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 had 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 had drawn Aunt Eliza in a certain direction and, absorbed in what she was saying, Aunt Eliza had 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 and running back towards the house. In the garden, she took a leap over the ferns and sidled up to the study window. By clambering on to the plinth of a large urn and clinging to 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. Mr Vaughan 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 had 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 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 the river 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