‘Come on,’ I said urgently. ‘Harry, wake up.’
He looked at me apathetically through a mist of weakness and pain and one could see he’d been in that water a lot too long. Apathy, like cold, was a killer. I bent down and turned him until I had my hands under his arms, his back towards me, and I floated him along in the water to the steps and there strained to pull him up them and out onto the grass.
‘My leg,’ he said, moaning.
‘God, Harry, what do you weigh?’ I asked, lugging.
‘None of your bloody business,’ he mumbled.
I half laughed, relieved. If he could say that, for all his suffering, he wasn’t in a dying frame of mind. It gave me enough impetus to finish the exit, though I dare say he, like me, felt only marginally warmer for being on land.
His leg seemed to have stopped bleeding, or very nearly, and he couldn’t have severed an artery or he’d have bled to death by now, but all the same there had to be a pretty serious wound under the cloth of his trousers and the faster I could get him to a doctor the better.
As far as I remembered from our arrival, the boatyard lay down a lane with no houses nearby: I’d have a fair run in my socks to find help.
On the other hand, among the general clutter, only a few feet off, I could see the upturned keel of an old clinker-built rowing boat. Small. Maybe six feet overall. A one-man job, big enough for two. If it weren’t full of holes...
Leaving Harry briefly I went to the dinghy and heaved it over right side up. Apart from needing varnish and loving care it looked seaworthy, but naturally there were no rowlocks and no oars.
Never mind. Any piece of pole would do. Plenty lying about. I picked up a likely length and laid it in the boat.
The dinghy had a short rope tied to its bow: a painter.
‘Harry, can you hop?’ I asked him.
‘Don’t know.’
‘Come on. Try. Let’s get you into the boat.’
‘Into the boat?’
‘Yes. Someone’s taken your car.’ He looked bewildered, but the whole afternoon must have seemed so unbelievable to him that hopping into a boat would seem to be all of a piece. In any case, he made feeble efforts to help me get him to his left foot, and with my almost total support he made the few hops to reach the boat, though I could see it hurt him sorely. I helped him sit down on the one centre thwart and arranged his legs as comfortably as possible, Harry cursing and wincing by turns.
‘Hang on tight to the sides,’ I said. ‘Tight.’
‘Yes.’
He didn’t move, so I pulled his hands out and positioned them on the boat’s edges.
‘Grip,’ I said fiercely.
‘Fine.’ His voice was vague, but his hands tightened.
I tugged and lugged the dinghy until it was sliding backwards down the bank, and then held on to the painter, digging my heels in, leaning back to prevent too fast and splashy a launch. At the last minute, when the stern hit the swollen water and the dinghy’s progress flattened out, I jumped in myself and simply hoped against all reasonable hope that we wouldn’t sink at once.
We didn’t. The current took the dinghy immediately and started it on its way downstream, and I edged past Harry into the stern space behind him and retrieved my piece of pole.
‘What’s that?’ Harry asked weakly, trying to make sense of things.
‘Rudder.’
‘Oh.’
I made a crook of my left elbow on the back of the boat and laid the pole across it, the shorter end in my right hand, the longer end trailing behind in the water. The steering was rudimentary, but enough to keep us travelling bow-first downstream.
Downstream was always the way to people... Bits of the guide books floated familiarly to the surface. Some of your traps are horrific.
Some of the traps described how to arrange for the prey to fall through seemingly firm ground into a pit full of spikes beneath.
Everyone had read the guides.
‘John?’ Harry said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Maidenhead, possibly. I’m not quite sure.’
‘I’m bloody cold.’
There was some water in the boat now, sloshing about under our feet.
Shit.
Nowhere on the Thames was far from civilisation, not even Sam’s boatyard. The wide river narrowed abruptly with a notice on our left saying DANGER in huge letters, and a smaller notice saying LOCK with an arrow to the right.
I steered the dinghy powerfully to the right. DANGER led to a weir. A lock would do just fine. Locks had keepers.
At about then I took note that there weren’t in fact any other boats moving on the river and I remembered that often the locks closed for maintenance in winter and maybe the lock-keeper would have gone shopping...
Never mind. There were houses in sight on the right.
They proved to be summer cottages, all closed.
We floated on as if in a timeless limbo. The water in the bottom of the boat grew deeper. The current, away from the mainstream, was much weaker. The lock cut seemed to last for ever, narrowing though, with high dark trees on the left; finally, blessedly, on the right, there were moorings for boats wanting passage through the lock to the lower level of the river below. No boats there, of course. No helping hands. Never mind.
I took the dinghy as far as we could go, right up near to the lock gates. Tied the painter to a mooring post and stepped up out of the boat.
‘Won’t be long,’ I told Harry.
He nodded merely. It was all too much.
I climbed the steps up onto the lock and knocked on the door of the lock-keeper’s house, and through great good fortune found him at home. A lean man: kind eyes.
‘Fell in the river, did you?’ he asked cheerfully, observing my soaked state. ‘Want to use the phone?’
Chapter 13
I went with Harry in the ambulance to Maidenhead hospital, both of us swathed in blankets, Harry also in a foil-lined padded wrap used for hypothermia cases; and from then on it was a matter of phoning and reassuring Fiona and waiting to see the extent of Harry’s injuries, which proved to be a pierced calf, entry and exit wounds both clean and clotted, with no dreadful damage in between.
While Fiona was still on her way the medics stuffed Harry full of antibiotics and other palliatives and put stitches where they were needed, and by the time she’d wept briefly in my arms he was warm and responding nicely in a recovery room somewhere.
‘But why,’ she asked, half cross, half mystified, ‘did he go to Sam’s boatyard in the first place?’ Like a mother scolding her lost child, I thought, after he’s come back safe: just like Perkin with Mackie.
‘He’ll tell you about it,’ I said. ‘They say he’s doing fine.’
‘You’re damp!’ She disengaged herself and held me at arms’ length. ‘Did you fall through the floor too?’
‘Sort of.’ The hospital’s central heating had been doing a fine job of drying everything on me and I felt like one of those old-fashioned clothes-horses, steaming slightly in warm air. Still no shoes or boots; couldn’t be helped.
Fiona looked at my feet dubiously.
‘I was going to ask you to drive Harry’s car home,’ she said, ‘but I suppose you can’t.’
I explained that Harry’s car had already been driven away.
‘Where is it, then?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘Who took it?’
‘Maybe Doone will find out.’
‘That man!’ She shivered. ‘I hate him.’
Before I could comment, a nurse came to fetch her to see Harry, and she went anxiously, calling over her shoulder for me to wait for her; and when she returned half a hour later she looked dazed.
‘Harry’s sleepy,’ she said. ‘He kept waking up and telling me silly things... How could you possibly get to this hospital in a boat?’