boat-mender nodded. ‘If the river’s in the mood to let me, yes.’
‘Would you attempt it at night?’
‘Risk my life to save a few seconds? I’m not such a fool.’
There was a sense of satisfaction at having settled at least one aspect of the night’s events.
‘And yet,’ Joe wondered, after a pause, ‘if it was at Devil’s Weir he came to grief, how did he get from there to here?’
Now half a dozen small conversations broke out as theory after theory was proposed, tested and found wanting. Suppose he had rowed all the way after the accident … With those injuries? No! Then suppose he drifted, lying in the boat between life and death, until at Radcot he came to his senses and … Drifted? A boat in that cock-eyed state? Negotiating obstacles in the dark all by itself and letting in water all the while? No!
Round and round they went, finding explanations that fitted one half of the facts or the other half, that supplied a what but not a how, or a where but not a why, until all imagination came to an end and they were no nearer an answer. How had the man not drowned?
For a while the only voice to be heard was that of the river, and then Joe coughed lightly and gathered his breath to speak.
‘It must be Quietly’s doing.’
Everybody glanced towards the window and those near enough looked out, into the soft, flat night in which a span of swiftly moving blackness shone with a liquid gleam. Quietly the ferryman. All knew of him. From time to time he featured in stories they told, and some swore they’d met him. He appeared when you were in trouble on the water, a gaunt and elongated figure, manipulating his pole so masterfully that his punt seemed to glide as if powered by an otherworldly force. He spoke never a word, but guided you safely to the bank so you would live another day. But if you were out of luck – so they said – it was another shore altogether that he would take you to, and those poor souls did not return to the Swan to lift their pint of ale and tell of their encounter.
Quietly. Now that would turn it into another kind of story altogether.
Margot, whose mother and grandmother had spoken of Quietly in the months before they died, frowned and changed the subject.
‘It’ll be a sorry awakening for that poor man. To lose a child – there is no heartbreak like it.’
There was a murmur of agreement and she went on: ‘Why would a father take a child out on the river at this time of night, anyway? In winter too! Even if he were alone it was foolish, but with a child …’
The fathers in the room nodded, and added rashness to the character of the man who lay senseless in the next room.
Joe coughed and said, ‘She were a droll-looking little maid.’
‘Strange.’
‘Peculiar.’
‘Odd,’ came a trio of voices.
‘I didn’t even know it was a child,’ a voice said wonderingly.
‘You weren’t the only one.’
Margot had been pondering this all the while the men had been talking of boats and weirs. She thought of her twelve daughters and her granddaughters and admonished herself. A child was a child, dead or alive.
‘How did we not see it?’ she asked, in a voice that made them all ashamed.
They turned their eyes to the dark corners and consulted their memories. They conjured the injured man to stand again in the doorway. They reinhabited their shock, considered what there had not been time to consider as it happened. It had been like a dream, they thought, or a nightmare. The man had appeared to them like something from a folk tale: a monster or a ghoul. They had taken the child for a puppet or a doll.
The door opened, as it had opened before.
The drinkers blinked away their memory of the man and saw this:
Rita.
She stood in the doorway, where the man had stood.
The dead girl was in her arms.
Again? Was it time’s error? Were they drunk? Had they lost their wits? Too much had happened and their brains were full. They waited for the world to right itself.
The corpse opened its eyes.
The girl’s head swivelled.
Her gaze sent a wave through the room so strong that every eye felt its ripple, every soul was rocked on its mooring.
Time went unmeasured, and when the silence was at last broken it was Rita who spoke.