Atlantic Fury (6 page)

But my attention was concentrated on her features, which were unusual: the dark colouring, the wide mouth below the strong, slightly beaky nose. I knew there were islands up here where Nordic blood had mixed with the Celt to produce blue eyes and dark hair and skin, and because it interested me, I said, ‘You're an islander, aren't you?'

‘I live here.'

‘No, I meant you come from one of the islands up here.'

‘My father does.' The blue eyes staring at me and again that sense of hostility. ‘I'm Marjorie Field.' She said it defiantly, adding that she worked part-time at the hotel. She seemed to expect some reaction from me, and then she began asking me a lot of questions – my name, where I had come from, how long I intended to stay. At the time I put it down to the natural curiosity about strangers in an isolated community.

The fact that I was an artist seemed to surprise her. ‘You mean you paint – for a living?' We were at the top of the glen then and she concentrated on her driving until the road straightened out, running down to the flat desolation of buildings scattered round marsh and loch; ugly modern dwelling houses, impermanent-looking against the misted bulk of the hills beyond. ‘Artists don't come here at this time of the year,' she said quite suddenly. ‘And they don't live in tents, Mr Ross – not when it's cold and wet.'

‘Do you know many artists?' I asked.

‘A few.' She was tight-lipped now, her manner cold, and I had a feeling she didn't believe me. We drove through Leverburgh in silence. This, according to my guide book, had been the village of Obbe until Lord Leverhulme renamed it as part of his grandiose scheme for making it the centre of the west coast trawler fleet. Beyond the village she turned to me and said, ‘You're a newspaper man, aren't you?' She said it flatly, in a tone almost of resignation.

‘What makes you think that?'

She hesitated, and then she said, ‘My father is Charles Field.' She was watching me out of the corner of her eyes and again she seemed to expect some reaction. ‘He's the Education Officer at Northton.' And then she slowed the car and turned her head. ‘Please. Won't you be frank? You haven't come up here to paint. It's something else – I can feel it.'

Her reaction was disturbing, for this was something more than ordinary curiosity. We had reached the top of the next glen and there was the sea and a cloud-capped mountain, half-obscured by rain. To distract her I asked, ‘Is that Toe Head?'

She nodded. ‘The hill is called Chaipaval.'

It seemed bedded on sand, for the tide was out and the bay to the north was a dull, flat gleam running out to dunes. Dunes, too, formed the neck of land that made Toe Head a peninsula. But much of the sand-bunkered area had been bulldozed flat to make a camp and a landing place for helicopters. Seaward of the camp was a wired-off enclosure with blast protection walls. The whole effect – the tarmac apron, the tight-packed ranks of the hutted camp, the flat square of the launching pad – it was raw and violent, like a razor slash on an old oil-painting. ‘And that's the rocket range, I suppose?'

She nodded. ‘Surprised?' She gave me a quick, rather hesitant smile. ‘It always seems to surprise people. They've read about it in the papers, but when they actually see it …' And she added, ‘Of course, being near the road, it's much more obvious than the old range down on South Uist.'

In a few minutes now we should be at the camp. ‘Has a Major Braddock been posted up here?' I asked.

She nodded. ‘He arrived a few days ago.' And after a moment she said, ‘Is that why you're going to Northton?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I'm hoping he'll be able to get me across to Laerg.'

‘Laerg? Then it isn't my father … You really are a painter.' She gave a quick, nervous little laugh – as though laughing at her own foolishness. ‘I'm sorry, but, you see, we get so few people at Rodil – only fishermen, a few tourists, the occasional bird-watcher. Why aren't you in the Mediterranean, somewhere warm and sunny? I never knew an artist come to the Hebrides, not for the winter.' Her voice ran quickly on as though by talking she could conceal from me that the presence of an unexpected visitor had scared her. ‘You're Scots, aren't you? Perhaps that explains it. But an artist wanting to go to Laerg – it's so unusual. And the birds will have flown. No gannets or puffins. They've all left now. What are you going to paint?'

‘The island,' I said. ‘Laerg as the islanders knew it at the worst time of the year.'

She nodded. ‘I've never seen it. But Mike says it can be very beautiful, even in winter.'

We were in Northton now and I could see what it had been before the Army had come, a line of small crofts clinging to an old existence in a land as old as time. It was an anachronism now, pitiful-looking against the background of the camp with its fuel dump and its M.T. workshops and the barrack lines of its huts. ‘Where will I find Major Braddock?' I asked.

‘His office is in the Admin, block. But he may not be there. He's supposed to be flying to Laerg today.' She drew up at the main gate where the model of a rocket stood and a notice board read: Joint Services Guided Weapons Establishment. ‘The Admin. block is down there on the left,' she said. I thanked her and the little estate car drove off along a concrete roadway drifted with sand that led to another part of the camp.

There was no guard on the gate. I simply walked straight in. The huts stretched in two straight lines either side of a concrete road; sand everywhere and the rain driving like a thick mist. A staff car and two Land-Rovers stood parked outside the Admin. block. There was nobody about. I went in. Still nobody, and a long passage running the length of the hut with glass-panelled doors to the offices leading off it. I walked slowly down it, feeling oddly nervous, conscious of being an intruder in a completely alien world. Small wooden plaques announced the contents of each closed box of an office: RSM – W. T. Symes; Commanding Officer – Colonel S. T. Standing; 2nd-in-Command – Major G. H. Braddock (this lettered in ink on a paper stick-on); Adjutant – Captain M. L. Ferguson.

I stood for a moment outside Braddock's door, unwilling now to face the awkwardness of this moment. Lane and his snapshots seemed a whole world away and I felt suddenly foolish to have come so far on such an errand. How could the man possibly be my brother after all these years? But I had an excuse all worked out, the excuse that I wanted to visit Laerg. He could only refuse and at least I'd know for certain then. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I pushed it open. There was nobody inside and I had a feeling of relief at the sight of the empty desk.

There was a sliding hatch in the partition that separated this office from the adjutant's and I could hear a voice talking. But when I went into the next office Captain Ferguson was alone at his desk. He was speaking into the telephone. He wore battledress, a ginger-haired youngster with a square freckled face and a Scots accent that took me back to my Glasgow days. ‘… I can see it is … Aye, well, you check with the Met. Office … Damned if I do. You tell him yourself. He's down at Leverburgh, but he'll be back soon. Eleven at the latest, he said, and he'll be mad as hell when he hears … Laddie, you haven't met the man. He'll be across to see you … Okay, I'll tell him.' He put the phone down and looked at me. ‘Can I help you?'

‘My name's Ross,' I said. ‘I wanted to see Major Braddock.'

‘He's out at the moment.' He glanced at his watch. ‘Back in about twenty minutes. Is he expecting you?'

‘No.'

‘Well, I don't know whether he'll have time. He's very busy at the moment. Could you tell me what it's about?'

‘A private matter,' I said. ‘I'd like to talk to him personally.'

‘Well, I don't know …' His voice doubtful. ‘Depends whether this flight's on or not.' He reached for his pad. ‘Ross, you said? Aye, I'll tell him.' He made a note of it and that was that. Nothing else I could do for the moment.

‘Could you tell me where I'll find Cliff Morgan?' I said. ‘He's a meteorologist at Northton.'

‘Either at the Met. Office or in the bachelor quarters.' He picked up the phone. ‘I'll just check for you whether he's on duty this morning. Get me the Met. Office, will you.' He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘There are two of them there and they work it in shifts. Hello. That you, Cliff? Well now look, laddie, drum up a decent forecast, will you. Ronnie Adams is on his way over to see you and he doesn't like the look of the weather … Yes, Himself – and he'll raise hell if the flight's off. Okay. And there's a Mr Ross in my office. Wants to see you … Yes, Ross.'

‘Donald Ross,' I said.

‘Mr Donald Ross … Aye, I'll send him over.' He put down the phone. ‘Yes, Cliff's on the morning shift. You'll find the Met. Office right opposite you as you go out of the main gate. It's below the Control Tower, facing the landing apron. And I'll tell Major Braddock you're here as soon as he gets back from Leverburgh.'

I wished then that I hadn't given my name. But it couldn't be helped. I zipped up my windbreaker, buttoning it tight across my throat. It was raining harder now and I hurried out through the gate and along the road to the hangar. Pools of rain lay on the parking apron where an Army helicopter stood like some pond insect, dripping moisture. The bulk of Chaipaval was blotted out by a squall. Rain lashed at the glistening surface of the tarmac. I ran for the shelter of the tower, a raw concrete structure, ugly as a gun emplacement. Inside it had the same damp, musty smell. The Met. Office was on the ground floor. I knocked and went in.

It was a bleak dug-out of a room. Two steps led up to a sort of dais and a long, sloped desk that filled all the window space. The vertical backboard had a clock in the centre, wind speed and direction indicators; flanking these were schedules and code tables, routine information. The dust-blown windows, streaked with rain, filtered a cold, grey light. They faced south-west and the view was impressive because of the enormous expanse of sky. On the wall to my right were the instruments for measuring atmospheric pressure – a barograph and two mercury barometers. A Baby Belling cooker stood on a table in the corner and from a small room leading off came the clack of teleprinters.

The place was stuffy, the atmosphere stale with cigarette smoke. Two men were at the desk, their heads bent over a weather report. They looked round as I entered. One of them wore battledress trousers and an old leather flying jacket. He was thin-faced, sad-looking. His helmet and gloves lay on the desk, which was littered with forms and pencils, unwashed cups and old tobacco tin tops full of the stubbed-out butts of cigarettes. The other was a smaller man, short and black-haired, dressed in an open-necked shirt and an old cardigan. He stared at me short-sightedly through thick-lensed glasses. ‘Mr Ross?' He had a ruler in his hand, holding it with fingers stained brown with nicotine. ‘My publishers wrote me you would be coming.' He smiled. ‘It was a good jacket design you did for my book.'

I thanked him, glad that Robinson had taken the trouble to write. It made it easier. The clack of the teleprinter ceased abruptly. ‘No hurry,' I said. ‘I'll wait till you've finished.'

‘Sit down then, man, and make yourself comfortable.' He turned his back on me then, leaning on the tubular frame of his swivel seat to continue his briefing. ‘… Surface wind speed twenty to twenty-five knots. Gusting perhaps forty. Rain squalls. Seven-eighths cloud at five hundred …' His voice droned on, touched with the lilt of his native valleys.

I was glad of the chance to study him, to check what I knew of Cliff Morgan against the man himself. If I hadn't read his book I shouldn't have known there was anything unusual about him. At first glance he looked just an ordinary man doing an ordinary routine job. He was a Welshman and he obviously took too little exercise. It showed in his flabby body and in the unhealthy pallor of his face. The shirt he wore was frayed and none too clean, the grey flannels shapeless and without crease, his shoes worn at the heels. And yet, concentrated now on his briefing, there was something about him that made my fingers itch to draw. The man, the setting, the pilot leaning beside him – it all came together, and I knew this would have made a better jacket for his book than the one I'd done.

The background of his book was a strange one. He had written it in prison, pouring into it all his enthusiasm for the unseen world of air currents and temperatures, of cold and warm fronts and the global movements of great masses of the earth's atmosphere. It had been an outlet for his frustration, filled with the excitement he felt for each new weather pattern, the sense of discovery as the first pencilled circle – a fall in pressure of a single millibar perhaps reported by a ship out in the Atlantic – indicated the birth of a new storm centre. His quick, vivid turn of phrase had breathed life into the everyday meteorological reports and the fact that he was an amateur radio operator, a ‘ham' in his spare time, had added to the fascination of the book, for his contacts were the weather ships, the wireless operators of distant steamers, other meteorologists, and as a result the scope of his observations was much wider than that of the ordinary airport weather man taking all his information from teleprinted bulletins.

How such a man came to be stationed in a Godforsaken little outpost like Northton needs some explanation. Though I didn't know it at the time, there was already a good deal of gossip about him. He had been up there over six months, which was plenty of time for the facts to seep through, even to that out-of-the-way place. The gossip I don't intend to repeat, but since the facts are common knowledge I will simply say this: there was apparently something in his metabolism that made him sexually an exhibitionist and attractive to women. He had become mixed up in a complex affair involving two Society women. One of them was married and a rather sordid divorce case had followed, as a result of which he had faced a criminal charge, had been found guilty and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment. He had been a meteorologist at London Airport at the time. On his release from prison the Air Ministry had posted him to Northton, where I suppose it was presumed he could do little or no harm. But a man's glands don't stop functioning because he's posted to a cold climate. Nor, thank God, do his wits – a whole ship's company were to owe their lives to the accuracy of his predictions, amounting almost to a sixth sense where weather was concerned.