Free The River Wife by Heather Rose Page A

enormous creature before the water enveloped it and the breath of life returned.
    ‘But though the fish waited beyond the tumbling waves for the friend to be returned to the sea also, the friend did not come. The tide changed and changed again. Darkness came and the golden light returned and still the other waited and knew it was too long, and in time the fish returned to the deeper sea.
    ‘ “I have seen the golden world. I have lain upon the shore. And upon the shore it is not possible to breathe and so it was as if I had died. But there are creatures on the shore who watch over us. And some of us they return to life, and some they keep with them,” said the fish when it was asked.
    ‘ “How do they choose?” a fish asked.
    ‘ “I do not know,” said the other.
    ‘And the fish was glad in the time that remained to live in the green ocean and be not dazzled by things unknown. When another asked to swim beside the fish and hear the story again, the fish said, though it caused more pain than to breathe upon the shore, that it preferred to swim alone.
    ‘And so it is,’ said Wilson James, smiling now at me, and himself again, ‘that fish leap still to the shore to bathe in the golden light, and fall and wait on the silver sand. And rarely, though not unknown, a hand reaches down and carries the fish to the water and watches as it takes flight back into the sea.’
    I said to Wilson James, ‘Was it the one who wanted to leap who was saved, or the one who did not?’
    ‘Perhaps it is the one who led, perhaps the one who followed. It depends on how you listen,’ he said.
    ‘That is the secret,’ I said, ‘to every story. It is always in the listening.’
    ‘I never told Eustace,’ said Wilson James, ‘that when I was a boy I found a man washed up on the beach. I was always happy whenever I walked on a beach not to find such a thing again. In the last few months of Eustace’s life his mother and I took a house right on the coast where he could hear the waves at night. It had been years since we had lived together, but having to be with one another and be kind because of him, somehow we managed it. It changed the perspective on everything. When he died it all fell apart, but while he was alive, we were somehow better than ourselves.’
    After a while he said, ‘I should have had more children. I thought when I married again . . . It is a strange thing to choose a mother for your children.’
    Wilson James washed jars and lined them up on the table. He stirred the jam and tested it on a plate to see if when it cooled it ran this way or that or stayed quite still. ‘Jam is tricky because you never know how your mood will affect it. If you are sad it always goes runny and will not set.’
    I said, ‘Are you often sad?’
    ‘Do you have no simple questions?’ he asked, but he was not unhappy. ‘I do what men do. Instead of being sad I grow angry and arrogant. But lately, since Eustace . . . It’s helped being here.
    I don’t know what you are—a muse, a ghost, a spirit. If it’s madness that I can see you and even touch you then I feel perhaps at last I am understanding what it is to be a writer. In the back of my mind I wonder when I will know that the madness has gone far enough. That it’s time to return.’
    ‘On some days you do not feel the sun on your face at all but stay here in the house. You smell sometimes as if something harsh has possessed you. What is that?’
    He looked out the window. ‘That is caused by a bottle. But I think I’m coming out of that.’
    Wilson James took a clean plate and poured jam onto it and breathed on it. He reached out and lifted my hand towards him. Dipping his finger into the red sauce he drew on my skin first one long straight line and then another shorter line crossing through it. He said, ‘I believed in the idea of heaven when I was a boy. I thought this was the sign that meant that I was safe. By the time I became a man I knew it wasn’t true. I turned