Lily turned to Victor and smiled.
When Lily arrived back at Basketman’s Cottage, she knew before she even opened the door. The river smell was never so strong it could cover the fruity, yeasty odour, nor could the rain wash it away.
‘I had to go to the parsonage,’ she began, but before she could get her excuse out, the first blow landed on her upper arm. The next found the softness of her belly, and as she turned away from his fists, it was her back and shoulders that took the attack. Mr White had battered her too, but he was a drinker, and though he was big he had not had the expertise of Victor nor half his strength. His blows had been weighty, but in comparison to this, lax, flabby. She’d been able to dodge Old Whitey’s poorly launched punches, deflect his knuckles, and when he did land a blow home, the bruises had faded in a week. Victor, though, had been beating her for nearly thirty years. He knew every one of her tiny repertoire of feints and ruses, teased her into moving one way so he could land a blow the other; he went about it with cold concentration, unmoved by pleas or tears. All she could do was let him.
He never touched her face.
When it was over, she lay on the floor until she heard him pull up a chair and sit down.
She got to her feet, straightened her dress.
‘Are you hungry?’ She tried to make her voice as ordinary as possible. He didn’t like a fuss afterwards.
‘I’ve eaten.’
That meant he’d have left nothing for her.
At the kitchen table, he exhaled with an air of satisfaction she recognized.
‘Have you had a good day, Victor?’ she asked timidly.
‘A good day? A good day? I should say so.’ He nodded with a secret air. ‘Things are coming on nicely.’ She hovered on her feet. She would not sit down unless he told her to, but there being no food she could not occupy herself with preparing a meal.
He glanced towards the window.
Will he go now? she hoped.
But it was summer solstice night. Even in this rain, people would be about at all hours. Would he want to stay there all night?
‘River’s up. Scaring you silly, I expect. Giving you nightmares, is it?’
In fact, the nightmares had ceased since Ann had arrived at the Swan. Her sister couldn’t be in two places at once, she supposed. But she needn’t tell Victor that. It would give him satisfaction to think she was still suffering from the visitations that had tormented her for so long. She nodded.
‘Fancy being afraid of water. It’s everywhere. Places you can see it. Places you can’t. Places you know about it and places you don’t. Funny thing, water.’
Victor was a man who liked knowing. One of the best ways of avoiding his torments was to be ignorant about something and let him put you straight. Now he was enjoying his expertise and wanted to explain at length.
‘There’s as much water hidden underground as there is above,’ he told her. ‘Enormous caverns of it, deep underground, vast as cathedrals. Think of that, Lily. Think of that church you like so much, full right up of water, deep and dark and still. Imagine that amount of water but underground, like a lake. All kinds of water down there, there is.’
She stared. It couldn’t be true! Water underground? Whoever heard of such a thing?
‘Fountains and springs and wells,’ he went on, watching her sharply through his narrow eyes. She felt her heart pounding. Her throat was dry. ‘Ponds too. Brooks and rivers and marshes.’ She felt her knees weaken. ‘And lagoons. Bet you never even heard of lagoons, have you, Lily?’ She shook her head, pictured awful creatures, made of water, like dragons that spewed water instead of fire.
‘It’s a marvellous fact of nature, Lily. There we go about our business on the surface of the earth, but beneath our feet, down there,’ – with a gesture to his feet – ‘there are great lakes underground.’
‘Where, exactly?’ Her voice was full of fear and she was trembling.
‘Why, anywhere. Here, maybe. Right under your cottage.’
She quivered in horror.
His eye travelled up and down her body.
It might not be over yet, she thought. He might want the other thing too.
He did.
Two Strange Things
AND HOW DID the night end over in Kelmscott, at the Armstrong farm? They sat up late, later than the children had ever stayed up before. There were candles on the table and all were in their nightgowns except Armstrong, but no one had any thought of going to bed. The girl sat on the lap of the eldest daughter, and the other children gathered round smiling to pet her and offer their favourite toys as Armstrong and Bess looked on. The boys and girls were enchanted, exclaiming at her every movement, every blink of her tired eyes. The youngest, only a couple of years older than the girl herself, offered his new wooden toy bought that day at the fair, and when she grasped it in her little fingers, exclaimed joyfully, ‘She likes it!’ The older girls had brushed her hair and plaited it, washed her face and hands, and dressed her in one of their outgrown nightdresses.
‘Is she staying?’ they asked a dozen times. ‘Is she going to live with us now?’
‘Is Robin coming home to be her daddy?’ another little voice piped up, but with a note of worry about such a thing.
‘We’ll see,’ said Armstrong, and his wife cast a sidelong glance at him.
Coming away from the fair, as soon as they had put some distance between themselves and the crowds, Robin had put the child into his mother’s arms and gone his own way back to Oxford, giving no clear account of his intentions or when they might expect to see him at the farm again. There had not yet been a chance for Armstrong and Bess to consult each other about the events of the day out of the hearing of the children.
The child’s eyes began to close and the children hushed around her. On the brink of sleep, her fingers loosened their grip on the little toy and it fell to the floor with a bump that woke her again. Looking dazedly around her, her face pulled into a weary frown, and before she could open her mouth to cry, Bess lifted her away and said, ‘Come on. Bed, all of you!’
There was some arguing over the child, all wanting to have her sleep in their room, but Bess was firm: ‘She’ll sleep with me tonight. If you have her with you, nobody will close their eyes.’
She set the older girls to making sure the little ones got to bed, and took the child to her own bedroom. Bess sang softly to her as she laid her down and tucked her in, and in moments the girl’s eyes fluttered and she inched into the shallows of sleep.
Bess lingered over the bed, searching for a hint of her own features in the child’s. She sought Robin in the sleeping face. She looked for echoes of her other children there. She would not think of him, the one who had fathered Robin before Armstrong had married her. She had buried his face years ago, and would not disinter it now.
She remembered the letter that had started it all, the torn fragments in Robin’s pocket that she and Armstrong had pieced so unsuccessfully together. ‘Alice, Alice, Alice,’ she had repeated then. The name was on the tip of her tongue tonight, but she hesitated to pronounce it.
When the child’s light breathing told her she was deeply asleep, Bess crept away.
Armstrong was in the armchair by the unlit hearth. There was an air of unreality about the scene, she in her nightclothes, he in his outdoor jacket, candles in the dark but no fire, and the muggy softness of the day still lingering. Her husband looked grave as he turned the little wooden figurine in his hands abstractedly.