The Singing Sands ag-6

by Josephine Tey

  However, there was no qualification to the welcome he was given. Apart from the Royal Family, in person and in toto, Grant could think of no one who could be guaranteed the equivalent of the reception that Wee Archie was now being accorded. Even discounting the effect of libations at the lee end, it was surprising. And the silence that succeeded it when he began to talk was flattering. Grant wished that he could see the faces. He remembered that Bella from Lewis had had no use for his back-door proselytising; and what Pat Rankin thought of him would not go through the post. But what did these Islanders, cut off from the world and from the variety that alone could teach a man to judge between this and that, what did these Islanders think of him? Here was the material of his dreams; innocent, acquisitive, self-conscious, egotistical. They could not be subverted to another rule, the Islanders, because no one had ever ruled them in any real sense. A Government was there, as far as the Islanders were concerned, to be milked of benefits and diddled out of its dues. But their separateness could be played upon to alienate sympathy; their opportunism could be sharpened by dangled benefits. In Cladda, Wee Archie was not the embarrassing nonentity he had been at Lochan Dhu; in Cladda he was a possible power. Cladda and all its attendant islands represented, in the ultimate reckoning, submarine bases, smuggling points, stepping-off places, watch-towers, airfields, patrol bases. What did the Islanders think of Gilleasbuig Mac-a’-Bruithainn and his creed? He wished that he could see the faces.

  For half an hour Wee Archie spoke to them in his thin, angry voice, with passion and without pause, and they listened without a sound. And then Grant, casting a glance at the rows of seats in front of him, thought that they looked less full than they had been at the beginning of the evening. This was so unlikely that he took his attention from Archie to consider the matter. He caught a stealthy movement along the trough between Row 5 and Row 6 and followed it with his eye until it reached the end of the row. There it stood upright and materialised into the person of Katie-Ann. With no fuss at all Katie-Ann, still with demure eyes fixed on the speaker, faded backwards through the standing rows of males and disappeared into the outer air.

  Grant watched a little longer and found that this melting process was continuous, both among the seated audience and among the males standing round the walls. The audience was melting away invisibly under Archie’s very nose. This was so unusual—a country audience will always wait to the end however boring an entertainment—that Grant turned to Mr Todd and whispered: ‘Why are they leaving?’

  ‘They’re going to watch the ballet.’

  ‘The ballet?’

  ‘Television. It’s their great treat. Everything else they see on television is just a version of something they’ve seen already. Plays, and singing, and what not. But ballet is something they’ve never seen before. They wouldn’t miss ballet for anything or anyone….What is so amusing about that?’

  But Grant was not amused by Cladda’s passion for ballet. He was enjoying Archie’s so-unlikely disarming. Poor Archie. Poor wee deluded Archie. He had been overthrown by an arabesque, foiled by an entrechat, defeated by a plié. It was fantastically appropriate.

  ‘Have they gone for good?’

  ‘Oh, no, they’ll be back for the dance.’

  And back they were, in force. Every soul on the island was at the dance; the ancients sitting round, and the active taking the roof off with their wild yelling. It was less agile dancing than Grant was used to on the mainland, less graceful; for Highland dancing one needed the kilt, and the soft thonged shoes that made no sound on the floor and let a man dance like a flame among the sword points. The Island dancing had much of the Irish in it; much of the sad Irish immobility that left the dancing a matter of foot-work only, and not an uprush of joy that filled a man to the last finger-tip of his up-flung hands. But if the dancing itself lacked art and gaiety there was a fine wholesale merriment in its stamping performance. There was room, with some squeezing, for three eightsomes, and sooner or later everyone, including the Swedes and the Hollanders, were dragged into this orgy of exercise. A fiddle and a piano gave out the lovely floating rhythm (for that one needed a regimental band, thought Grant as he swung Katie-Ann into the arms of a delighted Swede, one needed that double drum-beat and pause; it might not be purist but it certainly was effective) and the hands of those at rest beat time. The wind howled along the skylights on the roof, the dancers yelled, the fiddle sawed, and the piano thumped, and a wonderful time was had by all.

  Including Alan Grant.

  He swayed home through the stinging lash of hail wielded by a pitiless south-wester, and dropped into bed drunk with exercise and fresh air. It had been a delightful day.

  It had also been a profitable one. He would have something to tell Ted Hanna when he got back to town. He knew now who Archie Brown’s ‘ravens’ were.

  Tonight he did not look at the closed window with misgiving. Nor tonight did he forget it altogether. He looked at the closed window and was glad of it. He had absorbed the Island point of view that a window is there to keep out the weather.

  He burrowed into his cotton-quilt nest, out of the wind and the weather, and fell into dreamless depths of sleep.

  8

  Wee Archie departed next morning when ‘the boat’ called, on his way to spread light throughout all the other dark places of the archipelago. He had been staying with the Reverend Mr MacKay, it transpired; and Grant wondered what that blameless padre to a Highland regiment would think if he knew what he had been sheltering under his roof. Or was the Reverend Mr MacKay, too, sick of Archie Brown’s disease?

  On the whole Grant thought not.

  Mr MacKay had all the authority that mortal man could crave; he had a satisfaction for his vanity every Sunday morning; he had seen the world, and life and death, and men’s souls in relation to both, and he was not likely to hanker after esoteric glories. He had merely been host to a Scottish celebrity. For in a small country like Scotland Archie ranked as a celebrity, and Mr MacKay was no doubt greatly pleased to entertain him.

  So Grant had the island to himself, and for five days in the company of the whooping wind he quartered his bleak kingdom. It was rather like walking with a bad-mannered dog; a dog that rushes past you on narrow paths, leaps on you in ecstasy so that you are nearly knocked over, and drags you from the direction in which you want to go. He spent his evenings with his legs stretched out to the office fire listening to Mr Todd’s tales of pub-owning in the Lowlands. He ate enormously. He put on weight visibly. He slept as soon as his head touched the pillow and woke only when it was morning. And by the end of the fifth day he was ready to face a hundred air journeys rather than spend another twelve hours in the place.

  So on the sixth morning he stood on the great flat of white sand waiting for the little plane to pick him up on its way back from Stornoway. And the small misgiving somewhere in the depths of him was nothing like the pervading apprehension with which he had expected to be filled at this moment. Mr Todd stood with him, and beside them on the sand was his small case. Up on the grass, where the road ended, was the Cladda Hotel car, the only one on the island and the only one of its class anywhere in the world. They stood there, four tiny dark objects in the shining waste, watching the small bird-like thing in the sky drop down to them.

  This, Grant thought, was as near to the original idea of flight as one was likely to get nowadays. As someone had pointed out, when man first dreamed of flying he had seen himself rising on his own silver wings into the blue empyrean, but it hadn’t turned out at all like that. First he was trundled to a field, then he was shut in a box, then he was terrified, then he was sick, then he was in Paris. Being picked up from the sands on the sea-ward fringe of the world by a casual-alighting bird was as near as one would ever come to the free soaring of man’s original vision.

  The great bird idled up to them along the sand, and for a moment Grant panicked. It was, when all was said, a box. A tight-closed trap of a thing. But the casualness of everything loosened his
rigid muscles almost as soon as they had stiffened. In the clinical order of an airport, shepherded and compelled, panic might have conquered. But here, on the open sand, with the pilot draped about the top step as he gossiped with Mr Todd, and the crying of gulls and the smell of the sea, it was a thing one could take or leave. There was no compulsion to be afraid of.

  So when the moment came he put his foot over the last step with nothing more than a slight heart-quickening. And before he could analyse his reaction to that closing door a nearer interest caught his mind. In front of him, on the other side of the gangway, was Wee Archie.

  Wee Archie looked as if he had just got out of bed, and as if he had done that getting-out in some hurry. His dishevelled splendour looked more than ever as if they were someone’s else’s clothes altogether. He looked like a discarded armature with some studio props flung on top of it. He greeted Grant like an old friend, condescended to him about his ignorance of the Islands, recommended Gaelic to him as a language it would pay him to study, and went back to sleep. Grant sat and looked at him.

  The little bastard, he thought. The vain, worthless little bastard.

  Archie’s mouth had fallen open, and the strands of black hair no longer covered the thin patch. The knees above the fat brilliant socks were more like anatomical specimens than any mechanism designed for the propulsion of a living being. They weren’t knees; they were ‘the knee joint’. The articulation of the fibula was particularly interesting.

  The vain vicious little bastard. He had had a profession that would give him his bread and butter, a profession that would have given him a certain standing, a profession that would have brought him spiritual reward. But that had not satisfied his egotistical soul. He had needed the limelight. And as long as he could strut in the light he did not care who paid for the illumination.

  Grant was still considering the fundamental part that vanity played in the make-up of the criminal when a geometrical pattern opened below him like a Japanese flower in water. He took his thoughts from psychological matters in order to consider this Euclidean phenomenon in a world of nature and found that they were circling the mainland airport. He had flown back from Cladda and had hardly been aware of it.

  He climbed down on to the tarmac and wondered what would happen if he did a war-dance of joy there and then. He wanted to go whooping and prancing round the aerodrome like a child on his first hobby-horse. Instead he went to the telephone booths and asked Tommy if he could pick him up at the Caledonian in Scoone in about two hours. Tommy could and would.

  The food at the airport restaurant tasted like Lucas-Carton, the Tour d’Argent, and La Crémaillière all rolled into one. The man at the next table was complaining bitterly about it. But he of course had not just been reborn after five months of hell and seven days of Katie-Ann.

  Tommy’s round, kind face in the lounge of the Caledonian looked rounder and kinder than even Tommy’s face had ever looked before.

  There was no wind.

  No wind at all.

  It was a beautiful world.

  What a frightful anticlimax it would be, he thought, if when he got into the car with Tommy the old horror overcame him. Perhaps the thing was just waiting there for him, licking its lips with anticipation.

  But there was nothing in the car. Just himself and Tommy and the good relaxed atmosphere of their habitual intercourse. They drove away into the country, an appreciably greener country than it had been ten days ago, and the evening sun came out and sent long golden fingers of light across the calm fields.

  ‘How did the Moymore ceremony come off?’ he asked. ‘The bouquet presentation.’

  ‘Oh, heavens: that!’ Tommy said, making motions as of a man mopping his forehead.

  ‘Didn’t he present it?’

  ‘If letting her have it is presenting it, I suppose technically he presented it. He handed it over with a speech he had thought up himself.’

  ‘What kind of speech?’

  ‘I think he had been rehearsing a sort of get-out for himself ever since we talked him into it by making Zoë Kentallen a rebel of some kind. Which was Laura’s idea, by the way, not mine. Well, when she stooped to take the great bush of carnations from him—she’s very tall—he held them out of her reach for a moment and said firmly: “I’m only giving you this, mind, because you’re a fellow-revolutionary.” She took it without batting an eyelid. She said: “Yes, of course. How very kind of you,” although she hadn’t an idea what he was talking about. She bowled him over, by the way.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In the good old female way. Pat is in the throes of his first infatuation.’

  Grant looked forward to seeing this phenomenon.

  Clune lay very peaceful in its green hollow, and Grant looked at it as one coming home victorious from battle. Last time he had driven up that sandy road he had been a slave; now he was a free man. He had gone out to look for B Seven and had found himself.

  Laura came out to meet him at the doorstep and said: ‘Alan, have you taken to a tipster’s business on the side?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Or one of those Lonely Hearts columns, or something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because Mrs Mair says there is a whole sackful of mail waiting for you at the post-office.’

  ‘Oh. How did Mrs Mair know that the letters were for me?’

  ‘She said you were the only A. Grant in the district. I take it you haven’t advertised for a wife?’

  ‘No, just for a bit of information,’ he said, going with her into the sitting-room.

  The room in the early dusk was full of firelight and wavering shadows. He thought it was empty until he noticed that someone was sitting in the big wing-chair by the hearth. A woman; so long and slender that she seemed as fluid as the shadows and he had to look a second time to be sure that she was not in truth a shadow.

  ‘Lady Kentallen,’ said Laura’s voice behind him, in an introducing tone. ‘Zoë has come back to Clune for a few days’ fishing.’

  The woman leant forward to shake hands with him and he saw that she was a girl.

  ‘Mr Grant,’ she said, greeting him. ‘Laura says that you like to be called Mr.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do. “Inspector” has a grim sound in private life.’

  ‘And a little unreal, too,’ she said in her gentle voice. ‘Like something out of a detective story.’

  ‘Yes; people expect you to say: “Where were you on the evening of the umpteenth inst?”’ How could this virginal creature be the mother of three sons, one of them nearly old enough to leave school? ‘Have you been having any luck on the river?’

  ‘I had a nice grilse this morning. You are going to have it for supper.’

  She had the kind of beauty that allows a woman to part her hair in the middle and wear it smooth to her head. A dark, small head on a long graceful neck.

  He remembered suddenly about the newly decorated bedroom. So the fresh paint had been for Zoë Kentallen, and not for Laura’s latest candidate for his interest. That was an enormous relief. It had been bad enough to have Laura’s selections put under his nose, but to have had the latest one actually under the same roof would have been, to put it mildly, tiresome.

  ‘The Oban train must have been in time for once,’ Laura said, remarking on his early arrival.

  ‘Oh, he flew back,’ Tommy said, throwing another log on the fire. He said it casually, unaware that the fact had any importance.

  Grant looked over at Laura and saw her face light with happiness. She turned her head to find him among the shadows and saw that he was looking at her, and smiled. Had it mattered so much to her then? Dear Lalla. Dear kind understanding Lalla.

  They began to talk about the Islands. Tommy had a fine tale of a man whose hat blew off as he was boarding a boat in Barra and who found it waiting for him on the pier at Mallaig. Laura was funny about the impossibility of carrying on a conversation in a language that has no words for anything less than two hundred years old and
supplied an imaginary account of a road accident. (‘Blah-blah bicycle blah-blah S-bend blah-blah brakes blah-blah traction-engine blah-blah ambulance blah-blah stretcher blah-blah anaesthetic blah-blah private ward blah-blah temperature-chart blah-blah chrysanthemums freezias ranunculus narcissus carnations….’) Zoë had stayed in the Islands as a child and was very knowledgeable about poaching salmon; an art she had been taught by local talent under the very nose of her host’s game-keeper.

  Grant was pleased to find that the family atmosphere of Clune had been in no way disturbed by the presence of this guest. She seemed unaware of her beauty, and unexpectant of attention. He was not surprised that Pat had been ‘bowled over’.

  It was only when his bedroom door finally closed on him and he was alone that his mind went to that waiting sack of letters in the post-office at Moymore. A sack of them! Well, that was not unbearably surprising, after all. A life in the C.I.D. conditioned one to the existence of the letter-writer. There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all. Seven-eighths of that pile of letters would be the product of those whose hobby was writing letters.

  But there was still the odd eighth.

  What would the odd eighth have to say?

  In the morning he watched the guest getting her tackle ready for the river and wished that he was going with her, but still more he wanted to go to the post-office at Moymore. She set off without fuss, self-sufficient and unobtrusive, and Grant, watching her walk down the path, thought that she was more like an adolescent boy than a prospective dowager. She was wearing very elegant trousers and a disreputable old lumber jacket, and he remarked to Tommy that she was one of the few women who looked really well in trousers.