‘When we brought you home and put you in your nightdress, I couldn’t help noticing you are putting on weight again. And Mrs Clare tells me you have been eating so many radishes it has made you feel sick and she has been making you ginger tea. But it is not the radishes that are making you feel unwell. It is your pregnancy.’
‘It is impossible,’ said Helena, shaking her head. ‘My monthly signs came to an end when we lost Amelia. They have never restarted. So it cannot be as you say.’
‘It is not with the first bleeding that your readiness to conceive commences, but in the few weeks before. If in that time a baby starts, the signs will not have a chance to begin again. This is what has happened in your case. In about half a year you will be a mother again.’
Helena blinked. It took time for the information to sink in to a mind made turbulent with grief, but it finally happened, and then she exclaimed, ‘Oh!’ very gently and brought her hand to her belly and placed it there. A small smile pulled feebly at her lips, and the tear she shed was not the same kind of tear that had wetted her pillow before.
A faint frown crossed her face, and she said, ‘Oh!’ a second time, in puzzlement, as though, following her initial surprise, enlightenment had been shed on some dark and distant aspect of her mind.
With that she closed her eyes and fell into a deep and natural sleep.
Downstairs, Vaughan was standing in the dimness of his study, looking out of the window. He had not lit the lamps. He had not taken his jacket off. He had not moved, it seemed, for hours.
When Rita knocked and came in, she found Vaughan glazed, more than half absent, a man too enmeshed in his previous thoughts to attend to the present. ‘Yes,’ he told her in a hollow voice, when she said Helena was sleeping, and ‘No,’ when she asked whether he himself needed a draught to help him sleep. ‘Yes,’ he said, when she stressed that Helena must be preserved from any further shocks.
‘It’s particularly important,’ she emphasized, ‘now that there is a new baby on the way.’
‘Right,’ he said dully, leaving her uncertain whether he had actually taken the news in. Plainly he believed the conversation to be at an end, for he turned back to the window and returned to whatever it was that held his mind hostage.
Rita let herself out into the garden, by the doors whose new locks were now redundant, and went down to the river. The summer rain burst slackly on her shoulders in fat, warm drops, which seemed to contain double their weight of water. Though it was evening it was not yet dark, and the light fell on wet leaves and puddled paths, casting everything in glinting silver. The river’s gleam was lent a hammered finish by the incessant raindrops.
Rita felt a swell in her own throat. For hours she had been preoccupied with medical matters, had taken refuge in the demands and challenges of her work. Now that she was alone, sorrow welled up in her, and she allowed tears to join the raindrops on her face.
She had never once visited Buscot Lodge without seeing the girl. At every visit she had taken the child on her knee, or thrown pebbles with her into the river, or watched ducks and swans sail by, reflected in the water. When that little hand had reached for hers, she had pretended to herself that her pleasure in this gesture of trust was a small and unimportant thing. But when she had seen the tall woman with the spike for a nose swing the child away from the Vaughans and into the arms of Robin Armstrong, the instinct that had caused Helena to reach out imploringly to the girl had found an echo in her own breast.
Sobbing in a way that she scarcely recognized, Rita attempted to gather herself. ‘You are being very foolish,’ she addressed herself. ‘This is not like you.’ The stern words had no impact. ‘It’s not as if she were your child,’ she continued, but at these words her tears only redoubled.
Leaning against a tree trunk, Rita gave way to her feelings, but after ten minutes of bitter weeping there was no end in sight to her sorrow. She remembered the solace God had once brought her in the days when she had faith. ‘You see why I don’t believe in You?’ she addressed him. ‘Because at times like this I’m on my own. I know I am.’
Her self-pity did not last long. ‘This is no good,’ she exhorted herself. ‘Whatever’s the matter with you?’ She rubbed her eyes with violent energy, cursing the rain in language that would have scandalized the nuns, and picked up her pace, throwing herself into a headlong dash along the path, till the breathlessness of exertion replaced the heaving of emotion in her chest.
As she neared the Swan, the din of voices filled the air. The farmhands and the cressmen and the gravel-diggers were exhilarated by the day of festivity in a long season of hard work, and intoxicated too. The endlessness of the daylight gave rise to all sorts of excess, and regulars and visitors alike were making the most of it. Despite the rain, some were outside on the riverbank. Soaked to the skin, they imbibed, not minding – not even noticing – the rain that diluted the liquor, as they told each other rambling versions of the afternoon’s events.
Rita had no wish to be drawn into the throng. People had seen her leave the fair with the Vaughans, and if they saw her now, they would inevitably stop her and want the story. She had no intention of telling anyone what was the Vaughans’ private business, but getting that across to a crowd of curious drunks would be no easy matter. She turned up the collar of her cape, trying not to mind the rivulets of water it sent down her neck, and dipped her head so that her face was hidden. For the rest she would have to count on speed and the drunkenness of the crowd to get past unnoticed.
Because her head was down, she failed to spot one of the farmhands, relieving himself into the river. He turned, buttoning up rather haphazardly, and she almost ran into him. He was drunk, but not too drunk to apologize, ‘Pardon me, Miss Sunday,’ before he staggered off to his fellow drinkers. He was bound to talk, and her chances of getting beyond the inn unaccosted were slight.
‘Rita!’ she heard, and sighed, bowing to the inevitable. ‘Rita!’ the voice came again, low and urgent, and now she realized it did not come from the tables on the bank. It was from the river. There was Collodion, moored half concealed under the willow. And there was Daunt, beckoning her aboard. She reached the ladder, climbed the first rungs. His hand reached down, she put hers into it, felt herself hauled up and was aboard.
Below deck all the last boxes, bottles and photographic plates had been stowed away. The only sign of the business of the day was the paperwork on the table, where Daunt had been logging the day’s plates and takings. There was a glass of hock beside it; he took down a second glass, filled it and placed it in front of Rita.
They had last seen each other in the crowd that gathered to witness the scene between the Vaughans and Robin Armstrong. They had parted there when Daunt, seeing the tall woman divide the mass of spectators to depart, had taken off in pursuit.
‘Did you catch up with her?’
‘The pace she was moving, I couldn’t close the distance. I was weighed down.’ He gestured to the heavy box in which he carried extra plates. ‘She spoke to nobody. Stopped to look at nothing. Made directly for the far field, and when she got to the gate someone was waiting for her with a pony and trap. She climbed up and away they went.’
‘Back to her brothel at Bampton?’
‘Presumably. Most polite people call it a lodging house. For an unmarried woman raised in a convent, you have a remarkable frankness about such a place.’
‘Daunt, I spend a large part of my working life dealing with the consequences of those activities that take place between men and women and which polite language skirts around. If you knew half of what that job involves, you would understand why a mere word has no power to shock me. Bringing a child into the world is too bloody a thing to be photographed and you will never see it, but I – I see it all the time.’