pulse rate of a child fall to less than forty per minute. Except when it falls to zero.’
Her fingertip retained its connection with his skin. In a moment or two she would come out of her distraction and remove it. He tried to keep her in this train of thought.
‘Below forty and they die?’
‘In my experience, yes.’
‘But she wasn’t dead.’
‘She wasn’t dead.’
‘She was alive.’
‘At one beat a minute? It’s not possible.’
‘But if it was impossible for her to be living and impossible for her to be dead, what was she?’
His blue clouds of thought dissolved. The leaf-green and plum stripes swelled with intensity and moved so far to the right that they were out of range. She exhaled a lungful of frustration, withdrew her fingers from his neck, and splinters of bronze shot up in his vision as from a falling coal in the fire.
It was he who broke the silence. ‘She was like Quietly. Between the two states.’
He heard a puff of exasperation that ended in a half-laugh.
He laughed. The stretch of his skin made him cry out in pain.
‘Ow,’ he cried. ‘Ow!’
It brought her attention back to him, brought the tips of her fingers back to his skin. As she held the cooling cloth against his face, he realized that his vision of Rita Sunday had altered in the course of their conversation. She now looked not altogether unlike the maidens of destiny.
Is It Finished?
THE WINTER ROOM was alive with voices and tightly packed with drinkers, many of them standing, for there were not enough seats. Margot stepped out from the dim corridor and nudged the nearest backs, saying, ‘Step aside, please, make room.’ They shuffled out of her way and she stepped into the fray. Close behind her, Mr Vaughan appeared with the child wrapped in a blanket in his arms. Behind them came Mrs Vaughan, delivering little nods of thanks to left and right.
At the sight of the child, those first drinkers hushed. Those who were a little deeper in the room caught the sudden drop of noise behind them, found Margot prodding them out of the way, and fell quiet in turn. The girl’s head rested on Vaughan’s shoulder, her face pressed into his neck, half concealed. Her eyes were closed. The slump of her body told them she was asleep. The silence made faster progress than the Vaughans did, and before they were halfway to the door, the peace was as resounding as the din had been a few moments before. The crowd leant and rose on tiptoes and peered hungrily to secure a better view of the girl’s sleeping face, and at the back some clambered on to stools and tables to see her. Margot no longer needed to prod and nudge, for the mass of bodies parted of its own accord, and when they reached the door a bargeman stood ready to open it for them.
The Vaughans passed through the door.
Margot nodded at the bargeman to close it behind them. No one had moved. Where the crowd had parted, a curved line of floorboards was still visible. After a moment of stillness when nobody spoke, there came a shuffling of feet, the clearing of throats, and in no time the crowd remassed and the boom of voices was louder even than before.
For another hour they talked. Every detail of the day’s events was gone over, the facts were weighed and combined, quantities of surmising, eavesdropping and supposition were stirred in for flavour, and a good sprinkling of rumour added like yeast to make it rise.
There came the sense that the story had now moved on. It was no longer here, at the Swan at Radcot, but out there, in the world. The drinkers remembered the rest of the world: their wives and children, their neighbours, their friends. There were people out there who did not yet know the story of the Vaughans and young Armstrong. In ones and twos, and then in a trickle that became a steady stream, the drinkers departed. Margot organized the more sober of the lingerers to escort the most drunken along the riverbank and see that they did not fall in.
When the door closed on the last of the drinkers and the winter room was empty, Joe set to sweeping the floor. He made frequent pauses to rest on the broom and catch his breath. Jonathan carried in logs. There was an uncharacteristic air of melancholy in his angled eyes as he tipped the logs into the