The Green Gauntlet (50 page)

Miraculously she still had the torch, and even more miraculously its battery continued to work. She clawed her way through the screen of roots and directed the beam downwards. Almost at once she gave a cry of satisfaction, for there was the upended sofa, with part of its webbing still attached to it, and a trailing end just within reach. She grasped it, wound it round her free hand and began to tug, at first gently, then frantically as the tacks resisted the rupture.

It came away very slowly, perhaps six inches at each tug but at last it floated free and she gathered about eight feet of the tough, fibrous fastening. Then, trailing it behind her she began her return journey up the sloping trunk.

It seemed to her the tallest tree in the world, taller than one of those huge redwoods she had seen in California, taller than the giant Douglas fir that had once stood at the top of the orchard but had been felled many years ago because, Paul said, its roots were exposed and it promised to come down on the greenhouses. All the time she kept the beam directed on the fork, spotlighting the white blur of the plaster on Vanessa’s leg and when at last she could reach up and touch the child’s shoe she was so thankful that she remained motionless for more than a minute before making the supreme effort to draw herself into the fork.

There was no hope of cutting the webbing. The best she could do was to fasten one end to the deeply embedded nails, driven there by young Jerry and then, holding the torch clamped between chin and breast, wind it round and round one of the branches and under Vanessa’s armpits, knotting the loose end to the butt of a sawn-off branch a few inches lower down. She was so intent upon the task that she did not notice the wavering approach of lights, this time from a different direction, and it was fortunate that she was not diverted. The moment the last knot was tied she felt the first exploratory probes of pain.

This time it was so terrible that it blotted out everything else—Vanessa, their chance of rescue, the landslide, the tree, the roar of water below. Everything was submerged in the great surge of pain that shot from her back to shoulder, then down her left arm like a jet of molten lead directed at wincing flesh.

The pain was totally absorbing. While it lasted she was not conscious of movement and confused shouting away in the darkness beyond the wrecked cottage, or the snail-like approach of lights on the shoulder of the hill behind the garden, but then, as the pain moderated, she experienced an almost dreamlike sensation of relief and on the threshold of this liberating trance she heard, or thought she heard, Paul’s voice calling her name, calling it loudly and clearly over and over again.

Then, as though amplified a hundred times, the steady roar of the water became deafening and everything about her began to toss and thresh on the surface of the flood. And after that nothing, only the long sough of the wind, strong enough to absorb every sound in the Valley.

III

T
heir uneasiness increased when they rounded the last bend leading to the stretch of river road on which the cottage stood. Already Simon had slowed the speed of the Vanguard to about three miles an hour as they moved through six inches of overspill and listened to the crackle-swish of twigs and brushwood caught up in the wheels. He stopped about a hundred yards short of the cottage, saying it would be asking for trouble to drive any further. If the engine died they would have no alternative but to wade all the way back to the lodge in the dark.

‘I can’t even turn here,’ he said, ‘I shall have to reverse. Thank God the Gov’nor had those white flood-posts put in all the way along.’

The roar of the Sorrel on their right was so loud that Evie had to shout in his ear.

‘I can’t see the cottage. We’re not even near it yet,’ and the statement alerted him because he had often fished along here as a boy and would have thought he could have pin-pointed his position to a yard. And yet she was right. The white hump of the cottage should have shown up in the path of the headlights but it did not. On their left was the gleaming bank of the sloping meadow between the paddock and the western side of the Coombe, and on their right a seemingly limitless waste of water.

It was the unfamiliar note of the torrent that gave him his first clue. It seemed to come from further afield, as though road and river were separated by an appreciable distance rather than yards. He said, ‘Wait, I’ll test it for depth,’ and got out, the flood reaching to his shins and the surface under his feet more yielding than it should have been.

He edged forward in the beam of the lights but he had not gone far when he came up against a wild tangle of brushwood. He tried to scramble beyond it but, to his bewilderment, the ground on his left rose steeply so that it was almost as though he was clawing his way up a bank. Then, directly ahead, he saw the wink of the torch flashing its signal and a partial awareness of the situation came to him, expressing itself in a yelp of dismay. Sloshing back to the car he shouted, ‘There’s been a landslide! A bloody great landslide and they’re beyond it, signalling for help!’

Margaret seemed stunned but Evie said, ‘We’ve got to get to them. We’ve got to get to them somehow!’

‘We can’t, not from here. Nobody could. We’ll have to reverse back and get help.’

Margaret said with a groan, ‘Vanessa—she can’t help herself—her leg’s in plaster! Let me try …’ and she threw open the car door but Evie reached over and grabbed her by the shoulder. ‘If Simon can’t, you can’t. You’ll drown out there. If they’re signalling they’re still all right—they’re almost certainly upstairs.’

Simon said, sharply, ‘Shut that bloody door and watch out for me—I’m going to back,’ but before he threw the car into reverse he answered the signal, three short flashes, three long, three short.

They kept him on course over nearly a mile of reversing. The posts helped—about a foot of each was still showing—and Evie shouted directions from her side. It needed a tremendous effort of will not to accelerate but Simon took his time. Nothing would be gained by ditching the car or stalling the engine and having to walk. At last they reached the ford, crossed it and made a U-turn. Then, in forward gear, the car shot up the drive and skidded to a halt in the forecourt.

From then on it was Paul who took command and they deferred to him, for he was on his home ground and a situation like this had always seen him at the hub of affairs, working without haste and certainly without any hint of confusion, bringing his intimate knowledge of the tract between the Bluff and the Whin to bear on problems of approach and method.

He said, as soon as Simon had briefed him on the situation, ‘One thing’s clear, we can’t go at it direct until it’s light. We’ll have to do the best we can without more help—just the three of us, you, me and young John. The girls must stay here but one of them can go across to Home Farm and tell Rumble to contact Henry Pitts, Eveleigh and any men they can get together.’ And when Simon said, ‘Damn it, Gov’nor, there’s the ’phone,’ he said, gravely, ‘You can try it but I’ll lay you a thousand to one it’s dead. A slide like that would bring all the poles down. You won’t be able to raise Home Farm or Coombe Bay.’

Simon marvelled at his steadiness, at the way he grasped the essentials of the task. Then he remembered that Paul had been a community leader here a very long time and that he had faced approximate situations not once but a dozen times over the years, the first of them the day Simon had been born when he had ridden through a gale to Four Winds and had been the first to find Arabella Codsall sliced to death with a hay knife and her crazy husband swinging from a beam.

Watching him going about his preparations Simon swore to himself that he would never undervalue Paul again, that this was, and always had been, a job that few men he had ever known could perform with anything like the same despatch and efficiency. Evie, equipped with a bull’s-eye, set off on foot across the paddock to alert the Home Farm. There was no danger in that direction, he told her, for the farmhouse lay this side of the road and the ground fell away sharply to the south. All the same, she was to follow the paddock palings, even though it meant another half-mile.

‘You can lose your sense of direction in the meadow,’ he said, ‘and might run against something Rumble has left lying around.’ In the circumstances he spoke very quietly and decisively so that nobody questioned his decisions. He gave Margaret something to occupy her mind, sending her off to put hot-water bottles in the beds, light fires in the bedrooms and after that to prepare soup.

‘Make up the stove and hang blankets on the clothes-horse,’ he added. ‘They’ll want to be fed first and there’s nothing like drinking soup while wrapped in a warm blanket after a shock and a drenching.’ Simon expected him to comment on the cause of the landslide but he did not. He just went about things methodically, almost as though he had been planning it for days.

Young John said, ‘We’ve got a torch apiece. We can cross the field and work our way down the lane. Shall I go on ahead? I can get there far quicker than either of you.’ But Paul said, quietly, ‘No, John, we’ll stay together, the three of us. And we won’t walk either. We’ll take the landrover and go by way of Hermitage Lane, branching off along that track under the woods. Then we’ll have transport handy when we find them and the benefit of headlights providing we’re lucky enough to get down the lane.’

They were factors that Simon, with all his army training, might have overlooked—handy transport for the rescued, and light to work by. A few moments later they were off, John driving and the landrover carrying a coil of rope, rugs and a metal ladder that opened out to twenty rungs. They went down the drive and turned right instead of left, moving along under the park wall until it joined Hermitage Lane and climbing it to within about two hundred yards of Henry’s place.

‘Couldn’t we pick up Henry now?’ Simon asked, but Paul said no, it wasn’t worth the wasted time. Three could do nearly as much as four and Rumble would have others on the scene within the hour.

There was no evidence of the slide up here under the woods and the track, although very muddy, was negotiable. In ten minutes they had struck the head of the narrow lane that ran up from the river road to the south-eastern corner of the woods and as John eased the vehicle round, Paul said, ‘Steady now, we don’t know where the slide began. My guess is it’s much lower down but there may be fissures as high as this. Let me get out and walk ahead.’

He got out and Simon with him. Together they began to descend the slushy surface of the lane, pointing their torches beyond the creeping headlight beam of the landrover. In five minutes more they struck the first big change in a familiar landscape, a great mound of freshly turned earth, as though someone had ploughed a giant, diagonal furrow from east to west. Paul judged that they were now two-thirds of the way down and within eighty yards of the cottage but they couldn’t be sure, for their lights fell on what looked like a twenty-foot earthwork, and the rivulet on their immediate left had grown to a torrent that skirted the lower ridges of the new escarpment and then fell directly on to the flooded road. The water echoed flatly as it came down the sound telling Paul that it was cascading into appreciable depths. He stopped for a moment, directing his torch to the crest of the mound.

‘We’ll have to leave the landrover here,’ he said, ‘but keep the headlights on and don’t lose touch. We’ve got to go up and over, no matter how liquid it is. Bring the rope and leave the ladder against the bonnet.’

They did as he bid, moving like a couple of privates under the eye of a general, and then, with Paul in the lead, they advanced into the soft soil and forced their way up the face of the giant slide.

It was heavy going on the north side but they kept moving, sometimes sinking to their knees. Once over the summit the mud was even less solid and sometimes rose to their thighs, plucking at their gumboots and causing them to flounder and curse. They made progress, however, and half-way down they saw the tree and the cottage or what was left of the cottage.

The tree was a sturdy elm, probably about seventy years old and because it had not stood in the direct path of the avalanche it had remained rooted in the bank, mud enclosing its bole to within a few feet of the lower branches. Approaching it and paying out the rope they sank to their waists, but Paul fought free of this porridge as soon as he grasped the lowest bough and was able to fasten the rope as an anchor for further descent. John said, fearfully, ‘There’s no sign of life down there, Gov’nor. The back part of the roof is smashed in and the rear walls are down,’ and he waited for his father to comment.

‘They’ll be at the front,’ Paul said and bracing himself against the rope cupped a hand and shouted, ‘Claire! We’re coming down!’

They stood waist-deep in the mud and waited for a reply but none came. All they could hear was the frenzied roar of the Sorrel tumbling down to the sea and after thirty seconds or so Paul said, huskily, ‘Stay here, John, and bring the ladder if I shout for it.’

‘Let me go down first.’

‘Do as you’re told, boy,’ he said and John nodded, taking hold of the anchored rope and helping them pay it out as they slipped and slithered down the still-moving mass of mud to a lip of stones that marked the northern edge of the garden.

It was just possible, down here, to stand on the remains of the thatch and the slices of cob that had been the walls of the kitchen and scullery. Moving from beam to beam and probing with their torches they called and called again, and when no answer came from below they gave the rope a twist round an angled beam-end and kicked their way through the rubble, Simon advancing with mounting desperation so that Paul, still calm, said, ‘Easy, boy. We won’t help by bringing the whole damned lot down on us.’

A moment later they were in the chaos of the living-room and their torches centred on the spread of roots in the aperture. For the first time since he had returned home with the news of the landslide Simon sensed desolation in the man who was stumbling and probing among the mush of carpet and shattered furniture that had built up under the window. He said, with authority, ‘Stay here, Gov, and let me do the looking,’ and without waiting for Paul’s assent he crawled through the roots, pushing his torch ahead until its beam rested on the small figure lashed to the fork by strips of webbing. He called over his shoulder, ‘It’s Vanessa. She’s here, tied in a tree … it’s okay, Gov’nor, she’s fastened there.’ Then, despair lifting his voice an octave, ‘
Claire.
Where are you, Claire?’ as he edged out along the trunk and clawed at the fastenings holding the child in the ‘Y’ of the lower branches.