Swing, Swing Together

CHAPTER 2

“It couldn’t have been easier, could it?” said Molly, already unfastening buttons.

“Like peeling an orange,” said Jane.

“You say the funniest things, Jane! Peeling an orange! Just when we’re about to-” Harriet stopped in midsentence.

Molly had stepped out of her dress and was standing naked in front of her. So was Jane. They could not have been wearing anything under their dresses.

“Aren’t you ready?” asked Molly, with a slight implication of censure.

“My underclothes. I didn’t think to leave them off.” It was out of the question to ask them to wait while she struggled several minutes more with stockings and stays. “I’ll join you as soon as I’m ready.”

“Very well, then. We probably would get cold waiting.”

She watched as they stepped carefully off the bank, Jane markedly taller than Molly. In the water, reflected moonlight faintly underscored the areas of their anatomy nearest the surface. It occurred to Harriet what a silly spectacle they presented. With less enthusiasm she lifted her day-gown over her head.

The conversation that presently carried across the water did little to salve her wounded feelings.

“Is she still undressing?”

“It doesn’t surprise me. Harriet had a very proper upbringing. She wouldn’t dream of coming out without her drawers on. I’m surprised she wasn’t wearing a hat.”

This provoked a peal of laughter from Jane. “The one with the hummingbirds-the one she wears to church? Imagine taking to the water in that, without a stitch on underneath!”

So this was their idea of a companionable dip. Harriet would have put on her dress again and marched straight back to the house if it were not certain to become the principal topic of breakfast conversation next morning. No, she would not give them the chance to say she had taken fright at the last minute. She was going to demonstrate that a proper upbringing was no constraint on a truly adventurous spirit. She started unfastening her tapes with determination.

The river looked another place by night. The ranks of beeches set back on both sides which were such a feature by day made no impression at all, except when a breeze stirred the leaves. Instead the water provided the spectacle, exhibiting a fragmented and elongated moon across its width and so marking the limits of the banks.

Harriet’s shape, too, was defined against the shimmering moonlight. Naked now, she still had the well-cared-for look of her class, a figure unquestionably cultivated on three good meals a day; perhaps the hips were too rounded for perfection, but her waist was trim and her bosom claimed attention with a sportive bob as she waded towards the centre of the river.

“Here she comes!” Molly announced. “Get your shoulders under quickly, Harriet. Someone might be watching!” This suggestion had the intended outcome. Harriet surged into the deeper water with the suddenness of a life-boat, remembering just in time to keep her hair from getting wet. The Thames was colder than she expected and the mud on the river bottom unpleasantly soft to the feet, not in the least like the sand of Bognor Regis, where she had bathed from a machine the previous summer. But once the initial shock was over, she found the temperature of the water quite tolerable. She pushed forward with her arms and took her feet off the bottom as if she was swimming. She was not really a swimmer, but she enjoyed the sensation of weightlessness in the water. Better than that, she had the delicious satisfaction of defying the Plum in as flagrant a manner as she could imagine. She drew her hands down her body to reaffirm her nakedness.

“Awfully jolly, isn’t it?” said Jane, at her side. “Like water nymphs. Do you think we could tempt a young man in here and drown him?”

“Don’t be so morbid,” called Molly, from closer to the centre of the river. She was able to swim several strokes and she wanted the others to be in no doubt of the fact.

“Let’s surprise her,” whispered Jane. Before Harriet had time to consider what was in prospect, her hand was taken and she was tugged towards the centre. She felt the current pressing her from the right.

“I can’t swim.”

“I won’t let go of you,” Jane promised. “It doesn’t shelve much. We’ll approach her from behind and tap her on each shoulder.”

It was the kind of trick Harriet had half-expected the others to play on herself. She allowed Jane to steer her into deeper water. She could touch the mud with her toes, no more. They manoeuvred themselves behind Molly, who was facing down-river. The current carried them effortlessly towards her. Each of them stretched out a hand as they closed on her.

At the contact, she turned, laughing and poked playfully at them. “I knew what was going on,” she said. Then, with a change of expression so sudden that they might have mistaken it for a delayed reaction if she had not at the same instant taken her hand out of the water and pointed behind them, she screamed, not a piercing scream, more of a gasp, but devastating in its timing, that split second after their trick had appeared to fail.

Harriet looked over her shoulder and saw the cause of Molly’s alarm.

They were approaching steadily downriver. Three men in a boat, and a dog, keeping watch from the prow.