The Secret Vanguard

by Michael Innes

  Sheila Grant scarcely heard. She was squinting out at as much of the bridge as she could see – squinting out and remembering. Right on top of the central cantilever there had been a little box. A sentry, her father had explained. And knowing that it is the business of sentries to pace up and down she had been puzzled: there seemed so little point in pacing up and down on the topmost girders of the Forth Bridge.

  That must have been in 1917 – she was barely four – and, of course it was a puzzling time. There was a drive – it was from Queensferry towards Cramond surely – on which one saw the fleet, one saw the long low ships in their fantastic camouflage. It made them invisible, people said – and other people, knowing ones, said No, but it made them look like different ships, or all like the same ship. A crazy time, a time as crazy as those fantastic patterns she remembered, and very much in the past… Sheila looked down through the slanting girders – and almost rubbed her eyes. Gliding smoothly up the Firth was a small warship, camouflaged.

  ‘Poetry?’ said the uncommunicative man irritably.

  Since then she had been abroad. And back in Edinburgh for a time when she was nineteen. She had gone for that same drive one evening with a young man, a friend of the family. They had got out and he had tried to make love to her. ‘There’s a rug in the car,’ he had said. It was a formula, some sort of password current at the time… And then she had been abroad again… And here she was once more, with a small camouflaged warship – something of the sort – gliding past below.

  ‘I seldom read it,’ said the uncommunicative man. He spoke with a finality which even the expansive person opposite found momentarily damping.

  Sheila remembered that her mother would never believe that these stops on the middle of the bridge were for any purpose other than to afford passengers a view. She believed this so firmly that if a train on which she was travelling did not stop she felt cheated of something for which she had paid when they gave her a ticket. And even when her husband had pointed out, over tea at a window of the Hawes Inn, that goods trains frequently stopped in just the same way…had pointed this out to her mother, who always called goods trains luggage trains… Sheila sank back, lost in reminiscence.

  ‘Rousing stuff sometimes,’ said the expansive man, returning to the assault. ‘I remember, now, something we had to learn at school. Our flagship was the Lion–’

  The uncommunicative person frowned. And the fourth occupant of the compartment, an undistinguished young man with sandy hair, looked up curiously from his magazine. But again Sheila was scarcely listening. She had recalled her disappointment on first crossing the bridge. That, of course, had been because of the Marine Gardens… had they been at Portobello, and were they there still? In the Marine Gardens there had been a gigantic scenic railway, a switchback up and down which shouting and laughing and breathless people were swept in charging coaches. And so she had come to suppose that on the bridge trains would behave in the same way – that they would make the crossing sweeping magnificently up and down the bold outline of the cantilevers. Her indignation when the great moment came and she found herself part of a sedate and level crawl through a maze of dull red girders and tubes had been extreme.

  The expansive man had become frankly aggressive. ‘Our flagship,’ he reiterated loudly and rapidly, ‘was the Lion and a mighty roar had she and she was first in the van sir when the foemen turned to flee–’

  With a jerk the train moved on. It made a considerable clatter on the bridge. The expansive man obstinately raised his voice. ‘And if e’er again they try sir to creep out warily–’

  The uncommunicative man gave a grunt of frank disgust.

  ‘We’ll send them staggering back to port from the grey North Sea.’ The expansive man put a quite terrific emphasis on ‘staggering’; he seemed to concentrate in the word all the growing animosity he felt towards the reserved person at the other end of the seat.

  Sheila had not noticed how it began. But certainly the oncoming man – he was a powerful and florid person, with something obscurely disturbing about his bearing – certainly the oncoming man had been at it before the train left the Caledonian station. He was of a type, no doubt, whom reticence or reserve in a chance companion will drive to outrageousness. And certainly the reserved man was reserved to a point of ostentation; he had crackled his Scotsman forbiddingly when addressed and had uttered scarcely half a dozen words during the journey. Just how it had got to poetry – or to what the aggressive man thought of as poetry – Sheila could not remember. At any rate, it was mildly absurd.

  North Queensferry. Sheila, who had a copy of The Antiquary open before her, turned back to the first page. It was early in a fine summer’s day, she read, when a young man of genteel appearance, having occasion to go towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in one of those public carriages which travel between Edinburgh and the Queensferry, at which place, as the name implies, and as is well known to all my northern readers, there is a passage-boat for crossing the Firth of Forth.

  An ever-so-mildly interesting young man in an ever-so-mildly interesting situation. Nice to be Sir Walter Scott and able to open a tale of romantic adventure with that leisurely, confident, book-wormy prose. Nice that readers stood for it; nice that one could feel oneself as a reader standing for it today. It was Sir Walter’s confidence that got one. And perhaps he was confident because his age had been fairly close to the real thing – shipwrecks and smugglers, family secrets and mysterious beldames being part of a just-vanishing Scotland. Perhaps –

  The reserved man had lowered his Scotsman. In the most temporary way, it was evident; nevertheless, it was possible to feel that something decisive was about to happen. The sandy-haired youth had this feeling; Sheila sensed that he had stopped reading his magazine. The expansive man was going to be crushed; the reserved man, long passively resistant behind his paper, was going to fire a single decisive salvo from an altogether superior armament. That was it, and it was curious that one so clearly knew. Sheila closed her book – shutting up romantic adventure with a snap – and turned to observe the social comedy. She took another look at the two men.

  She was going to call the reserved person Pennyfeather; nothing else would quite do. A professional man, but from one of those corners of the professional world in which money is the main concern. Money was his job, and his job had thinned those lips and given just that set to the chin. He was tolerably high up in money – and would not get higher. For he had an uncertain streak; it emerged in a faintly hunted look. Something had happened in his nursery; the effect of that something had asserted itself at adolescence – and Pennyfeather had been obscurely pursued ever since. It was because of this that he was distinguishably a ‘cultivated’ person; he had compensated for a haunting inner uncertainty by getting up a little art and what not. And it was because of this, too, that he was so severely aloof. Behind the severe and ready frown of Pennyfeather was a person easily scared.

  This modish analysis had taken Sheila some time. She had barely christened the expansive person Burge – it was not quite right, but it would serve – when Pennyfeather spoke.

  ‘I seldom read verse,’ said Pennyfeather, ‘but I read good verse when I do.’

  Blunt and to the point, thought Sheila. But glancing diagonally across the compartment she could see that Pennyfeather was trembling slightly. The uncertain streak coming out. As for Burge, his eye was taking on a glazed quality which was decidedly in the picture. The eye, Sheila told herself, of a stupid and obstinate man who gets into a quarrel in a pub.

  ‘Did you ever hear of Swinburne?’ Pennyfeather asked.

  This was a smashing stroke – rather like suggesting to the man in the pub that he was little better than a bleeding Aristotle. Burge made an inarticulate noise: he knew better than to know about Swinburne, it seemed to say.

  ‘Listen.’ And Pennyfeather, leaning back in his corner
and closing his eyes, began to recite:

  In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

  At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

  Walled round with rocks as an inland island

  The ghost of a garden fronts the sea…

  Pennyfeather paused, opened his eyes, and surveyed Burge with severe displeasure. ‘That, now,’ he said, ‘is poetry.’ And he repeated the lines over again.

  It was eminently absurd. Burge – who after all had started off on poetry – was looking embarrassed as well as angry. He was like a man who, having initiated a slightly improper conversation, is now being told the wrong sort of indecent story. Sheila had scarcely done admiring a comparison somewhat outside her own experience when Pennyfeather was off again:

  A girdle of brushwood and thorn incloses

  The steep square slope of the blossomless bed…

  He was evidently set to deliver himself of the whole poem. A beautiful and drowsy poem. It was odd, thought Sheila, making a rambling incursion in literary criticism, that verse so wildly exciting in its day should be decidedly hypnoidal now. Or better perhaps pleasantly lulling – its effect not dissimilar to that of the book-wormy prose about the young man at the Queensferry… On Burge’s eye the glaze was thickening. The sandy-haired man, who had shown an unobtrusive interest when Pennyfeather started to declaim, had relapsed into inattention. And Pennyfeather himself droned on; his enunciation was not unpleasant, but exaggerated perhaps the already obvious rhythm of the piece. Ti-ti-tum, ti-ti-tum… Sheila became aware of the rapid beat of the wheels on the rails beneath her, and found herself trying to fit this to the beat of the verse:

  Where the westerly spur of the furthermost mountain

  Hovers falcon-like over the heart of the bay,

  Past seven sad leagues and a last lonely fountain,

  A mile towards tomorrow the dead garden lay.

  Pennyfeather droned on, his eyes still shut. Burge, too, had shut his eyes, evidently as the next best thing to stopping his ears. Even the sandy-haired young man – about whom there was an obscure air of habitual vigilance – looked sleepy. Only the pulse of the train beat faster, as if it had scented moor and glen far in front. And Pennyfeather, forging ahead as steadily as the smooth projectile in which he sat, presently announced that as a god self-slain on his own strange altar Death lay dead. Never again would it be possible for the aggressive Burge to say or imply that he knew nothing of Swinburne.

  And with this issue of the affair the severe Pennyfeather appeared satisfied. Without attempting to add argument to demonstration he flicked the Scotsman back into place. Nor did Burge seem disposed to retaliation. A man who, on being offered a few rousing lines about our flagship being the Lion, could spout in that offensive way was plainly beyond the social pale. Burge produced a newspaper of his own and was presently absorbed in what appeared to be a crossword puzzle. Silence fell upon the compartment and lasted till the train ran into Perth.

  5: She Begins to Understand It

  Here, thought Sheila, we used to get the luncheon baskets. And the creak of the wicker lid, the weight on her lap of the big thick plate, the tug at her teeth of the drumstick of a cold boiled fowl – these came upon her suddenly with a hallucinatory vividness. And it was here, of course, that they would thrust hot sandbags into the carriages to alleviate the rigours of the Highland line – long ago… For she had not been north since childhood and this visit to unknown relations was bringing up innumerable memories.

  Sheila frowned. Was it possible that an unmarried woman of twenty-six was already on the verge of a morbid relationship with time? She looked out of the window as the train drew to a halt and took an objective view of Perth. She saw a poster advising a visit to York; a poster, rather better designed, advising a visit to Bavaria; a poster about National Service. There was scope for reflection, but not for reminiscence, in all that.

  Pennyfeather was first out; he was closely followed by the young man with sandy hair. Then Burge departed and Sheila was left to collect her luggage. She did so slowly, sniffing the air. The air, as was to be expected, smelt chiefly of railway station, but it was possible to believe that there blew through it another smell which came from the very portals of the north. A smell known to Scott’s genteel young men and which had in no wise changed since, a smell of peat and bell heather and true heather and pine needles thick upon the ground. The very names of the places down the line had this smell: Kingussie, Blair Atholl, Aviemore – astonishing names with which the lowlands of Scotland had nothing to do. At one of them, Sheila remembered, a shabby old fiddler used to appear and trudge up and down the platform playing; he would travel with the train for a time, playing at each stop, playing now a wild and broken pibroch and now some Scotch comedian’s banal tune. And in the intervals of scraping at his fiddle he would peddle a little volume of his own verses – poor verses enough, but not exactly such as the purchasers would laugh at unless they were vulgar folk. A shabby and perhaps disreputable old man, he had nevertheless his status with the railway people and the regular travellers on the line. He would sit among the shepherds and their dogs in the guard’s van, and his talk would be the shepherds’ talk. A last surviving example of a beggar of the romantic sort. And surely dead by now.

  Because of these reflections and because she wanted to make a telephone call before going on Sheila almost missed her connection; she would actually have done so had a powerful and raw-boned porter not insisted with some vigour that it should be otherwise. As it was, she found herself pitched into a compartment with her belongings on the floor about her just as the train began to gather speed… And it was mildly disconcerting to recover from the flurry of this and become aware once more of Burge.

  He was sitting back in a corner with the appearance of a man who is glad to find himself alone. Nevertheless, he got up at once and stowed her suitcase and hatbox on the rack. And Sheila sat down in a far corner and suddenly knew that she was very disconcerted indeed. For the aggressive man was not Burge. Burge, that was to say, was the wrong name for him. She had made an unusual mistake.

  Sheila produced The Antiquary and from the inadequate shelter it afforded made what observations she could. The expansive man – the man who had been so expansive – was dressed like Burge. In a sense he had been born Burge: there was a heaviness, a lurking brutality that was Burge to the life. But he was not Burge. It was not simply that he had got up to move her bags – though it was partly, no doubt, the way he had done so. A young man of genteel appearance, having occasion to go towards the north-east of Scotland… That was it. The man she had called Burge, though not dressed to present a genteel appearance, was a gentleman. The fact resided in the lines on his face as he sat looking sombrely out over the late Scottish afternoon.

  Turning a page of her novel at random, Sheila considered this puzzle. A man might be a gentleman or not and she didn’t care twopence. A gentleman might take an unsophisticated and even aggressive pleasure in our flagship being the Lion. He might sometimes look like a stupid person about to become involved in a quarrel in a pub. He might – Sheila frowned at the blur of print before her. The thing just wouldn’t analyse out. About the man in the far corner – sitting so quietly now in the rather loud clothes – there was something distinctly out-of-the-way… Sheila took another good look and came to a further and more perplexing conclusion. He was not exactly what she thought of as a gentleman after all. Rather he was of a related species.

  These curious social speculations were so evidently futile that Sheila applied herself resolutely to her book. The leisurely narrative had just been enlivened by the appearance of a sinister foreigner called Dousterswivel; moreover, some sort of treasure hunt appeared to be in prospect. She read on doggedly as the afternoon waned outside. The treasure hunt was a trick of Dousterswivel’s. There was to be a second treasure hunt…there was to be a third. Sheila’s mind wo
und its way through the story as the train wound its way through the bastions of the Grampians. And occasionally she would steal another look at her solitary companion in the compartment. The puzzle remained.

  And then Sheila saw that something odd was happening. She saw that the man in the corner had become aware of her occasional scrutinizing glances. Nothing remarkable in that. But she saw, too, that as a result of this Burge was coming cautiously back. Inch by inch, like a contortionist wriggling in a sealed box, Burge – the idea that was Burge – was insinuating itself once more into the physical presence opposite. She had just assured herself that this was indeed so when the man spoke for the first time. ‘Balmoral’, he said, and pointed through the window beside him.

  Considerably astonished, Sheila crossed the compartment and looked out. About half a mile away a moderate-sized shooting-box stood on the side of a hill. And Balmoral must be sixty miles off at least. ‘Really,’ Sheila said, ‘I hardly think–’

  ‘That’s Balmoral.’

  Burge was re-established indeed. This gratuitous and obstinate error was of his essence. But it was too late for conviction. Sheila’s eyes went involuntarily to the rack whither the man who was not Burge had instinctively lifted her luggage an hour before. And the eye of the man opposite followed her glance.

  There was silence. The train was labouring up a wild and lonely pass in which it was already twilight. The momentary plash of a waterfall tumbled through the compartment and was gone. Sheila said: ‘I don’t think you cared for Swinburne.’ Obscurely she felt that it was like putting her foot deliberately through ice, and that if she had not been reading of Dousterswivel and Edie Ochiltree and the young man of genteel appearance she might not have done it. Or perhaps it was the smell of the moors. At any rate, she had spoken against the bidding of some more cautious self.