* * *
By the end of dinner I was overcome once more by fatigue, or jet-lag or whatever you like to call it, and using my energetic day tomorrow as an excuse, I said good night to the others, and went to bed where I immediately fell sound asleep.
I awoke, some time later, to the sound of the wind that Gibson had promised us, nudging at the house, whistling under my door, whipping up the waters of the loch into small waves which broke and splashed against the shingle. And, above the sounds of the night, I heard voices.
I reached for my watch, saw that it was not yet midnight, and listened again. The voices became clearer and I realized then that they belonged to my grandmother and Sinclair, and that they were out on the lawn below my room, doubtless taking the dogs for a turn around the garden before locking the house up for the night.
“… thought he’d aged a lot.” That was Sinclair.
“Yes, but what can one do?”
“Pension him off. Get another man.”
“But where would they go? It’s not as though either of the boys were married, with a home to give them. Besides, he’s been here for nearly fifty years … as long as I have. I couldn’t get rid of him just because he’s getting old. Anyway, he’d be dead in two months without a job of work to do.”
I realized, uncomfortably, that they were talking about Gibson.
“But he’s not able to do this particular job any longer.”
“Now, what grounds have you got for saying that?”
“It’s obvious. He’s past it.”
“As far as I’m concerned, he’s still perfectly adequate. It’s not as though he were expected to run a lot of highly-powered shoots. The syndicate is—”
Sinclair interrupted her. “That’s another thing. It’s utterly impractical letting off a superb moor like this to one or two local businessmen from Caple Bridge. What they pay you doesn’t even begin to cover Gibson’s keep.”
“The one or two local businessmen, Sinclair, happen to be my friends.”
“That’s beside the point. As far as I can see, we seem to be running some sort of charitable institution.”
There was a pause, and then, coldly, my grandmother corrected him. “I seem to be running some sort of charitable institution.”
The iciness of her voice would have silenced me, but Sinclair seemed impervious to it, and I wondered how much of his courage was the Dutch variety, bolstered by postprandial brandies.
“In that case,” he said, “I suggest that you stop. Now. Pension Gibson off and sell the moor, or at least let it to a syndicate that is able to afford to pay a reasonable rent…”
“I have told you already…”
Their voices faded. They were walking away, still deeply in discussion; they went round the corner of the house, and I could hear them no longer. I found that I was lying rigid in my bed, miserable at having been forced to hear what was obviously not intended for my ears. The thought of them quarrelling made me sick, but worse was what they quarrelled about.
Gibson. I thought of him as he used to be, strong and tireless, and a mine of countryman’s lore and wisdom. I remembered him, endlessly patient, teaching Sinclair to shoot and fish, answering questions, letting us tag along at his heels like a pair of puppies. And Mrs Gibson, who had spoiled and petted us, bought us sweets and fed us scones hot from her oven, dripping with the strong yellow butter that she churned herself.
It was impossible to reconcile the past with the present—the Gibson I remembered and the old man I had seen today. And harder still to realize that it was my cousin Sinclair who spoke so glibly of getting rid of Gibson, as if he were a smelly old dog, and the time had come at last to have him painlessly put down.
7
I awoke again, drawn from sleep by some subconscious alarm. I knew it was daylight. I stirred and opened my eyes, and a man was standing at the foot of my bed, watching me, cold-eyed. I let out a gasp of fright, and sat up with my heart pounding, but it was only Sinclair, come to wake me.
“It’s eight o’clock,” he said. “We have to leave at nine.”
I sat rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, giving myself time to let the panic run out of my veins. “You gave me the most dreadful fright.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to … I was just going to wake you up…”
I looked up again, and this time saw no menace, simply the familiar figure of my cousin, arms crossed on the end of my bed, tip-tilted eyes dancing with amusement. He wore a faded kilt and a big ribbed pullover, with a scarf knotted at the neck. He looked clean and brushed, and smelt deliciously of the after-shave he had slapped on his face.
I scrambled into a kneeling position and hung out of the open window to inspect the day. It was perfect, bright, clean, cold, the sky cloudless. I said, in wonder, “Gibson was right.”
“Of course he was right. He always is. Did you hear the wind in the night? And there’s been a frost, soon all the trees will be turning.”
The loch, blue with reflected sky, was flecked with small scuds of white foam, and the mountains opposite were no longer veiled in mist, but clear and sparkling, bruised with great sweeps of purple heather, and in the morning’s crystal air, I could trace every rock and crack and corrie that led to their swelling summits.
It was impossible not to be elated by such a day. The uncertainties of the night had gone with the darkness. I had heard what was not intended for my ears. But in the clear light of morning, it seemed perfectly possible that I had been mistaken, had misunderstood. After all, I had not heard the beginning of the discussion, nor the end … and it was wrong to make any sort of a judgement when I was in possession of only half the facts.
Relief at having so easily shed my private worries made me suddenly enormously happy. I jumped off the bed, and went, in my nightdress, to find some clothes, and Sinclair, his mission successfully accomplished, went downstairs to start his breakfast.
* * *
We ate it in the kitchen, warm and snug by the Aga. Mrs Lumley had fried sausages and I ate four, and drank two enormous cups of coffee, and then I went and found an old rucksack, and we packed it with lunch: sandwiches and chocolate, apples and cheese.
“Do you want a Thermos?” Mrs Lumley wanted to know.
“No,” said Sinclair, still filling himself with toast and marmalade. “Put in a couple of plastic mugs, though, and then we can drink out of the river.”
There was the hooting of a car horn from outside, and presently Gibson emerged through the back door. He wore his sagging greenish tweeds, the knickerbockers enormous around his skinny calves. On his head was the old tweed hat.
“Are you ready?” he asked, obviously not expecting that we would be.
But we were. We gathered up waterproof anoraks and the rucksack of rations, bade goodbye to Mrs Lumley, and went out into that glorious morning. The air was icy inside my nose, cut deep into my lungs, made me feel as though I could jump over the house.
“But aren’t we lucky?” I crowed. “It’s the most perfect day.”
And Gibson said, “It’s all right,” which, being a Scotsman, was the most enthusiastic comment he could muster.
We piled into the Land-Rover. There was room for the three of us in the front, but Gibson’s dog looked nervous and in need of company, so I chose to sit in the back with her. To begin with, she wheeked and was restless and worried, but after a little became used to the lurching of the car and settled down to sleep, with her soft, velvety head across my shoe.
Gibson took the road to Braemar by way of Tomintoul, driving south over the mountains and running down into the gold and sunlit valley of the Dee at about eleven o’clock. The river was in spate, deep and clear as brown glass, winding through fields and farmland and great stands of tall Scotch pine. We came to Braemar, and drove through it, and out the other side, and on for another three miles or so until we came to the bridge that crosses the river and leads the way to Mar Lodge.
There we stopped and all got out, the dog was given a
little run, and Gibson went to fetch the key of the forestry gates. Then we all went into the bar, and Sinclair and Gibson had beer, and I was given a glass of cider.
“How much farther?” I wanted to know.
“Another four miles or so,” Gibson told me. “But the road is verra rough, maybe you’d be better in the front with us.”
So I abandoned the dog, and went and sat in the front between the two men, and the road was scarcely a road at all, simply a bulldozed track, deeply rutted, and used by the Forestry Commission. Every now and then we would pass a team of foresters, working with huge chain-saws and tractors. We waved, and they waved back, and sometimes had to back their great lorries off the track so that we could pass. The air was filled with the piney smell of trees, and when at last we came to the little lodge, which is used for climbers and weekend expeditions, and got out of the Land-Rover, stiff and aching from the ride, there was the most immense quiet. The forests, the moor and the mountains were all about us, and only a distant trickle of water, and the soughing of the pines far above us, broke the silence.
“I’ll meet you at Loch Morlich,” said Gibson. “Do you think you can make it by six o’clock?”
“If we don’t, wait for us. And if we’re not in by dark, get a call through to the Mountain Rescue.” Sinclair grinned. “We’ll stay on the path, so it should be perfectly easy to find us.”
“Don’t go turning your ankle over,” Gibson warned me. “And have a good day.”
We said that we would. We watched him get back into the car, and turn and drive off the way we had come. The sound of his engine died away into the immensity of the morning. I looked up at the sky, and thought, not for the first time, that Scotland seems to have more than its fair ration of sky … it sweeps and soars and appears to reach to infinity. A pair of curlews flew over and in the distance I could hear the baa-ing of sheep. Sinclair smiled down at me. He said, “Shall we go?”
We walked, and Sinclair led the way, and I followed him up a path that ran alongside a burn set deep in rushes. We came to a solitary sheep farm, set about with wooden pens, and a dog came out to bark at us, and we passed the farm, and went on, and the dog retired to its kennel, and silence fell again. There were, every now and then, small patches of colour, harebells blowing, and huge purple thistles, and the dark stain of heather, humming with bees. The sun climbed up into the sky, and we peeled off our sweaters and tied them around our waists, and the path leaned upwards against the hill, and we climbed through trees and Sinclair, ahead of me, started to whistle under his breath. I remembered the tune: “Mairi’s Wedding”; we had sung it as children, after tea in the drawing-room, with Grandmother playing the accompaniment on the piano.
“Step we gaily, on we go,
Heel for heel and toe for toe,
Arm in arm and row on row
All for Mairi’s wedding.”
We came to a bridge and a waterfall, and the waterfall was not brown, but green, the colour of Chinese jade, plunging twenty feet or more into a cauldron of pale rock. We stood on the bridge and watched it, an arc of water bright as a jewel, translucent and shot with sunlight, curving down to the boiling pool, and ringed by a miniature rainbow. I had never seen anything so lovely. Over the roar of the water I said, “Why is it that colour? Why isn’t it brown?” and Sinclair told me that it was because the water here dropped fresh from the limestone peaks, and so had not become stained with peat. And we stayed for a little, until, he said that we had no time to waste, and must be on our way.
For encouragement, we sang again, each vying with the other at remembering words. We sang “The Road to the Isles”, and “Westering Home”, and “Come Along”, which is the best marching song of all, and then our path began to climb, leading up and over the shoulder of a great mountain, and we stopped singing because we needed all our breath. The ground was thick with old heather roots and very boggy, and with every step dark mud oozed on either side of my shoes. My legs started to ache, and my back; I found that I was short of breath, and, although I would set myself the goal of this summit, and then the next, it seemed there was always another, waiting beyond. It was very disheartening.
And then, just as I was giving up hope of ever getting anywhere, there appeared, ahead of us, a black tooth of a mountain, jagged tip piercing the blue of the sky, and sheer face dropping a thousand feet or more to the foot of a narrow brown valley.
I stopped and pointed. “Sinclair, what’s that?”
“The Devil’s Peak.” He had a map. We sat, and he opened it and flattened it against the wind and identified the surrounding peaks. Ben Vrottan and Cairn Toul, Ben Macdui, and the long ridge that led to Cairngorm.
“And this valley?”
“Glen Dee.”
“And the little burn?”
“The little burn, as you call it, is the mighty Dee itself, in its early stages of course.” And indeed it was ludicrous to identify this modest stream with the majestic river we had seen earlier on in the morning.
We ate some chocolate and started off again, mercifully downhill, and now we had joined the long path that leads to the Lairig Ghru itself. It wound ahead of us, a scribble of white through the brown grass, climbing gently to a distant point on the horizon where the mountains and the sky seemed to meet. We walked, and the Devil’s Peak towered ahead of us and over us, and then fell behind. We walked and were alone—really alone. There were no rabbits, no hares, no deer, no grouse. No eagles. Nothing broke the silence. No living creature stirred. There was only the sound of our own footsteps, and Sinclair’s whistling.
“Plenty herring, plenty meal,
Plenty peat to fill her creel
Plenty bonnie bairns as weel
That’s the toast for Mairi.”
Presently a house came into view, a stone bothy tucked into the foot of the hill on the opposite shore of the river.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a refuge hut, for climbers or walkers to use in bad weather.”
“What sort of time are we making?”
“Good time.”
After a little, “I’m hungry,” I told him.
He grinned back at me over his shoulder.
“When we reach the hut,” he promised, “we’ll eat.”
* * *
Later we lay supine, cushioned in blowing grass, Sinclair with his head pillowed on his sweater, me with my head pillowed on his stomach. I stared up at the empty blue sky and thought that to be with a cousin was a strange thing—at times we were as close as brother and sister, but at others there was an unease between us. I told myself that it was to do with no longer being children … with the fact that I found Sinclair enormously attractive, and yet this could not wholly explain an instinctive restraint, as though, somewhere in the back of my mind, a bell was warning danger.
A fly, a midge, some sort of a bug landed on my face, and I brushed it away. It landed again. I said, “Darn it.”
“Darn what?” came, sleepily, from Sinclair.
“A fly.”
“Where?”
“My nose.”
His hand came down to brush away the fly. It rested against the curve of my jaw and stayed there, his fingers cupping my chin.
He said, “If we go to sleep we’ll wake to find Gibson and the entire mountain rescue team come thundering through the pass to find us.”
“We won’t go to sleep.”
“How can you be so sure?”
I did not reply, I could not speak about my inner tensions, the tightening of my stomach at the touch of his hand … the fact was that I did not know if this tightening was caused by sex or—fear? It seemed an extraordinary word to use in connection with Sinclair, but now the conversation that I had heard last night came surfacing up out of my subconscious, and I worried at it again, like a dog with an old and unsavoury bone. I told myself that I should have made a point of seeing my grandmother before coming out this morning. One look at her face, and I would have known the true lie of t
he land. But she had not appeared before we left, and if she was sleeping then I did not want to disturb her.
I shifted uncomfortably, and Sinclair said, “What’s the matter? You’re as tense as a string of wire. You must have a secret worry, some sort of a guilt complex.”
“What would I have to be guilty about?”
“You tell me. Leaving Poppa perhaps?”
“Father? You must be joking.”
“You mean you were quite happy, shaking the dust of Reef Point, California, off your pretty heels?”
“Not at all. But Father, at the moment, is more than well provided for, and not in the least worthy of a guilt complex.”
“Then it must be something else.” The ball of his thumb moved lightly over my cheek. “I know, it’s the love-lorn lawyer.”
“The what?” Now, my amazement was genuine.
“The lawyer. You know, old pawky-Rankeillour himself.”
“Quoting Robert Louis Stevenson will get you nowhere … and I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” But of course I did.
“David Stewart, my love. Do you know, he couldn’t keep his eyes off you last night? He watched you all through dinner, with a lusty glint to his eye. I must say, you were a fairly toothsome spectacle. Where did you get that eastern-looking outfit?”
“In San Francisco, and you’re being ridiculous.”
“Not ridiculous at all … honestly, it stuck out a mile. How do you fancy the idea of being an old man’s darling?”
“Sinclair, he’s not old.”
“I suppose about thirty-five. But so dependable, my dear.” His voice took on the honeyed tones of some desiccated dowager. “And such a nice boy.”