The Stormy Petrel

  Well, I had asked for it. I left my cases parked on the quay, and made my way into the post office.

  Since the thrice-weekly visit of the ferry brought all the island’s mail and supplies, and the post office was very small, the place was crowded, and the postmistress, busily sorting through a pile of mail and newspapers, while exchanging two days’ news in Gaelic with the ferry’s master, had no glance to spare for me. The little shop had been arranged as what I have seen described as a mini-hypermarket, so I found a basket and busied myself with collecting what supplies I thought I might need for the next couple of days. I was called to myself by the echoing hoot of the ferry’s siren, to find that the shop had emptied of its crowd, and the postmistress, taking off her spectacles, was hurrying round to the store counter to look after the stranger.

  ‘You’ll be the young lady for Camus na Dobhrain? Miss Fenemore, was it?’

  She was a thinnish woman of perhaps fifty, with greying hair carefully arranged, and very blue eyes. She wore a flowered smock, and her spectacles hung round her neck on a cord. She had the beautiful skin of the islands, with hardly a wrinkle, except near the eyes, where the smile lines puckered the corners. She was not smiling now, but her look was full of a benevolent curiosity, and the soft island voice, with the lilt of the Gaelic moving through it like a gentle sea-swell, warmed me as palpably as if the sun had come into the dim and cluttered little shop.

  ‘Yes, I’m Rose Fenemore. And you are Mrs McDougall? How do you do?’ We shook hands. ‘And yes, I’m for the cottage that the Harris Agency advertised. Is that the one? I don’t understand Gaelic, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And how should you? Yes, indeed, that is the one. The English for it is “Otters’ Bay”. It is the only place on Moila that is to let. We’re not just a metropolis, as you see.’ She smiled, busying herself with my purchases as she spoke. ‘You’ll not have been here before, then? Well, if the weather stays fine you’ll find plenty of nice walks, and I’m told that the house at Otters’ Bay is comfortable enough these days. But lonely. You are by yourself, are you?’

  ‘Till Wednesday, at least. My brother’s hoping to come then.’ I gave her all she wanted to know. I was part of the week’s news, after all. ‘He’s a doctor, from Hampshire. He couldn’t get away when I did, so I came up on my own. Does the Wednesday ferry come in at the same time?’

  ‘It does. You have not put any firelighters in. You will find it is much easier to get your fire going with one of those. Are you used to a peat fire?’

  ‘No, but I’m hoping I can learn. Mrs McDougall, how do I get from here to the cottage? I’m told it’s about two miles. I can easily walk to do shopping and so on, but I’ve got a couple of suitcases here now, and I certainly can’t manage those.’

  ‘No worry about that. I saw your cases there, and Archie McLaren will have them into the Land Rover by this time. So will you perhaps be wanting a couple of bags, say, of coal to help with the fire? The house will be dry enough; there was a couple in it through the middle of May, and we have had good weather, but you would be better to stock up now for what next week might bring.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Thank you very much. Two bags of coal, then, please, and the firelighters, and – yes, I think I’ve remembered everything else. Oh, about milk and bread. Can one only get it fresh when the ferry comes over?’

  ‘We have fresh milk here from the farm, but you would be better to take some of the long-life with you. It’s a long walk from Otters’ Bay in the bad weather. Here it is. Two cartons, and it will keep a long time, even with no fridge. I don’t know if you have one over there . . . The bread comes with the boat. Will I keep you a loaf on Wednesday? And another at the weekend, or two then, perhaps? Mostly we make our own if we want it fresh. There, is that everything?’

  ‘I think so, thank you. How much is that, Mrs McDougall?’

  She told me, and I paid her. A young man, dark, short, burly, in a navy guernsey and jeans and gumboots, came in and lifted the coal bags into the Land Rover beside my cases. I picked up the carrier bag where the postmistress had packed my groceries.

  ‘I don’t imagine there’s a telephone at the cottage, is there?’

  ‘There is not. There is one here, and one at the House, and that is all there are. And the one at the House is cut off since the old lady died.’

  ‘The House?’ Somehow, the way she said it gave it a capital letter.

  ‘The big house. It’s not far from you, half a mile along the shore, maybe. Taigh na Tuir, they call it. That means House of the Tower. There is a small island off the coast just there, with the remains of a broch on it. I suppose that is the tower that the House was named for. It was built as a shooting lodge in the old days, and then the Hamiltons bought it, and lived there most summers, but old Mrs Hamilton, she was the last of them, died this February, so it’s empty now, and likely to stay so.’ She smiled. ‘It’s not everyone wants the kind of peace and quiet we have on Moila.’

  ‘I can imagine. Well, I’m all set to enjoy it, anyway. And I don’t really want a phone, except to make sure about my brother’s coming. So I’ll walk over here tomorrow and telephone him, if I may. What time do you shut?’

  ‘Half past five, but if you want the telephone, then come to the house door. No, it’s no trouble, it’s what everyone does, and the cheap calls are after six anyway. Just you come. That’s it, then.’ She picked up the second carrier bag and saw me to the door with it. ‘Archie will see you into the house, and if there’s anything more that you need, you will let him know. And I’ll look for you maybe tomorrow. Goodbye. Look after the lady, now, Archie.’

  Archie was understood to say that he would. I got in beside him, and we set off. The Land Rover had seen better days, and once we had left the village street and taken to the track – it was little more – that wound up from the village towards the moorland, conversation was difficult. After one or two tries, met by a nod or a non-committal noise from Archie, I gave up, and looked about me.

  I suppose that there are very few places on Moila from which one cannot see the sea. The track, rough and strewn with stones, climbed, at first gently, through sheep-cropped turf bristling with reeds and thistles and islanded with stretches of bracken. Once we were out of sight of the village there were no trees except, here and there, thorns dragged sideways by the wind and shorn close by the weather. The track grew steeper, and twisted. Now to either hand was heather, at this season still dark and flowerless, except where patches of the early bell heather splashed their vivid purple across grey rock. The whins, those perpetual wonders, were blazing gold, and everywhere over the stretches of grass between the bracken spread the tiny white and yellow flowers of lady’s bedstraw and tormentil. The very lichen patching the grey rocks was bright mustard-gold, like flowers. Away to the right I saw the flat gleam of the loch.

  Nothing could be heard above the noise of the engine, but I saw a lark spring skywards out of the heather, and another, a few minutes later, sink to its rest. A pair of grey-backed crows – hooded crows – flew across the track, and then, as the Land Rover topped the rise and started down into a narrowing glen, a buzzard soared up in leisurely circles, to be lost over the crest of the moor.

  Then we were running gently downhill beside a burn, towards the distant gleam of the sea. Here, in the shelter that the glen gave from the Atlantic gales, the trees crowded close, and reasonably tall. Oaks, mostly, but there were beeches and ash trees, with birch and hazel everywhere, tangled with brambles and wild honeysuckle. Along the edge of the burn were thickets of alder and hawthorn standing knee-deep in foxgloves.

  The track levelled out, the glen widened, and there below us was the bay.

  Otters’ Bay was very small, a pebbled crescent backed by a storm beach of smooth boulders. Thick black curves of dry seaweed marked the reach of the tides. To our left a high cliff cut off the view, and to the right a lowish headland jutted well out into the sea. Narrowing my eyes against the Atlantic glitter I could see the line of
a path that climbed from the bay and on over the headland to the west. And beyond the crest of the headland, hazy with distance, the shape of a hill, smooth and symmetrical, like a drawn-up knee.

  Then the Land Rover came to a halt beside a rough jetty made of stacked boulders tied down with fencing wire, and there, backed against the cliff a short way above us, was the cottage.

  3

  The cottage was bigger than I had expected. Originally it had been built on the usual pattern, a tiny square hallway, with doors to either side leading into the two ‘front’ rooms, and a steep enclosed stair up to the twin bedrooms under the pitch of the roof. But someone, fairly recently, had done a job of conversion; the two downstairs rooms were thrown into one, with the staircase half dividing them. The sitting room, to the right, had a pleasant fireplace, and was adequately, if not well, furnished with a couple of easy chairs, a low table, and a doubtful-looking sofa pushed back against the staircase wall. The ‘kitchen-diner’ on the other side boasted the usual cupboards and what looked like home-made worktops, and a table near the window with four chairs drawn up to it. On the worktop stood an electric kettle and a toaster, and these were the only ‘mod cons’ to be seen.

  A door at the rear led to a narrow room which ran the width of the cottage and had originally been the ‘back kitchen’ or scullery and wash-house. Under one window was a modern sink and draining-board, with an electric water-heater fixed to the wall above it. Beside this stood the cooker, installed, apparently, by someone who distrusted the island’s electricity supply; it was a gas cooker, and had been placed there to be within easy reach of the cylinders of Calor gas that stood just outside the window under a lean-to, beside a stack of peat. That was as far as modernisation had gone: the other end of the scullery was just as it had always been, with the old deep sink for laundry, served by a single, presumably cold tap, and in the corner beyond it the copper for ‘the boil’. A deep cupboard, clean and empty, would serve as a storeroom; another, beside the copper, held cleaning tools. No fridge, but the place would be cool even in summer; those windows never saw the sun. Peering out, I could see that there must once have been a garden or kail-yard between the cottage and the cliff; now the tumbledown wall enclosed nothing but a tangle of brambles and wild roses almost hiding a garden hut. Alongside the wall a narrow path wound between waist-high nettles to a small structure whose function one could guess at. The house agent had assured me that a bathroom and lavatory had been installed upstairs above the scullery; looking at those nettles, I hoped he had told the truth.

  ‘I will take your cases upstairs for you,’ said Archie McLaren.

  ‘No, don’t bother – well, thank you very much.’

  I dumped the carrier bags of groceries on the kitchen table and started to unpack them. I heard him moving about upstairs, and it was a minute or two before he came down again.

  ‘I was just’ – he pronounced it ‘chust’ – ‘taking a look. She had Robert McDougall over from Mull last year to do the bedrooms up. That is Mary McDougall’s cousin from Dervaig. He always does a good job. I had not seen the upstairs rooms since they were finished, but I remember the job they had with the bathroom, and with this.’ He looked about him with interest. ‘It was very different here when the family had it. It was Alastair Mackay lived here, that was the gardener at the House. They only moved away two years ago, to the mainland, and then Mrs Hamilton did the place up for letting. When they took the old oven out, I brought the cooker down myself, and the fittings for the kitchen units. The timber and the bath and such came across by boat into the bay there, and a fine job they had dragging them up to the house.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised that the cottage belongs – belonged? – to Mrs Hamilton. Mrs McDougall told me that she had died recently.’

  ‘That is so. She was a nice lady, and when her husband was alive he was a great one for the shooting and the fishing, though there is not much fishing here on Moila. He used to go north for the salmon every year, to the mainland, but she would stay here. She liked it, and then after Colonel Hamilton died she never went away at all, even in the winter. But this last winter was too much for her, poor lady.’

  ‘What do you suppose will happen to the House – the big house, I mean – now?’

  ‘I do not know. I think that there is a relation abroad somewhere, but that is all. It will be sold, I think, but who will buy it?’

  ‘Someone who loves peace and quiet, I expect.’

  ‘An ivory tower?’

  I had been reaching up to put packets and tins into one of the wall cupboards, but this startled me into turning. ‘A what?’

  ‘Ivory tower. It was what Mrs Hamilton used to say. She was a writer, a real one who got books printed. When she was younger she used to write books for children. She said it was a poetic way of saying you wanted to be left alone.’

  ‘I see. Yes, I see. I did wonder. House agents aren’t usually poets.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Only that the house agents called it that when they advertised it. Rather clever of them. That’s what caught my eye. I wonder if they’ll try to sell the cottage too, or if they’ll go on letting it?’

  ‘It has only ever been let in the summer, and no one has been here yet this year except the people last month, folk from Cornwall, I think. They came with a boat, and did all their shopping in Tobermory, so we did not see much of them at all.’

  ‘I suppose a boat would make sense if one was here for long. Do you have a boat?’

  ‘I do. If you should ever want to go fishing, or maybe to take a look at the bird islands, you will just let me know?’

  ‘I certainly will. Oh, I nearly forgot. Did you unload the coal?’

  ‘I did. It is out the back where the peat is kept. Just beside the door. Will I get some in for you now? No bother. Do you know how to make a fire with the peats?’

  ‘Mrs McDougall asked me that,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. I can but try. I might have to ask for help with that as well.’

  ‘You will be welcome. But you will find plenty of kindling and dry wood down on the beach. Then give the peats plenty of air. If once you get it going, it is a good fire.’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Thanks very much, Archie. Now, what do I owe you?’

  I paid him and he took his leave, but in the doorway he hesitated, then suddenly, as if the question had forced itself out in spite of good manners, asked: ‘Are you sure you will be all right here, all on your own? What are you going to do? It’s a lonely spot, and if it’s walking you want, Moila is such a small island, and once you have been round it, you have seen it all. There is nothing special about Moila, except maybe the birds on the outer islands, and they will be away soon.’

  I smiled. ‘I wanted an ivory tower. I’m a writer, too, you see.’

  ‘Well, now . . . A writer, is it? Yes, I do see.’ His tone and look said, clearly, that everything – any possibly lunacy – was now fully explained.

  I laughed. ‘I don’t intend to write all the time, though there is some work I want to do. But I’m not really planning to be a hermit; my brother’s coming over soon, and I know he’ll want to go to the islands, so we’ll be in touch. Thanks again.’

  I watched the Land Rover grind its way up the track till a turn of the glen hid it from sight, and in a few more moments the sound of its engine had faded to silence.

  Silence? The wash of waves on the pebbled beach, the crying and calling of the wheeling gulls, the silver chain of sound from a lark above the clifftop, and, as a final coda, the distant, breathy note of the ferry’s siren as she drew away towards the west. The last link gone. Solitude. Complete and unassailable solitude. The sported oak.

  I shut the front door gently, a symbolic gesture which shut out what sounds there were, and went upstairs to see what that nice lady, Mrs Hamilton, had provided in the way of beds.

  The beds were reasonable, the bedrooms tiny, tucked under the slope of the roof, and charming, with white paint, flowery wallpaper, a m
inimum of furniture, and of course that marvellous view right out to the south-west. Storm-direction, I supposed, and spared a thought for the winter; but in June, surely, all would be well? The windows were tightly shut, and the rooms smelled stuffy, but not damp, though the drawers of the chest stuck as I tried to pull them open. The solitary ornament in my room was a faded copy of a Biblical scene by Gustave Doré, sinners drowning in a rough sea. Rather too pertinent, I thought, for the place’s original dweller, who must have gone down to the Atlantic in a small boat on many a stormy night. But today the real sea looked wonderful, silken, with a gentle running glitter where the tide moved, and here and there the tilt and flash of white wings in the sunlight as the gulls sailed out from the cliffs.

  It would do. It would do very well. I would finish unpacking, have a look at the cooker and set things ready for supper, then I would take a walk out to look at the sea, and gather kindling in case the evening turned chilly enough for a fire.

  There was, as Archie had promised, plenty of good kindling among the piled jetsam on the beach. I soon had an armful, then clambered up off the shingle to the better walking of the salt-washed turf where the burn, dividing into deep peaty runnels, cut its way to the shore. Sea-pinks were thick everywhere, with here and there patches of small shingle glistening with broken shells. An oystercatcher screamed from somewhere at the end of the beach, warning its young. Not far away I caught, from the corner of my eye, the flickering movement as a ringed plover scudded and ran among the sea-pinks. It went silently, dodging and hiding; it must have left its nest at my approach.

  Any thought I may have had about finding the nest for Crispin’s camera left me then. Gradually, over the last few minutes, I had become conscious of a growing discomfort, a tickling, burning sensation in the face and hands, and even in my hair a stinging sort of unpleasantness that suddenly became insupportable.

  Midges. I had forgotten about the midges. The curse of the Highlands. The infinitesimal and unbeatable enemy. The serpent in paradise.