The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary
Paris. I was there only once, but I loved it.’
‘Why don’t you come with us now?’
He kissed her quickly on the cheek, extricated his fingers from hers. ‘I’m a working man with a wife and kid to support.’
He turned away from her, still feeling the tension in her even though he was no longer touching her.
3
It snowed heavily during the night and for the next two days. All the pipes in the house froze, and Tim moved Nina and Michael down to a hotel in Henley. He went back to the house and invited the Hamills and their children in to join him; they would be a little more comfortable than in their caravan. Tim stoked up the fire in the living-room, kept it going twenty-four hours a day, and he and the Hamills camped in the room. They boiled ice for drinking water and poured hot water down the toilet to break up the ice in the sewage pipe. Nina phoned twice a day from the hotel and Tim, lying unconvincingly with a half-frozen tongue, told her things were fine. On the third night the snow turned to rain and it rained for the next three days. By then Tim, telling Steve Hamill not to worry about the cost, had insisted that Eileen Hamill and the two little girls be moved down to join Nina and Michael in the hotel at Henley.
On the sixth morning Tim, who had been dozing in a chair, half-awake all night, sat up as Steve shook him. ‘We’ve got to get out, mate. The bloody river’s at the front door.’
Tim hastily did up his boots. He looked around the living-room, at first saw nothing that he wanted to save from the flood; then he noticed Steve’s paintings and sketches hanging on the wall. He grabbed them and raced upstairs with them, wrapped them in blankets and laid them on the bed in the main bedroom. When he got downstairs and into the hall Steve was at the front door with a skiff.
‘Lucky I got this before the bloody thing went under.’ The water was rising by the minute, flooding into the house through the open door. ‘We better head for the boat-yard. And pull like buggery. If we can’t get across that current, we’re going to finish up half-way to France.’
Brown water, looking as thick as soup, was rushing down past the house as they slid the skiff away from the front door. The island had already disappeared; the house stood in a brown swirling waste. The usually placid Thames raged past in swift, yellow-flecked ropes of current. Logs and trees bobbed and whirled like drowning dancers; a panic-stricken dog went by, only its head showing, chasing a sheep’s carcase. The rain was still falling, shutting out the slopes of the valley, deadening every sound but the hiss and death-rattle gurgle of water.
As soon as Tim and Steve pushed off they had to start rowing furiously. The current swept them straight at the raised bridge that connected the island to the main bank; but there was no island and no bank and it stood like an upturned long-boat stuck on a hidden reef. Tim saw the bridge rushing at them; he dug in his oar and they skidded past with inches to spare. Then he quickly started rowing again. They had to row diagonally across the river if they were not to be swept round the bend and past the boat-yard. A mile downstream there were a lock and a weir and the thought of crashing into one or plunging over the other made him and Steve row furiously.
The river was normally forty to fifty yards wide at the bend; now it was closer to a hundred. The current tore at the skiff, muscling it off an even keel as it struggled sideways across the wide sweep of the bend. Tim was blinded by rain and each time he opened his mouth to gulp in air he choked on the water he took in. Cold and stiff, he must have pulled a muscle: every time he pulled back on the oar he wanted to yell with the pain in his side. He had got into the skiff without any thought that they might be in any real danger, but now he saw they stood a better than even chance of having the skiff overturned and their being flung into the river. He saw Steve, the man afraid of water, throwing frantic glances back over his shoulder, looking for the far bank and safety.
Everything flung itself against them as they battled their way across the current: the swirling water, the rain, logs and debris. A dead cow hit the skiff head-on in a blind charge; the boat swung round, tipping dangerously, and for a moment Tim thought they were going to go under. Then the skiff righted itself, the two men dug in their oars and they swept down towards the tiny jetty that ran out from the slope below the yard. They hit it with a thud, the skiff splintered and tipped over and Tim and Steve were flung into the freezing water.
Tim grabbed at the jetty as the water tore at him, pulled himself up on to it. He clutched at Steve as the latter was about to be sucked under the platform. Water was already lapping over the jetty and Tim could feel it moving on its pilings. As Steve struggled out of the water, the whole jetty leaned dangerously to one side. Both men scrambled to their feet and ran.
They leapt on to the cobbled slope as the jetty was swept away by the flood. They staggered up the slope and sat down heavily, exhausted by their efforts, weak with relief at their narrow escape. It was fully a minute before they stood up, both of them wavering on unsteady legs.
‘Jesus wept!’ Steve Hamill let out a cry of agony. ‘Look at that!’
Coming downstream, like runaways down a hill, were his caravan and studio shed. They went past at speed, the caravan a bright mocking note, bobbing and dancing like something on a carnival carousel, in the brown raging flood. As it went past the boat-yard the shed, which had been upright, suddenly tipped over. Its floor opened and paintings and canvases shot out and went skimming down the river, riding the current like gaily-coloured surf-boards that had lost their riders.
Tim looked at Steve. The Australian’s face was wet, water streaming down his cheeks, but it was impossible to tell whether it was rain or tears. The look on his face, however, was that of a man seeing his life’s work going pell-mell down a huge drain.
4
The rain stopped the next day, but it was almost a week before the flood fully subsided. The yard lost two-thirds of its boats, sunk or smashed; all the moorings and slipways and the work-shed went downriver. Tim and Nina, the house abandoned, living now in the hotel in Henley, drove up at the end of the week and took stock of the damage. Eileen Hamill stayed at the hotel to look after the children and Steve drove up with the Davorens.
‘It will take us at least six months to get things back to normal,’ Tim said. ‘We’ll never be ready for summer.’
‘What about the insurance?’ Nina asked. ‘Maybe we could buy all the boats we need.’
Tim looked around at the havoc. ‘The insurance won’t cover everything by a long chalk. You want to stay on, Steve?’
The Australian shrugged. He was utterly depressed, unrelated to the casual, happy man the Davorens had known. ‘I’m willing. But I don’t know if the wife wants to. Did she tell you? One of my paintings finished up stuck under the bridge all the way down at Henley. She saw some kids chucking stones at it, using it as a target. She’s more upset at what happened than I am. I think she’d like to move somewhere else, right away from here.’
Tim took Nina’s arm and they walked back to the car. The sky had cleared and the sun was shining; the flood-damaged valley was exposed pitilessly in the pale silver-gold light. Upstream the island was above water again; even at this distance it was possible to see the mark just below the upper-storey windows of the house where the flood had peaked. The boat-yard was thick with mud and debris, all of it beginning to smell as the sun shone on it. It looks like a battlefield, Tim thought. And I’ve just lost the battle.
‘I hate to say it, but I don’t want to start all over again. And that’s what it would mean.’
Nina felt a mixture of surprise, relief and disappointment. She had never seen him defeated before; or anyway so ready to accept defeat. In the time they had been married he had made compromises, but always with a wry insouciance that let her know he was granting concessions to please her. But this was a surrender of himself for himself: for the first time she saw a weakness of character that she had never suspected.
‘What worries me is what will happen to Steve?’ He looked across at