‘I’m ready.’ Daunt took a breath, and plunged his face into the ice-cold water.
At one, Rita raised the cover of the plate and removed the lens cap.
At two, she became aware of a thought rising from the depths of her mind.
At three, the thought surfaced and she knew instantly and beyond all doubt that it was significant.
At four, her brain working faster than she could keep up with, she had abandoned the camera, not caring what light got in under the hastily thrown-up curtain, and was running to the well, taking her watch from her pocket at the same time.
At five, she was at the well and had taken Daunt’s wrist between her thumb and fingertips to take his pulse, while opening the cover of her watch.
Six was completely forgotten – she was counting other numbers now.
Daunt’s pulse throbbed under Rita’s fingertips. The second hand of her watch turned around the clock face. Her brain was empty of everything except the two beats, clockwork and human. They ran alongside each other, each one according to its own rhythm, then – the shock. In the moment it happened, her mind did not falter. Instead it narrowed its attention even further so that she could read the action of Daunt’s heart and what it meant as clearly as if she held it in her hands. The universe was nothing but the life of this heart and her own mind counting and knowing.
After eighteen seconds, Daunt reared up from the water, frozen-faced and colourless. His features locked in a rigid mask, he looked more like a corpse than a living man, except that he gasped for breath, staggered and sat down.
Rita kept hold of his wrist, did not even glance up, maintained her count.
After a minute, she put her watch away. She took paper and a pencil from her pocket, dashed down the figures with trembling fingers and laughed a brief, startled laugh before turning to him, wide-eyed and shaking her head at the extraordinariness of it all.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Am I all right? Daunt – are you all right?’
‘My face is cold. I think I’m going to—’
To her alarm he leant away, as if nauseous, but after a moment turned back to her. ‘No. It’s settled.’
She took his hands in hers and scrutinized him intently. ‘Yes, but – Daunt – how do you feel?’
He returned her intensely puzzled stare with a mild version of the same thing.
‘I feel a bit peculiar, actually. Must be the chill. But I’m all right.’
She raised the piece of paper.
‘Your heart stopped.’
‘What?’
She looked down at her notes. ‘I got here at – let’s call it six seconds after immersion. It was about that. Your heartbeat was at its normal rate then – eighty beats per minute. At eleven seconds it stopped altogether for three whole seconds. When it restarted, it was at a rate of thirty beats per minute. Once you were out of the water it remained at that rate for seven seconds. Thereafter it rose rapidly.’
She took his hand and felt for his pulse again. Counted. ‘It’s back to normal. Eighty beats a minute.’
‘Stopped?’
‘Yes. For three seconds.’
Daunt paid attention to the beating of his heart. He realized he had never done that before. He slid a hand inside his jacket and felt the power of the pump in his chest against his hand.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ It was a ridiculous question. This was Rita. She didn’t make mistakes about things like that. ‘What made you think of it?’
‘The cold water made me remember the first experiment at the river. And I was suddenly struck by the fact that that day you weren’t completely submerged, only up to the neck, and so today the part of you in icy water was the only part that wasn’t before. And I suppose I must have connected that with the head injuries I’ve treated in the past, and the knowledge that so much of what makes us human is contained there … Everything came together and I just left the camera and ran …’
It was a discovery. Joy surged through her. Instinct made her reach for Daunt’s hand, but she did not take it, for it was plain her jubilation was not shared. He rose from the grass, looking tired and drawn. ‘I’d better retrieve this over-exposed plate,’ he said flatly as he made for the camera.
They dismantled and packed up in strained silence, and when everything was stowed away he was still.
‘I didn’t wish for anything,’ he told her abruptly. ‘I don’t believe in wishing wells. Though you seem to have been granted your wish. If I had been the wishing type I might have wished for you and a child. Both things. Together. But I don’t know if I could bring myself to wish for a thing you don’t want. I have imagined it, Rita. The two of us allowing our feelings to run away with us, nature taking its course, realizing a child is on the way … What’s the value of happiness that can only come at the price of another person’s despair?’
Collodion took them upriver to Rita’s cottage, slicing the water, creating a churn of noise and splash and leaving a long trail of turbulence in its wake. They went in silence. When they came to Rita’s cottage they murmured a stiff goodnight, and he went on to the Swan.
Letting herself into the cottage, Rita put her notebook on the table she used as a desk and turned to the page of the day’s annotations. A secondary exhilaration caused a little leap of the heart. What a discovery! It was followed by a sinking. What kind of a wishing well was it that gave you the thing you most wanted, without even wishing for it, and made you at the same time so painfully conscious of everything else you could not have?
The Magic Lantern Show
AT THE SWAN, summer turned to autumn and the rain did not cease. There were no more frowning conversations about the danger of a poor harvest, for it was now a certainty. No amount of sunshine could change anything. The crops sat stunted and blackening in the fields, and how could you harvest them anyway, with the ground so waterlogged? The laid-off farmhands tried to get jobs at the gravel works and elsewhere, and although all went to the Swan for respite from their worries, a mood of anxiety hung over the winter room.
In this atmosphere word got round that the child had come back from the Armstrongs and was living with the Vaughans again. What to make of it? They supposed she was not Alice after all. They supposed she was Amelia again. This deviation of the story was not met with enthusiasm. A story ought to go clearly in one direction, then, after a distinct moment of crisis, change to go in another. This slipping back on the quiet to the original lacked the requisite drama. Later it was said that the Vaughans had been heard calling the child Milly. Whether this was an abbreviation of Amelia or another name altogether was the source of some debate, but it didn’t match up to the early arguments over the colour of her eyes, and when measured against the passionate debate about whether or not the fact of being impossible means a thing can’t happen, it was distinctly lacklustre. The relentlessness of the rain dampened their enthusiasm too. In fact, stories began to grow as weak as the crops in the field. Sometimes the tellers even found themselves drinking in silence. When Jonathan tried to tell his tale about the farmer who drove his horse and cart into the lake and then something or other that he couldn’t altogether remember, and ended ‘and he was never seen again!’, he was met with little encouragement.
Joe ailed too. More and more often he lay sinking in the room at the back; when he appeared infrequently in the winter room he was frailer and paler than ever. Though he struggled for breath he told a story or two – strange ones, brief in the telling and stirring to hear; in their endings they seemed to open on to infinity, and nobody could explain or retell them afterwards.