A Dream of Wessex (15 page)

Here, in Blandford Passage itself, was the narrowest gap between England and Wessex Island. During the seismic disturbances of the previous century, the valley of the River Stour had been transformed from a shallow pass through the North Dorset Downs into a deep, narrow chasm, bounded on each side by crumbling chalk cliffs. To the north lay the wide Somerset Sea, which stretched from the Quantock Hills on Wessex Island to the Mendip Hills in England, and opened out into what had been the Bristol Channel. This triangular sea, whose southerly funnel was the pass over the remains of Blandford Forum, took the effect of the rising tide an hour before the sheltered waters of Dorchester Bay, which opened into the English Channel far to the east. Twice every day, as the level of the Somerset Sea rose, a tidal bore moved towards the south. Between the Quantocks and the Mendips its presence was imperceptible; as it passed the Wessex coastal town of Crewkerne it could be clearly seen as a wave of water some two or three metres high; as it reached Child Okeford, at the head of the narrow Passage, it was rarely less than twenty metres high, and in the seasonal spring tides had been known to reach fifty metres or more.

When the wind blew from the south-east the wave became a deadly rolling breaker, bursting out of the Passage in a spectacular cascade of foaming surf. It was this unique phenomenon that had first attracted visitors to the region, and it was this that had been the cause of the development of tourism on Wessex and the mainland.

Child Okeford, set high on the safety of Hambledon Hill, had become the centre for wave-riders, although it was Dorchester that attracted the visitors, with its night-life and beaches, its casino and mosque.

When Harkman left the launch, and had unloaded his equipment with the help of stewards, he went to the nearby pavilion to change. The wave-riders were obliged to follow many safety regulations, not the least of which was that all riders had to be out of Child Okeford harbour fifteen minutes before the wave arrived. This was so that the boom could be lowered over the harbour entrance, to prevent a potentially catastrophic inflooding of water as the wave passed. In any event, the riders needed to be ready in the centre of the Passage, well before the wave arrived.

Harkman struggled into his new wet-suit, pulling it on over his swimming trunks. The assistant in the shop had measured him for fit, but even so it felt tighter than it should. The Party had introduced new safety measures for riders, and there was more padding inside the suit than in the one he had worn when wave-riding in his youth. When he had finally got it on he went outside, needing help with the breathing-apparatus. This had to be checked by a steward to ensure it conformed to the regulations, and he was asked if this was to be his first ride; in that case he would have needed to have an approved supervisor following him, at an extra cost of ten thousand dollars.

The skimmer’s engine started smoothly, and after a few seconds to allow it to warm up, Harkman stepped down on to the broad surface of the craft, balanced himself, then accelerated smoothly across the harbour. As he passed through into the open Passage he saw that there were already some thirty or more riders ahead of him, with others following; it was more crowded than he would have liked, but still manageable.

While riding out he tried a few more practice turns, executing each without the ignominy of a fall. It was one thing to practise in the sheltered water of a creek by Maiden Castle, it was another to do it with the Okeford stewards watching from the shore.

He remembered his first fall, while learning to ride a skimmer. The throttle of the engine had remained open, and the little craft had skipped off into the wide stretches of the Somerset Sea on its own. Three days had passed before an army helicopter had spotted and retrieved it.

Another memory: flat and cool in the mind. Had it really happened?

A rider passed him, going in the same direction.

‘Thirty metres!‘ he shouted, but with the noise of the engine, and the helmet of his suit covering his head, Harkman barely heard him.

‘What?’ he shouted back, but the other rider had gone on. A little later, another rider passed the same information. This time Harkman heard him and, entering into the spirit, shouted it to another when he got the chance. Someone must have had a wave-height estimate from the stewards.

He looked towards the north, but there was as yet no discernible sign of the bore. Harkman remembered from the years before that distances were often deceptive, and that the only reliable guide was to watch the walls of the chasm for the signs of the swell.

His muscles were tense, so in the few minutes he had left he went through the rote of his old training, flexing his arms and legs, trying to make his body as supple as possible. He couldn’t help but be tense with expectation; in the past he had suffered many falls on the wave, and he knew too well the violence of the breaker.

The safest position for an uncertain rider was in the centre of the channel, but it was there that most of the riders congregated. Harkman liked freedom of manoeuvre, and so he moved to the Wessex side, knowing that if the wave was higher than he could safely ride, the smoothness of the cliffs on that side would keep the surface of the swell relatively stable while he moved back to the centre.

In the distance there was a loud explosion: the cannon fired to warn shipping, but the sound which, by tradition, started the riders jockeying to and fro in anticipation of the wave. Harkman glanced again towards the north, and this time he saw the wave as a dark line across the smooth sea. It was already nearer and higher than he had expected. He turned the skimmer round in one last practice flip, still not entirely at ease with the new equipment, but knowing that at this late stage there was no avoiding the wave.

Moments later there came the sound of breaking water, and Harkman saw the swell creaming against the base of the cliff.

He opened the throttle and moved sideways, away from the cliff and towards the centre of the channel; after a few metres he flipped round, went back again. Then he felt the swell lifting him, so he accelerated forward and across the wave, staying in front of it but feeling the board tipping up from behind. The wave was rising quickly, as it raced into the constricted width of the Passage.

After a few seconds Harkman saw that he was moving perilously close to other riders, and so he did a standard reversal flip, turning in the skimmer’s own length and moving back the other way. He was still racing away from the wave, but gradually it was catching up with him so that he was riding on its forward face.

For the moment the wave was unbroken, except where it rushed against the wall of the cliff, and here it roared and rebounded in white fury. Harkman flipped the board again, moving back towards the centre, and as he did so he found he was looking directly across the breadth of the wave, a terrifying mound of rising water, rushing through the Passage. Many of the riders at the centre had reached the crest too soon, and were leaning forward on their skimmers, racing their engine to keep abreast of the speed of the wave. Many fell or slipped back, were lost to sight behind the ever-rising wave. Harkman was about halfway up the wave now, still racing forwards to avoid the crest, but zig-zagging broadly to time it as accurately as possible.

He flipped back, away from the other riders, but found at once that the wave had taken him much further into the Passage than he had thought, and that the cliff wall was only a few metres from him. Badly shocked, he flipped again, and with a quick movement of his hand turned on his air-supply.

The mouth of the Passage was ahead: a rocky, jagged pass into the open waters of the bay. It was less than a hundred metres away. Now was the time to reach the crest!

He throttled the engine back, and allowed the skimmer to ride diagonally up the wave. The gradient was steep, and already in places white spume was blowing up from the crest. Harkman was unpractised: he reached the crest too soon, before the wave had started to curl, and for an instant he slipped behind. He gunned the engine to its maximum, and regained the crest.

The wave had reached the mouth of the Passage, and it curled.

Harkman saw for an instant the spectacle that only riders of the wave ever saw: the calm stretch of the bay, grey under the cloudy sky, reaching from Dorchester in the west to the distant hills of Bournemouth in the east; the island of Purbeck was a black mound ahead.

As the wave curled the crest thinned and shot Harkman forward. He slid forward and down, falling through to the shimmering slope of rising water beneath. The practised wave-rider would anticipate, would try to land on the slope, and accelerate down the wave to safety before it crashed on top of him. But Harkman was taken unawares, and the skimmer landed tail-first. For an instant he thought he had recovered balance, but the skimmer was turning to one side ... and the dark tunnel of the immense pipeline wave was closing above him.

He closed his eyes, and forced his limbs to relax.

He was thrown from the board with a violence that almost knocked him senseless, and then he was in a black bedlam of noise and pressure and gigantic currents, tearing him up, down, sideways.

The wave was collapsing, bursting into Dorchester Bay in a swathe of white foam that stretched for more than a kilometre. Harkman, inside the turmoil of raging water, plunged by the weight of the wave to the depths of the bay, was crushed and turned and wrenched. He made himself breathe steadily through his mask, tried not to resist the pressures on his body, knowing that the violence would subside in the end.

And at last it did, and Harkman surfaced, his head surrounded by the brilliant yellow of the flotation bags that inflated from his air-supply the instant he saw the sky.

Half an hour later, the stewards’ launch from Winterbourne found him, and he was plucked out of the water. Only seven other riders had made it as far as the bay, and as the launch ploughed back through the now navigable tidal flood towards Child Okeford, Harkman learned from the regular riders that the wave had been satisfactory, but not as big as usual.

Harkman was shivering, but it was not from cold, for the clouds had cleared at last and the sun was shining hotly.

As soon as he got back to Dorchester, he went to see Julia at the stall, and they arranged to meet again in the evening. He was so exhilarated by his ride that it was impossible to work, and spent the day in his office restlessly.

During the afternoon he heard that his skimmer had been recovered undamaged from the bay, and that there was a salvage fee to pay.

Marilyn had come back from the Castle for lunch, and Julia shared a table with her. She was glad of the break from the emotional stresses of the hour before. She saw Paul sharing a table with Eliot and Mander at the far end of the room, and Paul had his back towards her. It was as if someone had turned an electric fire away from her, so that the radiance was directed elsewhere.

The dining-room was in the old part of Bincombe House, and it was a high, stately room with small leaded windows. Relics of the past were attached to the walls: crossed pikestaffs, old shields, axes. In two glass cases were assortments of coins and pottery taken from archaeological digs in the grounds, and half of one wall was covered by an ancient brocade, protected by transparent plastic sheeting.

Marilyn filled her in on the gossip and news that had accumulated while she had been inside the projector. The gossip didn’t interest Julia much - living with two separate identities of her own provided her with enough involvements without wondering about the private lives of others - but she always asked about it, because Marilyn was funny when she gossiped.

The news was more involving, and more depressing. Ever since the British troops had withdrawn from Northern Ireland, the Loyalist extremists had thrown in their lot with paramilitary Scottish independence groups, and for the last two years an intense urban bombing campaign had been conducted in English cities. For two of the three weeks Julia had been inside the projection there had been a lull, but on the day the Scottish Assembly had been surrounded by British troops - to protect the elected representatives, according to Westminster - two major bus-bombs had been set off, one in London, one in Bristol. At the same time, a bomb had exploded inside a rush-hour London Underground train. The casualties had been frightful. Public transport in every English city had come to a standstill as a result. There was other news too: another war in the Middle East, a dollar crisis, a royal pregnancy.

Julia listened with a feeling of growing detachment; the projection did that for her, and she knew that the others felt it too. Although they were sometimes accused of running away from the real world, the fact was that once they had lived in Wessex the participants became distanced from real life, and there was no need to hide from something insubstantial.

In another sense, though, Julia welcomed Marilyn’s talk about matters outside, because it took her mind off Paul. She was feeling stronger about that, and as Marilyn chatted on Paul’s malign presence faded.

After lunch they reassembled in the lounge, and they were helping themselves to more coffee when John Eliot was called away to the telephone. While they waited, Paul offered her a cigarette, and she refused it. Others were present; still no sign passed between them that they were anything other than recent acquaintances.

When Eliot came back he seemed preoccupied, and poured himself a coffee from the sideboard without saying anything.

Then, as he sat down, he said: ‘That was Trowbridge at the Castle. Andy and Steve have just come back from Wessex.’

‘Did they locate Harkman?’ Don Mander said.

‘Apparently, yes. But they couldn’t retrieve him.’

‘Did something go wrong?’

‘I’ve only had a partial account, because they’re still recovering. But from what I gather, Harkman didn’t respond to the mirrors.’

‘But that’s impossible,’ Mander said. ‘Are they sure?’

‘It’s what they said.’