Vince follows. He’s too vertical, pointing straight upstream. The hole begins to pull. He back — paddles, suddenly loses almost ten yards, but fights his way across with a huge expenditure of effort. Panting, relieved, he signals to Mandy to come across and join them. There’s room in the eddy for all four. They can regroup. As she looks across to him, Mandy’s face is grim and Vince guesses at once that she isn’t going to make it. The woman is hunched. Her posture betrays her nerves. She is here for the group, Vince is aware, for the companionship that expeditions like this can offer a single woman in middle age, for the photographs and fun.
Mandy’s first tentative stroke leaves the tail of the boat still anchored in the eddy. Before she’s halfway across, she’s lost at least twenty yards to the current. Barely breaking the surface, there’s a stone in the middle of the river here. She could rest the bow of her kayak behind it, take a break, decide what to do next. But she hasn’t seen. She isn’t thinking. She drifts against the stone sideways, paddling like mad. It surprises her. With the unexpected contact, the bow is shifted the other way, back to the left bank. She fights the shift, but half — heartedly. The river has got her now. Grey and bouncy, the current swirls towards a smooth black boulder by the bank where it piles up in a tense cushion before being forced back into the centre to plunge down the next drop. All this would be easy enough to negotiate if taken face on, but Mandy is pointing upstream. She is still trying to turn the boat back across the flow when the current pushes it sideways onto the boulder. Immediately she’s pinned, the underside of the kayak against the rock, the water crashing on the spray — deck.
Vince is watching all this from the safety of his eddy on the opposite bank, thirty yards upstream. He sees the woman try to brace her paddle against the oncoming water to keep her head up. He has a picture of the blue helmet, the orange paddle — blade. But it’s only a fraction of a second before she’s down. Now she will pull out and swim. She doesn’t. Arm in a sling, Keith is scrambling down the bank. But there are thick brambles between himself and the rock. He can’t get to it. Mandy is still under. Amal! Vince looks round. The boy is locked away from the stream by Vince’s boat. Vince looks for Phil. Incredibly, he is fooling around in the hole. He’s let his kayak be sucked in and is throwing the boat this way and that, tail up, tail down, in the spongy water. He hasn’t seen anything. He can hear no screams.
Amal is trying to force a way round Vince to the stream, but now Vince breaks in himself. He will get to her first. In one stroke he’s in the quick of it. The power of the current tosses the boat round. It’s a matter of seconds. He is bearing straight down on Mandy’s boat, still pinned upside down against the rock. The bank is to the right, the next rapid to the left. I have no idea how to do this, Vince thinks.
Keith is shouting something, but Vince can’t hear, can’t listen. Instead of fighting the pull of the current onto the rock, Vince speeds towards it, as if to spear Mandy’s boat as he goes down. Lean into it! Keith is yelling. Vince pays no attention. Just before he hits the submerged boat, he lets go the paddle with his right hand and throws his body towards the rock to grab the bow — handle of the boat. His arm is wrenched violently, but the boat shifts. It’s free. Dragged over, Vince thrusts his hand down on the bow of Mandy’s boat to bounce up and prevent himself from capsizing. Now he’s spun backward and dropping into the rapid. He’s just got both hands back on his paddle when he hits a stopper sideways and goes down. This time he rolls up without thinking, as if rolling in white water were the easiest thing in the world. Mandy is swimming. Keith has already got a line to her. Amal is chasing the upturned boat down the river. Exhausted, mentally more than physically, Vince pulls over to the bank.
The deck just wouldn’t pop, Mandy is repeating. There’s a note of hysteria in her voice. She is stumbling up on the rocks. Her body is shaking. The water was so powerful, it wouldn’t pop. I couldn’t get out. I was drowning. Thought I might have to take a swim there, Keith laughs. Stitches or no stitches. Then the woman insists on embracing Vince. You saved my life. Nonsense! Later they worked out that the whole crisis had lasted no more than twenty seconds. Nursing the pain in his shoulder, Vince understood he had booked himself a place on tomorrow’s trip.
The chair — lift begins a mile or so above Sand in Taufers. It took them up in threesomes, their feet dangling a few yards above the tall pines either side, the cables humming and clicking above them, the air cooling around their faces, the valley falling away dramatically behind. The kids giggled and took photos of each other. Amelia was quiet beside Tom. Max dangled Wally below his seat on a string amid shrieks of fake horror. Somebody had begun to sing ‘Inky Pinky Parlez — Vous’.
At the top, a large timber — built hostelry, flying the vertical red and white banner of the Tyrol, sits in a wide meadow hemmed in on three sides by even steeper slopes leading up to a ridge at almost nine thousand feet. But the youngsters really don’t want to walk. The sun has a sharper, brighter quality here. They could buy Cokes at the hostel, fool around and sunbathe. Since Bri can only hobble, we’ve all decided to keep him company, Max laughed. Keith and Mandy had stayed behind, to explore Bruneck, they said. The woman had needed a rest. So for the walk up to the glacier there were just Vince, Amal, Adam, Clive and Michela. Adam tried to persuade his son to join them. Risking nothing, the boy had survived the slalom course well enough. He doesn’t want to, Vince said softly. It was clear there was something going on between him and Louise. Adam insisted. It would do everybody good to stretch their legs after being cramped in the boat. Mark didn’t even reply now. He turned and ran after the others.
Then no sooner had the walkers set off up a path that zigzagged steeply through walls of flint, than Clive suddenly stopped to apologise to Adam. Michela didn’t expect it. The party was brought to a halt on the narrow path. I shouldn’t have hit you. A clouded look came over his handsome face. Dead right, you shouldn’t, Adam agreed. Then the instructor said, Forget it, but grudgingly, Michela thought. They climbed in single file up the steep slope under bright afternoon sunshine, and as they walked and she watched Clive’s strong legs in short trousers and his powerful back bending to the slope, she began to feel angry. You shouldn’t be apologising, she began to speak to him in her mind. He isn’t worth it. And you shouldn’t be wasting time, doing stupid, touristy things, taking groups up mountainsides. The kayaking was a mistake, she told herself now. If we aren’t to be happy together, what point is there in arranging these trips? She was thinking in English. What point for a man like Clive? Suddenly she understood that he must do something serious. That’s why he has never married. He is preparing himself. Michela knew that Clive had lived with two or three other women before her. He couldn’t marry because he must do something important. It’s crazy for him to lead ungrateful people up a mountain, when they just want to hang around at the rifugio and flirt and sunbathe. He must do something that changes the world. Yes. Oh, but it made her so furious that he could break off their relationship, he could stop making love, just like that, before there was really any need, and that he could do it without missing her body at all, without any sense of loss. Why did I have to find a saint? she complained. I’m his last temptation. You’re a saint, Clive. The voice in her head was louder now. So what are you waiting for? she demanded of him. It sounded like a scream. Whatever it is you have to do, do it!