the bank, but it was too steep for him to climb. She scrambled soddenly up, and with her weight off him he managed it. But she knew she would die of cold in ten minutes unless she could find something dry to wear.
Jonathan must have known it too, for he was already slowing the tug as he came abreast of her.
“Dry clothes in the cabin!” he shouted through a smashed window, his face streaming with blood.
“Are you all right?” she called back, in the accents of a fussing mum.
“Only bits of glass. Doesn’t hurt. Get aboard.”
The stove was still going in the cabin, and the close air warm as a drying cupboard. Margaret stripped and rummaged through a big cardboard box full of clothing. Jonathan must have raided a department store for Lucy. She dried herself on a blanket and then put on a vest, two pairs of jeans and two thick jerseys — it didn’t seem the time for the tempting little frocks. Then she started to hang out her own sodden clothes to dry over the stove, but there wasn’t room, so she took them all off the line again and rolled them into a tight bundle tied with her belt. She took the blanket up to rub down Scrub.
They were already far down the last arm of the canal, where it ran tight against the river with only a thirty-yard-wide embankment to separate its listless waters from the rushing tides of the Severn. Only when the pony was nearly dry did she remember about Jonathan’s face.
His left eye was glued shut with drying blood, and his lip swollen to a blue bubble, but he hummed to himself as he stood at the large wheel, twitching it occasionally
to keep the tug dead in the center of the canal. The main cut in his forehead had stopped flowing, and he said nothing while Margaret sponged and dabbed. She found he wasn’t as injured as he’d looked, and the moment she stopped worrying about him she felt the pain nagging again at her own shoulder. He must have noticed the sudden tightening of her movements.
“Did he hit you?” he said. “He looked too close to miss.”
At once she was ashamed.
“Only one stone,” she said. “It just hurts when I think about it.”
“You’ve got us through twice now,” he said. “I was an idiot second time; and an idiot to let Caesar go, too. He could have towed us through.”
“I don’t think they’d have allowed us to open the bridge anyway.”
“I didn’t think about towing till too late — you get in a mood when you’re just going to blind through, and you don’t want to stop to think. They’re right about machines, somehow — Mr. Gordon and his lot, I mean. Machines eat your mind up until you think they’re the answer to everything. I noticed it that morning when you stopped Mr. Gordon hypnotizing Mother; all I could think of was some sort of contrivance, and there wasn’t one.”
“Lucy says I killed Mr. Gordon,” said Margaret.
“No you didn’t!” said Jonathan hotly. “I saw his litter keel over and tip him in, and I didn’t see him climb out. But if he’s dead, he killed himself. Something like this was going to happen, for sure. He’d have pushed somebody too far — somebody like Father with a mind of his own — and they’d have gone for him with a billhook.” “Yes,” said Margaret. “But it was me.”
She stared through the shattered windows at the wide, drear landscape. It was so different from the hills because, though you could see just as much of the scurrying and steely sky, you couldn’t see more than a few furlongs of earth. The land lay so flat that distances lost meaning —even the mile-wide Severn on their right looked only a grim band of water between the muddy band of bank in the foreground and the reddish band of cliffs beyond. And the hills of home, the true hills, the Cotswolds, might just as well have been clouds on the left horizon, so unreachable seemed the distance to them.
“Lord, that’s a big tower!” said Jonathan. He pointed ahead to where the warehouse at Sharpness soared out of the flatness, less than a mile away.
“High tide just under three hours,” he added. “Otto worked it out from old tide tables — it’s time we got him on deck. Could you ask Lucy to persuade Tim? And there’s a dustpan and brush in the cabin, if you felt like getting rid of this broken glass.”
Scrub was standing in the oval of space behind the engine room roof, watching with mild boredom as the bank slid past. Margaret knelt at the engine room hatch; the torrid air, blasting through the small opening, smelled of wicked things: burned fuel, reeking oil and metal fierce with friction. Each cylinder stamped out its separate thud above the clanging and hissing. Otto lay in his corner, watching Lucy and the signal dial. She stood by the control lever and watched it too, frowning. Tim slept in the middle of the racket, crouched in a gangway like a drowsing ape, with Davey asleep in his arms. Margaret hated the idea of going down, so she yelled and yelled again. Lucy glanced up. The oily face smiled, and said something, and an oily hand gestured at the dial. Margaret nodded, beckoned and pointed forward. Lucy shrugged and left her post.
“Sorry,” said Margaret as her head poked out of the hatch. “Jo wants Tim to bring Otto on deck.”
Lucy nodded and stared across the choppy estuary. “Shouldn’t fancy living in these parts,” she said. “I’ll wake Tim.”
Margaret found the dustpan and brush and swept out the wheelhouse. When she threw the last splinters overboard she saw that they’d finished with hedges and fields and were moving between sidings and timber yards; and Heartsease was going much more slowly too.
“Are the bridges the same as the others?” called Jonathan. “One’s got a railway on it. You’ll have to land and open them.”
“There’s one high one, but I don’t remember the other,” said Margaret.
“Funny. . . . Anyway, there’s the high one — we can get under that. And there’s the other, and it’s open. Lord, that is a big tower!”
The huge, windowless column of concrete on the south side of the dock came nearer and nearer. The canal widened as it curved. Round the corner lay the big ship which had so astonished Margaret; Heartsease seemed like a dinghy beside it. Then, right across the
water, ran a low, dark line with a frill of railing above it in one place. The line was the quay at the bottom of the docks, and the frill was the guardrails for the narrow footpath on top of the lock gates. It was here the canal ended — and their escape too, if they couldn’t find how to open the lock gates.
IX
OTTO lay out on dock beside Scrub, as pale as plaster with his illness and long hiding from daylight. Tim knelt by him, bubbling worriedly — and Margaret thought that the paleness might also be pain, the pain of being heaved with ribs half-mended up a vertical iron ladder. But he smiled wickedly at her as she walked aft.
“Hi, Heroine of the Resistance,” he said. “I sure wish I’d taken a movie of you playing your bull, just to show the folks back home. You look like a girl back home, too, in that rig. Nice.”
Margaret felt herself flush, and glanced down at her primrose-yellow jersey and scarlet jeans. They made her feel like someone else.
“Pity your own folk can’t see you,” said Otto.
“Uncle Peter would whip me if he did,” said Margaret. “And strangers would throw things at me. Women mustn’t wear trousers — it’s wicked.”
“And what do you . . .” Otto began. “Hey! How do we know the Horse of the Resistance won’t step on me?” “He’s much too clever,” laughed Margaret. “Did it hurt a lot being carried up?”
“So-so,” he said, “but Tim . . . hold tight! He’s misjudged it!”
The tug swung suddenly, and then the whole length of it jarred as it thudded into the quay. Margaret was flung to the deck, almost putting her arm through the glass of the engine room roof. As she went down she saw Scrub prancing sideways towards Otto in a desperate attempt to keep upright; but when she rose he’d stopped, with his forelegs actually astride the sick man. Delicately he moved himself away.