Wilt in Nowhere

Chapter 18

Harold Rottecombe reached the boat-house to find the brilliant plan he had devised to save having to cut across the fields to Slawford wasn’t going to work. It was clearly out of the question. The river, swollen by the downpour that had driven Wilt to the whisky bottle, swirled past the boat-house in full spate, carrying with it branches of trees, empty plastic bottles, a whole bush that had been swept from the bank, someone’s suitcase and, most alarmingly of all, a dead sheep. Harold Rottecombe eyed that sheep for a moment–it passed too quickly for him to dwell on it for long–and instantly came to the conclusion that he had no intention of sharing its fate. The little rowing boat in the boat-house wouldn’t drift downstream; it would hurtle and be swamped. There was nothing for it. He would have to walk to Slawford after all. And Slawford was ten miles downriver. It was a long time, a very long time since Harold had walked ten miles. In fact it was quite a long time since he had walked two. Still, there was nothing for it. He wasn’t going back to the house to face the media mob. Ruth had got them into this mess and she could get them out of it. He set off along the river bank. The ground was soggy from the torrential rain, his shoes weren’t made for trudging through long wet grass and, when he rounded the bend in the river, he found himself confronted by a barbed-wire fence that ran down to the water’s edge. It stood in two feet of water where the river had overflowed. Harold looked at the fence and despaired. Even without the rushing water he would not have attempted to climb round it or over it. That way lay castration. But several hundred yards up the fence there was a gate. He headed for it, found it locked and was forced to climb painfully over it. After that he had to make several detours to find gaps or gates in hedges and the gaps were always too narrow for a man of his size to squeeze through while the gates were invariably locked. Then there was the barbed wire. Even the hedges that would have looked attractive on a nice summer day turned out on closer inspection to be festooned with barbed wire. Harold Rottecombe, Member of Parliament for a rural constituency and previously a spokesman for farming interests, came to detest farmers. He’d always despised them as greedy, ill-informed and generally uncouth creatures but never before had he realised the malicious delight they obviously took in preventing innocent walkers from crossing their land. And of course with so many detours to make to find gates or something he could get through, and parts of fields that were flooded, the ten miles he’d dreaded looked like becoming more like thirty.

In fact he never reached Slawford.

As he staggered wearily along he cursed his wife. The stupid bitch had been raving mad to set the dogs on those two bloody reporters from the _News on Sunday_ instead of being tactful. He was just considering what he would do to her and coming to the conclusion that short of murder she had him by the short and curlies, when it began to rain again. Harold Rottecombe hurried on and came to a stream which led into the river, and trudged up it looking for a place to cross. Then his sodden left shoe came off. With a curse he sat down on the bank and discovered his sock had a hole in it. Worse still his heel was blistered and there was blood. He took the sock off to have a look and as he did so (he was thinking of tetanus) his shoe rolled down the bank into the water. The stream was flowing fast now but he no longer cared. Without that damned shoe he’d never get to Slawford. In a frantic attempt to get his hands on it before it was swept away he slid down the bank, landed painfully on a sharp stone and a moment later was flat on his face in the water and struggling to get up. As the water carried him down his head hit a branch that hung down over the stream and by the time he reached the river he was only partly conscious and in no condition to deal with the torrent. For a moment his head emerged before being sucked under by the current. Unnoticed, he passed below the stone bridge at Slawford and continued on his way to the Severn and the Bristol Channel. Long before that he had lost more than his political hopes. The late Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement swept on his way towards the sea.