He left her remittance on the hall table.
On leaving the house, Vaughan felt an unexpected coolness about his knees and collar. It was apparent too at his wrists. His clothing was damp still where his tears had trickled into his cuffs and on to his collar and dripped on to his knees. It’s amazing, he thought. Whoever would think a human body could have so much water in it?
Photographing Alice
COLLODION CARRIED RITA and Daunt downriver to the farmhouse at Kelmscott, and on the way their conversation – about the Vaughans, the Armstrongs, but mostly about the child herself – effectively masked their constraint in dealing with one another. But when each one knew the other was looking elsewhere, when they were sure of not being seen, they cast quick glances of love and sorrow, bailing out the excess feeling that threatened otherwise to capsize them.
At Kelmscott, the younger children were waiting for them on the bank. They waved as soon as they saw the smart navy-and-white houseboat decorated with its vivid yellow-orange flourishes. Rita looking out avidly, was quick to spot the girl. She was with them, waving; then another child, a boy, the youngest one and closest to her in age, took her hand and they ran together back to the farmhouse.
‘Where has she gone to?’ Daunt asked, distracted by her absence as he tried to concentrate on mooring.
‘Back to the house,’ Rita said anxiously, but then, ‘Here she is! They just went to fetch the older ones.’
All the Armstrong children made themselves useful in sensible ways, from the big boys who listened carefully to Daunt before lifting the heavy equipment, to the little ones who were all given something light and unbreakable by Rita, which they then carried with a great sense of self-importance over the field and to the house. The unloading was completed in record time.
Rita was always conscious of the girl. Whatever she was doing she had one eye on her, noticing how the other children treated her affectionately, how the older ones were patient with her and the smaller ones went slowly in order not to leave her behind. It occurred to her to wonder whether the little girl had lacked the companionship of other children at the Vaughans’, and couldn’t help feeling that the kindness of these children must be good for her.
Bess showed them into the dining room, and there was more busyness as Armstrong and his big sons moved the table and arranged chairs according to Daunt’s instructions.
‘We don’t want a photograph of me,’ Bess said. ‘Why, I’m here all the time, if anybody needs to know what I look like!’
But Armstrong insisted and the children backed him up, and soon the photographs were all set up: the first was to be of Armstrong and Bess; they would take the whole family portrait later.
‘Where is Robin?’ fretted Armstrong. ‘Half an hour ago he should have been here.’
‘You know what young men are. I told you not to count on him,’ murmured his wife.
Robin’s contrition, which had so affected her husband, had not removed her own doubts about her son. ‘He was always better in words than in acts,’ she reminded him, but when Armstrong chose to forgive – as he always did – she did not press the matter. Then, seeing her eldest son with the child in his arms at the fair, she discovered to her own surprise that hope had rooted faintly in her heart. She kept an eye on it, with the painful curiosity of a gardener who watches the frail progress of a plant that cannot possibly thrive. The absence of her son’s visits to the child did not pass unnoticed. Armstrong had written to let Robin know the day and time of the photography session, as though his presence were a thing he could now take for granted, but there had been no answer, and she for one was not unsurprised at his absence.
‘We’ll take you and Mrs Armstrong first,’ said Daunt. ‘That will give him plenty of time, if something has held him up.’
He seated Bess on the chair and placed Armstrong behind her, then slid the plate into position while he explained again the need to keep still. When all was ready, he ducked under the dark cloth and removed the cover as Rita stood behind the camera and encouraged the pair of sitters to look consistently in the one direction. In ten seconds the Armstrongs had time to feel all the things that people felt when they were having their photograph taken for the first time: abashed, stiff, nervous, significant, and rather foolish. But half an hour later, when they were looking at the finished article, developed and washed and dried and framed, they saw themselves as they had never seen themselves before: eternal.
‘Well …’ said Bess wonderingly, and it seemed that she was going to complete the sentence, but she fell into silence instead, while her eyes flickered all over the photograph of a neat middle-aged woman wearing an eye patch and a dark, stern man behind her with one hand on her shoulder.
Meanwhile Armstrong looked over her shoulder at the photograph and told her how beautiful she looked in it, but his eyes returned time and time again to his own grave face. His mood seemed to turn sombre as he looked at himself.
The interest in the photograph had distracted them all, but eventually it was time to prepare for the second group and Robin had still not come. No horse had been heard on the cobbles, no door opening in the hall. Armstrong went to find the maid anyway, to see whether he might have come in quietly at the back, but no. He was not there.
‘Come now,’ Bess said firmly. ‘If he’s not here, he’s not here, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Living in Oxford as he does, he can go to Mr Daunt’s studio any time and have his photograph taken. It will be a hundred times easier for him.’
‘But it would have been such a thing to have all the children together! And there is Alice!’
Indeed, there was Alice.
Bess sighed and took her husband’s arm encouragingly. ‘Robin is a man now, and not a child to do as his parents tell him. Come, let us make the best of it. Here are the others, all six of them, eager and happy to take their place alongside us and Alice. Come.’
She coaxed Armstrong into taking his place in the grouping. All the children shuffled a little to the left or right to fill the space left for their missing brother.
‘All set?’ Daunt asked, and Mr Armstrong gave one last glance in the direction of the window, just in case.
‘All set,’ he answered with a sigh.
For ten seconds Armstrong, his wife and their six younger children stared into the eye of the camera, of time, of the future, and cast themselves into immortality. Rita, watching from the corner of the room, noticed that the one they called Alice fixed her gaze on a point still further off, beyond the camera, beyond the walls, beyond Kelmscott, somewhere so far-flung it might be beyond eternity.
While Daunt was developing the photograph, Mrs Armstrong and her daughters prepared the table for tea, and the boys changed into their work clothes to feed the animals. Rita found herself alone with Armstrong just as the sun came out and the rain stopped.
‘Would you like to see the farm?’ he invited.
‘I would.’
He picked up the little girl and hardly seemed to feel her weight on his arm as they went outside.
‘How is she?’ Rita asked. ‘Do you find her well?’
‘I’m not sure I can tell you. Ordinarily I am pretty good at knowing living creatures, whether they be human or animal. It’s a matter of observation. With chickens you can see restlessness in their feathers. A cat can tell you a lot by the way it breathes. Horses – well, they’re a bit of everything. Pigs look their meaning at you. This little one is hard to know. A mystery, aren’t you, piglet?’ He gave her hair a fond stroke as he looked tenderly at her.