Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (7 page)

Rack of lamb for dinner. Afterward, sat outside on the rear lawn, watching the stars; you can see an amazing number of stars from here, for someplace so close to the light-pollution of Oxford, and I see something describing a perfectly circular path across the night sky at a fast but steady pace that I’m sure is a satellite in earth orbit. Anthony, who was a Navigator in the RAF, tells a story about being in a plane packed solid with soldiers inside all the way to the tail, and needing to go to the loo, which was in the back of the plane, and the sergeant gruffly ordering his men to bend over, so that Anthony could walk over their backs, literally stepping on them, to the rear of the plane to reach the loo. As an old enlisted man myself, this sounds like perfectly normal officer behavior to me, but I refrain from telling Anthony so.

Friday, August 18
^th
—
Oxford, London, Train to Inverness

A day mostly spent dealing with major and minor hassles, and more packed with frustrations than sightseeing. Check out of the inn, drive into Oxford, get lost, and spend a half-hour or so driving around before finally finding the train station. We offload the luggage, then find that none of the lockers at the station are even remotely large enough to check our suitcases in, thus ending our plan to leave the luggage there and go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford this morning before taking the train for London. Reload the luggage into the car, and then spend almost two hours of escalating annoyance driving back and forth through the streets of Oxford trying to locate the car rental company, at one point missing a turn and driving a good deal of the distance out to Blenheim Palace before we can find an exit on the highway that lets us turn around in a tiny village called Wigham and get headed back in the right direction again. Finally do find the car rental place, which turns out to be quite some distance from town, so that we need an expensive cab ride back into Oxford, where we miss our train by seconds, forcing us to wait more than an hour for the next one. Then a hot ride into London, with our suitcases jammed into the aisle of the fortunately nearly empty train car, since they won’t fit in any of the available luggage-storage spaces. Then another cab ride, from Paddington Station to Euston.

Find, to our relief, that there is an actual left-luggage department at Euston Station, and gladly pay the money to leave our luggage there. We are too limp and exhausted from all of this to want to do much, so we give up on our half-formed alternate plan to tour the Victoria and Albert Museum, and decide to take one of the city bus tours instead; at least we won’t have to walk to do that. Take a cab to Russell Square, where we know we can catch such a tour, and get there just a second or two after the bus pulls away. I find it oddly pleasing to be standing in front of the Russell Hotel again, and I decide that this feeling comes from the fact that, after a week of navigating mostly new and unfamiliar territory, here I know where everything
is:
the American Express office is just down the block, as is the newsstand where you can buy bottled water, the Night and Day, where you can get an ice-cream cone, the Italian place with the outdoor tables where you can get dessert, the little cafe near the British Museum where you can get a scone for breakfast, and so on. Somehow this makes it seem almost like stepping back into last week. (Later learn that George R.R. Martin was probably
in
the Russell while we were standing out in front of it, since he was staying there that day, but we had no way of knowing that at the time.)

Catch a cab to Victoria, hoping to catch up with a tour bus there, but, near Trafalgar Square, we spot a London double-decker tour bus waiting by the curb, hop out of the cab, and board it—or rather, board one we’re directed to a few blocks away, in front of Charing Cross Station. Sit up on the top deck, of course, in the open air. The tour drives us by nothing we’re not already familiar with, but it’s a pleasant way to kill an hour and a half, and one that doesn’t involve walking or carrying huge suitcases. Susan becomes noticeably more relaxed and cheerful, now that she no longer has the responsibility of driving, which has clearly been weighing heavily on her. We pass the Statue of Eros (actually, the Spirit of Christian Charity, although no one will call it that) in Piccadilly Circus, where I’d once spent a night sitting on the fountain steps, decades ago, and although the fountain itself is the same (as are the hordes of shabbily romantic/Byronic kids sitting in romantic gloom on the steps), the surrounding Circus has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. Pass the grounds of Buckingham Palace, noticing the very heavy-duty and sincere barbed wire that tops the high surrounding walls and fences. Pass Green Park, which has been baked nearly brown by the sun.

We get out across from Charing Cross, walk up to Covent Gardens, where the little streets in front of the pubs are completely blocked by loitering customers, foaming pints in hand; later, we peek into the end of Leicester Square, and that’s so crowded that the tourists are literally standing packed-in shoulder-to-shoulder, as though they are at some kind of political rally or free rock concert—but they’re just taking in the night. I don’t recall London being quite
this
jammed with tourists twenty-five years ago, and I wonder if the tourist density level is this high every year now . . . or is this just another effect of the unusually hot and dry and prolonged (and very un-English) summer weather? Perhaps all the crowds who usually go to Spain or Italy or Florida “seeking the sun” have stayed home instead this year. (Florida, by the way, is by far the most popular destination in the States for British tourists; just about every British person we met had been to Florida, although most of them had been nowhere else in the States during their trip, and in several bookstores guides to Florida were the only travel books on U.S. destinations available—the Brits may not have seen New York City or L.A. or Washington, D.C. or Seattle, but they’ve seen Disney World . . . which must offer a somewhat distorted view of what the life in the States is like!) Have a decent if unexciting Indian meal, then have coffee and strawberry pie down the street in a little place named Crank’s. As we eat, I look out the open window-wall of the restaurant at the bustling sidewalk traffic, mostly young people out looking for one sort of action or another, and again think of myself here when I was young. Feel a pang when I think that this may well be my last glimpse of London for many years, or perhaps ever in this life.

Go back to Euston Station, pick up our luggage, drag it to the sleeper train for Inverness. Have tea in the lounge car, and, while we are sipping it, London slips silently away behind us, without any fuss, and is gone.

Saturday, August 19th—
Inverness, Moray Firth
&
Polmaily House, Drumnadrochit, Urquhart Castle

Slept fitfully, woke about 6:40. Rugged Scottish hills sliding by the train window. Stony high hills, very bleak, with purple heather on their sides. In the valleys and below the tree-line, what appear to be spruce or fir forests, with here and there trees that look like silver birches, glinting like bone in the dull green body of the woods. Lots of rabbits running away across the fields. Sit down to have a cup of coffee in the lounge car as we arrive at Aviemore. Brief drizzle later at Slough Summit, where the grey clouds clamp down overhead like an iron skillet lid, obscuring the tops of highest hills. It’s what the Irish call a “soft day”—fine constant mist, not quite rain—by the time we get to Inverness, where we get off the train.

Check out the various posters advertising boat rides and bus and taxi tours, and then catch a cab to the car rental place, where we pick up our new car, a blue Ford Mondeo this time, which proves to be nowhere near as comfortable as our faithful Daewoo (no air conditioning, for one thing; it’s been an amusement to me throughout our trip that although our rooms weren’t air-conditioned, our car was. The Brits tend to sneer at or at least be extremely patronizing to Americans about their dependency on air-conditioning, but a few more summers like this one in Britain, and they may find themselves putting air-conditioners in as well; already, in London, we were seeing hand-lettered signs on some restaurants promising that it was “Air-conditioned inside!” or “Fully air-conditioned!” or just “Cool inside!” . . . and I remember the movie theaters using the same ploy to attract customers back in the ‘50s—remember the Chilly Willy signs outside movie houses?—when Americans didn’t have home air-conditioners either).

Drive through town and down to the harbor, where we park at dockside and book passage on the Moray Firth Dolphin-Watching Cruise. Inverness doesn’t seem to be a terribly pretty or terribly interesting town, striking me as an unpretentious no-nonsense no-frills working-class town, an impression confirmed or at least emphasized for me when we walk around the harbor area while waiting for the cruise to leave, strolling around the corner and over a bridge to a quiet, working-class neighborhood: a sleeping pub, a laundromat, a take-away fish-and-chips shop, and a bakery, where I buy a “potato pie” (something like an inferior Cornish Pastie) and a “battery,” which turns out to be a greasy lump of cold fried dough or batter (hence the name), served plain, without even powdered sugar on it, the dough itself not even remotely sweet—it tastes mostly like cold congealed grease.

Back at the dock, the harbor-cruise ship has arrived, and we file on board. Swans have formed a queue in the water alongside the ship, and are begging the tourists for food, and I regret not bringing the largely-uneaten remnants of my “battery” back for them; perhaps, as Scottish birds, they would appreciate it more than I did. One little girl is teasing a swan by pretending to be about to feed it a potato chip (sorry, crisp!), getting it to arch its neck up excitedly, and then snatching the chip away from it at the last moment—after a few minutes of this, the swan gives up and swims away in disgust. The drizzle has largely stopped by the time we set out, which makes the trip more pleasant, but I don’t expect that we’re going to see much except for the scenery of the Firth itself (a not-inconsiderable attraction in its own right, of course), and that turns out to be true (I become suspicious when they offer us the tour tickets at a considerable discount; whenever they offer something to tourists during tourist season for less money than it says they’re going to charge you for it, something’s wrong—in this case, I suspect, they know that we’re too late in the year to really have a good chance of seeing a lot of wildlife). During our hour-long cruise, we see exactly one—count ‘em, one—dolphin, which we dutifully watch for the minute or so that it’s visible above the surface of the water. Still, it’s a pleasant cruise on Moray Firth, enjoyable for its own sake, just for the pleasure of being out on the water in the open air in a small boat. By the time we get back to Inverness, the skies have cleared, and the sun is out.

Drive down the A82 to Drumnadrochit, along the shores of Loch Ness. It’s a bright day by now, the narrow waters of Loch Ness sparkling with sunlight and whitecaps, and I’m amused to see that the road alongside the loch is lined with people hopefully watching the loch with binoculars, waiting for the Monster to show up. I do exactly the same thing for a few minutes (without success, alas!), then we continue to Drumnadrochit—which consists mostly of a couple of hotels and gift shops and The Official Loch Ness Monster Center, which has a big plaster statue of Nessie outside—and on out the other side of town to Polmaily House, our next inn. This turns out to be a nicely rambling old wooden house, not as pretty or imposing as Fallowfields; the room is nice, although a bit smaller and not quite as elegant as our room at Fallowfields; the bathroom is considerably larger and more conveniently arranged than at Fallowfields, though, where we had a toilet and shower set in one tiny closet-sized cubicle and the sink all the way on the other side of the room, tucked away in a cabinet. And the grounds are about as extensive, or perhaps even more extensive, with tables set out under a nice expanse of tree-shaded lawn that leads over to the swimming pool, and grazing horses visible in the field below, before the ground climbs up to the hill on the other side of the road.

We drop our luggage in our room (which is hot, so we open all the windows . . . which turns out to be a fateful decision) and drive back through Drumnadrochit to the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the shores of Loch Ness, the castle they always show in movies that have a Loch Ness locale. We’re both so tired by this point that we end up driving on the wrong side of the road for more than a mile before either of us notices! Fortunately, the road that leads to the inn is not a heavily trafficked road, so we manage to get away with it. Perhaps we’re a bit too tired to really enjoy the castle, either, probably we should have just stayed at the inn, but we buy our tickets and dutifully trudge down the hill to tour it, with only a few groans about how steep the hill is going to be coming back up. There’s not really a lot of Urquhart Castle left to tour, actually, it being mostly ruined, but the views out over the loch are splendid, especially with the broken castle walls in the foreground, and there’s a kilted piper playing continuously near the gate, for atmosphere (they have a tip jar set up for him, so, on the way out, we literally pay the piper). Looking out over Loch Ness, it’s easy to see how the Monster legends got started—there are lots of odd currents running through the loch, producing lines of ripples that could easily look like serpentine humps in a row from a distance. In fact, the problem is not in seeing the Monster, but that at any given moment you can see six or seven of them—every movement of the currents, every wake, every boat moving far enough away in the distance to have dwindled to a black dot, every wind-generated pattern of ripples: all of them could be a Monster, and most of these phenomena would look no less convincing than the classic Monster photos if you took a picture of them. Actually seeing Loch Ness, though, makes it even plainer how absurd the idea is that there’s a herd of plesiosaurs swimming around in it—the loch may be very deep, true, but it’s also extremely narrow. If there were plesiosaurs swimming around in it, people would be seeing them
all the time,
not just every once in a rare while.