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.

When a story is yours to tell, you are allowed to take liberties with it—though

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

Foreshadowing

I was stunned and astounded. What about you?” 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. “I reckon I was dumbfounded.”

“There’s a great many things hard to fathom in darkness that set themselves straight in the light of day.

The laws of life and death, as she had learned them, were incomplete. There was more to life, more to death, than medical science had known.

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.

“She would be about four now, wouldn’t she?”

Hmmm

For the first time in a lifetime by the river he noticed—really noticed—that under a moonless sky the river makes its own mercurial light. Light that is also darkness, darkness that is also light.

Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness.

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

Instead she had put her hands to her eye patch and slid it round so that it covered her good eye and revealed the one that looked sideways and Saw things an ordinary eye didn’t.

The feeling—expectation, or something rather like it—came upon all three of them, and they spoke in unison: “Something is going to happen.”

“We have lost a child, you see.” “Lost?” “She was taken.” “Forgive me, Mr. Vaughan, but we use so many euphemisms in English when we speak of the dead. Lost, taken… These are words that have more than one meaning. I have already misunderstood you once regarding your wife, and I should not like to do so again.”

The rhythm of the train on the tracks suggested words to his overtired brain and he heard them as clearly as if an unseen person had pronounced them: Something is going to happen.

Something is going to happen.

Ok this is beginning to bjother me, but in a good way

(Armstrong had his clothes made with large and reinforced pockets to store the items he habitually kept on him for the taming and reassuring of creatures. As a rule he kept acorns for pigs, apples for horses, marbles for small boys, and a flask of alcohol for older ones. For females of the human species he depended on good manners, the right words, and immaculately polished shoes and buttons.)

“When the time is right for running away, Ben, I hope you will come to me. I have a farm at Kelmscott, and there is always a job for honest boys who are not afraid of working. Just make your way to Kelmscott and ask for Armstrong.”

There are other children in the world just the same as Jonathan, with the same slanting eyes and large tongues and loose limbs. Some doctors call them Mongol children, because they resemble people from that part of the world.”

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.

“Quietly. The ferryman. He sees to it that those who get into trouble on the river make it safely home again. Unless it is their time. In which case he sees them to the other side of the river.” She pronounced those last words in a tone of half-comic gravity.

“Is it finished, Dad?” “Finished?” Jonathan watched his father put his head on one side and gaze up to the dark corner where the stories came from. Then his eyes came back to Jonathan and he shook his head. “This is just the beginning, son. There’s a long way still to go.”

In this room, in this inn, they had seen her dead and seen her alive. Unknowable, ungraspable, inexplicable, still one thing was plain: she was their story.

He invested the total of the lease money and every penny of his savings into the boat. For Daunt had a plan.

Hmm

“But the girl’s pulse fell… We found the opposite of what was meant to happen.” “Yes.” “It was for nothing, then.” She shook her head slowly. “Not nothing. I’ve ruled out a hypothesis. That’s progress.” “What’s hypothesis two?”

Armstrong thought about it. He made his decision, and then he slept, and when he woke the decision still seemed to be a good one.

The actors had forgotten their lines, and each one waited for the other to pick up the story.

So its fake

When they had remembered everything there was to remember, the alcohol encouraged them to recall things they only half remembered and even to invent things they did not remember at all.

“Daunt, I spend a large part of my working life dealing with the consequences of those activities that take place between men and women and which polite language skirts around. If you knew half of what that job involves, you would understand why a mere word has no power to shock me.

touched her wine. but she took

Amazingly like. And yet it seemed to me, quite plainly, both then and for some time afterwards, that she was not Amelia. Not my child. How could she be? I knew my child. I knew how her eyes alighted on me, how her feet danced and shuffled, how her hands reached and fidgeted and grasped. I took this child’s hand in mine and it did not tighten around my fingers the way Amelia’s would have. Something glinted. Amelia’s necklace with the silver anchor was round her neck.

“It was a nightmare and that was the only way I could think of to end it. My daughter, my Amelia, was alive. You do see, don’t you?” “I do.” Mrs. Constantine’s eyes, sad and unfaltering, held his. “But what I know now—what I have known for a long time—is that it was Amelia. My poor child was dead.”

“Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or a companion in grief. My husband and I studied together in America.

“We’ve been photographing the Armstrongs this afternoon. They are certain she’s not Alice. She belongs here after all.” Vaughan and Helena exchanged a glance in which they agreed something silently together. When they turned back to Daunt and Rita, they spoke as one: “She is not Amelia.”

Hahaha now nobody wants her

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.” On

This devastation of her home was a trivial detail. “The books first,” she said.

And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, you surely have rivers of your own to attend to?