rise and fall of the girl’s breathing, and measured her own inhalations so that as her chest fell, the child’s expanded; as the child’s fell, her own filled the space. An obscure pleasure took hold of her; she sought drowsily to identify it, name it, and couldn’t.
An idea came floating towards her in the dark.
If she doesn’t belong to this man. If nobody wants her. She could be mine …
But before she had time to register her own thinking, the sound of the river, endless and low, filled her mind. It nudged her from the solidity of wakefulness, carried her on to the current of the night where, without awareness of what was happening, she drifted … drifted … into the dark sea of sleep.
All were not sleeping, though. The drinkers and the storytellers had some way to walk before they found their beds for the night. One of them turned away from the river on leaving the Swan and skirted the fields to find his way to the barn two miles off where he slept with the horses. He regretted that he had nobody waiting for him, nobody he could shake awake and say, ‘You won’t believe what’s just happened!’ He pictured himself telling the horses what he had witnessed that night, saw their large unbelieving eyes. Nay, they will say, he thought, and That’s a good joke, I’ll remember that. But it wasn’t horses he wanted to tell; the story was too fine to be squandered on animal ears. He turned off the direct path and made a detour to the cottages by Gartin’s fields where his cousin lived.
He knocked.
No one answered, so the story made him knock again, a full-fisted hammering.
In the adjoining cottage, a window was flung up and a woman put her head out in her nightcap to remonstrate with him.
‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Hold your scolding till you know what I have come to tell you!’
‘Is that you, Fred Heavins?’ She peered in the direction the voice was coming from. ‘Drunken stories, I shouldn’t wonder!’ she grumbled. ‘As if I haven’t heard enough of those to last me a lifetime!’
‘I’m not drunk,’ he said, offended. ‘Look! I can walk in a straight line, see?’ He placed foot in front of foot with elaborate ease.
‘As if that proves anything!’ she laughed into the night. ‘When there is no light to see by, any drunk can walk in a straight line!’
The argument was interrupted by the opening of his cousin’s door. ‘Frederick? What on earth is it?’
Simply, with no embellishments, Fred told what had happened at the Swan.
Leaning out of the window, the neighbour was drawn in, at first unwillingly, to the story, then she called to someone behind her.
‘Come, Wilfred. Listen to this!’
Before long, Fred’s cousin’s children were shaken out of their beds in their nightgowns, and the neighbours on all sides were roused too.
‘What is she like, then, this girl?’
He described her skin, as white as the glazed jug on his grandmother’s kitchen windowsill; he told of her hair, that hung in a dead straight curtain and was the same colour dry as wet.
‘What colour are her eyes?’
‘Blue … Blueish, at any rate. Or grey.’
‘How old is she?’
He shrugged. How was he to know? ‘If she was by my side she’d come up to … about here.’ He indicated with his hand.
‘About four, then? What do you reckon?’
The women discussed it and agreed. About four.
‘And what’s ’er name, this girl?’
Again he was stumped. Who would have thought a story needed all this detail, things he had never considered while it was happening?
‘I dunno. Nobody asked her.’
‘Nobody asked her name!’ The women were scandalized.
‘She was drowsy, like. Margot and Rita said to let her sleep. But her father’s name is Daunt. Henry Daunt. We found it in his pocket. He’s a photographer.’
‘So he’s her father, is he?’
‘I’d’ve thought so … Wouldn’t you? It was him brought her in. They arrived together.’
‘Perhaps he was only taking her photograph?’
‘And they both half drowned, taking a photograph? How do you make that out?’
There was a general hubbub of conversation between the windows, as the story was discussed, its missing pieces identified, attempts made to fill them in … Fred began to feel left out of his own tale, sensed it slipping from his grasp and altering in ways he hadn’t anticipated. It was like a living thing that he had caught but not trained; now it had slipped the leash and was anybody’s.