Unknown (13 page)

Stuart’s dinghy bore the name
Gazelle,
but she was no elegantly slender craft, but a stout, broad-beamed boat originally used for lobster-fishing. An efficient inboard engine sent her bobbing powerfully across the Sound towards Cruban.

“Does Andy still want another boat?” he asked Judith casually.

“I’m not sure.”

“If he does, I might let him have this one. He can have it cheap. I shan’t need it when the slipway’s finished. I’ll be able to moor the
Cloud.”

He tied up at the foot of steps in the harbour and insisted on buying icecreams for the children. For one ridiculous instant she thought it was like being married with a couple of children and all of them out together on a Saturday afternoon shopping spree.

But his next words dispelled such fanciful ideas.

“I hear you and Neil went cruising up the Loch the other evening and the steamer was late coming home.”

He had spoken so conversationally, without a trace of reproach, that any defensive retort from her might have emphasised the wrong point.

“Yes. It was fortunate that Mairi was able to row us back. At least, she brought the boat and Neil rowed back.”

“You won’t be taken in by Neil out of pity for his past sufferings, will you?” Stuart asked softly.

“Taken in? No fear of that, I think.”

He leaned on the promenade rail. “He’s already claimed one victim on Kylsaig—Mairi. I shouldn’t like to see you become another.”

“Surely one can feel sympathetic towards a man about his bad luck,” she protested.

Stuart smiled with amused mockery. “Has he told all? Or does he remain a man of mystery?”

“Why not ask him?”

“I doubt if he’d have much to gain by unburdening himself to me.”

“You’re being mean and petty, Stuart.”

He laughed lightly. “Probably. Is your telephone still out of order? Fiona tried to get you. She wanted to invite you to tea at the house on Monday. Barbara as well if she’d like to come over.”

“Oh, thank you. I’m sure we’d both be pleased to come.”

“I shan’t be there. I have to go with Angus, my factor, to the Great Glen cattle ranch. That’s beyond Fort William. But I might be home in time to take you back to Kylsaig.”

Barbara was interested in the invitation. “We haven’t been there since we took you over to dinner that evening, ages ago.”

Mrs. Huntly received the two sisters in her usual gracious manner. Fiona suggested that tea should be served in the garden, but Mrs. Huntly gently disagreed.

“Too windy, I think. I dislike insects being blown into my cup, and Barbara might find it too chilly.”

In the large drawing room with the panoramic views over the Sound, Fiona seemed restless. She had recently returned from a three weeks’ visit to London and was eager to exchange gossip with Judith.

“I can’t think why you stay here when you could be having such fun in London, even if you do have to work in the daytime.”

“Fiona, that’s hardly polite to Barbara,” Mrs. Huntly said almost sharply. “Judith has been looking after her sister and the rest of the family.”

“Sorry, Granna.” Fiona’s animated face was scarcely abashed.

After tea, Fiona suggested that Judith might like to see the boathouse down on the shore.

“I’d like that,” Judith agreed. “I’ve always been intrigued since you told me that you used the top part as a studio.”

She sensed a vague undercurrent of excitement about Fiona, but reflected that she did not know the girl well enough to judge. Perhaps she was usually like this, talkative, hopping from one topic to another so that her listener had to leap the unspoken bridges.

A suspended staircase led to the upper floor of the boathouse. The walls were nearly all glass on three sides, looking out over the water.

“What a wonderful place!” Judith exclaimed, gazing at the small grand piano in one comer, the richly-coloured rugs on polished honey-pale floor. A desk by the window, a couple of modern tub-chairs on spindle legs; a bench with a litter of oil paints, palette, a potter’s wheel, lumps of grey clay. It was the perfect place for arts and crafts and all kinds of do-it-yourself pursuits.

“When I found that Stuart’s new boathouse had this upper floor, I thought it was criminal to let him waste it as an office,” Fiona explained.

Judith’s attention was now caught by a practice-bar attached to the back wall.

“Have you danced ballet?” she asked.

“Not since school. Now I’m too old. But the bar is useful for exercises.”

Judith smiled. The idea of age creeping over anyone so mercurial as Fiona seemed to belong to the extremely distant future.

“Stuart certainly built this place as a room with a view,” Judith murmured, gazing down the Sound. “It’s like a look-out tower.”

“Most useful for spying,” Fiona added. She dashed towards a shelf and picked up a pair of binoculars. “And ' with these,” she adjusted and squinted through them, “one can see practically all that goes on—Kylsaig, in the Sound, even in parts of Cruban. Look!”

Judith took the binoculars reluctantly, put the lenses in front of her eyes and was slightly shocked to see Mrs. Drummond working in her front garden. She swerved away quickly, then found she was looking at Neil and his dog Jess waiting at the ferry.

“I must be careful when I’m on this side of Kylsaig.” she said, but although she laughed, she could not avoid a faint feeling of uneasiness. Did Stuart pick up binoculars whenever he fancied to take a look at the inhabitants of Kylsaig? She was glad that Andy’s house was on the far side of the island over the rise.

“When are you going to marry Neil?”

Fiona’s sudden question startled Judith so that seconds went by before she could even frame a thought into words.

“But I— What makes you think— He hasn’t asked me—” The words came out in clumsy jerks. She felt keenly at a disadvantage in the presence of this slender girl with her bright crown of hair and brilliant green eyes.

“As though that matters!” Fiona swung -away across the room and picked up a painting knife from the bench. “Men don’t go down on their knees nowadays and say ‘Darling, will you marry me?’ All the same, you’ve made up your mind, haven’t you?”

“If you mean that I intend to marry him, then you’re wrong. We’re good friends. He’s a neighbour of Andy and Barbara, and on a small island I can hardly help seeing him quite often.”

Judith was becoming a little tired of being badgered about her friendship with Neil. Mairi, Stuart, now Fiona —they all, it seemed, had different reasons for wanting that friendship to end.

“Mairi knows for certain that you’d like Neil to propose to you.” Fiona’s smile was triumphant.

“Then Mairi is also wrong. Oh, I know she’s terribly fond of Neil, but that’s exactly what makes her so jealous and suspicious of any other girl who comes within arm’s length of Neil. And since I happen to be the only other girl anywhere between twenty and thirty on the island, and unmarried, naturally she sees disaster in every casual glance or word.”

“But now that your sister is well, you need not stay here.”

“I’m sorry, Fiona, but I know that Barbara seems well enough. Actually, she has her bad days, and I feel I can
^,
'>e useful to help look after the family.”

“But you must have a reason for sacrificing yourself and your career,” Fiona persisted.

“I might have the excellent reason of wanting to please myself,” Judith retorted. “I like living on Kylsaig. It’s true that I might not want to live there always, but for the time being—”

“Until you have Neil safely under your thumb.”

“Look, Fiona,” Judith said patiently, trying to control her fast rising temper, “I don’t know how these ridiculous ideas have come about. I’ve already assured Mairi that I’ve no intention of coming between her and Neil—”

“How can you stop that if he wants you and not Mairi?”

“Oh, let the pair of them settle matters for themselves!” Judith realised now that Fiona had invited her down here to the boathouse studio for no other purpose than to ask the most pointed questions.

“Then if it’s not Neil you’re staying here for, who is it? Stuart?”

There seemed to be no end to Fiona’s catechism.

“Just believe that I’m utterly selfish and that I’m going to stay because I like it,” Judith snapped.

Fiona shook her head and continued to balance the painting knife on her finger tips. “I can’t believe that you haven’t any admirers in London, where you live, where you work. You’re most attractive. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I wish people would stop trying to drive me back to London as though I have some infectious disease.”

“Who has infectious disease?” Stuart had come up the staircase unobserved. “Have you any spots?”

Judith bit back her next retort, remembering that she was still Fiona’s guest and that Fiona was a member of Stuart’s household.

“They told me at the house that I’d find you both down here, in Fiona’s play-pen,” he added.

Judith’s exasperation evaporated, and she was relieved that he had appeared at that moment or perhaps she and Fiona might have exchanged blows.

“I’m going to Inveraray tomorrow,” he whispered to Judith as he accompanied her downstairs. “Like to come?”

“Thank you. Yes, I would,” she whispered back, aware that he did not want Fiona to overhear.

On the ground floor he showed her the sail loft which rose the whole height of the building. His cabin cruiser,
Flying Cloud,
lay shrouded on a set of rollers, a small dinghy alongside. Tools, wooden blocks, pieces of iron lay scattered about and the air held a mixed aroma of varnished wood, tar, rope and oil.

As she stood there with Stuart so close at her side, a delicate aura of intimacy seemed to surround them. She glanced up at his face and this time there was no mockery in his eyes or smile.

On the way to Inveraray next day, Stuart pointed out a quarry of handsome pink and grey granite, and further along the slopes of the loch a tree nursery with extensive beds of seedlings, miniature trees only a few inches high.

“All this part of Scotland seems so prosperous,” Judith remarked. “Why are you so worried about it?”

“If some of us didn’t worry, the whole place would die,” he returned grimly. “I want to see how successful the restoration scheme is working out in Inveraray. I’ve seen it at various stages, but you can’t get a picture of the whole. It’s a charming little eighteenth-century town, quite unspoilt, but it was just getting shabby and beyond repair until the Ministry bought it from the owners and started the scheme with first-class architects. Now it’s becoming so attractive that people are clamouring to be put on the waiting list for houses. Even the English want to live there.”

When they arrived and Judith saw the wide main street leading up from the loch side, the rebuilt flats with neat outside staircases to the upper storeys, the street lighting redesigned, she said, “Evidently even Sassenachs have good taste.”

“Of course, there’s always a danger that places become olde-worlde, but so far the town has escaped that.”

She was interested in picking out the trade signs over shop doors—the barber’s pole, the tailor’s scissors, the elegant boot for a shoe repairer.

Garden walls had been rebuilt, outhouses repaired, and when Judith and Stuart walked back along the loch edge, a man was busily painting his front door.

“All this work going on to restore the outsides of the houses. What about the inside?” she asked.

“Modernised, of course. Proper sanitation, heating, electricity. Inveraray is not just a facade.

They visited the castle with its fairy-tale turrets at the four compass points and were conducted through the apartments by a youth in Highland dress.

They had lunched at one of the hotels in the main street, and now he took her for tea to a small house in a courtyard, where evidently he was expected, for the plump little woman who opened the door gave Stuart an effusive welcome.

Judith was both surprised and delighted when he introduced her as “Miss Judith Whitacre of Kylsaig” instead of the inevitable “from London” tag. At last she was accepted as belonging, instead of being the intruder.

Their hostess, Mrs. Lindsay, plied them with tea, scones and cake, and at the same time gave Stuart a running discourse on her satisfaction with her new home.

“It’s a wee palace!” she said enthusiastically. “And I’m the queen in it.”

She toured them round the spotless rooms, the well-equipped kitchen and bathroom, breathlessly telling Judith how easy it all was to keep clean.

When eventually they left, Stuart said, “Until now, that woman lived in one room with the walls peeling, the roof leaking, no running water. Now she dazzles you with everything polished and shining.”

In the car going home, Judith’s elation made her long to sing or shout at the top of her voice. Today had not only been a pleasant, companionable outing, but Stuart had opened the door of his private world and admitted her as an interested party to his ideas and ambitions. During the day a recurring thought had crossed her mind that she did not know why he had not wanted to bring Fiona with him or inform her that he was taking Judith instead.

But Judith was happy enough not to worry unduly about Fiona.

He drove past the ferry and down to his own boathouse, where he launched the small dinghy. He showed her how to hold the oars and laughed when she caught a > crab. Halfway across the Sound, he took one of the oars to help her.

“You’re using them like chopsticks!” he complained. “Put both hands round that one and pull when I tell you.”

The dinghy moved erratically in half-circles, but eventually, with much bumping and splashing, it was manoeuvred alongside the ferry slipway.

Judith stepped out. “I’m a raw pupil, I know, but I’ll try to improve. I shall practise on Andy’s old tub. Thanks for the lesson—and for such a happy day,” she added.

He was already starting the dinghy’s engine and she stood a moment watching the boat chugging effortlessly across the Sound while Stuart had nothing to do but steer.