He peered at the image, but the candlelight made it hard to read the expression on the little girl’s face. ‘Expectation? Not really, is it. Nor hope.’
He turned to Rita for elucidation.
‘She’s sad, Daunt.’
‘Sad?’ He looked again at the photograph while she continued speaking.
‘She stares up- and downriver, in search of something. Something she longs for. Something she has been expecting every day, and every day it doesn’t come, and still she waits and still she looks and still she yearns, but the hope dwindles with every day that passes. Now she waits hopelessly.’
He looked. What she said was true. ‘What is it she’s waiting for?’
Suddenly he knew the answer to his own question. ‘Her father,’ he said at the same time as Rita opened her mouth and said, ‘Her mother.’
‘Does she belong to Robin Armstrong, after all?’
Rita frowned. ‘According to Helena, she’s indifferent to him, but if she hasn’t seen him for a long time – and he admitted as much at the Swan – she wouldn’t remember.’
‘So she might be his.’
Rita paused, frowning.
‘Robin Armstrong is a man who’s not what he seems, Daunt.’ He saw her weighing up how much to tell him. She came to a conclusion. ‘His faint at the Swan was faked. His pulse was far too steady. The entire thing was play-acting.’
‘Why?’
Her face had the grim and hungry look it always had when her knowledge of a thing was thwarted. ‘I don’t know. But that young man is not what he seems.’
The rain had slowed. She picked up a glove, put it on, and when she reached for the other found that Daunt had it in his hands.
‘When can I photograph you again?’
‘Have you nothing better to do than take photographs of a country nurse? Surely you must have enough by now.’
‘I have nowhere near enough.’
‘My glove?’ She would not be coaxed into coquettishness, not even over a glove. Flirting got you nowhere. She refused to play with undercurrents and scorned gallantry. Directness was the only approach she recognized.
He relinquished the glove and she turned, ready to leave.
‘When I see you with the girl …’
She paused, and he saw her back stiffen.
‘What I wonder is, haven’t you ever wanted …’
‘A child?’ Something in her voice opened the door to hope.
She turned and looked him full in the face. ‘I’m thirty-five. Far too old for all that.’
It was a clear rebuff.
In the silence that followed, it became obvious that at some point the rain must have stopped, because they heard it start up again, a gentle patter.
Rita exclaimed and refolded her muffler. He shuffled round her elaborately to open the door; it was a dance in which they both leant exaggeratedly away from each other.
‘Shall I see you to your door?’
‘It’s only a few yards. Stay in the dry.’
And she was gone.
Thirty-five, he was thinking. It was young enough. Had there been something unresolved in her voice? His memory played the exchange again, trying to catch every inflexion, but his auditory memory was no match for his visual one and he did not want to expose himself to false hope and wishful thinking.
He closed the door behind her and leant against it. It was natural for women to want children, wasn’t it? His sisters had them and Marion, his wife, had been disappointed not to become a mother.
He picked up the cases for the glass plates, and before sliding them in, took another look at today’s exposure. The child gazed out of the glass, upriver, longingly. Looking for her father? Yes, he could believe that. For a long moment he gazed longingly back, then he closed the glass into its box, and pressed his knuckles into his closed eyes to rub the yearning away.
The Genie in the Teapot
THE WATER LEVEL was nearing the top of the first post, as Lily expected after all the rain. Every year it was like this, for a day or a few days or a week. It made her wary. Still, there was no angry rush and no menacing loitering either. The water did not hiss or roar or dart spiteful splashes at her hem. It flowed steadily, wholly engaged on some calm business of its own, and had not the slightest interest in Lily and her doings.
What would the parson say? Lily emptied the feed into the trough, and when she put the bucket on the ground, thought she might as well sink down with it. It wasn’t so very long ago she had feared he might dismiss her because she missed a day’s work when Ann came back. Then there’d been the awful day when he wanted to know how old she was and when she last saw her mother. After that she had gone round the skirtings behind the heavy furniture, beaten the dust out of the curtains in the spare bedroom that was never used, washed down the walls of the privy, cleaned the underside of the kitchen table where spiders liked to nest in the corners, but nothing settled her nerves, and for several Thursdays in a row it was a relief not to be given her notice at the same time as her wages. Now it was worse. Would word of her concealment in the shrubs opposite the Vaughans’ boathouse have reached the parson?
‘What to do?’ she sighed aloud as she put the bucket down and the boar started to root around for the best bits. ‘I don’t know.’
The sow tautened her ears. Even in her worried state, Lily half smiled.
‘Droll creature – you look for all the world as if you are listening to me!’
A quiver ran through the pig. It began with the trembling of her nostrils, and then every ginger hair of her body shivered as in response to a breeze, rippling down her spine and twitching the curl of her tail. When the wave had completed its journey, the sow stood to attention, poised in readiness for something.
Lily stared. She noticed that the dullness that had clouded the sow’s eye for so long had lifted. The small eyes with their large pupils were now filled with light.
Then something happened to Lily too. She felt her gaze shift from looking at the sow’s eye to looking into it. And there she saw—
‘Oh!’ she cried, and her heart burst into a flurry of beating, for it is a startling sensation to look at something and find that inside it is another living soul looking back. Lily would have been no less astonished to be addressed by a genie from inside her teapot, or have the lampshade bow its head to her.
‘Well I never!’ she exclaimed, and she took a few gasping breaths.
The sow shifted her trotters restlessly and made a breathing noise that also signified agitation.
‘Whatever is it? What do you want?’
The sow became still and did not shift her gaze from Lily’s, but stared with an air of divine delight.
‘Do you want me to talk to you? Is that what it is?’
She scratched the sow’s ear, and the sow grunted softly in a way that Lily understood to be satisfaction.
‘You’ve been lonely, have you? Is it sadness made your eyes so dull? I don’t suppose he’s much company for you. Nasty brute. They’re no good, men. Not Mr White, and certainly not Victor who brought you here, and not his father before him. None of ’em. Well, the parson’s all right …’
She chatted to the pig about the parson, about his kindness and his goodness, and as she did, her own problems returned to her thoughts.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she admitted softly. ‘One of them’s bound to have told him. Not that photographer fellow, I haven’t never seen him in church, but the Vaughans or the nurse. I wasn’t doing anything bad, yet it looks bad … And if they haven’t said anything yet, it’ll come before long. What am I to do? If I have to leave the parsonage …’