Twelve – replaced the cover over the plate.
They took the plate to Collodion and in the darkroom developed an ectoplasmic scene. They both stared sombrely at the faded figure of Rita overlaid with a blur of light and shadow, a sense of transparent action and silken flurry, motion without substance.
‘Is that the worst photograph you have ever taken?’ she asked.
‘It is.’
Somehow, in the red light they found themselves in each other’s arms. They did not so much kiss as press lips hard to skin and mouth and hair; they did not caress, but grasped. Then, as if it were the act of a single mind, they drew apart.
‘I can’t bear this,’ she said.
‘Nor can I.’
‘Would it make it easier if we didn’t see each other?’
He tried to match her for honesty. ‘I think it would. In the end.’
‘Well, then. I suppose …’
‘… that’s what we must do.’
Then there was nothing more to say.
She turned to go and he opened the door. In the doorway she stopped.
‘What about the Armstrong visit?’
‘What Armstrong visit?’
‘The photographic session at their farmhouse. It’s in your diary. I booked it on the day of the fair.’
‘The girl is there.’
She nodded. ‘Take me with you, Daunt. Please. I’ve got to see her.’
‘What about your work?’
‘I’ll put a note on the door. If anybody needs me, they’ll have to come and find me there.’
The girl. He’d thought he wasn’t going to see her again, and yet there was an appointment in his diary … The world seemed suddenly less unbearable.
‘All right. Come with me.’
Thruppence
‘THERE’LL BE TIME later to work out the terms of our arrangement,’ the fortune-teller had said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ For six weeks there was no sign, but Vaughan knew better than to think he might be reprieved. The blow had to fall, and when at last a letter in an unfamiliar hand appeared on a tray at his place at the breakfast table, he was almost relieved. The letter summoned him to an isolated spot on the river, early one morning. When he arrived, he thought he was the first there, but as soon as he had dismounted to stand on the muddy path, a figure emerged from the undergrowth, a slight man in a long coat that was too wide for him. He wore a hat low over his face.
‘Good morning, Mr Vaughan.’
His voice gave him away: it was the fortune-teller.
‘State what it is that you want,’ Vaughan said.
‘It’s more about what you want. You do want her, don’t you? You and Mrs Vaughan?’
Helena was very quiet these days. She seemed pleased about the baby, talked from time to time about plans for their lives to come, but her liveliness had gone. Future life and past losses coexisted in her, two halves of a single experience, and she bore her grief and her hope in a subdued manner.
It wasn’t only Helena who was grieving. He missed the girl too.
‘Are you suggesting I can get her back? Robin Armstrong has a witness,’ Vaughan pointed out. ‘Not the best of witnesses, it’s true, given her profession, but if I were to go against him in a court of law, I dare say you would knock me down again pretty fast.’
‘He could be amenable.’
‘What are you implying? That the man might be induced to sell his own child?’
‘His own child … Well, she might be. Or she might not. He don’t care one way or the other.’
Vaughan did not answer. He was more and more disconcerted by this encounter.
‘Let me spell it out for you,’ the man began. ‘When a man’s got something he don’t give tuppence about and another man wants it enough, thruppence will usually do it.’
‘So that’s it. If I give Mr Armstrong thruppence, along the lines of your suggestion, he will relinquish his claim. Is that what you have come to tell me?’
‘The thruppence was just by way of illustration.’
‘I see. Something rather more than thruppence, then. What’s your master’s price?’
The man’s voice instantly altered. ‘Master? Ha! He’s not my master.’ Beneath the brim of the hat the meagre mouth twitched as if he found something privately comic in the turn the conversation had taken.
‘But you are doing him a service in carrying this message for him.’
The man gave the smallest possible indication of a shrug. ‘You might see it as a service to yourself.’
‘Hmm. You’ll be taking a percentage, I presume?’
‘I stand to benefit from the arrangement – as is only natural.’
‘Tell him I’ll give him fifty pounds if he gives up his claim.’ Vaughan was fed up with the whole business and turned to walk away.
The hand that came down on his shoulder was like a vice. It gripped him and spun him round. Again he stumbled and this time, rising, caught a glimpse of the man’s face: an unfinished-looking nose and lips, his eyes two slits that narrowed as soon as they knew they’d been seen.
‘I hardly think that’s going to do it,’ the man said. ‘If you want my advice, I would say something in the region of a thousand pounds might be more in order. Think it over. Think of the little girl that Mrs Vaughan misses so much! Think of new life to come – you have no secrets, Mr Vaughan, not from me! Information swims to my ears like fish to the net – and let us pray that Mrs Vaughan keeps well and suffers no sad shocks. Think of your family! For there’s some things you can’t put a price on, Mr Vaughan, and the most important is family. Think on that.’
The man turned sharply and headed away. When Vaughan peered to see beyond the curve in the path, the way ahead was empty. He had turned in somewhere across the field.
A thousand pounds. Exactly what he had paid in ransom money. He ran through the value of the house and land and the other property and figured out how it could be achieved. To purchase a lie. A lie that was still a lie and might be uncovered at any time. A lie that might be purchased by instalments, with this only the down payment.
His thoughts eddied, too fast to grab hold of, conclusions always out of reach.
Vaughan took the other direction to walk home. When he came to his own jetty he walked out on it, and sat down with his feet dangling over the edge. He put his head in his hands.
Once he might have been able to see his way through all this, taken action to arrive at a clean solution, when he was himself, when he was a better man, when he was a father. But now, he was no more able to direct the current of his life than a piece of debris can control the stream that carries it.
Vaughan stared into the water and the old yarns about Quietly came to mind. The ferryman who takes you to the other side of the river, when it is your time to go, and when it is not, returns you safely to the bank. How long, he wondered, did it take to drown?
He looked at his feet, so close to the jetty edge. Beyond and below, the water surged, black and endless, without thought and without feeling. He sought his own reflection in the water, but it gave him no mirror in the darkness and his own mind saw a face in the water. Not his own, but his lost daughter’s. He remembered the formless face that had come to precision in Daunt’s darkroom, liquid running over it, and in the black mirror of the water he saw Amelia.
Vaughan crouched over the edge of the jetty, rocking forwards and back on his feet as he wept.