‘Amelia.’
‘Amelia.’
‘Amelia.’
With every repetition of her name he rocked more violently. Is this how it ends? he wondered. Calibrating the forward and backward motion of his body, he knew he was always in control. With every forward motion he could be certain the return was coming. But there was momentum. It was building. If he did nothing, the degree of oscillation would be reached where the return would be outside his control. Why not? he thought. I don’t have to do anything except allow it. Forward and back. Forward and back. Forward and back. Edging nearer to where it would be forward and – down – to the point where the laws of physics would take over and the body surrender to gravity. But not yet. A few more to go. Forward and back. Forward – nearly there now, a fraction of an inch away – and back. Forward—
The void took him, and as he tipped into it, in his head a voice said, You can’t go on like this.
Hearing it, his arm shot out. His body was claimed by gravity, but his hand shot out for something – anything! – and closed on the rope tied to the jetty post. He fell, with a jolt to the heart and a wrench to the shoulder. Swinging one-handed, feeling the rope flay his palm as he slipped, his free hand swooped to grasp it while his legs flailed wildly in search of a toehold. Agonizingly, hand over hand, he heaved the weight of his body – his desperate, living body – on to the jetty, and when he arrived, collapsed on to it and lay there, gasping for breath while pain radiated from his shoulder.
You can’t go on like this, Mrs Constantine had said. She was right.
Retelling the Story
HE TURNED INTO the road with a kind of relief. The turbulence in his head that had plagued him for so long narrowed to a single objective. It was not a plan, nor a thought that brought him here. It was scarcely his own volition, for he had given up decision-making and abandoned will, too exhausted to do anything but succumb to the inevitable. He was here because of something more fundamental than that. Vaughan was not a man to bandy about words like fate and destiny, but he would not have denied that it was something of that kind that drew him to the gate, the front path and the pristinely painted front door of Mrs Constantine.
‘You said I could come back. You said you could help.’
‘Yes,’ she said, glancing at his bandaged hand.
A vase of roses now scented the room where the jasmine had been, but the cat was in the same place. When they were seated, Vaughan began.
‘They found a drowned child in the river,’ he began. ‘At winter solstice time. She lived with us for half a year. You might have heard of it.’
Mrs Constantine made a non-committal face. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
He told. Riding to the Swan after his wife, finding her there with the child, Helena’s certainty, his own equal but opposing certainty. The other claimants. Taking the child home. The passage of time, and with it the gradual erosion of his certainty.
‘So you started to believe she was your child, after all?’
He frowned. ‘Almost … Yes … I’m not sure. When I came to see you before, I mentioned that I couldn’t remember Amelia’s face.’
‘You did, yes.’
‘When I tried to remember her, it was this child that I saw. She doesn’t live with us any more. She lives with another family. A woman turned up at the summer fair who said she was not Amelia. She said she was Alice Armstrong. That is what people seem to believe now.’
She waited in a way that invited him to say more.
His eyes held on to hers. ‘They are right. I know they are.’
He was here now. He had come at last to the place he had avoided for so long. But Mrs Constantine was there.
His words came in a smooth stream. The story slipped evenly from his lips. It began much as it had the first time, with drowsy slumber shattered by his wife’s cry in the night, but his words were no longer the dusty containers of desiccated meaning they had been before. They were freshly forged things, alive with significance, and they carried him back in time to the night it began, to the night of the kidnap. The haste to reach his daughter’s room, the shock of the open window and the empty bed. Rousing the household, the search through the night. He told of the message that came at dawn. He told of the slow hours till the appointed time.
He took another sip of water and it barely stopped the flow of words.
‘I rode to the place alone. It was not an easy journey – there was not a star in the sky to light my way and the road was rough and pitted. At times I got off and walked alongside my horse. I was not always sure where I was, for the landmarks I was familiar with in daylight were lost in the night. I had to judge by my sense of the time that had elapsed and by the feel of the terrain beneath my feet – and by the river, of course. The river has its own light, even at night. I was familiar with its contours and every so often I recognized a certain bend or angle that told me where I was. When I saw that the night shimmer of the water was crossed by a darker band, I knew I was at the bridge.
‘I dismounted. I could see nothing and no one – though there might have been a dozen men standing motionless a few yards away and I would not have known it.
‘I called out, “Hoy there!”
‘There was no answer.
‘Then I called, “Amelia!” I thought it would reassure her, to know I was near. I hoped they had told her I was coming, that she was going home.
‘I listened hard for an answer or, if not an answer, a sound: a step or a shifting or breathing. There was only the lapping of the river, and underneath it that other sound of the river, that low, deep noise that you don’t usually notice.
‘I stepped on to the bridge. I crossed. At the other side, I placed the ransom money in its bag by the pier stone, according to the note’s instructions. As I rose, I thought I heard something. Not voices, and not steps, something less distinct than that. My horse heard it too, for he gave a whinny. I stood for a moment, wondering what was to happen next, and realized that I should move away from the pier stone to give them a chance to take the money. Presumably they would want to have it in their hands, feel the weight of it, before releasing Amelia. I stepped back on to the bridge. I picked up speed, ran over – and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my face in the dark.’
The account that emerged from Vaughan’s mouth came all by itself. He called on no stock phrases, no rehearsed words. His telling had its own energy and speed, and with them it brought the past into the room, its dark and its chill. He shivered, and his eyes took on the glazed look of those who are seeing the vision of memory.
‘The aftershock of the fall left me dazed. It was a moment before I got my breath back. I shifted to see whether I was injured, wondered whether someone had been lying in wait to cosh me. I got to my knees, expecting another blow to dash me down again, but none came and I knew then I had merely fallen. I tried to collect myself. Waited for the world to settle. It was only a little while later that I gathered myself to stand, and as I did so my leg brushed against something. I realized straight away that this soft but solid bundle was the thing that had tripped me up. I groped to get some sense of what it was, but in my gloves I could not tell. I took off my gloves and felt again. Something wet. Cold. Dense.
‘I was afraid. Even then, before I struck the match, I feared what it could be.