‘It couldn’t have been all that time ago.’
‘It seems a long time ago. I was only five. Well, it was kept by three old maids and I was thinking about them the other day. They were terribly old-fashioned but nice. What I mean is, they didn’t really teach but they did make school something to look forward to and that’s a terrific achievement if you think about it. I thought I’d—well—pay them a tribute, especially as they all died within about a year of one another when their school closed down. They kind of propped one another up you see, so that when one went they all went.’
She cleared her throat again and began to read. ‘It’s called “Kindergarten”.
‘“Miss Adams, Miss Ball and Miss Parminter-Beech
Wherever you are there is chalk within reach,
You were different in method, in looks, and in name
But in many respects you were almost the same.
‘“You each wore your hair in an old-fashioned bun
And each of you rationed the moments of fun,
Each sat on a dais and instructed us while,
You smiled the same ‘let’s-make-an-effort-now’ smile.
‘“Miss Adams, Miss Ball and Miss Parminter-Beech
Wherever you are there is chalk within reach,
For, quick as you were with your morning, ‘Look sharp!’
God Himself wouldn’t venture to teach you the harp.
‘“Miss Adams I see you with mock-severe look,
Making well-rounded ‘O’s at an alphabet book,
Miss Ball with abacus and bright-coloured beads
She forsakes to attend to our ‘May-I-go …?’ needs.
‘“But the one who still flatters my memory well
Is Miss Parminter-Beech with her lavender smell,
And the ‘scraps’ she declared only triers could earn
But which everyone got at the end of the term.
‘“What did you earn in those faraway days?
It couldn’t have paid for a new pair of stays
That creaked when you rose to admonish a caper
Or serve out the crayons, the paints and the paper.
‘“I think of you still when I hear the word ‘teach’
Miss Adams, Miss Ball and Miss Parminter-Beech,
Are they kind to you now? Was it true when they said
That the last one to die went out of her head?’”
Vanessa looked up as she laid the book aside but was only in time to see Claire’s back as she whisked the tea-things into the scullery. She withdrew because she did not want to find answers for the questions Vanessa might ask if she saw tears in her eyes and in any case they had nothing to do with the suspended sentence Maureen had pronounced on her a few hours ago. They were released by the poignancy of the child’s observation and her instinctive appreciation of the empty past of the three old ducks she had written about. In a way, Claire thought, the immature verses emphasised the difference of Vanessa, the separateness of her psychological make-up, and the circumstances of her conception and birth, bound up with the pathos of Stevie’s death and the putting of a term to the fulfilment he had found in the arms of the child’s mother. It also emphasised her own part in that bizarre episode, of her long weeks of anxiety ending in that interminable train journey up north only to find Stevie dead, and after that the long haul over the mountains to find and comfort Margaret in that nursing home on the bleak Welsh coast. But it did more than that, contrasting her own richly endowed life with the drabness of the lives of Miss Adams, Miss Ball and Miss Parminter-Beech, who had probably never had an opportunity to weigh the disappointments of life against the bonuses of producing a family and having a husband who could be stirred to laughter and desire by the worn clichés of love.
She managed to say, ‘I think it’s terrific, Vanessa. I honestly do.’
Vanessa made some kind of reply but what it was she was unable to catch, for at that moment a long, rumbling sound reached her like the gust of an enormously powerful gale and the cottage shuddered and bucked like a horse frightened by the sudden flap-crack of a haystack tarpaulin.
At first she thought she must be fainting and made a grab at the edge of the sink, but the sink came away in her hands and crashed down on her right foot, numbing it completely, and as she lurched into the circle of lamplight she saw the table on which the lamp was standing slide forward and fall with a crash, and beyond it the wide-eyed expression of Vanessa as she rolled past the fireplace towards the window, her mouth open in a scream that was lost in the confused uproar that had grown out of the original rumbling sound.
Claire’s first conscious act as she staggered into the room was to grab the long, heavy torch she had brought with her and had put down on the dresser, and automatically she switched it on so that the powerful beam was directed at the chaos on the far side of the room. At the same moment her brain cleared, the power of coherent thought rising like a swimmer shooting to the surface to find herself jostled by an ocean of flotsam.
She knew then, more or less, what had happened. The great hill that rose behind the cottage had moved, sliding towards the road and the river, and in the same moment she knew why this had happened and cursed the fools who had stripped the Dell of its vegetation and left it naked and vulnerable to every stream descending from the tableland behind.
As though goaded by rage the instinct of self-preservation reasserted itself and she hobbled on her damaged foot across the canting floorboards, kicking at objects that got in her way but keeping the beam of her torch fixed on the mass of broken furniture wedged in the window aperture where she could still see Vanessa’s head and shoulders and her angled leg encased in plaster, looking like a short white stump crowning a pile of rubble. She shouted, above the thunder of the landslide and the hiss of water, ‘
Wait!
I’m coming! Hold
on
!’
and glanced over her shoulder to see whether the overturned lamp or the logs in the shattered grate had started a fire to add to the horror.
There was no flame and no smell of smoke. The weight of cob, the avalanche of mud, or both, had effectively doused fire and lamp-oil, but instead a tide of sludge seemed to be rising to her waist and as she struggled against it the window frame burst outward with a prolonged crash of glass and crackle of splintered woodwork. With a tremendous effort she tore herself free from the glutinous embrace and reached Vanessa, and at the same moment she saw a means of survival directly ahead, where the trailing roots of a tree that had fallen on the cottage, crushing it like a cardboard carton, pointed towards the river at an angle of about thirty degrees to the ground. She even recognised the tree as the solitary oak that had stood about half-way up the garden at the back, and had, she remembered, a little house in its first fork built by Jerry, Mary’s child, when he had spent a week staying here while his parents were away.
If the remains of the little house were still there, if the fork itself was intact, and if the roots of the tree remained embedded in the ruins of the cottage, it offered some kind of refuge for both of them and she raised her arm to direct the beam through the jagged aperture and along the short, thick bole of the oak. The probing end of the shaft caught the fork and showed its exact position, about eight to ten feet above the flood and the swirl of wreckage, and at once Claire realised what had happened, and why the tree was so angled, for its branches must have been trapped in the granite outcrop on which the cottage had been built. It would, she thought, survive a great deal of pressure, no matter how heavily the hill pressed on it, for its own weight would have wedged it among rocks stripped of their topsoil. If they could reach that fork they might hang on until help arrived.
She said, clutching hard at Vanessa’s shoulder, ‘Are you hurt? Can you move?’ and Vanessa said, between gasps, ‘My leg … the bad leg … it’s caught …’ and then her body relaxed and she lost consciousness.
She turned the beam on the short column of plaster rooted in a variety of things, a chair, a small oak coffer, an assortment of sodden rugs and bricks from the chimneypiece. She began to scrabble, gripping the torch under her chin, and using both hands, and finally freed it from debris so that she was able to inch forward until she was crouched about two feet above Vanessa and could make some kind of attempt to drag her through the tangle of roots that all but blocked the window. It was terribly hard work but she made some progress, even though she dared not let go of the torch, and had to work with one hand and sometimes her teeth and knees. At length, however, they were free of the roots and she felt rough bark under her knees, and after that, straddling the trunk and moving an inch or so at a time, she found she could drag Vanessa upward and outward towards the fork.
It had stopped raining but the wind was strong and rank with the smell of fresh earth and sodden cob. During a pause for breath she swung her torch in an arc to reveal a scene of unimaginable desolation, a world of uprooted trees, tangled briars, and man-made objects from the cottage or other dwellings. On her right was Margaret’s car that she had left in the lane, its radiator poking from shining slime like the snout of a shark, and to the left, nearer the village, she could see what looked like a caravan, its stovepipe projecting at a crazy angle. Towards the river there was no debris, but a great swirling mass of water and the hill must have stopped sliding for behind her there was now comparative stillness, only the steady roar of water surging through the culverts that ran under a road no longer there.
By now, using reserves of strength she would not have believed she possessed as a young woman, she had dragged Vanessa about twenty feet from the window and her torch picked out some bent six-inch nails that had held Jerry’s tree-house to the fork. A few planks of the nest remained, affording some protection from the wind and behind these she crouched, one arm encircling Vanessa, the other clutching the torch.
By straining across Vanessa she could read the luminous dial of her watch. It had stopped at five minutes past eight and Margaret would not even attempt to return until ten. She tried to calculate how long an interval had passed between her watch having stopped and now but she could only guess. The struggle to free Vanessa’s foot and the slow journey up the tree might have taken ten minutes or a hour.
The roar of the water was getting louder and its level seemed to be rising but perched up here, only a few feet above the brown swirl, it was very difficult to judge. Far away to the left she could see a few twinkling lights pinpointing Coombe Bay but in the other direction, towards the lodge gates, there was nothing but windy darkness. She thought, without resentment, ‘Well, this is it, and it’s odd that it should happen today of all days. “A good run” Maureen said, “might last for years, like old Aaron the reed-cutter, depending on the life you lead”.’ But now it didn’t depend on anything but the temporary security of a fallen tree and the strength of the Sorrel current. Just these two factors, nothing else at all.
The distant lights appearing on the right showed like wavering globes, as though a large fish, with stupid, yellow eyes, was swimming slowly and carefully downstream. A moment or so passed before she recognised the eyes as headlights and then they stopped moving but remained pointing in her direction, about a hundred yards nearer the ford.
She began to shout but soon realised that she could not hope to compete with such an uproar, so she stopped shouting, threw a leg across Vanessa to brace her against the trunk, and turned the torch towards the stationary lights. Very deliberately she began to flash. Three short, three long, three short, a signal she didn’t even realise she had learned as representing the letters S.O.S. in morse code. She pressed the finger button of the torch over and over again, three short, three long, three short and then, to her astonishment, the carlights began to respond and as they did the car edged away, retreating up the road towards the ford.
She thought, ‘The road is obviously open to within about a hundred yards of here but it won’t be for long. Soon the flood, searching for lower ground, will wash back towards the ford unless the banks give way on the other side of the river and all the Coombe water floods across the stubble fields. Or perhaps it depends on the tide, in which case, if it isn’t ebbing now, it will be too late no matter how quickly they get here.’ And then another and more terrifying thought occurred to her. Irrespective of the arrival of rescuers how long could she hang on up here, even if the flood did not rise, even if the tree did remain jutting out over the water like half a bridge? And if she fell Vanessa would go too, unless the child could be secured somehow.
She isolated this last ‘if’ and began to consider it calmly and logically, using a part of her brain beyond the cells numbed by shock and terror. Maureen had said, do nothing impulsively, plan every action, even the lifting of a basket or a walk upstairs. She would indeed, and the first thing to plan was how to ensure Vanessa remained wedged in the fork, without having to be held there by a woman of over seventy with angina.
She turned her torch towards the cottage and what she saw there reminded her of the rubble she had shifted to free Vanessa’s leg. There might be some kind of fastening back there although she could not imagine what and the chances of finding it had to be weighed against the terrible risk of leaving the child while she searched. She balanced the risks carefully and finally decided to act, but before she began her descent of the trunk she wanted to assure herself of the fact that Vanessa was not, in fact, already dead, and slid her hand under the child’s sodden jersey, exploring the area to the right of her left breast. The beat of the heart was unmistakable and she spent the next minute or two wedging the body further into the fork. If Vanessa stirred while she was gone nothing could prevent her falling but this was another imponderable and there was nothing to be gained by taking it into account. Moving an inch at a time, and still straddling the bole as though it was a horse with a bad reputation, she eased herself down to the roots, where there was at least something to clutch and therefore less danger of rolling into the water. She did not test its depth, knowing that it would be at least six feet, for the ground outside the window had sloped away very sharply and there might even be eight or ten feet of water below, depending upon how much top soil had washed into the Sorrel.