The River Wife (9 page)

I said nothing, listening only to the sound within his voice that reached for me and drew me closer. His voice ahead of me on the path, the cadence of his stride a rhythm that suited, the air between us coloured with words, the mist of river that settled on his hair and curled it. These are the particles that love can gather from.

‘The summer is passing into autumn and I think that I will stay on a little longer,’ he said.

Then, ‘How did you meet him, your husband?’ he said suddenly, and in the suddenness of it I answered him truthfully.

‘He came from the mountains,’ I said.

‘It’s a long time since he was here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Wilson James drank from the cup he had carried down from the house.

‘Have you found your story, Wilson James?’

‘I think I have it then it slips away. But I’ve been listening. Listening takes a long time, but strangely I am okay with it. The world leaves me alone. Once it might have troubled me to be without anything to claim me. Is this what you do to all the men who come here? Bewitch them with this place?’ His eyes watched me and his smile lingered on his lips. ‘Your husband?’

I considered that perhaps it had been the Winter King who bewitched me, the young river wife he had come so far to find. He had walked as a bear, and he walked sometimes in the form of a man, and sometimes his form was falling snow. He was my husband and my daughter’s father, but above all he was winter’s guardian, one of the four keepers of nature’s cycles who walked the earth.

At dusk each evening the Winter King’s companions appeared with their instruments, and long into the night did they play. But they were gone when I returned to the shore at sunrise. If I glimpsed them as they truly were, it was only in the tracks they made in the snow. The house grew bigger in their company. The table was laden with food. The fire roared, the music swelled, their laughter echoed across the roof beams, and as I shut the door and walked towards the river, the sound of their songs died in the darkness.

In the mornings my husband would sometimes be a bear and other days he would be a man waiting on the riverbank at dawn. He would slip his hands into the river and lift me as a fish and hold me as I changed before he carried me back to the bed in the cottage. I think it amused him to be a bear with a fish he could love and not eat. He would laugh as he plucked trout from the river and ate them whole, though this unsettled me.

The last winter he came through the mountain path, he had been as tender with me as if I was a bird in need of healing. He carried our daughter about on his shoulders though she had grown tall and strong. She was excited to have him home, as she was each winter. His companions were quieter. The singing was all of journeys that were to be made, of caverns made of ice and of winter without spring or autumn. I did not know. I did not guess that this was his way of telling me he must leave.

‘My people are retreating,’ he said. ‘They will not return. I cannot hold against the time that is coming. The old cycles are changing.’

‘Is there nothing you can do?’

‘The singing that has been on this earth is ending. It is a vessel leaving the shore. There is no end I know or understand.’

He heard it earlier than I. The music of the world had changed.

So very gently did the Winter King lay me in the river that final night. He knew I would never leave the river, and that to try to persuade me was as if to ask a bird to stop flying. I slipped away to the moonpool with no thought that I would not see him again. In the morning, when I stepped from the river, there was no sound of him, no chop of wood or smoke from the fire. No footprints in the melting snow. It was as if he had never been, but for the skin, the pure white bearskin, that lay upon the bed.

When I sat beside Wilson James there was no haunting music, no shifting from one form to another, no knowing of each other as creatures who were not human. It was as simple as the small-leaved heath that grows everywhere it can in the forest. It was framed here in the forest by the distance between his home and mine and the course of the river. It had the smooth texture of bark from a slender tree, the smell of forest. It was a thing so simple it would have been easy to overlook it, like clouds so common they went unremarked.

‘I have nothing to offer you,’ said Wilson James. ‘I would like to find a gift for you.’

‘Why?’

‘I think you are some sort of guardian, a spirit of this place, and that it would be appropriate to bring you something.’

‘You have brought me bread.’

‘I will bring you jam to go with it,’ he said.

‘I will pick the fruit tomorrow morning. There are berries ripening all along the riverbank. I am sure they are edible.’

‘Yes, Father dried them but I . . .’

Sometimes in passing I plucked the fruit and let it rest upon my tongue. But I had let it all go, Father’s garden. The fruit vines he had planted had seeded through the forest, but the vegetables he had tended each day had long been overtaken by fern and scrub. The house too had sunk into the earth, as if one day it would relent and give itself back entirely. I had come from the river to find puddles on the floor. I could not fix it. I could not carve the pieces to fit as Father had.

I knew that one day the house would no longer offer the shelter Father intended.

‘Come to my house after midday. I’ll be ready,’ said Wilson James.

‘Will you, Wilson James?’ I smiled. ‘Then I shall be there.’

He turned to walk away, calling gently after him, ‘If the spirit of the forest is flirting with me, that must be a good sign.’

I
nside the house there was much that was unfamiliar, but not Wilson James or the fruit in bowls upon the table. The house was bigger than I had imagined it would be. My shoes made no noise across the floor, which was softened by something like fabric. But it was the smell that struck me as the strangest thing inside the house. The forest was gone from it. Although it was just beyond, the house was still and empty of the bright scent of trees.

‘Do you know the story of this place?’ Wilson James asked.

‘The child was killed.’

‘Yes, the gas tank. Apparently it took out the whole side of the house. You can’t tell.’

‘The trees have never grown here again after the fire.’

‘Mary’s daughter.’ He picked up a picture in a case above the fireplace and there was a child spinning in the sunshine, her face smiling as she whirled, her hand just beside her face. ‘It’s why Mary could never sell the place. She always felt that a part of her daughter was still here. Even now. It’s more than fifty years ago.’

Wilson James replaced the picture above the fireplace.

‘She was ten, Mary’s daughter, when she died. The same age as my son.’

‘You have a son?’

‘He died seven months ago. He would have been eleven today. Mary offered me this place so I could get away. A long way away.’ His voice strained but ran on. ‘Eustace was the happiest person I have ever known. He had a genetic condition that slowly paralysed him. He lived as if he knew his time was short. He played the most beautiful music. Piano. Since he was two. For the last part he couldn’t play or walk. He loved to sit on the beach. Other than music it was the thing he most liked to listen to, the sound of waves. We’d sit on the beach together and he’d make me tell him stories of mermaids and fish and all the creatures of the sea. When he died the last thing he said to me was, “Dad, I will see you on the beach one day.” Once I counted him as a limb of my body. Every day I wake and for a moment the limb is with me and then it is gone, snatched before I can grasp it. I am an amputee. I have ghost pain.’

So there it was. A child lost to a place he could never follow. I wanted to tell him that I understood. That I knew what it was like to feel the ghost limb of my child. But if I began to talk of my daughter how would I explain her? How could I explain myself?

‘I am saddened that you have lost your son, Wilson James. And I am glad you came to the river.’

He lifted his head and looked at me. I wanted to take his hand and put it to my cheek and say, ‘I will hold you.’ Our eyes did not leave one another and then I said, ‘I would like to hear one of your stories, the ones you told him on the beach.’

‘I do not know if I can remember them.’

‘Will you try? Are you really a storyteller, Wilson James?’

‘Well, as it is his birthday,’ said Wilson James, and though his eyes were bright with water, a smile attempted to rest on his mouth. We sat and picked out the stalks while fruit heated in a large pan. Our fingers grew red with juice and this is the story he told and later I added it to the river for others to hear.

‘One day,’ he said, ‘when Eustace was only four or five, we walked along the beach and found a fish. A silver fish, only this long.’ He indicated the distance from head to tail with his hands. ‘It was still breathing and we put it back in the water. It swam about in the shallows but seemed reluctant to swim away. We watched it for a while and then we continued on. There on the beach just a short distance away we found another fish, almost identical, but this fish was no longer alive.

‘Eustace asked me why they threw themselves on the beach. So this is my story for him.
The
Story of Two Fish
.

‘Once, deep within the green ocean,’ he began, ‘there were two fish. Both were silver-backed with mother-of-pearl eyes. These fish were friends as seaweed is friend to a rock and shell is friend to a snail. They belonged to each other. They did not remember a time when the world had been without the other, as if the tide of their friendship had been the rhythm of their lives.

‘And so it was one day that one fish said to the other, “When we leap above the sea and the golden world flashes bright in our eyes, do you not think it would be wonderful to have more than a moment? To have more than a glimpse of the golden sky?”

‘ “I think in those moments I am smaller than I ever realised,” said the other fish. “And if I stayed in that bright light I should become so small I might never know myself again.”

‘ “It is golden and the air stings me and I am frightened, but still I long for more,” said the friend.

‘ “It is not for us to step beyond our world. It is not the way. We are bound to the sea for a reason,” said the other.

‘ “I do not always want to live by the way,” said the friend, “but by what inspires me. What touches my heart and chills my skin, what lifts me up.”

‘ “The golden world does not lift you up,” said the other. “You lift yourself to it. It is all your own doing.”

‘ “Still I think it is my destiny,” said the friend. “I will spend my swimming thinking on how I can live in the golden world for longer than a moment.”

‘The friend travelled far and asked many questions and the other stayed close beside the friend and did not leave, and so it was that they both learned of the shore. The shore was the place that bordered the sea. Each day waves painted the white sand. Each wave that tumbled to the shore returned dizzy with stories of the surrender and rush of sea as it leapt against the land.

‘And so it was the friend said to the other, “We must throw ourselves out from a tumbling wave, throw ourselves into the golden air and bathe in the glory of that world, and then the next wave will come and carry us back to the sea again.”

‘ “But none return upon the next wave,” said the other. “It is not possible.”

‘ “We will,” said the friend. “I know it. The trick is not to leap too far.”

‘ “I am afraid,” said the other.

‘ “I am also afraid, but the shore will be kind. Nothing so beautiful could be unkind.”

‘Day after day as they swam the blue reaches the friend could talk of little else. They began practising their leaping, going closer and closer to the tumbling waves, sharpening their eyes on the golden light as they leapt.

‘ “Let us go this very day, for I feel it is my destiny,” said the friend at last. And because they were two, and had been so all their lives, it seemed the destiny of both.

‘And so they went together, for truly they had no thought to go alone or ever to leave the other, though their hearts sang different songs.