They emptied the second bookcase, and he rowed again to Collodion to unpack.
On his return, Rita was reading the book that she had separated from the rest.
Although the sky was dismal and cast an indifferent light, the greyness was enlivened, even indoors, by the silvery shimmer of reflections from the endless water, which cast ripples of light over Rita. Daunt watched her face lighten and darken in the shifting illumination. Then he looked beyond the ever-changing surface to study the stillness of her expression beneath. He knew his camera could not capture this, that some things were only truly seen by a human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face on to his soul.
Slowly Rita brought the book down to her side. She continued to stare at the place where the book had been, as if the text continued there, written on the watery light.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What are you thinking?’
She did not move. ‘The cressmen.’ She still stared at nothing.
He was nonplussed. He wouldn’t have thought cressmen capable of inspiring intensity like this. ‘From the Swan?’
‘Yes.’ She turned her eyes to his. ‘I remembered it the other night. The baby was born in its caul.’
‘What’s a caul?’
‘It’s a sack of fluid. The baby grows inside it for the entire pregnancy. Usually it ruptures during labour, but sometimes – rarely – it survives labour and the baby emerges with the caul intact. I cut it open last night and out he swam on a wave.’
‘But what has that to do with cressmen?’
‘Because of a strange thing I heard them say at the Swan. They were talking about Darwin and man being born of apes, and one of the cressmen reckoned he’d heard a story about men once being underwater creatures.’
‘Ridiculous.’
She shook her head, raised the book and tapped it. ‘It’s in here. Once upon a time, a long time ago, an ape became human. And once upon a time, long before that, an aquatic creature came out of the water and breathed air.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘And?’
‘And once upon a time, twelve months ago, a little girl who should have drowned, didn’t. She entered the water and seemed to die there. You pulled her out; I found she had no pulse, no breath, her pupils were dilated. Every sign told me she was dead. And then she wasn’t. How can that be? Dead people do not return to life.
Immersing the face in cold water slows the heart dramatically. Is it possible that sudden immersion in very cold water might slow the heart and constrict the blood flow so radically that a person might appear to be dead? It sounds too strange to be true. But if you remember that every one of us spent the first nine months of our existence suspended in liquid, perhaps that makes it a little less incredible. Remember next that our land-going, oxygen-breathing selves derive from underwater life – that we once lived in water as we now live in air – think of that and doesn’t the impossible start to edge closer to the conceivable?’
She tucked the book into her pocket and put out a hand for Daunt to help her down from the chair. ‘I’ll get no further, I think. I’ve come as far as I can go. Ideas, notions, theories.’
Rita packed her medicines, a bundle of clothes and linen, her Sunday shoes, and they left without attempting to close the door. They rowed to Collodion.
‘Where now?’ he said.
‘Nowhere.’ She flung herself on the bench and closed her eyes.
‘Which side of the river is that?’
‘It’s right here, Daunt. I’d like to stay here.’
Later, on Collodion’s narrow bed and with the river cradling the boat, Daunt and Rita loved each other. In the dark his hands saw what his eyes could not: the curl of her loosened hair, the curve and point of her breasts, the shallow dip at the small of her back, the outward flare of her hips. They saw the smoothness of her thighs and the complicated fleshiness between them. He touched her and she touched him and when he entered her he felt a river rise in him. For a little while he mastered the river, then it grew and he abandoned himself to it. There was only the river then, nothing but the river, and the river was everything – until the current at last surged and broke and ebbed.
Afterwards they lay together, and spoke quietly of mysterious things: they wondered how Daunt had got from Devil’s Weir to the Swan, and why everybody had thought the girl a puppet or a doll when they first saw her. They asked why her feet were so perfect it was as if they had never put foot to earth, and how a father could cross to other worlds and bring his daughter home, and they realized there are no stories of children crossing into other worlds to find their parents, and wondered why. They puzzled over what exactly Jonathan had seen from the window of the room where his father lay dead. They talked of the strange stories Joe brought back from his sinking spells and all the other stories at the Swan, and they wondered what the solstice had to do with all or any of it. More than once they came back to two questions: where had the girl come from? And where had she gone to? They came to no conclusion. They thought too about other things both inconsequential and significant. The river swelled and subsided without insistence.
All the time, Daunt’s hand lay on Rita’s belly, and she had her hand over his.
Beneath their hands, in the damp vessels of her abdomen, life was swimming urgently upstream.
Something, they both thought, is going to happen.
Happily Ever After
IN THE MONTHS that followed, Ruby Wheeler married Ernest; at the church, her grandmother took Daunt and Rita by the hands and said, ‘Bless you both. I wish you every happiness together.’
At Kelmscott farmhouse, Alice grew her hair. She began to look less like her father when he was a child and more like the little girl she was. Bess took off her patch and declared, ‘There’s not much of Robin in her at all. That girl he married must have been a good woman. This is a lovely child.’ And Armstrong said, ‘I think in some ways she takes after you, dearest.’
Basketman’s Cottage was uninhabitable after the flood and would always be so. Lily moved to the parsonage. She looked about the housekeeper’s room in awe, touched the bedhead and the night table and the mahogany chest of drawers and reminded herself that the days when she had said about even the smallest possession, ‘I shall only lose it,’ were over. The puppy slept in a basket in the kitchen and the parson grew as fond of it as Lily was. In fact, when she came to think about it, she wondered whether it hadn’t perhaps been her who was so keen on puppies as a girl – or perhaps she and her sister both were.
The water, when it eventually receded, left behind a small skeleton on the floodplain. A gold chain was around its neck and an anchor hung between the bones of its ribcage. The Vaughans buried their daughter and grieved for her, and rejoiced in their son. They went together to a house in Oxford, where Mrs Constantine listened to them talk about everything that had happened and they wept in her tranquil room and washed their faces afterwards, and soon afterwards Buscot Lodge and all its farmland and Brandy Island were put on the market. Helena and Anthony said goodbye to their friends and departed with their baby son to new rivers in New Zealand.
With Joe gone, Margot decided it was time for another generation to take the helm at the Swan. Her eldest daughter moved to the inn with her husband and her children and they made a great success of it. Margot was still as present as ever in the bar, mulling her cider, though she let her son-in-law – a strong fellow – chop the logs and carry the barrels. Jonathan helped his sister, as he had helped his mother, and often told a story about the child who was taken from the river one solstice night, first drowned then alive again, who spoke not a word, until the river came up the banks to take her back, a year to the day later, and she was reunited with her father the ferryman. But if you asked him to tell any other story, he couldn’t.