‘There is another side to the river,’ Eliza used to tell her. ‘Once upon a time there was a naughty little girl who played too close to the bank. One day, while she wasn’t looking, a goblin rose out of the water. He grasped the little girl by the hair and took her back, kicking and splashing, to his own goblin realm under the river. And if you don’t believe me …’ Had she believed her? It was hard to know, now. ‘If you don’t believe me, you have only to listen. Go on, listen now. Do you hear the water splashing?’
Helena had nodded. This was all wonderful to know. Goblins living under the river in their own goblin world. How marvellous!
‘Listen to the sounds between the splashes. Do you hear? There are bubbles, very, very small ones that rise to the surface and pop. Those are the bubbles that carry messages from all the lost children. If your ears are sharp enough you will hear the cries of that little girl and all the other homesick children who are weeping for their mothers and fathers.’
She had listened. Had she heard? She couldn’t remember now. But if the goblins had taken her away down into the water, her father would simply have come and got her back. It was so obvious that Helena Greville felt rather scornful of her aunt for not realizing it herself.
For years and years Helena Greville had forgotten the story about the goblins and their world on the other, deathly side of the river. But now Helena Vaughan remembered it. She came out in her old boat to remember it every day. The sound of the water was a semi-regular, uninsistent lapping, as the river licked and sucked at the boat. She listened to the sound and she listened to the spaces between the sound. It was not difficult to hear the lost children. She could hear them with perfect clarity.
‘Mrs Vaughan! You’ll catch your death! Do come in, Mrs Vaughan!’
The river lapped and the boat rose and fell, and a far-off little voice called without cease for its parents from the depths of the goblin world.
‘It’s all right!’ she whispered, white-lipped. She tensed her cold muscles, readied her trembling limbs to rise. ‘Mummy’s coming!’
She leant out of the boat and, as the vessel tilted, the teardrop spilt from her eye and dropped into the greater wetness of the river. Before she could shift her weight sufficiently to follow it, something righted the boat and she felt herself fall back into it. When she looked up, an indistinct grey figure was bending over the bow of her boat, gripping the cleat. The shadow in the mist then straightened and she saw it elongate like a man standing in a punt. It raised an arm in a motion that resembled the dropping of a pole to find the riverbed, and she then felt a powerful dragging sensation. The speed of progress through the water seemed oddly disconnected from the shadow’s ease of movement. The river loosened its grip and she was towed back towards the bank with a rapidity that surprised her.
A final propulsion brought the grey shape of the jetty into sight.
Mrs Clare the housekeeper was waiting and the gardener was by her side. He reached for the rope and secured the boat. Helena rose and, with Mrs Clare’s hand to steady her, climbed out.
‘You are frozen to the bone! Whatever possessed you, dear?’
Helena turned back towards the water. ‘He’s gone …’
‘Who’s gone?’
‘The ferryman … He towed me back.’
Mrs Clare looked into Helena’s dazed face in perplexity.
‘Did you see anybody?’ she asked the gardener in an undertone.
He shook his head. ‘Unless – do you suppose it were Quietly?’
Mrs Clare frowned and shook her head at him. ‘Don’t go putting fancies in her head. As if things weren’t bad enough already.’
Helena gave a sudden, violent shiver. Mrs Clare shrugged off her coat and wrapped it around her mistress’s shoulders. ‘You worry us all half to death,’ she scolded. ‘Come on in.’
Mrs Clare took one arm firmly, and the gardener took the other, and they made their way without stopping through the garden and back to the house.
On the threshold of the house, Helena halted confusedly and looked back over her shoulder to the garden and the river beyond. It was that time of the afternoon when the light drains rapidly from the sky and the mist was darkening.