The House Above the River (2 page)

“Thank God for that!”

Giles slowed down again, glancing at Phillipa as he did so. Her face was very white, and he cursed himself for the exaggerated note of relief he had not been able to keep-out of his voice.

“You go up in the bows with Tony,” he said, quietly. “Help him count the buoys till we turn off to port. It's only sand now, but I don't want to stick on it. After this reach we turn off, and then the tide will take us straight into the river. Nearly there, now.”

She gave him a wan smile and went forward to her husband's side. Giles checked his new course, praying that the fog would not thicken until they were safely in the river. These coastal fog patches could do anything. They came suddenly and unexpectedly as this one had, and they lifted just as unpredictably. Perhaps it was a clear, sunny morning in Tréguier. Perhaps there was no visibility there at all. They would soon know.

The fog might have been arranged to tantalise them. As they reached the river mouth it lifted almost completely, and they had a sudden lovely vision of Pen Paluch on their right, the houses climbing up the hill, the fishing boats lying at anchor, the green-gold fields beyond. On the other side, in the sun's eye, was the woody slope of the hill above the river, and the smaller village of Penguerrec clustered about the mouth of a little creek, with more fishing boats riding the gentle swell. But as they drove forward into the narrowing waters, trees, hills, villages, boats, and even the river itself, were swallowed up in a mist far denser than anything they had so far met. It wrapped them up completely, cold and wet as rain. They could not even see the full length of the yacht.

“Hell and damnation!” cried Giles, exasperated beyond measure.

His crew scrambled aft into the cockpit. Giles grinned at them ruefully.

“We're here,” he said. “We've only got to drop the hook where we won't dry out at low tide.
Only
!”

Tony went back to the foredeck to prepare the anchor and anchor chain; Phillipa stood by with the lead line, ready to take the depth of the water when Giles gave the word. From the way he had spoken she felt sure he knew every inch of this river. And anyway they were in. The great ranged rocks had not seized them on their groping passage. She felt great relief, and she was so tired she could hardly move.

“Something ahead,” called Tony, in an uncertain voice, breaking the silence.

“What sort of something, you clot?”

“Flat. I can't see.… Yes, I can. A landing-stage.”

“
Landing-stage
?” Giles put the engine into neutral, and while
Shuna
slid gently forward, searched the chart and Hasler's book. “I don't see any …”

“Bear away!” called Tony, “unless you want to ram it.”

The yacht swung away, and a minute later they slid past a neat well-kept little landing-stage of wooden planks, to which a smart, varnished dinghy and a small, white-painted motor launch were tied.

“Good enough,” Giles said, cheerfully. “Do your stuff, Pip. I'll go on a bit and turn and we'll stop as near that thing as we can make. This fog can't last for ever, and the day is still very young. We'll go on up to the town when it's cleared.”

He found a position where they were in the deep channel of the river, clear of the mud, and dropped anchor. The two men fixed the anchor chain, Phillipa gathered up the charts, torches, navigation aids, empty mugs and other remains of their passage, and took them below. She could hardly keep her eyes open, but she knew her duty was urgent, and set to at once to make breakfast. Tension had been too high on their approach through the rocks for any of them to think of it until now. She cooked a generous meal of bacon and eggs, and insisted upon the men going below to eat it hot, though they protested they had not finished tidying up on deck.

“It can wait,” she insisted, and for once Giles took this heresy meekly.

After breakfast, still wrapped in the stillness of the fog, but secure in the knowledge that they lay off the course of anything larger than a small fishing boat, they all turned in, and slept the undreaming sleep of effort rewarded.

Phillipa woke first. She and Tony shared the cabin, while Giles occupied a quarter-berth further aft, opposite the galley. Gathering her clothes together, she went forward into the fore-peak, moving noiselessly to avoid waking the two men. She dressed quickly, and climbed on deck through the fore-hatch, drawing in a quick breath of pleasure at what she saw.

It was now four o'clock in the afternoon, her watch told her. The fog had gone, and a brilliant sun was turning the sandy mud of the river bank to gold. The leaves of the trees beyond glinted and sparkled as they moved in a light breeze blowing in from the sea. Further off, on the same side of the river as
Shuna
, were the moored fishing boats they had seen for that brief instant as they came in. She could see now that they lay off a sloping hard, where rowing boats were drawn up, and beyond which steps and a sea wall led to a winding road, bordered by stone cottages.

It was the sort of scene she had looked forward to, never before having sailed on the Brittany coast. It was what Tony and Giles had raved about all the winter, planning this cruise.

Here it was, then, at last, reminding her of Cornwall or Devon, but with a character of its own, an exciting strangeness, that made her want to go ashore at once, to explore the village and meet the people, some of whom she could see, small in the distance, and slow moving, on the grey rock of the hard below the sea wall.

She turned to look in the other direction, up the river, and there was the landing-stage, fifty yards away, with the varnished dinghy and the gleaming white launch, the trees dropping to the bend of the river. The whole thing might have been a stretch of the Thames near Goring, she thought.

“Want to go ashore?”

Phillipa turned quickly and laughed.

“That stage looks terribly private,” she said. “I miss the ‘No landing' notice.”

Giles laughed.

“I don't see why we shouldn't use it, as it
doesn't
have a notice. It's a hell of a way back to Penguerrec.”

“Is that the village on this side?”

“Yes. Pen Paluch further seaward on the other bank. You can't really see it at the moment; it's straight into the sun.”

Phillipa screwed up her eyes and then looked away, dazzled.

“If we go ashore we could get some milk and bread. I've no fresh milk left, and I'm down to rock bottom in bread.”

“Right. You go and rouse out Tony. Tell him I want a hand getting the dinghy down into the water.”

Presently Phillipa and her husband went off to the landing-stage, the former taking a milk can and a large haversack for provisions. Giles watched them tip up and disappear among the trees, waving goodbye to him as they took what he decided must be a definite path up the hill.

When they had gone he turned to various small jobs on deck. These had been his excuse for staying on board, but they were not inventions. The sails, still wet from the fog, needed drying out. He spread the mainsail in the sun, and hoisted the jib to flap in the gentle breeze. He tidied up ends of rope, oiled the winches, tinkered for half an hour with the Stuart Turner, though it had given no trouble on this occasion, and finally, lighting a pipe, sat down in the cockpit to enjoy the sun and the scenery, and a sense of mild achievement.

A small grey fishing boat passed him, coming down river from Tréguier, making for the hard at Penguerrec. There were a man and a boy in it, who stared at him as they passed, but did not speak to him until he called to ask them if he was in a good position where he had anchored. The man nodded, and grinned widely. As he chugged on, Giles heard him say something in the Breton dialect to the boy, who shouted with laughter.

The tide that had carried them into the river early that morning, had turned at eleven, and was now near the bottom of the ebb. The fall was about thirty feet, so that the banks now seemed very high. The landing-stage, Giles saw, was built in three sections, one fixed, and two floating. As the latter sank with the water, iron ladders appeared, leading vertically from one to the next. The floating sections moved up and down on iron rings round posts, pontoon fashion. The ladders must be slimy and slippery when the water sank away from them, he thought, though by now they had dried in the sun. He understood why the boats fastened to the stage had been tied to the section furthest out in the river. This part was still floating, though the launch appeared to be aground.

Giles went below to sort out his charts and put them away. Presently he heard a shout, and going on deck saw Tony and Phillipa waving to him from the stage.

There was a girl with them. He saw that she was slim and tall, nearly as tall as Tony, and that she had fair hair, glinting in the sun like the leaves of the trees behind her. He was too far off to see her face clearly.

He stood up in the cockpit and waved back, hoping his crew had not asked the stranger aboard. He had come to Brittany to enjoy sailing and scenery and to get away from the exactions of his work. Not to begin a social round. He had no objection to visiting old friends on other yachts; he was sure to meet some of them in the course of the trip. But strange girls, provincial French at that, and on the very first day … !

Tony and Phillipa had some difficulty getting down the second ladder with the shopping. It seemed to be still very slippery. They had more difficulty getting the dinghy away from the stage. Their weight sank it in the mud, for the water was very shallow where they had tied up. The fair-haired girl climbed lightly down the ladder to shove them off, and then stood for a minute or two watching as they, moved away. Phillipa called goodbye, and the girl answered in an unmistakably English voice, and turning quickly, went back up both ladders and disappeared among the trees.

“Who was that?” Giles asked, when his crew were on board again.

“We met her in the village,” said Phillipa. “She's English.”

“So I heard,” said Giles.

“Her cousin owns the house—it's a small château, really, in the woods there. And the landing-stage is his. We ran into her first on the road to the village.”

“It was rather funny,” Tony explained. “We asked her in our very limited French if she knew where we could get milk and things, and she told us, also in French. Then a bit later, when we'd got everything in the village and were coming back, and had just turned off into the wood, we met her again.”

“She told us we were trespassing, and we tried to explain, but our French didn't run to it, and then she laughed and said she was English, too.”

“She allowed you to go on trespassing, I gather?” Giles suggested.

“Yes, indeed. She seemed quite pleased we'd come. She took us back up the road to the main gate of the house, and showed us a path from it that joins the one we took from the landing-stage, which incidentally peters out half-way up the hill. She came right down with us.”

“So I saw,” said Giles, sourly. A provincial French girl would have been bad enough, but a fellow-countrywoman was the end.

“You couldn't have seen very clearly,” said Phillipa, “or you wouldn't say it like that. She's terribly pretty, isn't she, Tony? Really, quite beautiful.”

“She most certainly is. I'd have asked her to come off for tea on board, only she wouldn't have been able to get back comfortably for several hours. I thought we were going to have to wait, ourselves. We three on board the dinghy would have stuck.”

“Tides have many uses,” said Giles.

Tony and Phillipa exchanged glances, but said nothing. The latter began to sort out the food she had bought.

Later in the evening, Giles said, “I suppose you thanked that girl for letting you use her stage?”

“Her cousin's stage,” said Tony.

“Same thing.”

“Not really. She doesn't live here. Only staying the summer.”

“Really? Had she any right, then, to give you permission to go through the grounds?”

Phillipa interrupted.

“The cousin and his wife are away in Paris. I imagine she's in charge. Until tonight, that is. She said they'd be back.”

She did not add that Susan Brockley had invited them all to the château for coffee in the morning. That could wait until the skipper was in a better mood.

“I see.” Giles's manner expressed total indifference. “Not that it matters,” he said. “We'll run up to Tréguier in the morning and have a look round and lunch at a place I know where they give you a damned good meal. Then on to Lézardrieux in the afternoon.”

But the next morning they woke to find
Shuna
wrapped round by a fog much denser than the one through which they had entered the river the day before. It lifted a little towards noon, and they could see the landing-stage dimly in the mist. But by then it was too late to carry out any of the plan Giles had put before them so confidently the night before.

“I'll have to do some more shopping,” said Phillipa. “We may be stuck here for days. Susan told us the fog banks often lie over the sea for a week at a time, when it's brilliant weather on land.”

Giles, who knew this only too well, merely said, “We'll row down to the hard.”

“But we can't see it.”

“We can find it.”

“What's the objection to the landing-stage?” Tony asked. “We've got permission.”

“Not from the owner.”

“If his cousin has given us leave I don't suppose he'll be surly about it. Why should he? Fellow-countrymen and all.”

The argument continued for a few minutes, but was settled when Phillipa said, “If we don't go soon we shall never get back in time for lunch. Anyway, the tide will be much too strong to row against corning back from the hard. So let's get going, and use the stage.”

She stepped down into the dinghy with the shopping bags and milk can, and the men followed. Tony took the oars and set off for the landing-stage. Giles only said, “The tide is flooding till twelve noon,” and left it at that.