Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

Along the borders of this world lie others. There are places you can cross. This is one such place.

The Swan at Radcot had its own specialty. It was where you went for storytelling.

As is well-known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, and the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen.

triply sinful, by fornication, by the act of self-murder, and by the attempt at killing her baby; and it would have been ungodly to encourage the child to remember her.

They were collectors of words the same way so many of the gravel diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.

The corpse opened its eyes.

Fred began to feel left out of his own tale, sensed it slipping from his grasp and altering in ways he hadn’t anticipated. It was like a living thing that he had caught but not trained; now it had slipped the leash and was anybody’s.

His tongue was furred and stinking like a three-day-dead mouse, so he stopped for a drink from the bottle in his pocket and then stumbled on a bit more.

Yuck

Back at the Swan, the cat was asleep, curled against the chimney breast, which still exhaled a gentle warmth. Its eyelids flickered with the images of cat dreams that would be even more perplexing to us than the stories our human brains concoct nocturnally.

Just beautifully written

Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface and then, when the sun comes up, a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames.

A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.

“Supposing there is some trouble… There are few things that cannot be put right by love, and there is no shortage of that here. Where love fails, money will usually do the trick.”

The browns and dark golds of autumn were long gone and the softening of spring was months ahead. The branches were at their blackest. It seemed that only by some miracle could life ever return to dress the stark treetops with the haze of new foliage. Seeing it today, one would sooner think that life was gone for good.

A child is not an empty vessel, Fleet, to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.”

He thought of the fish that strayed without knowing it from the main current and now found themselves swimming through grass a few inches above the ground, sharing territory with him and with his horse. He hoped not to tread on any creature lost in this landscape that no longer belonged clearly to earth or water. He hoped they would all be well.