to hand in her notice. The next thing we knew, Mrs Vaughan was racing down to the boathouse and there was not a thing we could do to stop her. By the time we got there, she had took the old rowing boat and was almost out of sight.’
Vaughan ran home, where the stable boy, anticipating his need, had readied his horse. ‘You’ll have to fly to catch her,’ he warned. Vaughan mounted and took the direction of Radcot. For the first few minutes he galloped as fast as he could, then he slowed to a trot. Fly? he thought. I’ll never catch her. He had rowed with her in the early days of their marriage and she was as expert a rower as any man he knew. She was slim, which made her light, and she was strong. Thanks to her father, she had been in and out of boats since before she could walk, and her blades dipped without a splash into the water, rose out of it as cleanly as a leaping fish. Where others grew scarlet and sweated with effort, her cheeks simply took on a serene rose flush, and she gleamed with contentment, feeling the pull of the water. Some women softened with grief, but in Helena it had burnt away the little softness she was starting to develop since their daughter’s arrival, and honed her. She was all wire and muscle, fired with determination, and she had a half-hour head start. Fly and catch her? Not a chance. Helena was out of reach. She had been for a long time.
It was hope that had her always so far ahead of him. He had parted company with hope long ago. If Helena would only do the same, happiness might – he thought – eventually be restored to them. Instead of which she stoked her hope, fed it with any trifle she could lay her hands on, and when there was nothing to feed it, she nourished it with some stubborn faith of her own making. In vain he had tried to console her and comfort her, in vain offered images of other futures, different lives.
‘We could go and live abroad,’ he had suggested. They had spoken of it when they first married, it was a notion for the years ahead. ‘Why not?’ she had said then, before Amelia’s disappearance, before Amelia had existed at all. And so he had suggested it again. They might go to New Zealand for a year – two, even. And why come back? They needn’t. New Zealand was a fine place to work, to live …
Helena had been appalled. ‘And how will Amelia find us there?’
He had talked of the other children they had always expected. But future children were immaterial, mere abstractions to his wife. Only to him did they appear incarnate, in his dreams and in his waking hours. The marital intimacies that had ceased so abruptly the night their daughter disappeared had not been resumed in the two years since. Before Helena, he had lived unmarried and more or less celibate for many years. Where other men paid for women or took up with girls they could later abandon, he went to bed alone and fell back on his own devices. He had no desire to return to this mode of life now. If his wife could not love him, then nothing. The spirit faded. He no longer expected pleasure of his own body or hers. He had given up one hope after another.
She blamed him. He blamed himself. It was a father’s job to keep his children from harm, and he had failed.
Vaughan realized that he was stationary. His mount had its muzzle to the ground, exploring for something sweet among the winter bracken. ‘There’s nothing there for you. Nothing for me either.’ He was overwhelmed with a great weariness. For a moment he wondered whether he was ill, whether he could in fact go on. He remembered somebody saying something, quite recently … You can’t go on like this. Oh, it was the woman in Oxford. Mrs Constantine. What a foolish expedition that had turned out to be. But she was right about that. He couldn’t go on.
He went on.
There was an unusual number of people packed into the Swan, he thought, given the time of day and the season. They looked up at him with the curiosity of those for whom something is already underway and further interest can confidently be expected. He paid