by Gwen Moffat
‘The fact is,’ he went on uncomfortably, ‘I’ve got a visitor.’
Playing for time, she turned and studied Sgurr Alasdair. Irwin was biting his lip; he may have been up at eight but at close quarters he looked tired and worried. There was also an air of defiance about him.
Miss Pink said: ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t break a previous engagement without good reason . . .’
She left it hanging and made to move away; he hadn’t asked her in. They descended a rough slope to the river where there were so many boulders exposed that one could cross anywhere. On the other side, the colonel’s woodland came right down to the bank.
Irwin said with suppressed fury: ‘A girl came here last night. I was reading late and she saw my lamp. Some lout had knocked her about and thrown her out of his tent. So I took her in. She’s in a bit of a state and I’d rather not leave her.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Terry. She didn’t tell me her surname.’
‘It’s Cooke. She was in the hotel last night with George Watkins. It was he, of course—? I think it’s an excellent idea for you to spend a day with her. Is there anything to be done or will she recover with rest—and security?’
‘The worst of it is,’ he began, not answering her but following his own line of thought, ‘she seems used to it. She’s not upset about the violence, but the fact that he threw her out—I mean, that he doesn’t want her! Can you understand that?’
‘It happens. It’s deplorable, but even the nicest girls do come under the spell of thugs: bewitched rather than falling in love. Strange—’ her eyes followed the flight of a raven towards the shore, ‘—how people who are not quite so strong as they might be, and immature ones easily fall prey to bad influences where they resist the good.’ She looked at him candidly. ‘Perhaps they’re less resistant to good influences after a nasty shock,’ she suggested. ‘You stay with her; don’t leave her on her own today. Watkins has gone out—but she might brood on her own.’
He still looked anxious. ‘I’ve to go to Sligachan tomorrow for two days. It means leaving her on her own in the cottage.’
‘See how today goes,’ Miss Pink urged. ‘If she doesn’t—’
His eyes sharpened at something behind her. She turned and saw Terry Cooke in the doorway of the cottage, still wearing her lilac dress. Miss Pink pondered for a moment, then climbed the bank again, Irwin following. Terry watched her approach without expression but when the girl looked at Irwin her eyes softened. Her lip was swollen and split and one eye was partly closed and bruised black. Both arms were grazed as if she’d fallen heavily when running. The dress was in tatters.
‘You go out with this lady,’ she told Irwin, ‘I don’t mind.’
He must have told her he’d intended to guide Miss Pink today. The latter said cheerfully, brooking no argument: ‘I changed my mind.’ Then, practically, ‘Have you left anything in Watkins’ tent?’
Terry looked at Irwin. ‘Your gear,’ he explained. He turned to Miss Pink. ‘She did. I’ll go across for it.’
They all went, Terry barefooted and limping a little.
The river ran into the sea at the side of the glen, leaving half a mile of unbroken sand stretching to the far side of the valley. Above the shore were grassy dunes and the camp site which was best reached from Largo by a swing bridge a short distance downstream. The MacNeills’ farm, Rahane, was the only other dwelling on this side of the river. It stood close to the tide-line on the miniature estuary.
They crossed the bridge upstream of a ford and climbed the bank through broom bushes to a track which led to the camp. Terry guided them to an old Ford van and an orange tent. Miss Pink unzipped the latter and exposed a chaos of squalor. With some show of eagerness (she must have thought she’d seen the last of them), Terry retrieved her possessions.
‘How much money did you have?’ Miss Pink asked as the girl backed out of the entrance with a green suède shoulder bag.
Irwin said quickly, ‘She doesn’t need money; I’ve got plenty.’
‘Have a look.’ Miss Pink indicated the bag.
He lifted the flap and took out a leather purse, opened it, shook it. It was empty.
‘How much?’ Miss Pink pressed.
‘There wasn’t a pound,’ Terry said, almost in tears. ‘It’s not worth bothering about.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ Miss Pink agreed suddenly. ‘Forget about it. Have you got everything? Now you’d better go home and have some breakfast.’ Across the mouth of the river some cows were gathered about Rahane. ‘If we’re lucky,’ she went on, with unconscious irony considering the late hour, ‘the MacNeills will have milked. Go and get a dozen eggs, Mr Irwin, and plenty of milk.’
She gave him a pound note and at the bridge he strode away to the farm while the women strolled towards Largo. Miss Pink glanced back at the dunes. There were only a few tents on the camp site besides that of Watkins, and one camping van. People had been moving about the site but they’d paid no attention to the elderly woman and the girl in the ragged dress. She wondered how bizarre a situation would have to be before their attention was engaged.
‘You didn’t think of asking for help from any of those people last night?’ she asked. Largo was some distance from the camp site.
‘I met Colin last evening when I went over to Rahane for the milk.’ With her bad foot, Miss Pink thought grimly. ‘Besides,’ the girl went on shame-facedly, gesturing to the dunes, ‘all these people are couples, or with kids. And Colin was the only one with a light. It was late, see, when we got back.’ Her voice dropped. ‘I ran away from him—from George—and when I stopped and looked, there was the light, quite close. I fell over the stones in the river; that’s how this happened, I guess.’ She held out her arms.
Miss Pink had been the first to go to bed last night. She’d wondered at the time what would be the outcome when Watkins decided to leave the hotel. He was not the kind of man who would go home sober. As they walked slowly back to Largo she reflected that, taking everything into consideration, the girl had been lucky.
*
She left them absorbed in cooking and each other and walked back past the big house and through the wood to take the main path that climbed straight out of the glen towards the Cuillin. She was preoccupied—which is not a bad thing on long upward gradients—and she plodded on for twenty minutes only half aware of the sun on her damp face, and moorland smells: peat and heather and baking rock. Grasshoppers rasped, and from the glen came the whine of a tractor.
Suddenly she stopped, appalled. Her vision had been confined to dry earth and heather stalks about her boots; now the land stopped, dropped away, and for a moment there was only a green abyss below. She was on the lip of the ravine which contained the burn emerging from Coire na Banachdich and the greenery was the tops of silver birches which, on the near side of the depression, plunged so steeply that one wondered where and how their roots found purchase. On the far side, the ground was even steeper with vertical rock walls where, in the sheltered and humid environment, every ledge and scoop was a riot of vegetation. In the back of this sculpted amphitheatre the cliffs were over a hundred feet high and the burn poured over the lip in the waterfall called Eas Mor.
Today the fall was a broken thread, still impressive because of its height but nothing like so sensational as it was when in spate.
She moved back to the path, and the sound of water faded to be replaced by the hum of insects and the whine of the tractor. After a while she heard a distant but unmistakably metallic clatter and realised that the tractor had stopped. She looked back towards the settlement.
Largo and Rahane were full in the sunshine. The sound of the tractor’s engine came to her again and she pulled the binoculars from her rucksack to focus on the farm. After a few moments she discovered the tractor moving along a level green shelf towards the buildings. It was drawing no implement but a hydraulic shovel was attached to its front. She worked backwards, along the shelf to its termination at a
gully in the sea cliffs. There, as she’d suspected (for the clatter could have been only something large falling a long distance), was Rahane’s rubbish tip: at the back of the once beautiful inlet called Scarf Geo.
She put the binoculars away and turned towards the mountains. If anything could be done to stop crofters throwing their waste, from old cars to drums which had contained toxic chemicals, over the nearest cliff, it could not be done at this moment. Now, seven hours of the ridge lay ahead and, like an efficient detective, she turned, metaphorically and literally, from Scarf Geo and, looking southwards, concentrated on the islands and the nearer moors where water gleamed in the peat and once, long ago, she had found black-throated divers nesting.
The path meandered through dried-out bogs, skirted a lochan, climbed steeply to turn the corner where the world of wide seas and skies shrank suddenly to a narrow corrie hemmed by cliffs. But the impression of claustrophobia was momentary for the eye was drawn upwards to a skyline of gaps and towers and pinnacles while, across the mouth of the corrie, stood the Sron: Sron na Ciche, a concave precipice of dark rock where the coloured specks that were climbers looked terribly lonely and vulnerable. The Lindsays and Watkins were here. Madge and Maynard were round in the next corrie.
The cliff was a place for companions and a rope. Miss Pink made her way to the back of the corrie and the innocuous pleasures of Sgurr Sgumain with its more broken face.
Again her preoccupation showed, this time in her making a false start. She failed to notice that the loose and steepening rock up which she was scrambling bore no traces of previous climbers. It wasn’t until she was brought up short by an impending wall where chimneys were wet even in the drought that she realised her mistake but, unwilling to retreat down something which, from the top, assumed a much higher angle than had been apparent from below, she wandered under the wall trying in vain to find a way through.
At some risk she negotiated rising basalt dykes which stood proud above the basic rock, but it wasn’t until she was descending an enormous balloon of black lichen like a tumour on the face that she came to her senses.
She descended carefully, to find the correct line farther along: cleaned of lichen and the rock smoothed by nailed boots. In half an hour she reached the crest and looked over to see the Sron, with figures, much closer, and more human in scale. A thousand feet below, the peacock eye of a lochan was winking in the sun.
She came to the final tower of Sgumain and turned it by a trod like a chamois track which brought her at last to the main ridge. Across Glen Sligachan rose the Red Hills and beyond them and just distinguishable through the haze, the great sea lochs of the Inner Sound penetrated the hinterland of Knoydart and Applecross. Then gently, and so quiet she could hear the air in its pinions, an eagle drifted past, and before it vanished round a near buttress, she saw the wings come up and the feathered talons brake and knew it was going to land.
She scrambled after it, forcing herself to go carefully because there was a drop into Coir’ a’ Ghrunnda and if she slipped she might not stop for several hundred feet, but as she rounded the buttress and thought there was a small pinnacle perched on the edge, she saw its eye. She had one glimpse of the fierce profile then the wings spread and, dropping a little under its own weight, it sailed down the corrie leaving her breathless with pleasure.
In a dream she returned and, still below the crest, heard familiar voices. She stopped, saw a party climbing along the ridge and heard George Watkins say: ‘I haven’t got all bloody day to hang around pulling you up; you go round the side and up the chimney.’
Miss Pink wore drab colours and she was in shadow. She sat down in a corner and watched the Lindsays climbing carefully behind their guide towards what climbers called the Bad Step. The clients carried rucksacks but Watkins was unencumbered except for a rope. Betty Lindsay had the second rope.
The acoustics were in Miss Pink’s favour. She heard Betty Lindsay say clearly: ‘There’s plenty of time. Really, George, if you’re so concerned at getting down for opening time—’
Lindsay said, ‘Oh, come off it; stop needling him!’
‘Me needling him! He’s been getting at me all day—’
‘Shut up!’ Watkins was standing below the Bad Step, uncoiling the rope. He hesitated, then handed the end to Betty without looking at her, and turned to the rock. Unsecured, Betty pulled out a few coils deftly so that the rope wouldn’t snag as he stepped up the broken wall. It was only a few moves but there was a nasty drop underneath. Watkins’ climbing was clumsy and, although he got up, he was not a pleasure to watch. He belayed at the top and took in the slack. Betty tied on casually and waited. Her pack looked enormous.
‘Come on,’ Watkins said.
She stepped off the ground and went up the wall with astonishing neatness considering her build and her load. As she drew level with Watkins she must have said something because he exclaimed, ‘Christ! You think I’d trust him to you? Take that rope off and get out of the bloody way!’
She untied and moved on a few yards to sit down and watch. Miss Pink took the binoculars out of her sack and raised them carefully. Adjusting the range, the other woman’s face was in startling close-up: flushed from the sun and the constriction of her helmet certainly, but not appearing in the least put out by the outrageous behaviour of the guide.
Lindsay was making a hash of the Bad Step. The secret was knowing where the fingerholds were, for the rock overhung slightly and the footholds sloped. Miss Pink suspected that, far from being the kind of man who was encouraged when others encountered no difficulty, the reverse was the case here. His standard was far below that of his wife.
A steady murmur of encouragement came from the guide, punctuated by complaints from Lindsay. The man was tired and inclining to panic.
‘All right then,’ he cried suddenly on a rising note. ‘If I come off—you’ve got me?’
‘Sure.’ Watkins was chuckling. ‘Come on then: up you come!’
Watkins braced himself for a fall but with a wild heave and a grab Lindsay was up. There were exclamations of relief and congratulation from Betty, and Watkins was laughing loudly. They milled a little, the rope was coiled and, still oblivious of the watcher, the party moved away towards the summit.
Miss Pink replaced the binoculars and fastened the strap of her pack. Her eyes wandered over the ridges and down to the corrie underneath where a little brown and green lochan shone in the sun and two remote figures made splashes close to the shore. She smiled. That was more pleasant than the scene she had just witnessed.
After a while the bathers came out of the water and they were so consistently pale in that well of boulder fields that they must be naked. Miss Pink was in the act of rising when she paused and took another look at them. Two climbers—and Maynard and Madge were in that corrie. . . . She shrugged. In her own youth she had often swum in mountain lakes with male climbers but—and she pursed her lips in disapproval—none of them had a wife like Lavender.
*
‘How long has MacNeill been tipping down Scarf Geo?’
Behind the bar Hamlyn turned slowly to face Miss Pink. ‘Two years.’ His eyes were furious.
‘We had the same trouble in Wales when I lived there.’ She spoke with sympathy. ‘I haven’t come across it in Cornwall—yet.’
‘The English are civilised. Here they’ve hardly advanced since the Dark Ages.’ He warmed to the theme. ‘Timothy Barker was here in May: the anthropologist. He was explaining the development of civilisation—domestically, that is. You start with a house of sorts, which is nothing more than a shelter from the elements; that’s subsistence level. But once cultivators have a surplus, first they build up stock and implements, then domestic appliances: pots, pans, a better cooking range; nowadays it’s deep freezers and spin dryers, of course—bought by women whose mothers took in washing! And after necessities, or what they think of as necessities, they start to ornament their houses: plastic flowers, china Alsations on the window sill, coloured bathroom
suites. They’ve gone past the stage of keeping the coal in the bath and they don’t throw their rubbish out of the back door any longer. No, they take it to the edge of their land and tip it over a cliff.’
Miss Pink’s shoulders slumped but she tried again.
‘Doesn’t the Council collect rubbish from the glen?’
‘Of course it does. But the lorry can’t cross to Rahane; there’s only the footbridge. The ford is negotiable for the tractor, and young MacNeill even takes the cattle wagon across, but the Council lorry won’t risk getting bogged down and asking the MacNeills to pull it out with the tractor, so Rahane’s meant to take their rubbish across to the camp site in bags. They’re too bone idle for that.’
There were footsteps on the gravel outside the front door, and voices.
‘Ah, Miss Pink!’ Betty Lindsay came in, hot and jolly, ‘Where did you go?’
She murmured something about Sgumain, and Lindsay and Watkins shouldered into the room, a little larger than life, like all parties just down off the hill. Miss Pink had come in half an hour ago and had already bathed and changed.
‘We’ll have a pint of draught lager each,’ Watkins ordered. ‘Off the ice.’
Hamlyn stared at him without moving.
‘Please,’ Watkins added, and grinned sheepishly.
Hamlyn drew the lager with obvious reluctance. The Lindsays’ faces were carefully expressionless.
Lavender entered with a swirl of skirts. She was in orange tonight and smelt of musky scent. She started to talk to Miss Pink intimately, as if they were old acquaintances. Madge and Maynard appeared in the hall, seeming subdued after the impact of the first party. As Madge came to the bar Betty asked: ‘Did you do the White Slab?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what?’
‘Nothing else,’ Maynard put in, following his guide, smiling at Miss Pink. ‘It was too hot. Good evening, dear,’ to his wife.
Watkins said, with a nasty gleam in his eye: ‘That was you swimming, in Coir’ a’ Ghrunnda.’
