Once Upon a River Read online

  “All right, Robert.”

  She turned to go.

  “Watch your hem!”

  In the house, Bess Armstrong went to her bureau. The key turned in the lock only awkwardly. It had been so ever since it was mended. She remembered a day when Robin was eight. She’d come home and found the lock forced open. Papers were everywhere, money and documents missing, and Robin took her by the hand to say, “I disturbed the thief, a rough-looking fellow, and look, Mother, here is the open window where I saw him make his escape.” Her husband had immediately gone out looking for the man, but she had not followed him. Instead she had put her hands to her eye patch and slid it round so that it covered her good eye and revealed the one that looked sideways and Saw things an ordinary eye didn’t. She took her son by the shoulders and trained her Seeing eye on him. When Armstrong had come home, having found no trace of the rough-looking thief, she said, “No, I don’t suppose you did, for there was no such man. The thief was Robin.”

  “No!” Armstrong protested.

  “It was Robin. He was too pleased with the story he told. It was Robin.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  They had not been able to reach an agreement, and it was one of the things that had been buried under the weight of the days since. But every time she turned the key of the new lock, she remembered.

  She folded a piece of paper into a pocket. She slid all the unreadable bits of the letter into it, then gathered the set of phrases and put them in too. With the final three pieces of paper between her fingers she hesitated, uncertain, reluctant to let them go. At last she dropped them into the envelope, with a murmur for each one, like a spell:

  “Alice.”

  “Alice.”

  “Alice.”

  She pulled open the bureau drawer, but before she could put the pleat of paper away, an instinct halted her. Not the letter. Not the old story of the bureau and the forced lock. Something else. The sensation of a current rippling transparently through the air.

  She tried to catch the tail end of the feeling and name it. Almost too late, yet she did catch it, fleetingly, for she heard the words her tongue pronounced in the empty room:

  “Something is going to happen.”

  Outside, Robert Armstrong finished sharpening his knife. He called his second and third sons, and together they hoisted the carcasses onto hooks to bleed them over the gullies. They rinsed their hands in a pail of rainwater and emptied the water over the floor to rinse the worst of the blood away from the slaughter area. When he had set the boys to mopping, he went out to feed the pigs. They usually worked together, but on days when he had something on his mind, he preferred to feed the pigs alone.

  Effortlessly, Armstrong heaved sacks and spilled the grain into the troughs. He scratched one sow behind her ear, rubbed another on her flank, according to their individual liking. Pigs are remarkable creatures and, though most men are too blind to see it, have intelligence that they show in their eyes. Armstrong was persuaded that every pig had its own character, its own talents, and when he selected a female piglet for breeding, he looked not only for physical qualities but for intelligence, foresight, good sense: the qualities that make a good mother. He was in the habit of talking to his pigs as he fed them, and today as usual he had something to say to each and every one. “What have you got to be so grumpy about, Dora?” and “Feeling your age, are you, Poll?” His gilts, the breeding sows, all had names. The pigs he was growing for the table he did not name but called them all “piglet.” When he chose a new gilt, it was his practice to give her a name starting with the same letter of the alphabet as her mother; it made it easy to trace the breeding line.

  He came to Martha in the last sty. She was in pig and would deliver in four days’ time. He filled her trough with grain and her sink with water. She lifted herself from her straw bed and waddled heavily towards the trough at the gate, where she did not immediately eat or drink but rested her chin on the horizontal bar of the fence and scratched. He rubbed the top of her head between the ears and she snorted contentedly.

  “Alice,” he said thoughtfully. The letter had been on his mind the entire time. “What do you make of it, Martha?”

  The sow looked at him with eyes full of thought.

  “I don’t know what to think, myself,” he admitted. “A first grandchild—is that it? And Robin . . . What is going on with Robin?” He sighed heavily.

  Martha pondered his boots in the mud for a moment, and when she gazed back up at him, it was with a rather pointed look.

  He nodded. “Quite right. Maud would know. But Maud’s not here, is she?”

  Martha’s mother, Maud, had been the best sow he had ever known. She produced numerous litters of many piglets, never lost one by accident or neglect, but more than that, she listened to him as no other sow had ever listened. Patient and gentle, she had let him speak his mind, and when he shared his joys about the children, her eyes lit up with pleasure and when he told her of his worries—Robin, it was nearly always Robin—her eyes were full of wisdom and sympathy and he never came away without feeling somehow better about things. Her quiet and kindly listening had made it possible to speak his thoughts aloud, and sometimes it was only when he spoke his thoughts that he knew he had them. It was surprising how a man’s mind might remain half in shadow until the right confidant appeared, and Maud had been that confidant. Without her he might never have known certain things about himself or about his son. On this spot, some years ago, he had shared the disagreement between himself and his wife about Robin and the theft from the bureau. As he retold the sorry tale to Maud, he saw it anew and noticed what he had registered but not paid attention to at the time. I saw a man! Robin had said. I saw his boot disappearing out of the window! It was instinctive in Armstrong to see the best in people, and his faith in the boy was spontaneous. But then, prompted by Maud’s quizzical gaze, he’d remembered the watchful wait that followed the boy’s story, known then in his heart what it meant: that Robin was watching to see whether he had got away with it. It hurt Armstrong to accept it, but on this occasion Bess was right.

  When they had married, Robin was already on the way, put into her womb by another man. Robert had chosen to put this fact aside. This was not difficult, for he loved the boy with all his heart. He had determined to build a family with Bess, not fragmented and splintered, but whole and entire, and he permitted no member of it to be left on the outside. There was love enough for all. Love would hold them together. But when he realized the thief who left the bureau splintered and its contents ransacked was Robin, he wept. Maud had eyed him quizzically. What now? And he had found the answer. Loving the boy even more would put things right. From that day on he had defended Robin even more vigorously than before.

  Maud had looked at him again. “Oh, really?” she’d seemed to say.

  The thought of Maud brought tears suddenly to his eyes. One of them fell onto Martha’s thick neck, clung momentarily to the ginger hair that sprouted from it, then rolled into the mud.

  Armstrong brought his cuff to his face, wiped the wetness away. “This is foolishness,” he chided himself.

  Martha looked steadily at him from between her ginger lashes.

  “But you miss her too, don’t you?”

  He thought he saw a mistiness in her eye.

  “How long is it now?” He totted up the months in his head. “Two years and three months. A long time. Who took her, eh? You were there, Martha. Why didn’t you squeal when they came and stole your mother?”

  Martha gave him a long and intent look. He studied her expression, tried to decipher it, and for once failed.

  He was giving Martha a final scratch when she lifted her chin from the fence and turned in the direction of the river.

  “What is it?”

  He looked that way himself. There was nothing to see, and he had heard nothing either. Still, there must be something . . . He and the pig exchanged a look. It was a look he had never seen in her eyes before, yet he
had only to compare it with his own sensations to know what it meant.

  “I think you’re right, Martha. Something is going to happen.”

  Mrs. Vaughan and the River Goblins

  A pearl of water formed in the corner of an eye. The eye belonged to a young woman who was lying in the bottom of the boat. The bead of liquid rested in the place where the pink inner of the eyelid swells into the dainty complication of a tear duct. It shivered with the rocking motion of the boat but, supported by the lashes that sprouted beneath and above it, did not break or fall.

  “Mrs. Vaughan?”

  The young woman had rowed across the river, then drawn the blades in and allowed the little boat to drift into the reed bed which now held it. By the time the words from the bank reached the woman in the boat, the thick white river mist had rinsed the urgency out of them. The words drifted into her ear, washed out and waterlogged, and they sounded scarcely louder than the thoughts in her own head.

  Mrs. Vaughan . . . That’s me, Helena thought. It sounded like the name of another person altogether. She could imagine a Mrs. Vaughan and it would be nothing like herself. Someone old. About thirty, probably, with a face like the portraits that hung in the hallway of her husband’s house. It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now it was as if she was thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.

  “It’s too cold to be out, Mrs. Vaughan.”

  Cold, yes. Helena Vaughan counted the coldnesses. There was the cold of being coatless, hatless, gloveless. The cold of the air that dampened her dress to her skin and raised goose bumps on her chest and arms and legs. There was the cold of the air as it entered her, stinging her nostrils and making her lungs quiver. After all those came the coldness of the river. It was the slowest, taking its time to reach her through the thick planks of the boat, but when it did it burned the points of her shoulder blades, the back of her skull, her rib cage, the base of her spine, all the places where her body lay hard against the curve of the wood. The river came nudging at the boat, draining her of warmth with its lulling, rocking motion. She closed her eyes.

  “Are you there? Oh, answer me, for heaven’s sake!”

  Answers . . . The word dredged up a memory from a few years ago. Aunt Eliza had talked about an answer. “Think before you answer,” she had said, “because opportunities like this don’t come every day.”

  Aunt Eliza was the little sister of Helena’s father. Widowed in her forties and childless, she had come to live with her brother and the child of his late marriage, to disrupt and upset them, as Helena saw it. Helena’s mother had died when the child was an infant, and it was Eliza’s view that the girl needed a maternal figure to take her in hand. Her brother, owner of a boatyard that made wonderful boats but little money, was an eccentric who had neglected to instill proper discipline, and the girl was barely educated. Eliza had tried but she had failed to have much influence. Helena in the early days had complained to her father about Eliza, and he had told her, with a wink, “She has nowhere else to go, pirate. Just nod and say yes to whatever she says and afterwards do just as you like. That’s what I always do.” The strategy had worked. Father and daughter had continued to live together in great friendship, and neither one permitted Eliza to interfere with their days on the river and in the boatyard.

  In the garden, between exhortations to slow down, Aunt Eliza told Helena a great many things she already knew perfectly well, since they were about herself. She reminded Helena—as though she might have forgotten—that she was motherless. She alluded to her father’s great age and poor health. While Helena half listened, she drew Aunt Eliza in a certain direction, and, absorbed in what she was saying, Aunt Eliza allowed herself to be led. They came to the river and walked along the bank. Helena breathed in the thrill of the cold, bright air, watched the ducks bobbing in the lively water. Her shoulders twitched at the thought of oars. In her stomach she felt the anticipation of that first pull out into the water, that meeting of the boat with the current . . . “Upstream or down-?” her father always said. “If it’s not the one it has to be the other—and it’ll be an adventure either way!”

  Aunt Eliza was reminding Helena of the state of her father’s finances, which were even more precarious than his health, and then—Helena’s thoughts had been drifting with the river; she might have missed something—Eliza was talking about a Mr. Vaughan, his kindness and decency, and the fact that his business was thriving. “Though if you do not wish it, your father instructs me to tell you that you have only to say so and the whole thing will be put aside and not a word more said about it,” Aunt Eliza concluded. This was initially mystifying to Helena, and then suddenly perfectly clear.

  “Which one is this Mr. Vaughan?” she wanted to know.

  Aunt Eliza was nonplussed. “You have met him several times . . . Why don’t you pay more attention?” But to Helena her father’s friends and associates were versions of the same figure: male, old, dull. None of them were remotely as interesting as her father, and she was surprised he spent any time with them at all.

  “Is Mr. Vaughan with father now?”

  She darted off, ignoring Aunt Eliza’s protests, running back towards the house. In the garden, she took a leap over the ferns and sidled up to the study window. By clambering onto the plinth of a large urn and clinging on the window ledge, she could just see into the room, where her father was smoking in the company of another gentleman.

  Mr. Vaughan was not one of the red-nosed or grizzled ones. She recognized him now as the smiling younger man with whom her father sat up late over a cigar and a drink. When she went to bed, she could hear them laughing together. She was glad her father had somebody to cheer him up in the evenings. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a brown beard. Beyond that, the one thing that set him apart was his voice. Most of the time he spoke just like any other Englishman, but once in a while something slipped out of his mouth that had an unfamiliar ring to it. She had been interested in listening out for these odd sounds and asked him about it.

  “I grew up in New Zealand,” he had told her. “My family has mines there.”

  She considered the ordinary man through the window and felt no strong objection to him.

  Helena edged her heels from the urn’s plinth and hung, swaying pleasantly from the window ledge, enjoying the stretch in her arms and shoulders. When she heard Aunt Eliza’s approach she let herself drop.

  “I’ll have to leave home, I suppose, if I marry Mr. Vaughan?”

  “You will be leaving home anyway one day soon. Your father has been so unwell. Your future is uncertain. Naturally he is anxious to see you settled in life. If you were to marry Mr. Vaughan you would go to live with him at Buscot Lodge, whereas if you don’t—”

  “Buscot Lodge?” Helena came to a halt. She knew Buscot Lodge. A large house on a thrilling reach of the river; it had a long, broad stretch where the water was smooth and even, and a place where it divided to flow around an island, and just before that a spot where the water seemed to forget it was a river at all and idled, just like a little lake. There was a mill wheel and St. John’s Bridge and a boathouse . . . She had once rowed up close to the boathouse and, standing precariously in her one-man vessel, peered in. There was plenty of room in it.

  “Would I be allowed to take my boat?”

  “Helena, this is a serious business. Marriage has nothing to do with boats and the river. It is a binding contract, both in law and in the eyes of God—”

  But Helena was off, running at full tilt over the lawn to the door of the house.

  When Helena burst into the study, her father’s eyes lit up at the sight of her. “What do you think of this daft notion, eh? If it’s a load of nonsense to you, just say the word. On the other hand, a load of nonsense can be just the thing if the fancy takes you . . . Upstream or down-, pirate? What do you say?”
r />   Mr. Vaughan had risen from his chair.

  “Can I bring my boat?” she asked him. “Can I go on the river every day?”

  Mr. Vaughan, bemused, did not answer immediately.

  “That boat is at the end of its days,” her father said.

  “It’s not very bad,” she argued.

  “Holes in it last time I looked.”

  She shrugged. “I bail.”

  “Like a sieve. Surprised you get so far in it.”

  “When it gets too low in the water, I come back to the bank and upturn it and then set out again,” she conceded.

  They discussed the boat like two immortals for whom drowning was impossible.

  Mr. Vaughan turned from father to daughter during this exchange. He began to perceive the importance of boats in the matter at hand.

  “I could get it mended for you,” he suggested. “Or get you a new one if you like.”

  She thought. She nodded. “All right.”

  Aunt Eliza, who had come late to the discussion, glanced sharply at Helena. Something appeared to be concluded, but what? Mr. Vaughan took pity and enlightened her.

  “Miss Greville has agreed to allow me to buy her a new boat. With that business out of the way, we can now negotiate the lesser matters. Miss Greville, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

  Adventure either way . . .

  “It’s a deal.” She nodded firmly.

  Aunt Eliza’s sense that this was all falling far short of what a marriage proposal and acceptance ought to be, opened her mouth to address Helena, but Helena got in first.

  “I know. Marriage is an important contract, in the eyes of God and of the law,” she parroted. She had seen people conclude important contracts before. Knowing how it was done, she held out her hand for Mr. Vaughan to shake.

  Mr. Vaughan took her hand, turned it, and bowed to plant a kiss upon it. Suddenly it was Helena’s turn to be perplexed.