‘When I had a bit of light, I found that she was not looking at me. That was a relief. Her face was angled away, and she was staring fixedly towards the river. It was the strangest thing, for her eyes had the shape of Amelia’s eyes. She was dressed in Amelia’s clothes and her feet were in Amelia’s shoes. Her features were like Amelia’s too. Amazingly like. And yet it seemed to me, quite plainly, both then and for some time afterwards, that she was not Amelia. Not my child. How could she be? I knew my child. I knew how her eyes alighted on me, how her feet danced and shuffled, how her hands reached and fidgeted and grasped. I took this child’s hand in mine and it did not tighten around my fingers the way Amelia’s would have. Something glinted. Amelia’s necklace with the silver anchor was round her neck.
‘I picked her up, this child who could not – must not – be Amelia. I found a place where the bank was not too steep and scrambled down to the water’s edge. I carried her into the water and when I was waist deep I laid her down. I felt the river take her from me.’
Vaughan paused.
‘It was a nightmare, and that was the only way I could think of to end it. My daughter, my Amelia, was alive. You do see, don’t you?’
‘I do.’ Mrs Constantine’s eyes, sad and unfaltering, held his.
‘But what I know now – what I have known for a long time – is that it was Amelia. My poor child was dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Constantine.
Now the banks of the river burst and Vaughan felt the water stream from his eyes. His shoulders shook and he rocked forward and back and his weeping seemed endless. The tears slipped from his eyes on to his cheeks, they ran down his face, they trickled from his jaw to his neck and seeped into his collar, they dripped from his chin and dampened his knees. He raised his hands to his face and the tears wetted his fingers, then his wrists and cuffs. He wept and wept until he was drained.
Mrs Constantine was there with her vast and kind gaze that had accompanied him all the while.
‘When the girl from the river came home with us, I had strange thoughts. Sometimes I wondered …’ he shook his head in embarrassment, but a man could tell Mrs Constantine anything without fear of being found ridiculous. ‘Sometimes I wondered, what if she wasn’t dead? What if I put her in the river and she floated away and came to her senses? What if she drifted somewhere – to someone – and they kept her for two years and then – I don’t know how – or why – was found floating in the river again, and so came back to us? It’s quite impossible, of course, but thoughts like that … When one wants an explanation …’
‘Tell me about Amelia,’ she said, after a pause. ‘What was she like in life?’
‘What kind of thing do you want to know?’
‘Anything.’
He thought. ‘She was never still. Even before she was born she was a wriggler, that’s what the midwife said, and when she arrived and was put in her cot, her arms and legs made waving motions – as if she would swim into the air and was surprised she couldn’t. She used to clench and stretch her little hand and when she saw her fist turn into a palm with fingers there would be a look of sheer amazement on her face. She was quick to crawl, my wife said, and it made her legs strong. She liked to cling to my fingers and I raised her up, feet on the floor so that she could feel the ground supporting her. We couldn’t always be holding her hand while she tottered about. One day I had some papers to go through in the drawing room and she came patting my ankles for attention, wanting to be lifted to her feet, and I was too busy. And then, suddenly, a little hand pulled at my sleeve and there she was, upright at my side. All by herself she had pulled herself up using the chair leg and her face was all pleasure and surprise! Oh, you should have seen her! A thousand times she toppled over, but never cried, just upped and tried again. And once she’d found her feet she was never satisfied to sit again.’
He felt himself smiling at the memory.
‘Can you see her now?’ Mrs Constantine’s voice was so low and soft that it barely rippled the air.
Vaughan saw Amelia. He saw the strand of hair that went the wrong way, the indistinct colour of her lashes and their perfect curl, the speck of sleep dust in the corner of her eye, the precise curve of her cheek and the flush of the skin over it, the padded swell of her lower lip, the stubby fingers and their fine nails. He saw her not here in this room and not now in this hour, but in the infinity of memory. She was lost to life, but in his memory she existed, was present, and he looked at her and her eyes met his and she smiled. He met her eyes again, felt the meeting of their gaze, father and daughter. He knew that she was dead, knew that she was gone, but here, now, he saw her, and knew that this far – and this far only – she was restored to him.
‘I see her,’ he said, nodding, smiling through tears.
His lungs were his own again; the weight of his head no longer made his shoulders ache. The beat of his heart in his chest was steady. He did not know what the future held, but he knew it existed. He felt a stirring of interest in it.
‘There is to be a new baby,’ he told Mrs Constantine. ‘At the end of the year.’
‘Congratulations! That is good news.’ He felt the pleasure of it all over again in her response.
He took a great, deliberate lungful of air, and when he had expelled it, put his hands on his knees and made ready to rise.
‘Oh,’ exclaimed Mrs Constantine mildly. ‘Have we finished?’
Vaughan arrested the movement and wondered. Was there something else? It all came back to him. How could he have forgotten?
He told her about the fortune-teller at the fair, the opportunity to buy Robin Armstrong’s interest in the child, the implied threat that his knowledge of Amelia’s death might be shared with his wife.
She listened closely. When he came to an end, she nodded. ‘That isn’t what I was expecting when I asked whether we were finished. I was remembering that when you first came to me there was a particular difficulty you wanted to resolve …’
He thought back to their first meeting. It was such a long time ago. What had prompted him to come then?
‘Relating to your wife …’ she went on.
‘I asked you to tell Helena that Amelia was dead.’
‘That’s right. You invited me to name my price, I seem to remember. And now you are considering paying a stranger a very large sum of money indeed to stop him telling Helena the very same thing.’
Oh. He sat back in his chair. He hadn’t thought of it in that light.
‘What I am wondering, Mr Vaughan, is how much it would cost if you were to tell your wife what happened that night?’
Later, when he had drunk the clear liquid that tasted of cucumber and rinsed his face in the water that was neither too hot nor too cold, and dried it again, he said farewell to Mrs Constantine. ‘This is what you do, isn’t it? I understand now. I thought it was smoke-and-mirrors stuff. Trickery. You do bring back the dead, but not in that way.’
She shrugged. ‘Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or a companion in grief. My husband and I studied together in America. There is a new science over there: it can be explained in complicated ways, but you won’t go far wrong in thinking of it as the science of human emotion. He got a job here in Oxford, at the university, and I apply my learning in the field. I help where I can.’