"Once Upon a River"

[fiefoe]

I almost wrote off Diane Setterfield after the faux-gothic "Thirtheenth Tale", but Juliet Stevenson's voice reeled me in, and illustrated wonderfully how it's more about the telling than the story itself. The love affair between the medicine woman and the photographer was very nice.

• A river is a river, whatever the season... And then the babies, unwanted morsels of flesh, little beginnings of life, drowned before they had a chance to live. She’d seen it all.
• He regretted that he had nobody waiting for him, nobody he could shake awake and say, “You won’t believe what’s just happened!” He pictured himself telling the horses what he had witnessed that night, saw their large unbelieving eyes. Nay, they will say, he thought, and that’s a good joke. I’ll remember that. But it wasn’t horses he wanted to tell; the story was too fine to be squandered on animal ears. He turned off the direct path and made a detour to the cottages by Gartin’s fields where his cousin lived. He knocked. No one answered, so the story made him knock again, a full-fisted hammering.
• There was a general hubbub of conversation between the windows as the story was discussed, its missing pieces identified, attempts made to fill them in . . . 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.
• A river on a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes the trouble to follow its route, whether by boat or on foot, cannot help being aware that, furlong by furlong, singleness of direction is not its most obvious feature. En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead it winds its way in time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south, and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destination—or put it aside for the while. At Ashton Keynes it splits into so many rivulets that every house in the village must have a bridge to its own front door; later, around Oxford, it takes a great unhurried detour around the city. It has other capricious tricks up its sleeve: in places it slows to drift lazily in wide pools before recovering its urgency and speeding on again. At Buscot it splits into twin streams to maroon a lengthy piece of territory, then regathers its water into a single channel.
• What we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.
• This was where the order of the events had been set down properly. They were still in the grip of things then, and this time Helena was doing the telling too.
• 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. “She wasn’t there,” she repeated endlessly in a voice he had not known a human being to be capable of as she drowned in her loss, and he in a sort of paralysis, unable to do or say anything to save her.
• That brief and dry account, which he had reused countless times for the benefit of his business associates and other semi-strangers, was the one he brought out now. Though he had not used it for months, he found that he still had it word for word. It took less than a minute to lay the matter before the woman with the grey eyes.
• (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.) The marble that he showed to the boy was no ordinary one but contained flares of orange and yellow so like the flames of a fire that you would think you could warm yourself by it.
• Death might be a necessity in farming, but suffering? Never.
• Armstrong wept, and he discovered as he went that one loss brings back others. The thought of his favorite pig, the most intelligent and kindly pig he had known in thirty years of farming, suddenly afflicted him afresh with the poignancy he had felt that first morning over two years ago when he had discovered her missing.
• Incessantly, Vaughan’s eyes were drawn to the little girl’s face. At breakfast as he spooned marmalade into her mouth, he traced the jut of her jaw; at noon it was the dip in her hairline at the front that obsessed him; when he came home from Brandy Island after work, he was incapable of dragging his eyes away from the coiled architecture of her ear.
• All sorts of characters, known and somatic figments, bore the child’s face. Once he had dreamt of Amelia—his Amelia, the real one—and even she wore the child’s face. He had woken weeping. His ceaseless tracing of her features that began as an effort to find out who she was, gradually shifted focus, and became an attempt to explain his own fascination. It seemed to him that her face was the model from which all human faces were derived, even his own. The endlessness of his staring had worn her face so smooth, it was as if he saw his own reflection in it, and looking at her turned him back always to himself. This was something he could not tell Helena. She would hear only the thing he didn’t mean, that he saw himself in his daughter.
• The notion of memory failed to adequately capture the sensation. It was as if the child evoked in him something that had the size and shape of memory but inversed or turned inside out. Something akin to memory—its twin, perhaps, or its opposite.
• Mr. Montgomery himself was not a boating man, nor a fisherman, nor a painter of watery landscapes; in fact, he went from one year’s end to the next without setting eyes on the river, yet still it could be said without a word of a lie that he lived and breathed it. The way Mr. Montgomery pictured the Thames, it was not a current of water at all but an income stream, dry and papery, and he diverted a share of its bounty every year into his own ledgers and bank accounts and was very grateful to it. He spent his days contentedly drafting bills of carriage and negotiating the wording of letters of credit, and when a rare and valuable dispute involving force majeure came his way, which it sometimes did, his heart swelled with delight.
• They learned in time to save their voices, for had the visitors had their way, every man who had witnessed the events that night would have been in the summer room going round the tables, talking constantly. But, as an elderly cressman pointed out very appositely, that would leave no drinking time. So they worked out a rota that saw the regulars go two by two into the summer room for an hour of telling, and then return to their stools in the winter room to quench their thirst and be replaced by two more. Fred Heavins had crafted a good comic tale out of his side of it, which ended with the punch line, “ ‘Nay!’ said the horse.” A slantwise version like his went down well after ten o’clock, when the facts of the story had been told a dozen times over and the audience was drunk.
• “That’s right. Quick as a hare, it means.” “I know what it means, all right. But you can’t say she was ‘haring up the river.’ ” “Whyever not?” “Have you ever seen a hare rowing a boat?”
• I don’t know as I wants the hang of it. No, I shall go on by the old way: my words shall come as they like, and if I has her haring up the river, well, hare she must. Else I shan’t say anything at all.” There was an exchange of anxious looks across the table, and one of the gravel diggers spoke for them all: “Let the man speak. He was there.”
• All told their versions over and over, to each other and the visitors, and new details came to light. Memories were compared, adjudication made. There were splinter groups. Some remembered “for a fact” that the feather had been placed on the lips of the child before she was taken to the long room;
• There were some for whom the world was such a tricky thing that they marveled at it without feeling any need to puzzle it out. Bafflement in their eyes was fundamental to existence.
• the wife he only beat on Saturday night—and not always then—ran off for no reason at all to live with the cousin of the cheesemonger; the face he saw reflected in the river when he sat glumly staring into it with no bread in his belly, no ale to dull the hunger, and no wife to warm him was not his own but his father’s. The whole of life was a mystery, if you delved even a little way under the surface, and causes and effects not infrequently came adrift from each other. On top of these daily bewilderments, the story of the girl who died and lived again was one he drew consolation from as he marveled at it, for it demonstrated conclusively that life was fundamentally inexplicable
• Lively souls were frequently reduced by the camera: their essence escaped the lens, and all that was captured was a wax dummy, all outward resemblance with none of the quicksilver.
• Instead she opened her eyes to the camera with perfect composure. From under his cover, he saw one swell of living thought succeed another in an endless shifting movement, while all the time the muscles of her face remained unaltered. This was not one photograph, he knew by the end of the fifteen seconds. This was a thousand.
• His voice faded as they watched her face appear on the glass. They stood close in the red light, watching the shadows and lines on the glass coalesce, and Daunt felt a falling sensation in his stomach. A great dive.
• “What’s wrong with this one?” Nothing. He wanted her at every angle, in every possible lighting, in all moods and all positions. He wanted her with her hair loose around her face and pulled right back, concealed under a hat; he wanted her in a white chemise open at the neck and draped in folds of dark cloth; he wanted her in water and against tree trunks and on grass . . . There were a thousand photographs waiting to be taken. He had to have all of them.
• When she reappeared, something had changed in her. She was neat and active as before but the simplicity and naturalness of her interest in the world had been exchanged for something grimmer. A determination not to be beaten.
• He intercepted Bessie on her way to take her father’s lunch to him, on the riverbank where the hawthorn gave way to the hazel.
• the little Margots came one after the other and indistinguishably with plates of ham and cheese and radishes, and the wedding party had enough joy to drown out all doubt, all darkness. Six months ago a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.
• With the rain came the realization that they had been staring not at a piece of theater but at other people’s misfortunes. Embarrassed, they remembered themselves and ran for cover.
• Daunt tucked into his meal, listening, as events of two years ago were disinterred, rediscussed, and loose threads were picked out of the old story and today’s events, and efforts made to knit it all together and make of the two things a single story. But the threads left gaps too wide to be darned.
• They won’t tell you about the blood. You’ll be sent away, out of sight, out of hearing. By the time you are allowed back, they’ll have cleared it all away. Your wife will look pale and you’ll think it’s because she’s tired. You won’t know her blood is being wrung out of the sheets and into your drains. The housekeeper will scrub away at the stained bedsheets till it looks as innocuous as if someone spilled a cup of breakfast tea in bed about five years ago. There’ll be cloves and orange peel in the room so you won’t notice the smell of iron. If there is a doctor, he might advise you man-to-man not to attempt marital intimacy for a time, but he won’t go into detail, so you won’t know about the tears and the stitches. You won’t know about the blood. Your wife will know. If she survives. But she won’t tell you.”
• It was dark now. The day had stretched her thin, to the point where she felt the boundary of herself dissolving into the atmosphere. Another glass and she might lose herself altogether.
• One . . . Swiftly and without allowing light into the camera he ducked down . . . Two . . . and out of the black cloth . . . Three . . . and ran around the camera . . . Four . . . where he took Rita in his arms . . . Five . . . and said, “Don’t cry, darling . . .” Six . . . though his own cheeks were wet too . . . Seven . . . and she lifted her face to him . . . Eight . . . and their lips found each other until . . . Nine . . . remembering the photograph, he ran . . . Ten . . . back to the camera . . . Eleven . . . under the black cloth, being careful of the light, and . . . Twelve . . . replaced the cover over the plate.
• He saw her not here in this room and not now in this hour but in the infinity of memory. She was lost to life, but in his memory she existed, was present, and he looked at her and her eyes met his and she smiled. He met her eyes again, felt the meeting of their gaze, father and daughter. He knew that she was dead, knew that she was gone, yet he saw her, and knew that this far—and this far only—she was restored to him.
• In ten seconds the Armstrongs had time to feel all the things that people felt when they were having their photograph taken for the first time: abashed, stiff, nervous, significant, and rather foolish. But an hour later, when they were looking at the finished article, developed and washed and dried and framed, they saw themselves as they had never seen themselves before: eternal.
• “A man like me gets used to recognizing himself from the inside. The inside is what I am familiar with. Nor am I much given to studying my outward appearance in the looking glass. It is a curious thing, to see oneself in a photograph. It is a meeting with the outer man.”
• They sat on the bank. 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.
• She had slackened the muscles of her neck, allowed him to move her this way and that, and from time to time their eyes had met and wordlessly admitted feelings that they did not speak. And when the plate was exposed, and he was hidden beneath the black curtain—when all was silence and stillness—she nevertheless felt an intensity of communication, as everything she did not say to him overspilled into her gaze. Of course he had stopped taking her photograph. It was necessary.
• The perfect infant was in an underwater world. Eyes fast shut, with liquid movements, little fists dreamily opening and closing, it was sleep-swimming inside a transparent water-filled membrane. Rita touched the pearly sac with the tip of a knife, and a great split ran around it. Water splashed. The baby boy, opening his eyes and mouth at the same time, was astonished to discover air and the world.
• Lily swallowed. Tears welled in her. She hadn’t thought it would be like this. She had expected heaving masses of water, violent currents, and murderous waves, not this. It was serenity without end. Motionless, she stood in her doorway, staring at the fearful loveliness. It barely moved, just shimmered at times, peacefully alive. A swan came gliding across the clouds, after it, the trail it left in the clouds settled into flatness.
• “Joe?” Vaughan asked, though he could guess the answer. “Gone,” his daughters said. Then nobody spoke and they breathed the minutes in and out till they made an hour.
• Although the sky was dismal and cast an indifferent light, the greyness was enlivened, even indoors, by a silvery shimmer: reflections from the endless water, that cast ripples of light over Rita’s reading face. He watched her features lighten and darken in the shifting illumination. Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. 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.
• They were talking about Darwin and man being born of apes, and one of the cressmen reckoned he’d heard a story about men once being underwater creatures.” “Ridiculous.” She shook her head, raised the book, and tapped it. “It’s in here. Once upon a time, a long time ago, an ape became human. And once upon a time, long before that, an aquatic creature came out of the water and breathed air.” “Really?” “Really.”
• There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.