Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

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. Did the solstice have anything to do with the strange events at the Swan? You will have to judge for yourself. Now you know everything you need to know, the story can begin.

“Miracle” was the word Jonathan had pronounced, and they tested it on their own tongues. They were used to it in the Bible, where it meant impossible things that happened an impossibly long time ago in places so far away from here that they might as well not exist. Here in the inn it applied to the laughably improbable chance that the boat mender would ever pay his slate in full: now that would be a miracle all right. But tonight, at winter solstice in the Swan at Radcot, the word had a different weight.

But having witnessed one miracle, he now saw miracles everywhere: the dark night sky his old eyes had ignored thousands of times before tonight unfolded itself above his head with the vastness of eternal mystery. He stopped to stare up and marvel. The river was splashing and chiming like silver on glass; the sound spilled into his ear, resonated in chambers of his mind he’d never known existed. He lowered his head to look at the water. 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.

The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

Does the occurrence of one impossible thing increase the likelihood of a second? It was a greater conundrum than they had ever known, and they went at it with great thoroughness, leaving no stone unturned.

This world has—marvelous things—I shall miss—” “The river?” He shook his head. “There will—always be—the river.”

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. Her knowledge of her own mind was what he admired about her. To expect her to bend to his wishes would be to expect her to be other than herself. No, she would not change, so he must.

gone. Future life and past losses coexisted in her, two halves of a single experience, and she bore her grief and her hope in a subdued manner.

But now he was no more able to direct the current of his life than a piece of debris can control the stream that carries it.

“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. There is a new science over there; it can be explained in complicated ways, but you won’t go far wrong in thinking of it as the science of human emotion.

It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes room for the next.

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.” On they went. “What more could I have done? What did I miss? Eh?” Fleet shook her head and sent drops of water flying from the reins. “We loved him. We did, didn’t we? I took him about with me and showed him the world. I taught him what I knew… He knew wrong from right. He had that from me, Fleet. He cannot say he did not know.”

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?