Atlantic Fury (11 page)

I hesitated, not knowing what he expected. ‘I've only seen him for a few minutes.'

‘Long enough to fix yourself a trip to Laerg.' There was a bite to his voice, a resentment almost, as though he disliked the thought of my going to the island. ‘You were there when he cancelled that flight. How did he seem?'

‘A little nervous,' I said. ‘But in the circumstances …'

‘Nervous! He's scared. Scared he'll make a wrong decision. In fact, he's scared of making any decision. Scared, too, of leaving it all to me. He's a bloody old woman with a mind like an adding machine. And his wife's one of the most beautiful women I've ever met.'

‘Are you married?' I asked.

‘Yes, but it didn't work out any better than yours. Lasted longer, that's all. And I'll never get shot of her. She's a Roman Catholic.' We passed the church and a moment later drew up by the hotel. He came down to the loch-side with me and helped strike the tent and carry my stuff to the Land-Rover. It only took ten minutes or so and then we were driving back. It was as we topped the rise and sighted Northton that he said, ‘D'you know a man called Lane – a Canadian?' He tried to make it casual, but the tightness in his voice betrayed him.

‘I've met him,' I said. ‘Once.'

‘And that's why you're here.'

‘Partly – yes.'

He braked so suddenly that the engine stalled and I was flung forward in my seat. ‘Why do you want to go to Laerg?' The tension in his voice flared to a higher pitch. ‘What's behind it? What are you expecting to find there?'

‘Peace. Subjects to paint.' And I added, ‘I've always wanted to go to Laerg.'

‘But why now? You've managed very well for over twenty years … Now, suddenly, you have to go there. Why? What did Lane tell you?'

‘It's nothing to do with Lane.'

‘Then what the hell is it?' He had gripped hold of my arm and was almost shaking it. ‘As soon as I was away on that flight you went running to Standing and somehow persuaded him to ship you out on an LCT. What did you tell him?'

‘Nothing about you,' I said. ‘Just that my father came from Laerg and that I wanted to paint there.'

‘That all?' He was staring at me, the pupils of his eyes almost black and strangely dilated. And then he let go my arm. ‘You could have waited.' His voice sounded suddenly tired. ‘I'd have got you to Laerg in time – if you'd asked me.'

Was he hurt that I hadn't? ‘I was going to ask you,' I said. ‘But you went off on that flight, and then, when I saw Colonel Standing …'

‘Standing's not running this operation. I am. And I'm not having you or anyone else going out there and making a nuisance of themselves.' He shifted in his seat, watching me, his mouth twitching and a gleam of perspiration on his forehead. ‘After all these years. Bit of a shock, isn't it?' He was smiling now, trying to recapture the old charm. But somehow the smile wasn't right. ‘Be frank with me. You always were – in the old days. We never hid anything from each other.'

‘I'm not hiding anything from you now.'

But he didn't seem to hear. ‘What did Lane tell you? Come on now. He told you something that sent you scurrying up here with a sudden, urgent desire to get to Laerg.'

‘He guessed who you were. Suspected it, anyway. He's been interviewing survivors …'

‘I'm talking about Laerg. What did he say about Laerg?'

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘He's discovered you were on that raft and he's put two and two together …'

‘Then why are you so anxious to get out to Laerg?'

There it was again. Laerg – Laerg! Why did he keep harping on Laerg? ‘He never mentioned Laerg.'

‘No?'

‘Just listen to me, Iain,' I said. ‘I came up here with one object in mind – to find out whether you were still alive or not. Having done that, I thought it was a good opportunity to see the island. I've been wanting to go to Laerg for two years now, ever since I came back from the Aegean. I want to paint there. Just to paint, that's all. Nothing else.'

But I don't think he believed me even then. His face had a stony look as though he'd shut his mind to all reason, and I had a sudden feeling there was tragedy here, a deep, wasting wound that fed on his nerves. It was a moment of intuition, I think – blood calling to blood and the sense of his desperation very strong.

‘Well, you're not going.' He said it flatly, more to himself than to me. And then, as though suddenly aware of what he'd, said and the need for some explanation: ‘This is a military operation. The landing craft are fully committed. It's no moment for shipping tourists out to the island.'

‘I'm not a tourist,' I said, resenting the implication. ‘Not where Laerg is concerned.'

‘You are from the Army's point of view. I'll have a word with Standing.' And he got the engine going again and we drove down into the camp, neither of us saying a word. He dropped me off at the officers' quarters. ‘Room forty-two,' he said as I got my gear out of the back of the Land-Rover. ‘Maybe I'll have time for a drink with you before dinner.' He was Major Braddock again and we were strangers. I watched him drive off, wishing now that I'd made more of an effort to discover what it was that was eating into his soul, for this wasn't the brother I'd known. This was quite a different man – a man driven and desperate. I had that feeling, and it scared me. Later, I said to myself. Later I'll find out.

I didn't know that there wasn't going to be a later, that time was running out and I'd missed the only chance I'd get of being alone with him before it was too late.

Room 42 was the same as Cliff Morgan's, a standard pattern and standard furniture – bed, bedside table, bureau, chair, wardrobe, all in natural oak, an armchair, wash basin and the rusted steel windows looking out on to a drab patch of coarse dune grass. I dumped my things and went for a walk, heading north from the main gate, away from the camp and the landing apron. Ten minutes and I was amongst the dunes, alone in a world that hadn't changed since the first man set foot in the Outer Hebrides. To my left Chaipaval reared heather and grass-clad slopes to the clouds. To my right the mountains of Harris stood black and sombre, their stormbound peaks shrouded in rain. I came to the last sanded bluff and ahead of me was a great stretch of sands, glistening wet, and a line of dunes standing like a breakwater between them and the sea. The island of Taransay rose misty-green beyond the dunes. There were sheep sheltering in the hollows they had worn along the edge of the bluff and below a river of water flowed towards the sea, fish marking the smooth surface with little whorls.

It was a wild wet world and I walked there until it was almost dusk, thinking of Laerg and my brother Iain, the wind on my face bringing back to me the salt taste of Ardnamurchan and my youth. The picture in my mind was of a bare, wood-lined room and the two of us, sprawled on the floor, gazing with rapt attention at the craggy, bearded face of my grandfather softened by the peat fire glow – old Alasdair Ross at the age of eighty-five or thereabouts telling two boys of the wonders of Laerg, describing the strange remote island world that had been his life and speaking all the time the Laerg brand of Gaelic he'd taught us to understand. It was a picture etched for all time in my mind. It had stood between me and the fear of death as I'd gazed down at the waxen face and the pitifully shrunken body in the big bed; it had comforted me that cold day when I stood shivering and crying bitterly beside the open grave. I could hear the rattle of the first frozen clods on the coffin lid still, but the face I remembered was the live face, vital and glowing in the firelight, the soft voice, the sea-grey eyes beneath the shaggy tufted eyebrows.

And here I stood now at the threshold of his world. In twenty-four hours I should be ashore on Laerg. Would it match my dreams, or had the old man so coloured the picture with his longing to return that he'd spoiled it for me? I wondered; wondered, too, about Iain. Was the picture the old man had painted as vivid to him as it was to me? Was that why he'd been so determined to make the flight? Or was it something else – something to do with the tension I'd sensed in him?

I had a drink with him that night in the Mess, but there were others there and I couldn't probe. In any case, his mood didn't encourage it – he had a black look on his face and was barely civil to anyone. And after dinner, Mike Ferguson drove me down to Rodil. By then the weather had closed in again, the rain slanting in the beam of the headlight. ‘The forecast's not too good,' he said. ‘You may be out of luck.'

I thought for a moment he was breaking it to me that permission for me to sail with the LCT had been withdrawn. But then he added, ‘Stratton may decide not to go.'

‘But if he does …?'

‘Then Movements will get you on board in time. Colonel Standing's orders.' And he added, ‘Major Braddock wanted him to cancel your trip. Said visitors were a damned nuisance. But the Old Man dug in his toes.' He seemed preoccupied and I didn't like to ask him what had been said. In any case, it didn't matter. It wouldn't solve the mystery of my brother's extraordinary attitude. That was something deep-buried in his past, and I sat, puzzling over it, silent as the road unwound in the headlights, my interest in Laerg more urgent than ever.

The Fields' croft was just below Rodil church. It was stone built with small windows and looked like a cow byre, the thatch curving in dim silhouette and roped against the wind, each rope-end weighted with a stone. Field met us at the door, dressed now in grey flannels and an open-necked bush shirt. ‘Come in, my dear fellows.' The gentleness of his voice struck me again, strangely at odds with the hard lines of his extraordinary hatchet features. ‘Marjorie's seeing to the coffee,' he told Ferguson. ‘You'll find her in the kitchen.' He took me through into the living-room which was spartan and furnished only with the bare essentials. A peat fire smouldered in the grate. ‘We live very simply, as you can see.' But they had electricity, and despite its bareness there was an intimacy, a cosiness about the room that made me feel instantly at home. ‘Marjorie usually makes coffee about this time. Would that be all right?' There was a note of apology in his voice as though he thought I might have preferred whisky. ‘I imagine this is the first time you've seen the inside of a black house?' And he went on quickly to explain that the word derived from the fact that the original Hebridean croft had virtually no windows and a peat fire in a central hearth that was never allowed to go out. ‘The chimney was just a hole in the roof and smoke blackened the interior.' He smiled. ‘I should know, I was born in one – not far from here, on the west coast of Lewis.' He was talking quickly, putting me at my ease, and all in the same soft, gentle voice.

He sat me down by the fire, gave me a cigarette, went on to talk about crofting, the subsidies, land disputes. The religion, too, and drunkenness, so that the impression left in my mind was one of a feckless, hard-drinking, lazy people. ‘It's the climate,' he said. ‘The remoteness of the islands. It's as insidious as a disease.' He smiled gently as though he himself were infected by it.

‘It must be a pretty hard life,' I murmured.

‘Aye, and they're the salt of the ear-rth.' There was a twinkle of humour in his eyes. ‘Being one of them myself I understand them. But I've been outside the islands most of my life. It makes a difference. And coming back …' He shrugged. ‘One would be more sympathetic if they made a greater effort to help themselves. Take this place; here's a dwelling ideally suited to the climate, the materials all ready to hand – but the status symbol up here is something constructed by a builder out of breeze-blocks. You try and paint the interior of any black house that's still occupied. They wouldn't let you cross the threshold.'

‘Why not?' I asked.

‘Because they're ashamed of them now.' He was staring into the glowing peat, his long legs stretched half across the bearskin rug. ‘Islanders should never have contact with the mainland. It's destroying them here just as it's destroying the people of the out-islands. Laerg would never have been evacuated if the island had remained in isolation. It had a perfectly sound economy until the outside world brought to their doorstep the illusion of an easier life. They had their sheep – the sheep the Vikings introduced a thousand years ago – and they had the birds. In its heyday Laerg supported a population of over two hundred. They salted away huge numbers of puffins each year, splitting them open like kippers and hanging them up to dry in the peat smoke. Puffins and guga – that's the young of the solan goose. They had the down of the birds for bedding, the oil for lamps. They carded their own wool, wove their own clothes. Peat was there for the digging and the wind dried it in the loose stone cliets that litter the slopes of Tarsaval. They didn't need money.'

I knew all this – from my grandfather, from the books I'd read. What I wanted to know was how much the island had been changed by the Army. ‘Not a great deal,' he said. ‘There's a concrete ramp built on the storm beach in Shelter Bay for the LCTs. There's the camp, of course. That's just below the village, near to the Factor's House. And there's the High Road. That's probably changed the island more than anything else. It starts at the camp, skirts the Bay just back of the beach, climbs Keava in three hairpins, then up the ridge to Creag Dubh where the radar station is. There's a spur, too, that runs out to the Butt of Keava overlooking Sgeir Mhor. I can show it to you on the Ordnance Survey, if you're interested.'

The door opened and Marjorie Field came in; Ferguson followed with the coffee tray. ‘Talking about Laerg,' her father said.

‘Laerg?' She smiled. ‘Everybody's always talking about Laerg, and I'm not allowed to go there.' She turned to me. ‘I owe you an apology, don't I? You
are
a painter. I checked.'