‘Listen!’ he told her. ‘Just listen to this!’ And the story spilt out of him, the girl and the stranger, dead and alive.
‘What you been drinking?’ Mrs Connor wanted to know.
‘Hardly a thing.’ And he told her the story all over again, because she hadn’t grasped it.
She half sat up to see him properly, and there he was, the man she had worked for for thirty years and shared a bed with for twenty-nine, and he was still dressed, upright, a torrent of words pouring from him. She couldn’t make sense of it. Even when he had finished speaking, he stood there as if under a spell.
She got out of bed to help him off with his clothes. It wasn’t unknown for him to have such a skinful that he couldn’t manage his buttons alone. He wasn’t staggering though, nor did he lean on her, and when she unbuttoned his breeches she discovered him full of the kind of vigour that a drunk man is unlikely to sustain.
‘Look at you,’ she half chided him, and he embraced her with a kiss the like of which they had not shared since the early years of their time together. They rolled and tumbled in the bed for a little while, and when they were done, instead of turning over and going to sleep, Owen Albright kept her in his arms and kissed her hair.
‘Marry me, Mrs Connor.’
She laughed. ‘Whatever’s got into you, Mr Albright?’
He kissed her cheek, and she felt his smile in the kiss.
She was nearly asleep when he spoke again. ‘I saw it with my own eyes. It was me that held the candle. Dead, she was. That was one minute. And the next – alive!’
She could smell the breath from him. He wasn’t drunk. Mad, perhaps.
They slept.
Jonathan, still dressed, waited till he heard silence in the Swan. He let himself out of the upstairs room and came down the external staircase. He was underdressed for the weather, but he didn’t care. He was warmed by the story he held in his heart. He took the opposite direction from Owen Albright, turned upstream and walked against the river. His head was alive with ideas and he walked rapidly to deposit them with the person who would surely want to know all about it.
Arriving at the parsonage at Buscot, he rapped loudly at the door. There being no answer, he rapped again, and again, until he was knocking without cease, with no regard to the lateness of the hour.
The door opened.
‘The parson!’ Jonathan burst out. ‘I must speak to the parson!’
‘But Jonathan,’ said the door-opener, a figure clad in a dressing gown and nightcap, who was rubbing his eyes, ‘It is I.’ The man took off his nightcap, displaying an untidy mass of greying hair.
‘Oh. Now I know you.’
‘Is someone dying, Jonathan? Is it your father? Have you come to fetch me?’
‘No!’ And Jonathan, who wanted to explain that his reason for coming was the very opposite of that, fell over his words in his rush to tell, and all the parson could understand was that nobody was dead.
Sleepily, he interrupted. ‘You cannot rouse people from their sleep for no reason, Jonathan. This is no night for a boy to be out – too cold by far. You should be in bed yourself. Go home and sleep.’
‘But Parson, it is the same story! All over again! Just like Jesus!’
The parson saw that his visitor’s face was white with cold. His upslanting eyes were running and the tears were freezing on his flat cheeks. His entire face was illuminated with the pleasure of seeing the parson, and his tongue, always too big for his mouth so that it sometimes got in the way of his speech, was resting on his lower lip. Seeing him, the parson was reminded that Jonathan, for all his goodness, was incapable of taking care of himself. He opened the door wide and ushered the boy in.
In the kitchen, the parson heated milk in a pan and placed bread in front of his guest. Jonathan ate and drank – no miracle would get in the way of that – and then told his story again. The child that was dead and came to life again.
The parson listened. He asked a few questions: ‘When you thought to come here, were you in your bed and had been sleeping there? … No? … Well, then, was it your father or Mr Albright that told the story of