girl pushed the hairbrush away. But for the most part, she just put blithe confidence in the likelihood that time would bring him to his senses. His doubts were lightweight, her manner implied, and sure to be swept away with the next strong current. He did not raise the matter himself. It wasn’t that he was afraid of worrying her, but the contrary: You see, she would say, if he told her. You do know her really. It is all coming back to you now.
It was the kind of tangle that you could easily make worse in your efforts to straighten things out, and more than once Vaughan found himself considering a very simple solution. Why not decide to believe it? With her coming, the girl had broken a curse, returned them to the enchanted days of happiness. The years of pain, when they were encased in misery and comfortless to each other, were gone. The child brought straightforward joy to Helena, and to him something more complicated that he treasured, though he did not know what to call it. In a very short time it had come about that he minded when the girl ate less than usual, fretted when she cried at night, rejoiced when she reached her hand for his.
Amelia was gone, and this girl had come. His wife believed her to be Amelia. She bore some resemblance to Amelia. Life, which had been unendurable before she came, was now pleasurable again. She had returned Helena to him and, more than that, she herself had found a place in his heart. It wasn’t going too far to say that he loved her. Did he want her to be Amelia? Yes. On the one side: love, comfort, happiness. On the other: every chance of a return to the way things had been … Well, then. What reason was there to cling so doggedly to his certainty when the current was pulling so hard in the other direction?
There was only one reason. Robin Armstrong.
‘They will find the body,’ Helena insisted. ‘His wife drowned the child, everybody knows it, and when they find the body he will know.’
But it had been two months and no body had been found.
Vaughan had put off doing anything so far. He was a good man. Fair and decent. And he meant to be fair and decent now. There was himself, and there was Robin Armstrong, but there were also Helena and the girl. It was important that the best outcome should be found for all concerned. The situation could not go on as it was indefinitely – that did nobody any good. A solution must be found, and he was taking the first step today.
He rinsed briskly, towelled his face dry and got ready. He had a train to catch.
Although generally known as Monty and Mitch, any suspicion that this was the name of a provincial travelling circus fell away at the sight of the brass plaque attached next to the door of the sober Georgian Oxford townhouse: Montgomery & Mitchell, Legal and Commercial. The Thames was quite invisible from its windows, and yet its presence was felt in every room. Not only every room, but every drawer and cupboard of every room, for this was the firm of solicitors used by anyone who had business interests relating to the river, from Oxford all the way upstream for many a mile. Mr Montgomery himself was not a boating man, nor a fisherman, nor a painter of watery landscapes; in fact, he went from one year’s end to the next without setting eyes on the river, yet still it could be said without a word of a lie that he lived and breathed it. The way Mr Montgomery pictured the Thames, it was not a current of water at all, but an income stream, dry and papery, and he diverted a share of its bounty every year into his own ledgers and bank accounts and was very grateful to it. He spent his days contentedly drafting bills of carriage and negotiating the wording of letters of credit, and when a rare and valuable dispute involving force majeure came his way, which it sometimes did, his heart swelled with delight.
On the steps, Vaughan had his hand to the bell though he did not yet pull it. He was muttering to himself.
‘Amelia,’ he said, a little hesitantly. Then, with perhaps too much energy, ‘Amelia!’
It was a name he had constantly to practise, for it never came without having to leap over an obstacle, and the effort made it sound somewhat forced, even to his own ears.
‘Amelia,’ he said a third time and, hoping that that was good enough, he rang the bell.
Vaughan had written and was expected. The boy who answered the door and dealt with his coat was the same one who had been there on the day more than two years ago when Vaughan had come to deal with matters relating to the kidnapping of his daughter. The boy had been even younger then and quite at a loss to know how to behave faced with the wild sorrow and anguish that the visitor had displayed. Despite his strong feelings, Vaughan had wanted to reassure the boy, tell him that it was not his fault if he did not know how to look with calm deference into the eye of a madman who had lost his only child. Today the boy – for he was still a boy, if a bigger one – maintained his calm politeness as he took the coat and suspended it from a hook, but in turning back to Vaughan could no longer contain himself.
‘Oh, good news, Sir! What a turn-up for the books! You must be overjoyed, you and Mrs Vaughan, Sir!’
Handshaking was not quite the done thing between a client of Monty and Mitch’s and the boy who took the coats, but such was the momentousness of the day – so far as the boy was concerned anyway – that Vaughan allowed his hand to be taken and subjected to a vigorous pumping.
‘Thank you,’ he murmured, and if there was any shortcoming in his acceptance of these hearty congratulations, the boy was too young to perceive it and only beamed as he showed Mr Vaughan into the office of Mr Montgomery himself.
Mr Montgomery stretched out a professionally jovial hand. ‘How good to see you again, Mr Vaughan. You look well, I must say.’
‘Thank you. You’ve had my letter?’
‘Indeed I have. Pull up a chair and tell me all about it. First, though, a glass of port?’
‘Thank you.’
Vaughan saw the letter on Montgomery’s desk. It said little, really; the least he could get away with saying. But now, seeing it broken open and lying there, thoroughly perused, he wondered whether it was the kind of little that gave away more than it meant to. Vaughan’s hand was the open, fluent kind that anyone can read upside down and, as Montgomery busied himself with the glasses, some of the phrases he had written yesterday caught his eye. ‘The child having been discovered … girl being now in our custody … may be necessary to retain your services in matters relating …’ These were not, he now felt, the expressions of a man overjoyed at the return of his only child.