Peter Lovesey: Swing, Swing Together

So this was their idea of a companionable dip. Harriet would have put on her dress again and marched straight back to the house if it were not certain to become the principal topic of breakfast conversation next morning. No, she would not give them the chance to say she had taken fright at the last minute. She was going to demonstrate that a proper upbringing was no constraint on a truly adventurous spirit. She started unfastening her tapes with determination.

The river looked another place by night. The ranks of beeches set back on both sides which were such a feature by day made no impression at all, except when a breeze stirred the leaves. Instead the water provided the spectacle, exhibiting a fragmented and elongated moon across its width and so marking the limits of the banks.

Harriet’s shape, too, was defined against the shimmering moonlight. Naked now, she still had the well-cared-for look of her class, a figure unquestionably cultivated on three good meals a day; perhaps the hips were too rounded for perfection, but her waist was trim and her bosom claimed attention with a sportive bob as she waded towards the centre of the river.

“Here she comes!” Molly announced. “Get your shoulders under quickly, Harriet. Someone might be watching!” This suggestion had the intended outcome. Harriet surged into the deeper water with the suddenness of a life-boat, remembering just in time to keep her hair from getting wet. The Thames was colder than she expected and the mud on the river bottom unpleasantly soft to the feet, not in the least like the sand of Bognor Regis, where she had bathed from a machine the previous summer. But once the initial shock was over, she found the temperature of the water quite tolerable. She pushed forward with her arms and took her feet off the bottom as if she was swimming. She was not really a swimmer, but she enjoyed the sensation of weightlessness in the water. Better than that, she had the delicious satisfaction of defying the Plum in as flagrant a manner as she could imagine. She drew her hands down her body to reaffirm her nakedness.

“Awfully jolly, isn’t it?” said Jane, at her side. “Like water nymphs. Do you think we could tempt a young man in here and drown him?”

“Don’t be so morbid,” called Molly, from closer to the centre of the river. She was able to swim several strokes and she wanted the others to be in no doubt of the fact.

“Let’s surprise her,” whispered Jane. Before Harriet had time to consider what was in prospect, her hand was taken and she was tugged towards the centre. She felt the current pressing her from the right.

“I can’t swim.”

“I won’t let go of you,” Jane promised. “It doesn’t shelve much. We’ll approach her from behind and tap her on each shoulder.”

It was the kind of trick Harriet had half-expected the others to play on herself. She allowed Jane to steer her into deeper water. She could touch the mud with her toes, no more. They manoeuvred themselves behind Molly, who was facing down-river. The current carried them effortlessly towards her. Each of them stretched out a hand as they closed on her.

At the contact, she turned, laughing and poked playfully at them. “I knew what was going on,” she said. Then, with a change of expression so sudden that they might have mistaken it for a delayed reaction if she had not at the same instant taken her hand out of the water and pointed behind them, she screamed, not a piercing scream, more of a gasp, but devastating in its timing, that split second after their trick had appeared to fail.

Harriet looked over her shoulder and saw the cause of Molly’s alarm.

They were approaching steadily downriver. Three men in a boat, and a dog, keeping watch from the prow.

What happened next need never have occurred if our three bathers had kept their heads. The boat, gliding serenely across the moonlit strip of water, was some forty yards away, its occupants oblivious of the presence of anything remarkable. Its course would bring it, at worst, within fifteen yards of Harriet and her companions. Had they remained where they were and turned modestly towards the Buckinghamshire bank, the chance was high that they would not have been noticed.

Instead, they obeyed their first impulse and struck out for the place where they had left their clothes. Jane slipped her hand from Harriet’s and glided away with a rapid side stroke. Harriet, unable to swim and practically out of her depth, might still have been able to follow on tiptoe, and was beginning to, when she was confronted first by the pale, surfacing shape of Molly’s rump and, an instant later, the soles of her feet, drawn up in the first position of the breast stroke. As the legs straightened, the feet made contact with Harriet and pushed her firmly towards the centre of the river.

The current of the Thames is not reckoned to be powerful in the summer months, but it can still be inconvenient to boats or bathers that slip their moorings. Harriet first sank in the deeper water, swallowing enough of it to make her doubt whether she could find the strength to struggle upwards again. Her feet came into contact with something slimy to the touch, possibly waterweed, and she jerked her legs away instinctively, giving herself the impetus to come spluttering to the surface. A gulp of air, and she was under again, but by agitating her arms and legs, she avoided touching the bottom. She broke the surface for a second time and succeeded in staying afloat, thanks mainly to the steady pull of the current, which she found she could ride by spreading her arms wide.

It was an extraordinary sensation, strongly reminiscent of dreams she had experienced from time to time which she had always supposed had something to do with being introduced early to Alice in Wonderland. Now that she was reasonably confident she could keep her head above the water and would not drown, there was even something pleasurable in being carried along by the river, submitting to its firm, unending pressure. She understood why people said swimming was simply a question of confidence. Being carried by the current, she suspected, was more enjoyable than swimming, which she had always regarded as ungraceful. Like this, she could assume attitudes more natural than ever one could with the breast stroke or side stroke. The more relaxed she became, the more buoyant was her body. It was a discovery she was sure Molly and Jane had not made. It brought a new dimension to the night’s adventure.

The moment had to arrive when sanity reasserted itself, for whatever agreeable sensations Harriet derived from her predicament, Hurley Weir was only a mile downriver. In the darkness, and at so low an elevation, she was unable to tell how far she had already travelled. She estimated that she must be approaching Medmenham. Near the Abbey the river snaked sharply, before the broad reach leading to Hurley. If she was carried into that reach, there was no way of escaping destruction on the weir’s gargantuan teeth.

She had one chance, and the wit to conserve her strength for it.

It was not long in coming. On her left, the sky had been obscured for perhaps a minute by thick foliage along the Buckinghamshire bank. Now there was a break. She knew where she was. One memorable afternoon the Plum had conducted a geography lesson in two rowing boats manned by the gardener and his son. They had rowed the girls half a mile downriver to study the effects of erosion and deposition. From the lawn in front of Medmenham Abbey a party of young men with a banjo had serenaded them with “Paddle Your Own Canoe.” She was quite sure this was the place. Around the next bend, where the river turned almost upon itself, the action of the water had formed three eyots. The smallest and narrowest islet was to the left. The mainstream of the current passed between it and the two on the right. If Harriet had understood the geography lesson correctly-and concentration had been difficult that afternoon-water flowing on the inside of a curve is shallower and flows less quickly than on the outside. If she could possibly steer herself leftwards towards the smallest island, there was a chance of getting a foothold on the silt that must have accumulated around its base.