them no attention and made straight for the bar, where a woman took one look at him and said, ‘Follow me.’
She led him through a short panelled passageway to an old oak door. She opened it and stepped aside to let him enter first.
There were too many shocks: he could not separate one from another. Only afterwards was he able to tease out the many impressions that rushed upon him into separate strands and put words and an order to them. First there was the bewilderment of expecting to see his wife and failing to find her there. Second was the confusion of seeing a very familiar face that he had not seen for a long time. A young woman, scarcely more than a child really, whom he had once asked to marry him, and who had said Yes, with laughter, yes, if I can bring my boat. She turned a radiant face to him and smiled, her lips wide with easy happiness, her eyes brightly luminous with love.
Vaughan stopped dead in his tracks. Helena. His wife – bold, joyous and magnificent, as she had been. Before.
She laughed.
‘Oh, Anthony! What’s the matter with you!’
She looked down, took hold of something, speaking in a cajoling, sing-song voice that he remembered from another time. ‘Look,’ she said, though not to him. ‘Look who it is.’
The third shock.
She turned the little person to face him.
‘Daddy’s here!’
The Sleeper Wakes
MEANWHILE, A MAN with black-stained fingertips and a broken face lay sleeping in the pilgrims’ room of the Swan at Radcot. He lay on his back, his head on Margot’s feather pillow, and but for the rise and fall of his chest, he did not stir.
There are any number of ways you might imagine sleep, none of them likely to be accurate. We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete, the ability to commit it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.
When he was ten, Henry Daunt saw a picture of an ash tree whose roots plunged into an underground river in which lived strange mermaids or naiads, called the Maidens of Destiny. When he thought of the descent into sleep, it was something very like this subterranean waterway that he envisaged. He had a sense of his slumber as a lengthy swimming session, in which he navigated slowly through water that was thicker than usual, with effortless pleasant movements that propelled him in one direction or another with a kind of vivid aimlessness. Sometimes the skin of the water was only a little way above his head, and his daytime world, its troubles and pleasures, was still there, pursuing him from the other side. On those occasions he would wake feeling as though he had not slept at all. Most of the time, though, he slept easily, awoke refreshed, sometimes with the happy sense that he had met friends in his sleep, or that his mother (though dead) had communicated some loving message to him in the night. He didn’t mind this at all. He did mind waking just as the last traces of some interesting nocturnal adventure were lost to the tide.
None of these things happened in the Swan at Radcot. While life was at work in him, crusting blood over gashes and doing all manner of intricate work inside the skull box that had taken such a battering at Devil’s Weir, Henry Daunt sank, sank, sank to the darkest depths of his vast underwater cavern, where nothing ebbed and nothing flowed and all was as dark and still as the grave. He remained there for an unmeasurable length of time, and at the end of it, memory awoke and the still depths shivered and came to life.
A number of experiences then drifted into his mind and out again, in no particular order.
A dull sensation that was the disappointment of his marriage.
A stinging in his fingertips that was the cold he felt yesterday at Trewsbury Mead, when he had stopped the trickle that was the Thames with his forefinger and waited for the water to build up behind it till the volume became too great and it overspilt.
A whole body swooping and gliding – skating on the frozen Thames as a young man of twenty; he had met his wife that day and the gliding had continued for many weeks, all through the rest of the winter to a day at the beginning