Once Upon a River Read online

  When he came to the river, he turned upstream. There were no landmarks in the dark, but at about the time he thought he must surely be level with Brandy Island, he came to the spot he knew.

  The name Brandy Island was a new one. In the old days it was just “the island” and nobody needed another name for it because nobody ever went there and there was nothing to see. But when the new people came to Radcot Lodge, Mr. Vaughan at first and later his young wife, one of the changes was the construction on this sliver of land in the river of the big distillery and vitriol works and that is what gave the island its name. Acres of fields belonging to Mr. Vaughan were turned over to sugar beet and a light railway was installed to transport the beet onto the island and bring the brandy back. There were jobs aplenty making liquor on Brandy Island. Or there had been. Something had happened. The brandy was no good or the distillery was inefficient or Mr. Vaughan lost interest . . . The name had stuck. The buildings were still there, though the machinery lay silent and the rail tracks still ran to the river’s edge, but the crossing had been dismantled and any crates of ghostly brandy that came rattling along the rails now would end up at the bottom of the river . . .

  What to do? He had thought he might stand on the bank and holler, but now he was here realized the futility of such a thing. Then—fancy that!—he noticed a small rowing boat moored at the river’s edge—a little one such as a woman might row—left there by chance at just the moment he needed it. He complimented himself on his luck: the gods were on his side tonight.

  He lowered himself into the boat, and though it rocked alarmingly beneath him, he was too drunk to panic and too much a child of the river to topple in. He settled himself and old habit rowed for him till he felt the nudge of the island’s bank. It was not the landing place but no matter. Out he clambered, getting wet up to his knees. He climbed up the slope and made his way. The distillery loomed three stories high in the center of the island. To the east, the vitriol works. Behind that, the storehouse. He was as quiet as he could be, but not quiet enough: when his boot tangled with something and he stumbled, a hand came from nowhere and tightened on the back of his neck, keeping him down. A thumb and four fingers pressed painfully into the tendons.

  “It’s me,” he gasped, winded. “It’s only me!”

  The fingers loosened. Not a word was uttered, but he followed the man by sound until they came to the storehouse.

  It was a windowless space, and the air was densely fragrant. Yeast and fruit and heady sweetness with a bitter edge, so thick you could hardly inhale it but almost needed to swallow to get it down. The brazier illuminated bottles, copper vessels, and barrels, all haphazardly put together. It was nothing like the modern industrial-scale equipment that had existed in the factory, though it had been fabricated from pieces stolen from it and with the same aim in mind: the production of liquor.

  The man did not so much as glance at his visitor but settled himself on a stool where his slim, slight frame was darkly silhouetted against the orange light from the brazier. Without turning he concentrated on relighting his pipe beneath the low brim of his hat. When it was done, he sucked on it. Only when he had exhaled and added a note of cheap tobacco to the odor did he speak.

  “Who saw you come?”

  “Nobody.”

  Silence.

  “No one’s about. Too cold,” he insisted.

  The man nodded. “Tell.”

  “A girl,” the drunk told him. “At the Swan at Radcot.”

  “What about her?”

  “Someone have pulled her out the river tonight. Dead, they say.”

  There was a pause.

  “What of it?”

  “She is alive.”

  At this the man’s face turned, but was no more visible than before. “Alive? Or dead? She must be one or the other.”

  “She was dead. Now she is alive.”

  There was a slow shaking of the head and the man spoke flatly. “You have been dreaming. That or you’ve drunk one too many.”

  “It is what they are saying. I only came to tell you what they are saying. Dead they took her from the river and now she lives again. At the Swan.”

  The man stared back into the brazier. The messenger waited to see if there was any further response, but after a minute saw there would be none.

  “A little gesture . . . For the trouble I’ve took. It’s a cold night.”

  The man grunted. He rose, casting a dark and flickering shadow onto the wall, and reached into the darkness. From it his hand extracted a small corked bottle. He passed it to the tramp, who pocketed it, touched the brim of his hat, and retreated.

  Back at the Swan, the cat was asleep, curled against the chimney breast, which still exhaled a gentle warmth. Its eyelids flickered with the images of cat dreams that would be even more perplexing to us than the stories our human brains concoct nocturnally. Its ear twitched and the dream faded instantly. A sound—almost nothing; the sound of grass crushed underfoot—and the cat was already on all fours. It crossed the room swiftly and silently and sprang to the window ledge. Feline vision pierced the night with ease.

  Appearing by stealth from the back of the inn, a slight figure in an overlong coat, hat pulled down low, slipped along the wall, passing the window, and stopping at the door. There was a gentle rattle as he surreptitiously tested the handle. The latch was secured. Other places might be unlocked, but an inn, with its many barrels of temptation, must be locked at night. Now the man returned to the window. Unaware of being watched, his fingers worked their way by feel around the window frame. Thwarted. Margot was no fool. Hers was the kind of mind that remembered not only to lock the door at closing time but also to renew the putty in the windows every summer, to maintain the paintwork so the frames could not rot, to replace broken panes. A puff of exasperation emerged from beneath the low brim of the hat. The man paused, and a gleam of thought passed across his eyes. But not for long. It was too cold to hang about. He turned and strode smartly away. He knew exactly where to put his feet in the dark, avoided furrows, dodged boulders, found the bridge, crossed it, and on the other side diverged from the path into the trees.

  Long after the intruder had disappeared from sight, the cat followed him by ear. The drag of twigs across the woolen grain of a coat, the contact of heels on stone cold earth, the stir of woodland creatures disturbed . . . until eventually nothing.

  The cat dropped to the floorboards and returned to the hearth, where it pressed itself against the warm stone again and went back to sleep.

  So it was that after the impossible event, and the hour of the first puzzling and wondering, came the various departures from the Swan and the first of the tellings. But finally, while the night was still dark, everybody at last was in bed and the story settled like sediment in the minds of them all, witnesses, tellers, listeners. The only sleepless one was the child herself, who, at the heart of the tale, breathed the seconds lightly in and lightly out while she gazed at nothing and listened to the sound of the river rushing by.

  Tributaries

  A river on a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes the trouble to follow its route, whether by boat or on foot, cannot help being aware that, furlong by furlong, singleness of direction is not its most obvious feature. En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead it winds its way in time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south, and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destination—or put it aside for the while. At Ashton Keynes it splits into so many rivulets that every house in the village must have a bridge to its own front door; later, around Oxford, it takes a great unhurried detour around the city. It has other capricious tricks up its sleeve: in places it slows to drift lazily in wide pools before recovering its urgency and speeding on again. At Buscot it s
plits into twin streams to maroon a lengthy piece of territory, then regathers its water into a single channel.

  If this is hard to understand from a map, the rest is harder. For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county’s diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in themselves, before returning eventually to the earth via a chamber pot. Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface and then, when the sun comes up, a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames.

  And there is more: what we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page. Take Trewsbury Mead, for instance. That photograph, do you remember? The one they were so quick to dismiss, because it wasn’t picturesque? An ordinary ash in an ordinary field, they said, and so it appears, but look more closely. See this indentation in the ground, at the foot of the tree? See how it is the beginning of a furrow, shallow, narrow, and unremarkable, that runs away from the tree and out of the picture altogether? See here, in the dip, where something catches the light and shows as a few ragged patches of silver in the grey shades of muddy soil? Those bright marks are water, seeing sunlight for the first time in what might be a very long time. It comes from underground, where, in all the spaces beneath our feet, in the fractures and voids in the rock, in caverns and fissures and channels, there are waterways as numerous, as meandering, as circuitous, as anything aboveground. The beginning of the Thames is not the beginning—or, rather, it is only to us that it seems like a beginning.

  In fact Trewsbury Mead might not be the beginning in any case. There are those who say it’s the wrong place. The not-even-the-beginning is not here but elsewhere, at a place called Seven Springs, which is the source of the Churn, a river that joins the Thames at Cricklade. And who is to say? The Thames that goes north, south, east, and west to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forwards, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky while meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark, inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it came from.

  Ah, tributaries! That’s what I was meaning to come to. The Churn, the Key, the Ray, the Coln, the Leach, and the Cole: in these upper reaches of the Thames, these are the streams and rivulets that come from elsewhere to add their own volume and momentum to that of the Thames. And tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in the quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not their beginnings—mysterious unknowable things—but, more simply, what they were doing yesterday.

  What Do You Make of It?

  Before the coming of the child, at half past three in the afternoon, at a farmhouse in Kelmscott, a woman stepped out of the kitchen door and in some haste crossed the yard to the barn. Her fair curls were tucked neatly into her bonnet, and her blue dress was simple, as befits a busy farmer’s wife, though she endowed it with a prettiness that suggested she was still young at heart. She had a swaying gait; with every second step she stooped to the left, with every step in between she rose again. It did not slow her. Nor was she hindered by the patch that covered her right eye. It was in the same blue fabric as her dress and a white ribbon held it in place.

  She came to the barn. It smelled of blood and iron. Inside was a man who stood with his back to her. He was powerfully made, unusually tall, with a broad back and wiry black hair. As she put her hand on the doorframe, he tossed a crimson stained cloth to the ground and reached for his whetstone. She heard a ringing rise in the air as he started to sharpen the blade. Beyond him lay a row of corpses, neatly arranged snout to tail; the blood ran from them and found the shallows in the ground.

  “Dearest—”

  He turned. The darkness of his face was not the hale brown achieved by a lifetime’s work out of doors under an English sun but the kind that originated in another continent altogether. His nose was broad and his lips thick. At the sight of his wife, his brown eyes lit up and he smiled.

  “Watch your hem, Bess.”A rivulet of blood was trickling towards her. “You’re in your good shoes too. I’m nearly done here. I’ll be indoors in a little while.”

  Then he saw the look on her face and the duet of knife and stone came to an end.

  “What is it?”

  For all the differences between the two faces, it was a single emotion that animated their expression.

  “One of the children?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Robin.”

  The firstborn. His face fell. “What is it this time?”

  “This letter . . .”

  His gaze fell to her hand. She held not a folded piece of paper but a pile of ripped pieces.

  “Susie found it. Robin brought her a jacket to mend last time he came to visit. You know how dainty she is with her needle though she is only twelve. A very fine jacket too; I dread to think what it cost. There was a great gash in the sleeve, she says, though you wouldn’t know it now. She had to unstitch the pocket seam to get some thread the right color, and while she was about it, she found this letter, torn to pieces. I came across her in the drawing room, puzzling it out like some kind of a game.”

  “Show me,” he suggested, and he took a handful of her skirt to keep it out of the blood as they stepped towards the ledge that ran along one inner wall. She laid out the fragments

  “Rent,” she read aloud, lightly touching one of the fragments. Her hand was a working one: she wore no rings except her wedding band, and her nails were short and neat.

  “Love,” he read, and he did not touch the paper he read from, for there was blood under his nails and on his fingers.

  “at an end . . . What is at an end, do you suppose, Robert?”

  “I don’t know . . . How did it come to be torn into pieces like this?”

  “Did he tear it up? Is it a letter he received and didn’t like?”

  “Try putting that piece with this,” he suggested. But no, the two did not fit together.

  “It is a woman’s hand,” he said.

  “A good hand too. My letters are not so well-formed as these.”

  “You do well enough, my dear.”

  “But look how straight she writes. Not a single blot. It is nearly as good a hand as yours, with all your years of schooling. What do you make of it, Robert?”

  He peered silently for a while. “There is no point trying to reconstitute the whole. What we have is only a fraction. Let’s try something else . . .”

  They moved the pieces round, her deft hand operating according to his instruction, and arrived at an organization of the fragments into three sections. The first was of pieces too small to be meaningful: halves of words, “thes” and “ofs,” and bits of margin. They put them aside.

  The second set contained phrases which they read now aloud.

  “Love”

  “entirely without”

  “child will soon entirely”

  “help from no quarter but you”

  “rent”

  “wait no longer”

  “father of my”

  The final group was a set of fragments all containing the same word:

  “Alice.”

  “Alice.”

  “Alice.”

  Robert Armstrong turned to his wife and she turned her face to him. Her blue gaze fretted anxiously and his own was grave.

  “Tell me, my love,” he said. “What do you make of
it?”

  “It is this Alice. I thought at first it was her name, the letter writer. But a person writing a letter does not say their name so many times. They say ‘I.’ This Alice is someone else.”

  “Yes.”

  “Child,” she repeated wonderingly. “Father . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t make it out . . . Does Robin have a child, Robert? Do we have a grandchild? Why has he not told us? Who is this woman? And what trouble is it that has made her write a letter like this? The letter is torn up too . . . I fear—”

  “Do not fear, Bess. What good can fear do? Suppose there is a child? Suppose there is a woman? There are worse mistakes a young man can make than falling in love, and if a child has come from it, we will be the first to welcome it. Our hearts are strong enough, aren’t they?”

  “But why is the letter half-destroyed?”

  “Supposing there is some trouble . . . There are few things that cannot be put right by love, and there is no shortage of that here. Where love fails, money will usually do the trick.”

  He looked steadily into her left eye. It was a good blue eye, and he waited until he saw the worry ebb from it and confidence return.

  “You are right. What shall we do, then? Will you talk to him?”

  “No. Not yet, anyhow.” He turned back to the pieces of paper. From the group of unreadable fragments he pointed at one. “What do you make of this?”

  She shook her head. The tear had gone right horizontally through the middle of the word, slicing top from bottom.

  “I think this says, ‘Bampton.’ ”

  “Bampton? Why, that’s only four miles away!”

  He consulted his watch. “It’s too late to go now. There is cleaning up to do and these carcasses to be dealt with. If I don’t press on, it will be too dark to see what I’m doing by the time I feed the pigs. I shall get up early and go to Bampton first thing.”