A Blind Man's War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t talked about my fee yet.’

  Harry laughed derisively at me; the other guy grinned.

  ‘You can talk about it on the train tonight,’ Harry said. ‘You’ll need to find something to pass the time.’

  When we reached the station he stretched over to take my hand. His coat fell open, and I glimpsed the pistol stuck in his belt. A different league.

  I hadn’t told Doris that we were sharing a sleeper yet. It was all I’d been able to get at the last minute. Apparently the Friday night sleeper was always full of rich Jocks going home for the weekend. I hadn’t any realistic hopes of her – she’d told me, after all, hadn’t she? – but I anticipated she would pop on the upside-down smile when she found out. One way or another it was going to be an interesting night.

  There was a neatly typed label on the door of our twin berth.

  Doris was miffed because I hadn’t carried her suitcase – but I wasn’t their fucking native bearer.

  She asked me, ‘Mr and Mrs Miller?’

  ‘Sentimental reasons, nothing to do with you. Trust me.’

  ‘Where do you sleep, Charlie?’

  ‘It’s actually a case of where do you sleep, honeybunch. I’m sleeping in there. You can too, if you like . . . or if you’d be more comfortable curled up on a seat between a couple of drunken Scots on their way home it’s up to you. This is all I could get.’

  She was doing all she could to keep the lid on her temper. I liked that.

  She hissed, ‘I’m paying for this, you bastard.’

  ‘And I’m truly grateful – but it doesn’t alter anything.’

  ‘George won’t like it when he finds out.’

  We hadn’t discussed anything yet which George would like.

  ‘Maybe George won’t find out. It’s your choice again. See, I’m a proper gentleman – one of my finer points. I’ll always leave you options.’

  ‘You’re a bastard.’

  ‘That’s the second time you’ve said that. Actually I’m a hungry bastard, and I reserved a table for us at the first sitting for dinner.’ I opened the door of the small compartment. ‘Are you and your case coming in, or not? The bar’s open.’ I went in, and threw my small kitbag and the messenger bag on the bottom bunk. The door swung shut behind me. I started to whistle ‘The Music Goes Round and Round’, and got to the second chorus before the door banged open again, and Doris dragged her case in behind her.

  ‘The steward asked me if everything was OK,’ she said, ‘and I didn’t want to attract attention to us.’

  I stepped forward until this was the closest we’d been. I placed my hands on either side of her perfect face, and told her, ‘Don’t worry about it, honey, you are so perfectly beautiful that you’ll attract attention wherever you are. For the rest of your life probably. Get used to it.’ Then I let her go.

  Doris tried to slap me, but there wasn’t enough room – and she was laughing at the same time anyway. When she finished there was still a smile on her face. Maybe it was a worried smile. Or a scheming one. We shimmied around each other, and agreed to meet in the bar. I took the messenger bag with me, wondering if I had become its custodian. I found myself with a decent Glenmorangie in my hand. As I settled into a velvet-covered Pullman chair there was a long, haunting whistle outside, and almost imperceptibly the train began to move. She was called the Highland Queen, and her take-off was as smooth as a bobsleigh on the Cresta Run.

  We ate a four-course meal in the dining car. I enjoyed the men watching Doris. I enjoyed watching Doris as well. You can tell a lot about people if you watch them eating. She tucked into her grub like a professional – perhaps her brand of American fasted on Thursdays, and made up for it on Fridays. She didn’t stop chewing in order to speak.

  ‘Did you plan this, Charlie?’

  ‘No. You and George have done all the planning so far. All I’ve done is mop up the little mess you made in London.’

  ‘I mean – to get me alone on a train to Finian’s Rainbow or somewhere romantic in your Scottish Highlands.’

  ‘Point one, Finian’s Rainbow was in Ireland – wrong country. You probably mean Brigadoon. Point two – ’ I dropped my voice – ‘we’re here now because, thanks to you, we are running away from the bloody police. Point three, the Highlands are far from romantic – I’ve been there before, remember, and you haven’t. It’s not romantic at all – it’s nothing like you’ve ever imagined – just a few people living in cattle sheds, and they’ll hate us.’

  ‘Why will they hate us? They haven’t met us yet.’

  ‘It’s a point of principle. They’ll hate us for not being Scottish.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question, hon . . . the one about if you planned to get me on my own on this train.’

  ‘No, Doris. I didn’t plan to get you on your own, but now I have I’ll just have to put up with you until George catches up with us. Listen . . . do you want to finish this wine, or shall I?’

  We split it, and chased it down with another whisky. Doris asked me to give her time to climb into her bunk before I returned.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Twenty minutes should do it, I have a face to scrape off.’

  ‘If you thought of searching my sack, I wouldn’t bother. It’s just clothes, and not all of them are clean.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have dreamed of it, Charlie.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  She took the loot bag with her. It did occur to me to wonder what George was going to do for money when he finally got here.

  Doris was tucked up in the top bunk when I got back to the compartment. I undressed in the dark and climbed into my bunk, piling my clothes at one end.

  After a few minutes Doris said, ‘You lied.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘There was a book in your bag as well as your clothes, a Raymond Chandler – good writer.’

  ‘I think so too.’ It was The High Window.

  After another few minutes I asked, ‘Doris?’

  ‘Yes?’ I heard her turn over above me.

  ‘Did you ever see Robert Donat in The Thirty-Nine Steps?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘He got stuck on the night sleeper to Scotland with a beautiful stranger as well. We’re not the first.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘She was a lot friendlier than you are.’

  ‘He was probably better-looking than you, Charlie.’ I heard her shift in her bunk again. Then she said, ‘G’night.’

  After a few minutes she chuckled briefly, and softly. I had no idea what she found so funny, but it was a sound you could learn to live with.

  In my head I began to play through all the numbers I knew connected to railway journeys, one after the other, beginning with ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’, and going on to ‘Midnight special’, and all the others. I fell asleep during the second chorus of ‘The Little Red Caboose Behind the Train’. It never fails; even when you have Rita Hayworth’s sister lying a couple feet above you.

  We were awoken by the steward at about six in the morning with decent cups of coffee. The train was rattling slowly over Rannoch Moor heading for the station at Fort William.

  Over the breakfast kippers she asked me, ‘Tell me again . . .’

  ‘We stay in Fort William for a night. There’s bound to be a decent hotel – all the hunting and fishing types come up here in the season.’

  ‘When’s the season?’

  ‘Not yet, I hope. I don’t want a lot of trigger-happy idiots taking pot shots at us when we climb the hill.’

  ‘Why can’t we go straight on to the hotel you originally booked us into?’

  ‘Because we aren’t due to arrive until Sunday. Originally I expected a two-night stop in Fort William. If we stay there, and meet the train on Sunday morning, George might always catch up with us.’

  ‘What then? We take a cab?’

  ‘I doubt it. They probably wouldn’t want to drive halfway across Scotland. No, we get
a bus.’ Her mouth turned down. I wondered what buses were like in the States.

  ‘Buses are for poor folk, Charlie. I’ve got a better idea. We can buy a car this afternoon.’

  ‘For only a few days? Then what will we do with it?’

  ‘Sell it again, dummy. Trust me, I’ll get more for it than we paid. You ain’t seen me in action yet.’

  I looked down over her Alps; one could but hope, I suppose. I’d thought that before.

  A small, animated thimble of a woman booked us into the Royal Hotel under the names of Una and Samuel Anders. Doris’s idea. We had become brother and sister: don’t laugh. The Thimble didn’t smile. The church the Thimble attended forbad smiling on Saturdays. Doris had come up with our new names on the spur of the moment, and thought she was being cute – you work it out.

  ‘Cheque or cash, will it be?’ we were asked.

  ‘Cash. We don’t have a bank in the UK yet.’ That was Doris.

  ‘Separate rooms?’

  ‘If you have them.’

  ‘But adjoining, of course?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’d want Sammy to come running if he heard me having one of my panic attacks.’

  The Thimble gave us an old-fashioned look. Maybe she’d met brothers and sisters like us before. Her dun-blue woollen dress reached to the soles of her shoes. It made her look as if she glided across the floor on casters. As Doris and I followed her into one of those old cage lifts that were all the rage in the thirties, I was aware of an odd tension in Doris: as if a storm was brewing.

  I gave it a thought or two, and then pushed the idea away: she’d tell me whatever it was in her own good time – I knew her that well already.

  We had old, dark wood-panelled rooms on the top floor. They smelt of polish, and each had a main door, and another which opened from one into the other. I didn’t go anywhere near that one. I had a pygmy-sized four-poster. A clean but musty-smelling dressing gown was neatly folded on the end of it: the bedcovers were dark tartan blankets a foot thick.

  Maybe the dressing gown was a hint, so I went along the corridor to the bathroom and had a shower in an Edwardian bath with lion’s feet. The water was so hot my skin glowed when I stepped out of it. When I reached my room again I threw off the dressing gown, and enjoyed cool air on my skin.

  Doris must have heard me, because that was when she barged in through the connecting door. She was wearing most of a dressing gown. A flowing silvery silk job about the size of a jacket, and at least two sizes too small for her. She must have brought it with her. It wasn’t tied or buttoned down the front. That only took a glance.

  When she crossed to sit alongside me I asked her, ‘Is that your natural colour?’ Her hair was dark; the colour of port wine.

  ‘I hope so. Don’t you feel randy, Charlie? This place makes me feel randy – it’s so terribly old.’

  ‘If old things make you randy, go downstairs and find a grandfather . . . and cover yourself up, woman. You’re just playing with me.’

  ‘I wasn’t, honey, but I will now.’ She reached out. One hand; long fingers. Carmine nail varnish. Your mind takes these pictures. Snap. Snap. Snap When she looked at me it wasn’t at my face. What do you say to a girl at moments like that?

  ‘I call them Laurel and Hardy,’ I told her.

  Doris bent her head, and murmured, ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’

  If you’d really been awake you would have seen that one coming.

  I don’t know why she’d changed her mind, but things were looking up, weren’t they?

  Some time later she asked me, ‘When does our little soldier come to attention again?’

  I’ve never been comfortable with grown women using baby talk, and I wasn’t all that chuffed with the word little, so all I asked was, ‘Come again?’

  I suppose it was twenty minutes later before I told her, ‘You have a perfect body.’

  ‘I’ll bet you say that to all the girls, hon.’

  ‘No. I don’t believe I’ve ever said it before.’

  She stopped dressing for a moment and looked at me, her head cocked slightly on one side.

  ‘That’s nice, Charlie.’

  ‘Maybe, but I don’t suppose that George is going to like it, is he?’

  ‘And I don’t suppose he has to know. Isn’t that what you said? It always comes up, and I thought if I couldn’t avoid it, I’d get it out of the way before he gets here. That way you can save your strength for climbing a mountain.’ She’d made it sound like my fault.

  ‘You’re really serious about that, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I am, Charlie. Wouldn’t you be if your baby brother had died up there?’

  She knew it was a lie. I knew it was a lie. She knew I knew it was a lie. I knew she knew I knew it was a lie. What were these bastards up to?

  ‘Let’s go find a car lot,’ she told me, ‘and buy us a limo.’

  Chapter Five

  Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

  Some of you will remember the old Ford Popular, and some won’t.

  I have run this over in my mind quite a few times since then, but you simply can’t describe a black upright Ford Pop as a limo. It’s an unsprung rear-wheel-drive van, with a car’s body shell. We bought one for a hundred and ten quid. It looked as if it had seen better days. There were pieces of straw in the cabin, and its spare tyre sat on the back seat. I recognized the smell of chickens inside it. I once lived six months on a chicken farm: there’s not much I don’t know about chickens. The owner of Loch Linnhe Autos was a tall spare man with thinning hair. His eyes were lost in worry lines. He threw in a full tank of petrol and a can of Castrol and insisted on shaking both our hands and giving us a printed Bible tract before we drove away.

  I think he felt guilty at selling us such a clunker, but didn’t want to say so. I parked it in the rear hotel car park – the Thimble had made me hide it around the back because it wasn’t a good advertisement for the place. Doris dug her fingers into my left knee as we drew up, and laughed.

  I asked her, ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘George won’t like it,’ she said, and chortled again. Bugger George. Then she asked me, ‘Will he catch up today?’

  ‘No. He can’t get here until tomorrow at the earliest.’

  ‘Good.’ As we walked up the rather grand but tatty staircase she took my arm, and said, ‘My appetite’s come back. It must be all this Highland air.’

  But she was the best. In every man’s life there has to be one. Her bed was twice the size of mine: the covering on it was a deep crimson, and the scattering of cushions red. When I kissed her belly it was so flat and taut, it was as if my lips had touched the stretched skin of a drum. I could have beaten out a drum roll, or a tattoo, on it with my fingers.

  If I thought fleetingly of Flaming June, it was only to wonder who she was with.

  We paid off the hotel the next morning. The Thimble stood on the steps to watch us go: she wanted to be certain she had seen the back of us. I’m sure she was tut-tutting, and shaking her head as we drove away.

  George, however, did not alight from the train. Doris shrugged, and said, ‘We’d better get going then.’

  ‘What about your husband?’

  ‘Oh, hell, Charlie, he’s not my husband.’

  ‘Your brother, right? Uncle? Third cousin?’

  ‘How d’ye guess?’

  ‘I didn’t. I made it up, just like you.’

  She did the cock-the-head-to-one-side trick again.

  ‘You’re cute, Charlie. D’ye know that?’

  When the Yanks say cute they don’t mean appealing; they mean something else.

  Doris was in the mood to issue orders, ‘C’mon, let’s find the car.’

  It rained. The drive took me two wrong turnings, and four and a half hours. The Ford leaked, and leapt potholes in the road like a demented antelope. Doris slept on the back seat. Or tried to. When I suggested she read the map for me she just laughed, and shut her eyes again. You don’t keep a dog a
nd bark yourself.

  I went back to that lodge hotel at Shieldaig a few years ago – I was doing a tour of the places I’d known before I sat down to write about them. It doesn’t look any different now, although it’s easier to get there. The roads are better, and so are the cars.

  It’s a red sandstone rectangular building. Edwardian maybe, or Victorian. It looks down a sea loch fenced with mountains. I’ll swear the boats bobbing at anchor or tied up at its jetty are the same boats I first saw in 1956.

  I pulled into its driveway and stopped the car with a lurch. That woke Doris up. She stretched. I turned back to watch her stretching. She liked that, smiled, and did it again. I liked that too. There was absolutely no sign of life from the place. Doris smiled again.

  ‘What did you say the name was, Charlie? Brigadoon?’

  ‘Don’t worry, they probably all come to life again after the sun goes down . . . blood suckers just like the midges. It’s why Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in Scotland – he got the idea for the vampire from the Scottish midge.’

  ‘What’s a midge?’

  ‘In your case a very unpleasant surprise. A biting insect.’

  ‘Can you do something about them?’

  ‘I’ll find some local jallop, and rub it all over your body.’

  ‘Will that put them off?’

  ‘No, but it will take our minds off them.’

  ‘George wouldn’t like that.’ Sometimes she was like a record that had become stuck in one groove. She stretched again. Her whole body moved. So did the earth. Then she asked me, ‘When do you think you’ll be going off to Cyprus, Charlie?’

  Now who in hell had told her that? Randall? Pete? Ah. The black widow she might be, but Charlie had no intention of falling into her web.

  A cheerful young couple turned up in a civilianized Jeep about twenty minutes later. Mr and Mrs Mine Host. He looked as if he’d either had a good war or none at all, but you can be wrong of course. The wait had given me time to let the tranquillity of the place sink deep into my bones. I sat on an old wooden bench, looked down the loch and smoked a pipe. Doris wandered off around the foreshore. From time to time I heard her shoes crunch on the stones – she couldn’t have been far from me. I hadn’t answered her question, and she hadn’t pushed it. Maybe she regretted showing her hand.