He felt the same leap in the chest when she turned to him for reassurance. Though she was fearless on the river, she was nervous of all sorts of other things: the approach of horses on cobblestones, doors that slammed, over-familiar strangers who reached down to tweak her nose, the beating of rugs with brooms, and it was him she looked to when she was startled. In unfamiliar situations, it was his hand she reached for, he to whom she raised her arms to be lifted out of some perceived danger. He was touched by her selection of him as her protector. Two years ago, he had failed to protect Amelia; this felt like a second chance. With every danger averted, he felt his faith in himself returning.
The child still did not speak, she was often absent, sometimes indifferent, yet her presence gladdened him. A hundred times a day, his mind made the journey from Amelia to this child and from this child back to Amelia. The path between the two of them was now so well travelled that it was impossible to think of one without the other. They had become aspects of the same thought.
The maid came to clear the breakfast things.
‘The photographer is coming at half past ten,’ he reminded her. ‘I expect we’ll have coffee first.’
‘It’s the day the nurse comes – will she have coffee too?’
‘Yes, coffee for everyone.’
The maid looked anxiously at the child’s hair that was still tangled from sleep.
‘Should I try and brush Miss Amelia’s hair for the photographs?’ she offered, eyeing the tangle with a doubtful expression.
‘Let Mrs Vaughan do it when she’s up.’
The maid looked relieved.
There was something Vaughan needed to do to prepare himself before Daunt arrived.
‘Come on, little one,’ he said.
He lifted the child and carried her into the drawing room. He sat at the desk and placed the girl sideways on his lap so she could see into the garden.
He reached for the photograph of Amelia with himself and Helena.
With the coming of the girl, his fear of memory, so powerful that he had sought to bury his daughter’s face entirely, had lessened. He had had the sense – irrational, he knew – that Amelia herself was looking for him, and that he owed it to her to meet her gaze. Across that awful divide. Now that the moment had come, with the girl on his lap, he found that the task did not seem so difficult as he had feared.
He turned the image to face him and looked at it through the haze of the child’s unbrushed hair.
It was a traditional family pose. Helena was seated with Amelia on her knees. Behind them stood Vaughan himself. Knowing that the slightest quiver of emotion might end in a disastrous waste of time, money and effort, he had stared too fiercely and as a result looked intimidating to those who didn’t know him and comic to those who did. Helena had been entirely unable to suppress her smile, but delivered it so steadily to the camera that her beauty was crisp in every detail. On her knees: Amelia.
On a photograph three inches by five, his daughter’s face was small – smaller even than the thumbnail of the child on his lap. At two, she retained that undefined quality in her face that lingered from her baby years. Moreover, she had been unable to keep entirely still. The indistinct features had something universal about them; they lent themselves as easily to the face of the little girl on his lap as to the daughter he had tried so hard to lock away out of sight and out of mind. Her feet must have moved too, for they were a blur, spectral, boneless, the kind a ghost might hover on. Around her small body was a froth of petticoat and skirt that dissolved into transparency at its edges. The hands were lost in its spume.
The child shifted in his lap and he looked down. A bead of water had appeared on her hand. She raised it to her mouth and licked it, then looked up at him with casual curiosity.
He was weeping.
‘Silly Dada,’ he said, and bent to kiss her head, but she squirmed free. She crossed the room to the door, where she stopped and turned and extended a hand towards him. He followed, put his hand in hers and allowed himself to be led out of the house, into the garden and down the shallow gravel slope to the river.
‘What’s this in aid of?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Is this supposed to make me feel better?’
She stared up the river and down, and when there was nothing to see, looked around for a good stick to prod and poke with at the water’s edge. When she had done with that, she passed the stick to Vaughan to continue, while she selected some large stones from the slope to take and wash in the water. The washing seemed without purpose, and out of nowhere Vaughan was struck by the notion that he had stood here once before and watched Amelia wash stones. Did he not remember a time, some years ago, when the two of them had been at the river’s edge, just like this, rinsing stones for no reason and prodding at the soft mud in the shallows? He raised his head to work out whether the memory was genuine or whether it was some curious reverse echo, by which the present seems to duplicate itself in the past.
The girl had stopped her labour with the stones. On all fours, she bent close to the water’s surface as if it were a mirror. Looking back at her was another girl – one he knew.
‘Amelia!’
He grasped for her, but at his touch she was gone and his fingers were wet.
The girl sat up and turned her ever-changing eyes on him in an attitude of mild concern.
‘Who are you? I know you’re not her – but if you are … if you are – am I going mad?’
She handed him the stick and indicated with a vigorous motion that he should dig a channel with it. She lined it with her stones. She was exacting in her expectations and it took some time before she was satisfied. Then, he understood, they were to watch it. They saw how the water trickled in, and how it silted up, and how rapidly the work of the river undid the work of a man and a child.
In the end, they carried the coffee outdoors and down to the boathouse. It was generally agreed that a riverside setting would be more interesting than an indoor photograph, so they must make the most of the dry weather while it lasted.
Once they’d got the camera in position, Daunt went to prepare the first plate. ‘While I’m gone, here are the other exposures. From last time.’
Helena unfastened the hinged lid of the wooden box. The interior was lined with felt. It contained, each in its slot, two glass plates.
‘Oh!’ Helena said, when she was holding the first up to the light. ‘How strange!’
‘It takes you aback, doesn’t it?’ Rita said. ‘Light and shade are reversed.’ She peered at the same plate. ‘I fear Mr Daunt was right and you already have the best ones. This one is rather blurred.’
‘What do you think, darling?’ Helena asked, passing the plate to Vaughan.
He glanced at the plate, saw a smudge of a child, and looked away again.
‘Are you all right?’ Rita asked.
He nodded. ‘Too much coffee.’
Helena removed the second plate from the box and studied it. ‘They are blurred, it’s true, but not so much that you can’t see the thing that matters. It is Amelia. That’s perfectly plain.’ Her voice contained no unsettling intensity, no rising note of hysteria. It was measured, mild even. ‘This question in Mr Armstrong’s mind will never come to anything, but the lawyer thinks we should be ready, just in case.’