Joe was poorly, his chest not improved by the summer mists that hung with clammy warmth over the riverbank. This was the time of year when he’d usually been able to count on his lungs drying out, but the change of season helped him little this time and he’d continued to sink into his spells as frequently as in wintertime, and he sat quiet and pale by the hearth while the regulars drank and talked around him.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said in response to any enquiry. ‘I’m all right. I’m working up a story.’
‘It will get better at solstice time, I expect,’ Margot said.
The summer solstice was traditionally the day of the summer fair, and this year it was also to be the wedding day of Owen Albright and his housekeeper, Bertha. What with the wedding breakfast in the morning, and the fair-goers who would doubtless want to quench their thirst in the afternoon, Margot was expecting it to be a busy day. For a while her optimism seemed like wishful thinking, but then, in the third week of June, things did in fact pick up. First people wondered whether the rain showers were sparser, and then they actually were. Patches of blue appeared in the grey and lingered, and twice in a row the afternoons were dry. There came to be a sense of expectation as the longest day drew near.
Solstice day dawned – and the sun shone.
‘In fact,’ thought Henry Daunt as he set up his camera outside the church for the wedding photograph, ‘it’s too bright. I’ll have to take it here, sheltered from the glare.’
The celebrants came out of the church. The parson was his summer self: this morning he had opened his window and stood naked to the waist, feeling the sun on his white chest and his pale face, saying, ‘Glory, glory, glory!’ Only he knew this, but everyone saw his lively smile and enjoyed his vigorous shake of the hand as they came down the steps.
Daunt positioned Owen and his new wife at the spot that was just right and arranged Mrs Albright’s hand through Mr Albright’s arm. Owen, who was struggling to remember to call his wife Bertha and not Mrs O’Connor, knew what it was to have his portrait taken; he had done it once before, some years ago. Bertha had seen a great number of photographs, so she too knew what to do. The pair held themselves stiffly upright and turned grave, proud faces towards the camera. Even the teasing from Owen’s drinking pals at the Swan could not crack their solemn faces, and their newly married dignity was transferred by sunlight on to glass, where it would outlive them for a long, long time.
When it was done, the wedding party gathered itself for the walk along the riverbank. ‘What a day!’ they said as they went, looking up to the clear blue sky. ‘What a splendid day!’ And they came, a joyful procession, to the Swan at Radcot, where Margot had put flowers on the tables on the riverbank and the Little Margots were waiting with pitchers of cool drinks covered with beaded cloths.
The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer’s day winter always feels like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of, and not a thing you have lived. The unexpected sun made their skin tingle, they felt sweat at the backs of their necks, and a goosebump was suddenly a thing impossible to imagine. Yet the longest day of summer is the reversed twin of winter’s long night, and, this being so, one solstice inevitably recalls the other; and if there were some who did not connect the two days, Owen himself reminded them.
‘Six months ago,’ he told the wedding party, ‘I decided to make Bertha my wife. Inspired by the miracle that happened here at the Swan that you all know of – the rescue of little Amelia Vaughan, who was found dead and came to life again – I felt like a new man, and requested the hand in marriage of my housekeeper, and Bertha did me the honour of accepting …’
After the speeches, talk of the girl was renewed. Events that had taken place on this very riverbank, in the dark and in the cold, were retold under an azure sky, and perhaps it was an effect of the sunshine, but the darker elements of the tale were swept away and a simpler, happier narrative came to the fore. A little girl who had been kidnapped was returned to her parents, making her and the Vaughans and the whole community very happy. A wrong was righted, a family restored. The great-aunt of one of the gravel-diggers tried to say that she had seen the child on the riverbank and that the girl had no reflection, but she was hushed; no one wanted a ghostly tale today. The cider cups were refilled, the Little Margots came one after the other and indistinguishably with plates of ham and cheese and radishes, and the wedding party had enough joy to drown out all doubt, all darkness. Six months ago, a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.
Mr Albright kissed Mrs Albright, who blushed red as the radishes, and at noon precisely the party rose as one to continue their celebrations by joining the fair.
Between Radcot’s neatly hedged fields was an awkwardly shaped piece of land that had fallen to common use. Today it contained stalls of all kinds and all sizes. Some of them were professional-looking affairs with awnings to protect the goods from the sun; others were no more than a tarpaulin spread upon the ground with wares set out upon it. There was stuff that a person might actually need – pitchers and bowls and beakers; cloth; knives and tools; skins – but there was just as much frippery designed to incite cravings. There were ribbons, sweet delicacies, kittens, trinkets of all sorts. Some of the traders carried goods in baskets. These wandered here and there, and each and every one declaimed the authenticity of his own wares and warned against the other crooks whose goods were counterfeit, expensive, and would break the minute the charlatan had packed up and gone. There were pipers and drummers and a one-man band, and as the fair-goers walked, they wandered into and out of the range of love songs, drinking songs and sentimental songs of loss and hardship. Sometimes they could hear two at once and the notes bumped into and fell over each other in their ear.
Mr and Mrs Vaughan walked along the river from Buscot Lodge to the field where the day’s festivities were to take place. They held one hand each of the child who swung between them. Helena was faintly irritable – she was disappointed, Vaughan thought, that the doctor’s prediction about the return of the girl’s speech had not turned out as she hoped – yet it was less her mood than his own that was casting a shadow over the day.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Anthony Vaughan asked his wife.
‘Why ever not?’
‘Will she be safe?’
‘Now we know it was only Lily White watching us – a poor, harmless creature – what is there to worry about?’
Vaughan frowned. ‘But that fellow who accosted Rita …’
‘That was months ago. Whoever he was, he can hardly try anything when we are surrounded by so many people who know us. Our own farmers and servants are here. Everyone from the Swan. They wouldn’t let anyone harm so much as a hair on her head.’
‘Do you really want to expose her to the pointing and the gossip?’
‘Dearest, we can’t keep her from the world for ever. There is so much to amuse a child here. She will adore the boat races. It would be cruelty to keep her away.’
Life had been so much better since the arrival of the child. Helena’s happiness had come as such a relief to him that it had brought a surge of joy to his own heart. Their renewed love was so like the first years of their marriage that it was possible to forget that the long chill of despair had ever been. They had buried the past to live in pleasure and delight. Yet now that the novelty of their new-found marital happiness had worn off, he was unable to pretend to himself that it rested on secure foundations. The child swinging between them, with her mute inscrutability, her colourless hair and her ever-changing eyes, was at once the cause of their happiness and a threat to it.