Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

raising the dead was a not infrequent thing at the Swan, and that’s a detail worth remembering.

It had seemed then that her daughter’s absence had flooded Helena, flooded them both, and that with their words they were trying to bail themselves out. But the words were eggcups, and what they were describing was an ocean of absence, too vast to be contained in such modest vessels. She bailed and she bailed, but no matter how often she repeated the effort, she could not get to the end of it.

Lily was no great reader. She could not tell b from d and all the letters quivered on the page as soon as they felt the brush of her gaze; but when her mother read aloud in her gentle voice, the lines settled and she found she could follow the thread after all, mouthing the words silently in time.

“I must photograph you again,” he said as he rinsed the plate. “What’s wrong with this one?” Nothing. He wanted her at every angle, in every possible lighting, in all moods and all positions.

And in any case, since he wanted children… She couldn’t have made her feelings about the matter plainer, and though he had been surprised—he had seen her tenderness towards the girl, assumed too much—he knew he would be doing her an injustice to try to make her change her mind.

He knew his camera could not capture this—that some things were only truly seen by a human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.