by Rebecca Tope
‘We’ll probably be reasonably sheltered here in the woods,’ said Thea, with blithe optimism. ‘We might as well keep walking.’
‘Or we could go back to the pub and wait until it stops.’
‘I don’t think I can face that boy again. No, come on. It won’t be much.’
Another two minutes, however, saw the storm dramatically increased, with the trees a less than perfect protection. ‘Hey! This is quite exciting!’ laughed Jocelyn. ‘I haven’t been out in a good storm for ages.’
They dodged along, trying to stay under the broadest, thickest trees, and succeeding to some extent in avoiding a total soaking.
‘I’m not sure we’re going to think it’s fun if it lasts much longer,’ Thea said. ‘Look!’ She pointed to the sloping woodland to their right, where rivulets of water were already forming, and running down towards their path. ‘We’ll have very wet feet at this rate.’
A thunderous roll from the sky overhead seemed to endorse her trepidation. Jocelyn squealed, partly from fear, but mostly from a surge of exhilaration. The noise of torrential rain on the tree canopy was growing louder by the minute, until they had to shout to be heard. Hepzie was having second thoughts as to the pleasure quotient in quite so much of a deluge. Her ears hung limply and her feathering disappeared, making her seem half her former size.
‘Watch where you’re going,’ Thea warned. ‘It’s slippery.’
The world had changed completely since their walk in the other direction less than an hour before. A greenish light filled the woods like a toxic cloud. Even if they had been able to see far ahead, the relentless rain forced them to duck their heads and hunch their shoulders. Neither had jackets. Thea wore a T-shirt and light cotton trousers. Jocelyn had an open-necked short-sleeved shirt and knee-length jeans. Thea had trainers, which gripped the slippery path reasonably well, but Jocelyn’s sandals were smooth-soled and useless. Twice her foot skidded from under her, in the sudden mud.
‘How much further is it?’ Jocelyn asked, after a few minutes of blundering along.
‘I don’t really know where we are. It all looks different. If it doesn’t stop soon, we’d better find a good place to shelter.’
And then everything happened in a bewildering rush. The path seemed to narrow. A minor torrent of water was gushing downhill and across the path. Too late, Thea observed the abrupt drop into one of the canal locks, on their left. As Jocelyn tried to stride over the rivulet ahead of her, her foot slid sideways, her arms flailed, and she disappeared over the edge of the lock that neither of them had noticed was there.
‘Aarghh!’ screamed Jocelyn as she flew through the air, followed by a nasty silence.
Chapter Thirteen – Friday
Thea’s first thought was that at least the landing would be fairly soft, in the thick mud that lined the bottom of the lock. Her next was that it was a sheer drop of fifteen feet or more, and the original handholds or ladders attached to the walls must long since have disappeared. The dense growth of brambles, nettles and small shrubs blocked both ends where the gates had once been.
‘Joss?’ she shouted, carefully inching towards the top of the lock. ‘Where are you?’
Water flowed everywhere, down inside her clothes, over her face, over the lip into the lock. What would have been rather a joke on a fine dry day had been transformed into a disaster by the force and noise of the thunderstorm.
But she quickly located her sister, despite the rain, and was relieved to see her sitting comically in an expanse of dark brown mud. There were water weeds growing all around her, some of which had become draped across her head.
Jocelyn looked up, her hair plastered to her skull and her front entirely coated with the sludge of the lock bottom. Only then did Thea realise that she was cradling her right arm in her left, a rictus of agony pulling back her lips.
‘Did you hurt your arm?’ Thea called. The noise of the rain was maddening, and the bad light obscured all the finer detail of what she could see.
Jocelyn nodded. ‘I expect it’s just sprained or something. And my ankle hurts just as much. I landed all sideways.’ The need to get as close as possible to her sister made Thea first squat and then actually lie down on the brink of the lock, hanging her head over the edge. It did make the distance seem a lot less than before, but Jocelyn was still quite a way below her.
‘You won’t be able to get me out,’ Jocelyn said. ‘You’ll have to go and fetch somebody.’
Thea experienced the classic dilemma of all calamities taking place out of earshot of the passing crowd. A dilemma that mobile phones had in a stroke reduced to virtually zero. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got your mobile with you?’ she called down to Jocelyn. The answering shake of the head came as no surprise. ‘Neither have I.’
Another crash of thunder only added to her sense of crisis and helplessness. More water surged down the bank towards them, and she realised there was a culvert cut across the towpath, channelling much of the rainfall directly into the canal just beyond the lock. It was flowing invisibly under the vegetation, but efficiently raising the water level just where Jocelyn was sitting. Before long Jocelyn would be finding herself in something rather more fluid than the present sludge.
‘Okay,’ she decided. ‘I’ll have to run and find somebody.’ But the dog? Suddenly Hepzibah was dreadfully in the way; an insupportable nuisance. ‘Come here,’ she said to the bedraggled creature. ‘You’ll have to stay with Jocelyn.’ Thankful for the habit of always slipping a lead into her pocket, she tied the spaniel to a tree two feet from the brink of the lock. Hepzie hated being tied up at any time. Now, in pouring rain with some obvious calamity going on, she was desolate.
‘I’m leaving Hepzie here,’ she called down to Jocelyn. ‘She’ll be somebody to talk to.’
‘More like a hostage, to make sure you’ll come back,’ Joss said, again barely audible. ‘Hurry up, will you. This arm bloody hurts.’
‘I’m going.’
But which way should she go? Onwards towards Frampton Mansell, and its silent ghostly aura, but enough houses for somebody surely to be in – or back to Daneway, where there was at least a pub that she knew to be open? The distances, if she’d remembered accurately, must be almost equal. The deciding factor was the railway line at Frampton. Somehow she felt reluctant to cross it in pouring rain, where she could neither see nor hear properly.
It was horrible having to maintain at least a trot, and now and then a faster run, despite several near falls in the slippery mud. She was thoroughly soaked and cold. The distance seemed endless, and although she couldn’t see how any real harm could come to Joss, it felt completely wrong to leave her alone in her prison. Thea’s lungs were searing and her legs aching when she finally emerged onto the road over the Daneway Bridge. Water cascaded along the roadsides, and dripped from the trees, but by some miracle the deluge had in fact stopped. Only now did Thea become aware of this, with a mixture of thankfulness and self-rebuke at the awful timing of the woodland walk.
She was too breathless to speak coherently when she finally reached the road at Daneway. Her initial instinct had been to go to the pub and rally a group of people to come and haul Jocelyn out of the lock. But the pub looked unaccountably deserted from where she stood, and there was a house rather closer.
Nobody answered the door when she rang the bell attached to the doorpost. In desperation she tried the handle, planning to step inside and shout, but the door did not yield. How dare they be out, she inwardly raged. It felt as if hours had passed since she’d left Jocelyn, and now there was a nightmare delay where the world was empty and nobody would help. Water gurgled and slurped down the sides of the road, dripped off the trees and turned the ground to mud. Her clothes clung to her, making her feel naked.
There was no option but to try the pub. When the front door opened easily, and she stepped into a bar still half full of drinkers, Thea felt completely stupid. Of course they would all have retreated indoors when the rain started. And it was
still not quite two o’clock, according to the large clock on the wall.
‘Somebody help me!’ she shouted, feeling all vestiges of self-control running away with the rainwater that dribbled down her legs and into her inadequate shoes. ‘Please come and help.’
Everybody looked at her. ‘What’s up, love?’ asked an older man, the kindness scarcely bearable.
‘My sister – she fell in one of the locks. I can’t get her out. She’s hurt her arm and her ankle.’
The effect was unforgettable. Men leapt to their feet and hurled instructions at each other. The older ones seemed particularly galvanised. In seconds there was all the succour she could wish for, the party led by a man on a chunky vehicle that resembled a ride-on lawnmower. He waved at her, indicating that she should take a seat behind him, like the pillion on a motorbike.
All she could do was cling to him and hope her sodden condition wasn’t causing him too much discomfort. All she could think of was Jocelyn crouched in the mud of the pit, staring at the sheer brick wall above her, wondering how she’d ever get out. And her shivering uncomprehending dog, almost certainly whining and yapping for Thea’s return.
It seemed to take no time at all to get back to the place. Behind the lawnmower, which she faintly remembered was actually a thing called a quad bike, surged men with blankets, mobile phones and encouraging smiles. No ladders, she noted, with a twinge of anxiety. Jocelyn would enjoy all this, she thought. So would Hepzibah, in all probability.
By a process that looked to have been effected by pure magic, the rescuers simply walked into the lock from the farther end, pushing their way through plants that grew to armpit height. Of course, Thea realised, the bottom of the canal must be level with that of the lock, at the lower end, so the barges could get into it. Then the water level was raised, and the boat floated upwards, until it was able to leave the other end, having climbed the twelve or fifteen feet necessary. From Chalford to Daneway the sea level rose by something like fifty feet, which the canal had to accommodate somehow. Whoever invented locks was in Thea’s pantheon of absolute geniuses. What had appeared to be a completely impenetrable barrier was nothing of the sort.
Feeling faintly foolish for not having worked this out sooner, she watched as Jocelyn was gently carried onto the muddy towpath. The rain had entirely stopped, and the light was greatly improved. She knelt beside her sister, who was white and shivering, but still talking.
‘This is all very exciting,’ she was prattling. ‘I feel ever so important. And you’re all so organised. Does this happen a lot?’
Something in the atmosphere changed. One or two of the men seemed to draw back as if a nerve had been hit.
‘Not often since the canal was dry,’ said one with an attempt at humour. ‘This is a bit unusual.’
‘But it hasn’t had water in it for decades,’ said Thea.
‘Thank goodness, some might say.’ They were rubbing Jocelyn dry, carefully avoiding the damaged areas. It had been decided, it seemed, that she could ride on the quad bike, back to the road where she could be taken to hospital. ‘There should be an ambulance turning up any time now,’ said somebody. The men were hard to distinguish, with hair plastered sleekly over their heads, and shapeless rainwear covering most of their bodies. Thea kept glimpsing one who seemed familiar, but he wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to have a good long stare.
‘Didn’t you see the signs?’ the last speaker demanded. ‘We spent quite a bit putting these up, I can tell you. All in the interests of health and safety, of course.’
Thea gazed around. ‘No,’ she said. ‘What signs?’
The man pointed to a board, which presumably had lettering facing away from where they were gathered. ‘There’s one,’ he said. ‘It tells you to be careful of the locks.’
‘It was so wet,’ Thea defended. ‘We were walking with our heads down. And it was terribly slippery underfoot.’
‘It’s a sensitive issue around here,’ he continued. ‘One that you two haven’t helped.’
‘Well, gosh, I’m sorry,’ Thea defended heatedly. ‘We’ll be more careful next time.’ Crossly, she went to untie Hepzie from the tree, devoting herself to the dog for long enough to make the point that she had no more to say to these overbearing locals.
The whole party was on the move by this time, Jocelyn balanced on the wide back seat of the quad bike. Within two or three minutes, they were met by two paramedics, carrying a stretcher and other paraphernalia. Despite Jocelyn being vertical and fully conscious, they insisted on running checks on her before letting her continue any further. She was then escorted solicitously to the ambulance where she was driven to a hospital in Cirencester. Thea had been all set to go with them, when the presence of Hepzibah raised serious objections. ‘I can’t go without her,’ Thea stated, implacably.
‘Well, it can’t come in the ambulance,’ said the paramedics.
For a moment, Thea felt like screaming. The prospect of a long muddy trek yet again through the woods to Juniper Court was unbearable. ‘Here,’ said the man she thought she’d recognised, ‘I’ll drive you home.’
The men were rapidly dispersing, their task accomplished. ‘Thank you!’ Thea shouted after them. ‘You were wonderful.’ One or two flipped dismissive waves at her, the others just kept walking. Thea watched their retreating backs with a wild array of emotions. It was humiliating being the subject of a silly accident, the one in need of rescue, and even more uncomfortable to be indebted to a bunch of strangers. Threaded through this was a sense of transgression. She and Jocelyn had done something that angered and even sickened the locals.
The offer of a lift was too good to refuse. ‘We’ll make the car horribly muddy,’ she worried.
The man just shook his head as if nothing could matter less. ‘You’ve forgotten who I am, haven’t you?’ he said.
She looked more closely at him, trying to place him. ‘Robert!’ she said. ‘Frannie’s husband. I am sorry – it seems such a long time ago that I met you.’
‘Less than a week,’ he grinned. ‘But I gather quite a lot’s been going on.’
‘You could say that,’ she agreed.
The drive back to the house took little over five minutes, the small road running along the southern edge of the woods, parallel to the canal, and into Frampton Mansell. There was no time for much conversation, and besides, Thea’s head was much too full of worries and questions and plans and more worries.
‘I don’t think her arm’s broken,’ Robert offered. ‘Nor her ankle. From the things the ambulance people were saying, I got the impression she isn’t badly hurt at all.’
‘I hope not. She was planning to go home this afternoon.’
‘Really? Where does she live?’
‘Just outside Bristol. She’s got five children.’
‘Heavens! And you?’
‘Just one.’
She was hardly hearing her own words, speaking automatically, her thoughts elsewhere. Perhaps, she thought later, it was in an effort to capture her attention that Robert said what he did.
‘You’d better go home yourself.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s all such a mess.’ He was suddenly vehement, smacking the steering wheel. Thea could see the village just ahead, and opted not to take him up on his outburst. But she did have an urgent question.
‘Why were they so angry?’ she asked. ‘As if we’d broken some taboo.’
He didn’t take his eyes off the road ahead. ‘People have died in that canal,’ he said, gruffly. ‘My uncle, for one.’
‘Oh dear. Do you mean where – or when – there was water in it?’
‘Obviously. But that’s all I’m saying. This is where I drop you.’
‘Thanks ever so much for driving us,’ she gushed. Hepzie had been kept firmly on her lap, to avoid muddy pawprints on the upholstery. ‘I can’t wait to go and have a hot shower. I can’t remember when I’ve ever been so wet. And then I suppose I’ll have to go to Cirencester and fin
d the hospital.’
They drew into the yard of Juniper Court, through the open gate, and pulled up behind a silver-grey people carrier which Thea did not recognise. ‘Good God, who’s this?’ she groaned.
Then a man got out of the driver’s seat, looking as if he had been waiting a very long time.
‘Christ almighty,’ said Thea. ‘It’s Alex.’
‘Where’s Jocelyn?’ he said angrily, before noticing Thea’s condition. ‘What the hell’s been happening?’
Thea turned to Robert, leaning down through the open passenger door. ‘Thanks again,’ she said. ‘You’ve been really kind. I’m sorry we caused so much trouble.’
Instead of a polite acknowledgement, he gave her a hard look. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he said. Then he nodded at the irate visitor. ‘You’ll be okay, will you?’
Thea almost laughed. Between the two of them, she wasn’t at all sure which would be the safer bet. At least Alex was family. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He’s my brother-in-law.’
Robert said nothing more, but reversed back into the lane and sped away. Thea stared after him, thinking of all the other questions she wanted and needed to ask. Then she took a deep breath, and walked towards Alex. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to change out of these clothes.’
‘Where’s Jocelyn?’ he demanded again. ‘Her car’s here.’
‘She’s been taken to hospital,’ Thea flared, wanting to shock and alarm him, remembering that he had been guilty of behaviour that could have sent his wife for medical treatment. Hoping, almost, that he would think this had indeed happened; that an injury caused by him had turned septic or proved unexpectedly serious.
‘What? Thea – what did you say?’
It could have been the absence of any expletive, the fear in his voice and eyes, that thawed her icy manner. ‘She’s all right. We can go together to see her, when I’ve changed. Why don’t you make a pot of tea or something? The kitchen’s through there.’
