Stormy Petrel

by Mary Stewart

  Tucking my load of sticks under one arm, and rubbing my free hand hard over face and hair, I scurried for the safety of the cottage.

  After all, the evening stayed mild, so the fire never got lit. I made and ate supper, washed up, then watched the changing view of evening from the haven of the cottage window, and went early to bed.

  4

  I awoke next morning to a brilliant pearly light, but when I went to the window, no sea was visible. Nothing, in fact, was visible. The world was shrouded in a curtain of mist. This was not the sort of fog one is used to in towns, but a veil of salt-smelling white, damp and mild, with all the soft brilliance of a thin curtain drawn between earth and sun. But view there was none. I could not even see as far as the mouth of the burn. So, no walk today, until I was a little more certain of my way. Even the main track to the village could be treacherous in this blinding, moveless white.

  I was not disappointed. I told myself so, firmly, several times. I had all that I had wanted, peace and privacy, a day to myself before Crispin came, and an absolute compulsion to stay indoors and take another look at the poem that had been broken into by the tutorial in Cambridge. I would look at it again, and see if it had been totally destroyed. At least no person from Porlock was likely to interrupt me today.

  No one did. The day went by, still and silent but for the muted calling of the seabirds, and the sad little pipe of the ringed plover on the shingle. I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the blind white blankness in front of me, and slowly, like a clear spring welling up from the common earth, the poem rose and spread and filled me, unstoppable as flood water, technique unknotting even as it ran, like snags rolled away on the flood. When it comes, it is worth everything in the world. There is too much easy talk about ‘inspiration’, but at such times one sees it exactly for what it is, a breathing in of all experience, all apprehension of beauty, all love. As a fire needs air to make it burn, so a poem needs to be fuelled by each one of these. And the greatest of these is love.

  When I looked up at last, it was to see the near cliffs bright with the afternoon sun, and the sea creaming calmly against the storm beach in the gentlest of high tides. The horizon was still invisible, but above the line of mist that hid it the sky was clear, with the promise of a lovely evening. An evening with a breeze; I could see movement in the bracken that edged the track, and cloud-shadows moved from time to time over the sea-pinks. So much for the midges, and it would be better at the head of the track and over the central moors. I would make myself some tea, I decided as I packed away my papers, then walk over to the post office to make my call to Crispin.

  My sister-in-law answered the telephone, in the voice which, whether she means it or not, always sounds abrasive and resentful when she speaks to me. She was sorry, but Crispin was out on call. No, she did not know when he would be home. When did she ever? His train? Well, it now seemed that there was someone he wanted to see in Glasgow, so he was taking this chance to fit that in. He had booked on tomorrow night’s sleeper, and would head up to Oban on Friday. Then, she gathered, he would get the ferry the next morning, Saturday. Would that be right?

  ‘It could be. I was hoping he’d manage tomorrow’s boat, but Saturday would be great. I’ve found out more about it now, so if you wouldn’t mind giving him a message, Ruth? Have you got a pencil handy? Well, the ferry is the one for Coll and Tiree . . . C.O.L.L. and T.I.R.E.E. . . . Yes, they’re two of the islands in the Inner Hebrides; Crispin will know. It leaves at six in the morning, and they want you on board soon after half past five. I stayed at the Columba Hotel, just near the quay. I’ll make a reservation for him for Friday night. Oh, and tell him that Moila’s too small for the ferry to dock, so he’ll come ashore in a boat. I won’t offer to meet the ferry – it docks at eight in the morning – but I’ll arrange transport for him to the cottage. Did you get all that?’

  ‘Yes. But wouldn’t it be better if I got him to call you back when he comes in?’

  I laughed. ‘It would be difficult. There’s only the public phone in the post office, and I’ve just walked two miles to get to that. But I’ll give you the number –’ I gave it – ‘and if he wants to leave a message for me, Mrs McDougall will take it.’

  ‘Mrs McDougall. Yes.’ Now it was her professional voice, quick and cool, the doctor’s wife taking another message down. Then she was herself again. ‘Rose, what’s it like? Two miles from the phone? And you had to walk it? I must say, it sounds just the sort of place Crispin would love.’

  ‘He would. He will. It’s quite lovely.’ I added, in total insincerity: ‘You really ought to have come, Ruth. The cottage is tiny, but it’s charming, and the views are out of this world.’

  ‘But what on earth would there be to do?’

  ‘Well, nothing.’ Nothing, blessed state for the hard-working Crispin, and for myself after the turmoil of exams and end of term.

  ‘I,’ said my sister-in-law, who never, I am sure, means to be offensive, ‘simply cannot stand being idle. I’m going to Marrakesh in September. Marvellous hotel, bags of sunshine, and plenty of tours and fascinating shopping.’

  ‘That sounds wonderful. Enjoy it. I’ll have to go now, Ruth. I’ll ring again on Thursday evening to see if Crispin’s going to make it. Goodbye now.’

  ‘Goodbye.’ And she rang off.

  Mrs McDougall was in her kitchen taking a batch of bread out of the oven. I paid her for the call, and stayed chatting for a while, answering her queries about the cottage and then telling her of my brother’s expected arrival, and the possibility that he might telephone with a message.

  ‘I expect I’ll walk over this way every day anyway, and if he does come on Saturday could Archie be here, please, to take him down with his bags to the cottage?’

  ‘He will be there. He always meets the boat. There are always goods to carry that have been ordered. Well, it will be nice for you to have your brother here, and we will hope for the best. I am afraid that there is bad weather forecast. I have just heard it on the news.’

  ‘Oh, dear, is there? Really bad? Enough to stop the ferry crossing?’

  ‘It has to be very bad indeed for that. Don’t worry, your brother will get here. But you might find the cottage a bit draughty if it gets really rough.’

  ‘I’ll batten down the hatches,’ I told her. She laughed, and we talked for a few minutes longer. When I left I had a bottle of midge-repellent in my pocket, and a loaf of new bread, still warm, in a plastic carrier. The loaf was a gift. The natives were friendly, after all.

  I went slowly, and presently found myself walking towards a most spectacular sunset. Gold, scarlet and blazing flame I had seen before, but never like this, washing over the low clouds from below, and backed by the most delicate and limpid green which faded to primrose and then into the shadowy greys of the upper sky.

  I stood to watch. To my right was the small loch, edged with deep reedy banks of moss and thymy turf. The water lay smooth as glass, polished with all the colours of the sunset sky. Then something moved, and the shining world broke up into arrowing ripples, as a bird slid across the water, no more than a shape of black against the glare. A duck? Too big. A diver? It was possible. I had never seen one, but my brother had talked of them, and I knew that he was hoping he might find one here. As I screwed up my eyes against the dazzle, trying to see the creature so that I might describe it to Crispin, it vanished. Duck or diver, it had dived, and, though I waited for long minutes, it did not appear again. I walked on, and down the hill towards the cottage which, already, seemed like home.

  It is never quite dark on a clear June night in the Highlands. And never, in the long, light nights, do the seabirds cease from calling and flying. I went outside again that night, just before bedtime, to look at the stars. Back in the city, or in fact anywhere that I had lived, the night sky was disfigured by street-lamps and the city’s emanations. But here, in a clear arch of pewter-grey air, the stars were low and bright and as thick as daisies on a lawn. I picked out the Plo
ugh, and Orion, and the Pleiades, and of course the long splashing trail of the Milky Way, but that was as far as my knowledge went. Of one other thing I could be certain; the weather was changing. A wind was getting up, and even as I stood there, the lower stars were obscured by drifting darkness. The cries of the seabirds, muted, seemed to change, too. And the soft murmur of the sea. It was perceptibly colder, and the wind smelt of rain.

  I went indoors and to bed.

  During the night the wind got up, and the morning dawned grey and blustery, with bursts of heavy rain. Thankful that I had taken the trouble to gather dry wood while it was fine, I lighted the fire, and soon had a cheerful blaze going.

  And, once the chores were done, there was nothing to do but write.

  It is time, I think, to make a confession. Though I was a student of literature and, I believe, a reasonably good teacher, and loved my work, and though I was, moreover, a serious poet who had gained some small recognition in circles even outside my own University, my writing life was not confined to poems and articles, or even lectures. I wrote science fiction.

  Not only wrote it, but published it and made what seemed to a poorly-paid lecturer to be a very acceptable amount of money with it. Under another name, of course. The flights of Hugh Templar’s imagination paid Rose Fenemore very well indeed. They also gave her a much valued safety-valve for an almost too-active imagination. The pure invention of these tales, the exercise of what at its best can be called the high imagination, allow the writer (in Dryden’s phrase) to take the clogs off his fancy, and to escape the world at will.

  So through that dismal day Hugh Templar sat at his kitchen table and pursued the adventures of a team of space-travellers who had discovered a world directly behind the sun, which was a mirror-image of our own Earth, with the same physical composition, but with a rather different kind of population, a race having strange and, I hoped, thought-provoking ideas about how to run their planet . . .

  At ten o’clock the lights went out.

  Though normally, in the Highlands, there is almost enough light at that time to write by, the storm-clouds that had thickened and threatened all day made it quite dark. The fire had died to cold ashes, but I felt my way to where I had seen a candlestick, left ready on the mantelpiece, presumably as insurance against just this event. I crossed to the uncurtained window and peered out. The wind was stronger than ever, and fistfuls of rain hurtled against the glass. A wild and nasty night.

  I finished the section I had been writing – an idea left in mid-paragraph tends to vanish very quickly – then took myself and my candle early to bed.

  The walls of the cottage were thick enough to shut out the worst sounds of the storm’s buffeting, and even the creaking of doors and rattling of windows could not keep me awake for long. But something, some sharper, unaccustomed sound, brought me out of my first deep sleep into listening wakefulness.

  The storm was still raging, more fiercely now than before. I could hear the crash of waves on the shingle, and the intermittent shriek of the wind as it tore through the gaps in the kail-yard wall.

  But the sound that had startled me awake was different. It came from within the cottage, a quiet sound, but cutting through all the noise from outside. The closing of a door; the back door, I thought. And then sounds from the scullery. A tap running, and the echo of metal as the kettle was filled.

  Crispin? Against all expectation, all possibility, had my brother managed to make his way here, and cross to Moila in spite of the storm?

  Too bewildered by sleep to think just how impossible it was, I slid out of bed, pulled on my slippers, threw my dressing gown on, and opened my bedroom door. There was a light on downstairs, and as my bedroom door opened, all sounds ceased from inside the house. For a moment I thought I had been mistaken, and that perhaps I had left the switch on after the light failed, but no, I was sure I had switched it off. And I had locked the back door. I ran downstairs.

  He was just turning from the sink, kettle in hand. A young man, tallish, slenderly built, with dark hair dragged into a tousle by the wind, and a narrow, pale-skinned face. A good-looking face; blue eyes, straight nose, cheeks flushed with cold and wet with rain, and with tomorrow’s stubble already showing dark. He wore a navy fisherman’s jersey and gumboots, and a heavy anorak, shiny and running with wet.

  I had never seen him before in my life.

  I stopped dead in the doorway. He stood, rigid, gripping the kettle.

  We both spoke at the same time, and, inevitably, the same words.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  5

  He set the kettle down with a rap on the draining-board. He seemed even more taken aback than I was, and this heartened me. I said, with a reasonable show of calmness: ‘You’re welcome, of course, to take shelter from the storm, but do you usually walk into someone else’s house without knocking? Or did you knock, and I didn’t hear you? I thought the door was locked, anyway.’

  ‘Your house?’ He asked it without any apparent sense of its being a stupid question.

  ‘Well, yes. Temporarily, anyway. I’ve rented it for a fortnight. Oh, I see. You know the owners? And you thought you could just walk in—’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I thought it was my own house. I was brought up here. See?’ He put a hand in a pocket and brought out a key, the duplicate of the one I had been given, which fitted both front and back doors. ‘I’d no idea the place had changed hands. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too.’ An awkward silence. He stood by the sink, dripping quietly onto the scullery matting. He showed no sign of offering to go, and, hearing the wind outside hurling fistfuls of rain about, I could hardly blame him. I cleared my throat. ‘Well, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it? The people who lived here moved away a couple of years ago, so I was told. I don’t know where they went, but Mrs McDougall at the post office could probably tell you, if you wanted to get in touch again. I think she said the name was Mackay.’

  ‘That is right.’ Now in his voice I could hear, through the flattening cosmopolitan overlay, the unmistakable lilt of the islands. ‘My father used to do the garden at Taigh na Tuir. My foster-father, that is.’

  ‘You mean your parents lived here? Then this was your home?’

  ‘That is right,’ he said again.

  ‘Well . . .’ I stopped, at a loss for words. He smiled then for the first time, and the smile lightened his face to a sudden, vivid charm.

  ‘A bit of a facer, isn’t it? For me, too.’

  ‘You mean you really didn’t know they’d left? You just let yourself into your own home and thought they’d be upstairs asleep?’

  ‘Just that.’

  ‘But – but that’s awful. You . . .’ I stopped again. There was really nothing left to say. I finished, feebly: ‘You’re taking it very calmly. What will you do?’

  ‘What can I do, but wait till morning?’ The smile was still there, but behind it now was a hint of trouble, and more than a hint of tiredness. ‘It wasn’t quite such a shock as you might think. It certainly shook me when you came downstairs, but then I just thought my people might be away, and have let the cottage. Then I thought . . . well, as it happens, I did know that the old lady – Mrs Hamilton – had died earlier this year, and of course that could have meant that Dad’s job had packed up and they’d had to move. But then, when you said they’d been gone for a couple of years . . .’ He paused and took his breath in. No smile now. He frowned down for a few moments at the damp patch on the matting at his feet, then he shook his head, as if ridding himself of some unwelcome thought, and looked up at me again. ‘In fact, that’s still what may have happened, isn’t it? If she hadn’t been well, perhaps, for some time, and had lost interest in the garden, and wanted to get the cottage done over for sale or letting, then she might have told them to go?’

  He finished on a note of enquiry, but I shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve only just got here, and I really haven’t heard anything more than I told you. But how doe
s it happen that you didn’t know they were leaving? All that time ago – did they never write?’

  ‘I’ve been abroad. Moving around, and one loses touch, I’m afraid. I’ve only just got back to the UK.’ He looked around him. ‘I did notice the changes, of course, but I just thought the old lady had had the house done over for them – the parents. But she must have done it after they left; she’d have to, if she wanted to let the place. It wasn’t much before, you can see.’ A glance at the corner where the copper stood, then at the doorway behind me, where the light fell on the gleaming worktops and new cupboards. He lifted his shoulders and let them fall in a dismissive shrug. ‘Ah, well, I can see now, they’ve made a pretty good job of it. I didn’t really stop to look earlier – I was just so glad to get out of the weather.’

  ‘I can imagine. You said you knew that Mrs Hamilton had died?’

  ‘As it happens, yes. I hired my boat on Faarsay – that’s a little island south of Mull – and they’d heard about Mrs Hamilton, but they didn’t know my folks, so no one told me our house was let.’

  ‘I – yes, I see. Well, I’m sorry you had to find out this way.’

  A pause. There seemed to be nothing else to say. The water dripped steadily from his anorak to make a puddle on the floor. He looked pale and, I thought, tired and rather lost. I said crisply: ‘Give me the kettle. You look as if you could do with a hot drink, and as a matter of fact, so could I.’ I carried the kettle into the other room, plugged it in and switched on. ‘What’ll you have, coffee? Tea? Cocoa? I’m not stocked up with strong drink yet, I’m afraid. Why don’t you take that wet anorak off and get the fire going again while I make the drinks?’

  He did as I suggested, dropping the wet clothes into a corner by the back door. ‘Well, God bless this house. It’s very good of you to take it like this. I’m sorry if I gave you a fright. The coal’s still kept just outside the back door?’

  ‘Yes, but I brought some in earlier; it’s in that bucket there, and there’s peat there, too, and it’s dry. I suppose you’re used to peat fires? You can show me how. Are you sure cocoa will do?’