been waves, or curling locks, but might conceivably (if you were a boy of fourteen) not have been concealment at all but the actual curves of actual breasts. This was the image he lingered over in the dark hours. A creature with streaming hair, half-woman, half-river, cavorted with him and her caresses were so intoxicating that they had the same effect on him that a real woman might. His hand curled around himself and he was solid as an oar. A few tugs were enough, he was pulled into the current, he was the current, he dissolved into bliss.
Thinking about all this, and remembering the Maidens of Destiny, it occurred to him now to wonder what the nurse Rita Sunday looked like. He knew she was there, in the room with him. There was a chair diagonally left beyond the foot of the bed, by a window. He’d worked that much out. That was where she was now, silent, motionless – believing him to be asleep, no doubt. He tried to piece together an image of her. Her grip had been firm when she tried to draw his hands from his eyes. She was strong, then. He knew she was not short, for when she was standing her voice came from a high spot in the room. There was an assurance in her footsteps and movements that told him she was neither very young nor very old. Was she fair or dark? Pretty or plain? She must be plain, he thought. Otherwise she would be married, and if she were married she would not be here nursing a strange man alone in a bedroom. She was probably reading in the chair. Or thinking. He wondered what she was thinking about. This strange business with the girl, in all likelihood. He would think about it too, if he only knew where to start.
‘What do you make of it all?’ she asked.
‘How did you know I was awake?’ he asked when he had got over the fleeting notion that she could read his mind.
‘Your breathing pattern told me. Tell me what happened last night. Start with the accident.’
How had it happened?
It is a good thing to be solo on the river. There is freedom. You are neither in one place nor the other, but always on the move, in between. You escape everything and belong to no one. Daunt remembered the feeling: there was pleasure in the way his body organized itself with and against the water, with and against the air, pleasure in that quivering, precarious poise, when the river challenges and muscles respond. That was how it had been yesterday. He had been lost to himself. His eyes had seen only the river, his mind wholly engaged with predicting her caprices, his limbs a machine that responded to her every motion. There was a moment of glory, when body, boat and river combined in a ballet of withholding and giving, tension and relaxation, resistance and flow … It was sublime – and the sublime is not to be trusted.
It’s not that he hadn’t considered Devil’s Weir in advance. How to manage it, whether there would be someone about to help haul the boat out and drag it round. He had been aware of the other possibility too. It being winter and there being scarcely any fall to think of … He knew how to do it: draw the oars in, keep them ready to steady the boat the other side, and at the same time – rapidly, in a single smooth motion – throw yourself back and lie low. Get it wrong and you’ll either take a blow to the head or crack your blade, or both. But he knew. He’d done it before.
What had gone wrong? Seduced by the river, he’d fallen into that state of transcendence – that was his error. He might have got away with it, except that then – as he remembered it now – three things had come upon him at once.
The first was that, without his noticing it, time had passed and the light faded to a dim grey.
The second was that some shape – vague, hard to pin down – caught his eye and distracted him at just the moment he most needed to concentrate.
The third was Devil’s Weir. Here. Now.
The current had taken possession of the canoe – he flung himself back – the river surged, a great liquid limb rising beneath him, thrusting him up – the underside of the