Swing, Swing Together
( Sergeant Cribb - 7 )
Peter Lovesey
Peter Lovesey
Swing, Swing Together
Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest-breeze;
Blade on the feather,
Shade off the trees,
Swing, swing together,
With your bodies between your knees,
Swing, swing together,
With your bodies between your knees.
Eton Boating Song, William Johnson Cory (c. 1863)
CHAPTER 1
Original use of butter-Respecting the Rules-Down to the Thames
“Naked?” Harriet Shaw inquired.
“Completely, darling. In the buff. It’s awfully good fun. Words can’t describe it. You’ll come, won’t you?”
“I believe I might.”
“Splendid! We’ll meet in the common room at a quarter past midnight. Can you get some butter?”
“What do we want with butter, for goodness’ sake?”
“We rub it on the sides of the window to stop it from squeaking. Otherwise it makes enough noise to rouse the entire college. And you’ll need a towel, of course. There’s a stack of them in the linen store. Slip in there this afternoon when the maids are not about. Jane and I still have the ones we took last time. Oh, and don’t breathe a word to anyone else. People aren’t to be trusted. Certain of our fellow students would like nothing better than the Plum to catch us red-handed.”
“If she does, I shall be red all over, never mind my hands.”
In Elfrida College for the Training of Female Elementary Teachers, Miss Plummer had a well-justified reputation for securing the highest standards of behaviour in her young ladies. Any reckless enough to flout her Rules and Regulations, a copy of which hung above the spiritual text over each student’s bed, incurred more than displeasure. There was a scale of penalties ranging from restriction of diet (for minor offences, such as speaking out of turn) to instant expulsion (for offences not clearly specified in the Rules, but darkly implied by the phrase “intemperate, indecorous or unladylike conduct”). As a system it worked well, and the young ladies received their training in an orderly manner appropriate to the profession they were entering. That is not to say that the Rules were never dis-obeyed: that was too much to ask of thirty girls of seventeen and upwards. But Miss Plummer’s discipline was such that girls with insubordinate tendencies kept them under control for the greater part by far of their time at Elfrida College. The flaw in the system was that if they did decide to kick over the traces, they kicked with all the gusto of the front line of the chorus.
And that was how Harriet Shaw was persuaded to take a midnight bathe with Jane Morrison and Molly Stevens.
The College was located beside the Thames a short way below Henley Reach, a stretch of the river as safe, secluded and attractive as any from source to sea. The grounds extended right down to the towpath but the fifty yards of lawn fronting the river was out of bounds to students on account of perils presented not by the river, but by young men accustomed to using the towpath. So the river and its traffic had to be regarded from a discreet distance, a distance that lent something more than enchantment to the view. The river seemed to exert an attractive force increasingly difficult to resist as the girls progressed through their first year and entered their second. If a student were to give way to the promptings and break bounds, then she was risking expulsion, so why not make an occasion of it by going at night and bathing in the river by moonlight dressed as nature intended? That, in a nutshell, was Molly’s argument.
They claimed to have done it before, those two. They said it had been the most exquisite experience they could remember. Harriet believed them. They were adventurous spirits, she was sure, and they had secrets. No two girls in the College were as close friends as they and she was sure they had broken Rules before. Because they were so close they had covered up for each other. Better than that, they had actually conspired to be favourites of the Plum. It was a privilege really to be invited to share in their escapade. She was slightly mystified why they should have chosen her of all the girls, but there it was.
This and other thoughts occupied her as she lay fully clothed in bed that night waiting for Henley Church faintly to chime the quarter hour past midnight. The Plum had long since made her tour of the building checking that all bolts and catches were fastened. With luck she would be asleep by now, secure in her brass bedstead in the room with the balcony at the front of the house, that balcony from which she liked to quiz the girls through her lorgnette as she basked in the sunshine with her two white cats. After a year at Elfrida, Harriet was less terrified of her than she had been at first, but she was still a formidable personage, a distinctly sour Plum.
Just as she was beginning to fear she had not heard it, the single chime sounded. Minutes later she was in the common room releasing a long breath at having got down the stairs without causing one to creak. Molly and Jane were already at the window easing it upwards with professional stealth.
“You first,” whispered Jane.
Momentarily, as she drew her legs over the sill and felt for a foothold on the lawn outside, the uncomfortable thought crossed Harriet’s mind that they might close the window behind her and leave her stranded. But she had misjudged them. Molly, slight and agile, sprang down beside her and together they took Jane’s hands and helped her out. They celebrated their liberty with a swift exchange of smiles, and started running across the tennis lawn. Jane unfurled her bath towel and whirled like a dervish in the center of the court until Molly jerked her away, down through the trees towards the low stone wall that marked the edge of bounds without altogether obstructing the view of the river. They negotiated it easily, giggling now, for they were too far from the house to be heard, and raced down the slope to the row of willows beside the towpath.
CHAPTER 2
Molly by moonlight-Concerning Harriet’s hat-River scene with figures
“It couldn’t have been easier, could it?” said Molly, already unfastening buttons.
“Like peeling an orange,” said Jane.
“You say the funniest things, Jane! Peeling an orange! Just when we’re about to-” Harriet stopped in midsentence.
Molly had stepped out of her dress and was standing naked in front of her. So was Jane. They could not have been wearing anything under their dresses.
“Aren’t you ready?” asked Molly, with a slight implication of censure.
“My underclothes. I didn’t think to leave them off.” It was out of the question to ask them to wait while she struggled several minutes more with stockings and stays. “I’ll join you as soon as I’m ready.”
“Very well, then. We probably would get cold waiting.”
She watched as they stepped carefully off the bank, Jane markedly taller than Molly. In the water, reflected moonlight faintly underscored the areas of their anatomy nearest the surface. It occurred to Harriet what a silly spectacle they presented. With less enthusiasm she lifted her day-gown over her head.
The conversation that presently carried across the water did little to salve her wounded feelings.
“Is she still undressing?”
“It doesn’t surprise me. Harriet had a very proper upbringing. She wouldn’t dream of coming out without her drawers on. I’m surprised she wasn’t wearing a hat.”
This provoked a peal of laughter from Jane. “The one with the hummingbirds-the one she wears to church? Imagine taking to the water in that, without a stitch on underneath!”
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 downriver. 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.
CHAPTER 3
Harriet adrift-Advantages of an understanding of geography-One over the eyot
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.
With a determined thrashing of arms and legs she started across the current towards the eyot. She was immediately turned over like a log, but righted herself and tried again at a less ambitious angle to the flow. Several times she started to sink but managed to rear up, and when her strength was all but spent and she submerged again, she fe
lt her knees touch firm mud. She was in three feet of water.
How long she remained kneeling in the shallows waiting for the pumping of her heart to return to normal Harriet was in no state to estimate. She was not surprised that by the time she remembered the existence of the three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog) and turned to look for them, they were nowhere in sight. If they had noticed her in the water they had not demonstrated much concern for her plight. Two, she remembered, had been rowing and would have had their backs to her. The third had sunk downwards somewhat in the cushions at the other end and may well have been asleep. If that was so, then the panic in the water must have been unnecessary. Jane and Molly, for all their experience of the world at large, had plunged like porpoises at the first sight of the opposite sex.
Pleasing as that recollection was, it did not alter the fact that Harriet was marooned without her clothes, wet and shivering on a small island in the Thames.
Well, she would look upon it as a test of character. “A teacher must be equal to each situation, however unpredictable,” Miss Plummer frequently reminded her students, although the Plum’s wildest vision of the unpredictable was walking into a classroom and finding no chalk there. Resolutely, Harriet heaved herself onto the island, a narrow strip entirely covered by reeds, waist-high. Some small creature scuttled into the water, putting her nerves to the test at once. Harriet crossed the spine of the eyot with the high, fastidious steps of a wading bird, and entered the water on the other side.
A channel no more than fifteen feet in width separated her from the riverbank. Feeling no excessive pressure from the current, she ventured to the level of her thighs and found she could reach the bough of an overhanging willow. She twisted it round her wrist, took a deep breath and set off for the opposite bank with all the strength she had left. At its deepest point the water reached her chin, but she gripped the willow tightly and kept moving until she was clear and safely up the bank.
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