Armstrong dodged the wandering fair-goers who were in his way, and stepped swiftly after her. For a little while he made steady gains through the crowd. He was almost near enough to put his hand on her shoulder at one point, but a concertina expanded with a wheeze and when he had successfully got around it she had disappeared from view. He looked left and right at every opportunity, between the stalls and tables, and was surprised how quickly he found her again. Coming to a crossroads in the fair, he saw her standing still, looking around her as if waiting for someone. He raised an arm to hail her, but the minute her eyes turned in his direction off she went again.
He was on the point of giving up when suddenly ahead of him a great stillness fell. Nobody moved. Then a cry rent the air – a woman’s voice, in panic: ‘Get away! Away with you!’
Armstrong ran.
Vaughan arrived at the place where the crowd thickened and had to shove his way through. When he reached the heart of it, he found Helena on her knees on the ground, her skirt stained with the mud of so many tramping feet. She was weeping wildly. Over her stood a tall, dark-haired woman with a long, sharp nose and wide pale lips, who had contrived to be standing between Helena and the child, while Helena made frantic attempts in the slippery mud to reach around her wide skirts and lay her hands on the little girl.
‘I don’t know,’ the woman was explaining, to nobody in particular. ‘I was only being friendly. Whatever’s wrong with that? Awful fuss to make when all I did was say, “Hello, Alice.”’ Her voice was loud – a fraction louder perhaps than was necessary. She noted the arrival of Vaughan, then, turning to the crowd, addressed them as one. ‘You heard me, didn’t you? You saw?’ There were a few nods. ‘Saying hello to the daughter of my former lodger I haven’t seen in a long while – what could be more natural than that?’
The tall woman placed her hands on the girl’s shoulders.
Murmurs arose from the crowd. They were reluctant, indistinct, confused, but they confirmed that yes, it was as she said. Satisfied, the woman nodded to herself.
Vaughan crouched to put an arm protectively around his wife, while she stared in mute, wide-eyed shock, gesturing for him to take hold of the girl.
The crowd parted with a murmur and out of it emerged someone else they recognized.
Robin Armstrong.
Seeing him, a light of satisfaction, as at some scheme brought successfully to fruition, animated the tall woman’s face and was instantly suppressed, then with a violent swiftness that took everyone by surprise, she gripped the child and raised her up. ‘Look, Alice!’ she pronounced. ‘It’s Daddy!’
Helena’s cry of pain was accompanied by the gasp that came as a single sound from the crowd, and then silence fell, shocked and confused, as the woman delivered the child into Robin Armstrong’s arms.
Before anyone could gather themselves to react, she had turned and launched herself into the throng. In the face of her sharp-nosed velocity the crowd parted, then closed behind her and she was lost to sight.
Vaughan stood and looked at Armstrong.
Armstrong looked at the child and in a broken voice spoke words into her hair.
‘What did he say?’ the crowd asked, and word was passed from mouth to ear in a Chinese whisper. ‘He said, “Oh my darling! Oh my child! Alice, my love!”’
The onlookers waited, as at the theatre, for the scene to continue. Mrs Vaughan had fainted, it seemed, and Mr Vaughan was turned to stone, while Robin Armstrong had eyes only for the child, and his father, Mr Armstrong, stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Something had to happen next, but there was uncertainty in the air. The actors had forgotten their lines and each one waited for the other to pick up the story. The moment seemed destined to be without end, and murmurs were rising from the audience when a voice rose above the confusion.
‘May I help?’
It was Rita. She stepped into the circle and knelt beside Helena.
‘We have to get her home,’ she said, but she looked quizzically at Vaughan as she said it. Vaughan, his eyes locked on the girl in Robin Armstrong’s arms, seemed incapable of action.
‘What are you going to do?’ Rita said in an urgent mutter.
Now Newman, the Vaughans’ gardener, appeared, with another of the manservants from the household. Between them, they lifted Helena from the ground.
‘Well?’ Rita said, and she took hold of Vaughan’s arm to rouse him out of his inertia, but all he was capable of was a minimal shake of the head before he turned his back and, with a nod, instructed the servants to begin the task of carrying Helena’s senseless body back to Buscot Lodge.
All eyes were on the Vaughans’ departure, and then, as one, the crowd looked back to the remaining players. The little one opened her mouth, and everybody waited for the wail that was certain to come. But she only yawned, closed her eyes and rested her head heavily on Robin Armstrong’s shoulder. The slackness of her small body said she had fallen instantly asleep. The young man gazed with an expression of infinite tenderness at the face of the sleeping child.
There was a shifting in the crowd and voices were heard.
‘What’s happening, Mother?’
And: ‘Why is everybody so quiet?’
Bess, with her swaying gait and a ribboned eye patch, emerged, leading a procession of children, all come too late to witness the events.
‘Look, there’s Papa!’ one cried, spotting Armstrong.
‘And Robin!’ came another little voice.
‘Who is that little girl?’ the smallest of the family asked.
‘Yes,’ echoed Armstrong’s deep voice, and it was grave, though it spoke quietly so as not to be heard by the crowd. ‘Who is that little girl, Robin?’
Robin put his finger to his lip. ‘Hush!’ he said to his brothers and sisters. ‘Your niece is sleeping.’
The children crowded around their half-brother, their bright young faces turned to the child, who was now invisible to the crowd.
‘It’s raining!’ someone said.
Suddenly, from being a few drops of water it became a downpour. Faces ran with water, skirts were flattened against legs, hair was slicked to the scalp. With the rain came the realization that they had been staring not at a piece of theatre but at other people’s misfortunes. Embarrassed, they remembered themselves, and ran for cover. Some made for the trees, some for the refreshment tent – and a good number ran to the Swan.
Philosophy at the Swan
THE STORY THAT had been told with an air of conclusiveness at the wedding breakfast was now taken up again, and all agreed it had taken a distinctly new turn. They repeated the events of the afternoon over and over, recalling every detaiclass="underline" the sharp-nosed woman, Helena Vaughan’s dramatic faint, Mr Vaughan’s frozen stare and Robin Armstrong’s tenderness. When they had remembered everything there was to remember, the alcohol encouraged them to recall things they only half remembered and even to invent things they did not remember at all. They fell to questions: What would the Vaughans do now? How would Mrs Vaughan bear it? Might Vaughan yet persuade Robin Armstrong to give the child up? Why had they not come to blows? Might they yet, tomorrow or the day after?
The drinkers fell into factions, some insisting that the girl was Amelia Vaughan, pointing to Mrs Vaughan’s certainty, others shaking their heads and pointing out that the child’s fine hair was more like the soft waves they remembered on Robin Armstrong’s head. They went back, reconsidered every element of the story in the light of these recent revelations, weighed the evidence this way and that. The night of the kidnap suddenly came to the surface, for if this child was indeed Alice Armstrong, then what on earth had happened to Amelia Vaughan? They had put the story of her disappearance away following her reappearance, but now they revisited it and plumbed its depths again.