“Isn’t there an engine?” said Emma. “We can’t lift that!”
She gestured at the green hulk of Anadyomene.
“Yes you can,” said Andy. “Finn and I shifted her up an inch or two yesterday, just to see. It’s all done by gearing. Look.”
He leaned his weight against one of the spokes and turned it through the full circle. Emma heard the wheels groan on the rails and saw the cable tauten and creep a quarter of an inch towards the winch. Still holding the spoke in position with one hand Andy flipped an iron lug over so that it slotted between the teeth of the outermost cog.
“That locks it,” he said. “Now the weight’s on the cable and you can knock the chocks off the rails. There’s a big split-pin through them, Roddy, which you’ll have to punch out. I put some penetrating oil on them last night, so they should come easy enough; hammer and punch-bar on that beam there—put the pins and chocks up there when you’ve got them out. I’m going with Ewan to decide the best place for the tractor, and if I’m not back you can start letting her down to the water. OK?”
Roddy yawned.
“I think we might be able to manage,” he said in servile tones. “But if it’s very difficult we’ll come and fetch you, shall we?”
“Do that,” said Andy, and stamped out.
“Can’t you let him alone for a day or two?” said Finn. “It’s not much fun for Cousin Emma.”
“You ask him!” shouted Roddy. “He started it!”
He snatched the hammer and a short iron bar and dived under the trolley, where he began to bang so furiously at the rails that the whole shed rang with the clanking.
“Of course,” said Finn, “Andy can be pretty irritating when he puts on that quarter-deck voice. You’ll just have to stick it out, and let’s hope we can lure Gabriella up with the tellyfolk—that should ease things a bit.”
“I’m glad I’m not one of the clans the McAndrews had feuds with,” said Emma.
“Oh, we weren’t as rough as some of the others. We’re a very little clan, for one thing—not a vulgar great hotch-potch like the Macdonalds. And there’s a canny streak somewhere which has kept us out of real trouble. There were always a few McAndrews on the winning side in any wars; and we were sensible about who we picked a fight with. Father swore a feud ten years ago, against a firm which was trying to export kippers to California and stole our tartan to wrap them in; he got these kippers flown out to him whenever he went a broad, and sent them back sea-mail to the managing director, from places like Aden and Honolulu, so that they plopped stinking on to the man’s doormat. It wasn’t much of a feud, not like the one Grandfather had with Prince Albert over a McAndrew who went as a footman to Balmoral and . . .”
“Right!” yelled Roddy, hurtling from under the trolley. He slammed his tools and some bits of metal back on the beam, ran to the winch and threw his weight against a spoke. Nothing happened. He clawed at the lug which locked the outer cog, but that too was immovable. He was such a picture of wrath, crimson-cheeked and panting between clenched teeth, that it was hard not to laugh at him. Finn calmly hauled at a spoke and took the weight off the lug so that Roddy could lift it out from between the cog-teeth.
“Right!” he snarled. “Let’s have her in the water before Mr Big comes back to tell us we’re doing it all wrong.”
He snatched the spoke from Finn’s hand and shoved it round. It went almost of its own accord, because that was the way Anadyomene wanted to go, down the steep rails. The wheels of the trolley groaned like a sluggard waking from long sleep. Emma turned to watch the brightness of the water change its shape as the fattening curve of the hull bulked between the doorposts. The groaning raised its pitch and the knock of the turning cogs quickened and quickened again.
“Ouch!” yelled Roddy. Emma spun round and saw him sticking at the knuckles of his right hand while with his left he tried to catch one of the whirling spokes. Anna was now doing all the work, spinning the cogs round as she trundled unstoppably towards her element. The winch and rails rumbled and the shed thundered. Finn hovered behind Roddy and was just darting in to try and help him when one of the spokes spun clean out of its slot and crashed into the roof-tiles. Finn snatched at Roddy’s shoulder and dragged him back to the wall as another spoke hurtled out and bounced with a deep clang off the hull. Emma would have liked to run into the open, but she had been standing on the far side of the shed from the door, and now didn’t dare edge past the winch; all she could do was move further down towards the water.
Andy came racing into the shed with Ewan behind him. He picked up the fallen spoke and dodged round behind the winch; from Emma’s side he leaned across the drum (still turning incredibly slowly—it was only the high-geared cogs which were whirling) and used the end of the spoke to flick the lug over and shove it against the cog. But the cog was moving too fast for it to fall between the teeth; it clattered for a moment and bounced back. Ewan Uphill picked up a chock off the beam, waved it and shouted to Andy.
“No!” yelled Andy. “Tip her off!! Probably Ewan couldn’t even hear that across the shed, but he understood Andy’s gesture and put the chock back. Andy flipped the lug up with the spoke again, and this time leaned his weight against it as it jolted onto the cog.
Suddenly everything changed. Emma heard three loud bangs from different parts of the shed, and felt the wind of something whistling close past her, just over her head. Then there was less noise, only the rumble of the trolley as Anadyomene rushed down towards the water. Emma hadn’t even time to wonder why the trolley was now moving so much more quickly, or why the dull rattle of the winch had suddenly stopped, before the wheels touched the water. Even now Anadyomene was not moving tremendously fast—about ten miles an hour, perhaps—so the accidental launching happened slowly enough for her to watch the whole of it: how the first small ripples had begun to spread from the wheels before the bulk of the hull overwhelmed everything in a foaming wave which hummocked up on either side while the brilliant droplets of the huge splash glittered up into the sunlight. Then the water pattered back over the green bronze while the submarine sank and sank until she rested, rocking, with only a foot or two of metal showing round the squat conning-tower; it looked more like a bowler hat than ever now. The wave sloshed up the ramp beneath the rails, almost to Emma’s feet, then slid back again.
“Zow-ee!” said Ewan Uphill, breaking the astonished quiet.
“Like a sow diving,” said Roddy.
“Are you all right?” said Finn. It was several seconds before Emma realised that Finn was talking to her.
“Yes,” she said, looking round. “What happened?”
There was a whole plank missing from the wall of the shed behind her. Through it, still twitching slightly like a recently shot snake, ran the cable which a minute before had been taut under the weight of the submarine.
“I’m an idiot,” said Andy, quiet and rather white-faced. “I should have let her run. What happened, Cousin Emma, was that I got the locking-lug back into the cog and that stopped the winch dead and the extra strain snapped the cable. When you snap a taut steel cable it lashes sideways hard enough to . . . anyway, hard enough to knock a good oak plank clean out of the wall. But it missed you, and that’s what matters.”
“It was my fault,” said Finn. “I should have realised Roddy wasn’t strong enough to hold her. The spokes started turning too fast for him. What shall we do now?”
They all looked out at the absurd metal bowler, lying stolid in the settling water.
“Poop’s going to have to do some swimming,” said Andy.
They found Miss Newcombe out in the sunlight, lolling against the tractor in a way that made her absurd dressing-gown and the brutal blue metal and the steep slope of young pines in the background look all perfectly natural—not like a glossy advertisement, thought Emma; like part of Eden.
“That was lovely,” she said. “Can we all go for a ride now?”
“You can go for a swim now,” said Andy. “The exercis
e didn’t work out exactly as we intended.”
“I was wondering,” said Miss Newcombe. “It seemed a funny way to do things.”
She pointed to where the loose end of cable hung with its snapped shackle out of the gash in the boathouse wall, a still snake now.
“We won’t try to repeat that effect,” said Finn. “She’ll never be able to swim with the logging-cable, Andy. Couldn’t Roddy row you out there and you can use the engine to bring Anna back.”
“No dice,” said Andy. “No one’s going aboard her till she’s hitched up to Ewan’s tractor. If we buoy the cable Poop can swim with it easily enough.”
“What about that spool of nylon rope in the long boathouse?” said Roddy. “That’d be quicker.”
He scampered off without waiting for an answer and came back with a spool of shiny orange rope.
“Good-oh,” said Andy. “What knots do you know, Poop?”
“I can tie a bow. I don’t think I can tie anything else. People in post offices always do my parcels up again for me. They say they’ll come undone.”
“Oh, God,” said Andy.
“A bow will do fine,” said Finn. “Make it a double one, like you do when you don’t want your shoe-laces to come undone. Where’d she better tie it, Andy?”
“On the shackle just under the point of the bow. That’s a sort of iron loop, Poop, this end, about four feet under water. Don’t try and tie it anywhere else—we can’t afford to have her tilting around, because the hatch isn’t fastened.”
Miss Newcombe tossed her dressing-gown on the grass, put the end of the rope between her teeth, stepped without a tremor into the water, turned on her back and began a lazy back-stroke out towards the bowler-hat. Roddy unreeled the cable as she went.
“Doesn’t it get deep quickly?” said Emma. “She was only a yard out before she had to start swimming.”
“It’s not as steep here as it is in some places,” said Roddy. “The burn’s washed enough stuff down from the hillside to make a sort of shelf; but further out you get these underwater-cliffs—I told you—and they go straight down. It’s like Loch Morar. Nobody knows how deep that is, either.”
“And nobody kens what’s in those deeps, indeed,” said Ewan Uphill. “When I was a bairn I would give myself the nightmare, wondering what swam down there in the unholy dark.”
Emma shivered.
“That’s like the words on Darwin’s Pimple,” she said. “The dark abysm.”
“That’s from The Tempest,” said Finn. “Tiresome old Prospero talking about time—the dark backward and abysm of time.”
“She’s there,” said Roddy.
They all watched in silence as the white bathing-cap flipped itself under, smoothly, like a seal. Emma started to count the seconds; at forty-two the bathing-cap appeared again.
“Finished?” called Andy.
“No,” came the faintly gasping reply.
Next time she was under for less than thirty seconds, and waved a triumphant arm.
“Hardly worth hitching her to the tractor,” said Andy. “We can tow her round by hand.”
It seemed an impossible suggestion to Emma that five people, two of them children, should haul the big hulk through the water, and indeed the first minute was a tug o’ war, with their heels slipping on the sparse turf and the orange curve of the rope rising right out of the water except for the last few feet, dripping along its length, and then falling back with a slap as somebody lost his footing and the tension eased. But suddenly the feel of the rope changed, there was different grass underfoot and Anadyomene was swinging through the water.
“Easy, easy!” said Andy and dashed for the further boathouse. The rope slackened, but Anadyomene continued to drift towards the shore. Andy came back with a long, varnished pole—a spare mast for the dinghy.
“Keep her moving,” he said.
So in slow swoops, sometimes all hauling on the rope, sometimes resting and watching while Andy and Ewan poled the hidden hull away from the rocks, they manoeuvred the submarine along the shore, out round the rough jetty and back towards the slipway. All the time Miss Newcombe gambolled and splashed about as though Anadyomene were some huge beach-toy, laughing and gasping and getting in the way. Not until they had the hull nestling against the jetty did she climb out and scamper for her towel and dressing-gown.
“It’s not like the photographs,” said Finn.
“What do you mean?” said Andy.
“We’ve got Mother’s coronation-year pictures in one of the old albums. You could see much more of the hull, I think. And there’d have been Father and Andy Coaches aboard to weigh her down.”
“And stones for ballast,” said Emma. “You said they had trouble getting her under at all.”
“Um,” said Andy. “Perhaps the ballast tanks flooded a bit in that splash. That’d make sense. But don’t worry—we’ll be all right on the end of Ewan’s cable. Where d’you want to dig in, Ewan? There’s rock at the top of the slip-way.”
“Aye,” said Ewan, “that’ll not do. And there’s a wee bit bog behind, and that’ll not do either. I’ll try her a step or two up the hill.”
“Right,” said Andy, stripping off his shirt and kilt and lowering himself into the water in his bathing-trunks. Ewan lounged off. Andy forced himself clumsily under the water, and in a few seconds came up gasping. Next time he stayed down longer. Emma was surprised to see that he was nothing like so good a swimmer as Miss Newcombe, despite a lifetime spent by the loch, but didn’t like to say so. Sleek with water the black head plopped into view.
“We’ve pulled Poop’s knot so tight I’ll have to cut it,” Andy panted. “Borrow your knife, Roddy?”
They heard a cry from up the hill. Ewan was waving as though he wanted help. Finn started shorewards along the jetty and Emma went with her.
“Is the feud over?” she said as soon as they were out of earshot.
“Hope so,” said Finn. “It was nearly killing you that did it, and then all that heaving and shoving before they had time to start blaming each other.”
“You took the blame,” said Emma.
Finn smiled her curious smile, as though nobody else saw the jokes she saw.
“We’re all liars,” she said. “I just like to keep in practice.”
Ewan was literally digging, with a spade, a short deep trench just behind where the tractor faced uphill. Emma saw that when he had finished it the winch could be lowered until a shovel-like blade below would exactly fit into the trench; then the winch would have not just the weight of the tractor to hold it steady but the solid earth as well.
“That’s grand,” said Ewan. “You can just kindly lug the cable down for me and tell Mr Andy I’ll be ready as soon as he is. No, wrap a bit of rag round it, Miss Emma; cable’s cruel stuff for soft hands.”
The winch-drum turned easily as they hauled the cable downhill. The cable had a heavy D-shaped clip at the end of it, which Andy took and dived in with; its weight helped him down and he fastened it first go, then climbed out onto the jetty and dried himself roughly while Emma looked tactfully up the melodramatic reaches of the loch, far and shimmering beyond where the harsh diagonal of pines plunged to the water.
“That’s the shallow end, isn’t it?” she said.
“It’s not a swimming-pool,” said Andy.
“But it is very different, isn’t it?” said Finn. “I mean it’s almost as though we had two lochs, with bags of fish and weed up there and nothing but a few cunning trout down here. There’s even a scientific name for the two sorts of lake, but I always forget it.”
“That end’s eutrophic,” said Andy. “This end’s oligotrophic. If it’s Greek to you, that’s because it is Greek. Hi, Poop, where’ve you been? That was some knot you tied.”
“I don’t like wearing wet swimsuits. It’s like being inside a sponge-bag with a wet flannel. What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll nip aboard, shut the hatch, check that the light’s working and that there are
n’t any leaks, and try and find out why she’s lying so low. If everything looks shipshape, we’ll try taking her out a bit further. Hang on to that end of the ladder, Roddy.”
He placed the short ladder they had been using in the boathouse out on to the hull beside the conning-tower, so that it became a sort of skeleton bridge from the jetty. Roddy steadied the jetty end and Andy spidered out until he could place his feet on either side of the conning-tower. Carefully he worked himself upright until he stood teetering on the rocking hull. His weight drove it deeper, so that now the water lapped right against the conning-tower, just below the two glass windows. Still moving like a tight-rope-walker in a circus he gently eased the hatch open and lowered himself inside. The hatch closed, then clicked. They waited in the sunlight. Roddy, itching for action, suddenly rushed up the hill to talk to Ewan. Eight feet along the jetty the water rumpled as though a big fish were struggling in a net just below the surface; slowly the conning-tower edged out towards the loch and the logging- cable rattled a little as it slid over the cement of the slipway. The churning settled and began again, and the conning-tower drifted back towards the shore, stopped almost where they were standing, and then, after a fresh swirl, edged out a couple of feet again. The hatch rose and Andy’s head came out, grinning.
“No trouble,” he said. I touched bottom when I came a in. That motor runs like a dream. Do you feel like taking the risk, Finn?”
“Roddy would love to go first.”
“No dice. I don’t feel like depriving Father of all his male issue in one morning. I think we’re OK, but this is a dangerous toy, lovey.”
“OK,” said Finn, as though that made it much better.
“Right,” said Andy. “Now listen, Emma. I want to take her out just clear of the jetty, so that I don’t damage the hydroplanes if we come up in a different place from where we went down. We know how deep it is here, so if the slope goes on at this angle that should give us ten feet to the bottom. Lend her your watch, Finn. Allow five minutes after we’ve gone under, and if we don’t show by then get Ewan to haul us in. Let me get settled, Finn, then come aboard. Step delicate, and if you look like pushing the hatch under, jump into the loch.”
Emma Tupper's Diary Page 7
