Orkney Twilight (17 page)

‘Marie-Jean?’ Sam asked. She sat down beside him.

‘She went nearly a year ago now.’ He nudged one of the stones of her ancestor memorial with his boot. ‘She moved down to Edinburgh with a writer. He came here for a summer break without his wife to finish his book. Then he ran off with mine. I couldn’t understand it. She was younger than me. He was old and a bit fat.’

She nodded sympathetically.

‘She said she couldn’t put up with my drinking,’ Nils said. ‘I’m not sure the drink had anything to do with it in the end. This is an excuse. She just wanted to escape.’

‘And you decided to stay here in Orkney anyway.’

‘Yes. I moved here to be with Marie-Jean but, in the end, I fell in love with the islands. I miss her though. I hope she will come back to Stromness. And to me. She loves the sea.’

‘I’m sure she will get fed up with the writer and come back.’

‘I don’t think so.’

He rested his forehead on his knees, eyes down at the ground. She wanted to comfort him, put her arm round him, but couldn’t quite summon the courage. He lifted his head sharply, taking in his surroundings. He glanced back at Nethergate, looked at her.

‘Well, I just came to tell you about
The
Inquisitor
.’ He sounded suddenly sober. ‘I had better go now.’

She wanted to prolong the conversation. ‘How are you going to get back to Stromness?’

‘I left my car in Tirlsay.’

‘Are you sure you’re okay to drive?’

‘Of course.’

He heaved himself to his feet. ‘Come and see me in Stromness,’ he said. He smiled. ‘And we can go out on the boat again.’

She wondered if he always ended his conversations like that, with an invitation to accompany him on a sea voyage, or whether he really meant it.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll come and find you again before we go.’

He was already heading to the road, loping down the hill, swallowed up by the twilight. She peered into the valley, searching the borderline of the wood for the giveaway amber flare of the Watcher’s cigarette. But there was nothing. As she turned back to the house, a shadow flitted across her vision and the owl called its haunting note.

Sam checked nervously over her shoulder as they drove away from Nethergate. Jim raced ahead in the Renault. They tried to keep up in the Cortina, ploughing noisily through sheep-splattered hills while above them clouds scudded across the sky. By the time they reached the car park below Marwick Head the strengthening wind was making it difficult to open the car doors. Jim was waiting, propped against the Renault, assessing the rolling fields through his binoculars.

‘That’s why it takes longer to fly to the States than it does to fly back. It’s the prevailing winds,’ Jim yelled as they struggled to join him. ‘The Jet Stream. I’m the first person that’s stood up to this lot since it left the east coast of North America.’

He put his face up against the gale and prodded the air with his finger. ‘Back off. Don’t mess with me,’ he shouted.

She exchanged sidelong glances with Tom as they shivered in their flapping thin coats and she wondered what they were doing here alone with this madman attempting to bully the elements into submission.

‘What a couple of namby-pambies,’ yelled Jim, intercepting their unspoken communication. ‘Race you to the memorial.’

He head-butted the wind as he pounded up the path towards the square tower standing guard over the island.

‘That’s not fair. You’ve had a head start,’ she shouted.

‘That’s not fair,’ Jim echoed in a mocking squeaky voice as he turned and ran backwards, waggling his hands in the air. She set off after him, bent over by the assault and battery of the gusts, hair lashing her face, calves aching with the effort of running up the hill. When was the last time she played this game with Jim? Greenwich when she was eight. 1974. He was still at the docks with Harry. Just. Still watching the ships sailing between Tilbury and Russia. She had spent the day with Liz and her sisters, jumping the meridian, running around the Observatory and admiring the cloud-topped spires of the city. Jim did not rendezvous at the prearranged meeting spot. They had given up waiting for him, walked down to the
Cutty Sark
as the sun was setting, Liz biting her lip angrily. A cool breeze was blowing off the water, carrying the chime of distant church bells and far-off voices. A familiar figure was leaning on the railings, staring out over the Thames, mesmerized by the oily tide sweeping its secrets past Deptford and Gravesend and out to the sea. That was their man. What was he doing there? He dragged his eyes away from the water and grinned with what he hoped was boyish charm.

‘Who is coming to the Isle of Dogs? Who wants to look for the secret passage under the river?’ Jim shouted.

‘Me,’ Sam yelled. ‘I’ll go.’

Liz sat with regal disdain on a bench by the clipper and Helen and Jess, her ladies in waiting, slumped by her side. They were not amused.

‘We’ll have to be quick,’ said Jim, ‘or Liz will have our heads chopped off.’ Jim led the way to the crystal dome glowing irresistibly against the violet sky.

‘If we’re lucky, we might catch Charlie the lift-man.’

Charlie was pulling the concertina lift-gate shut as they arrived and he shook his head and tapped his watch. ‘You’re too late. You’ll have to use the stairs.’

‘Do us a favour,’ said Jim.

Charlie folded his arms. ‘I’m always doing you favours.’

‘Official business.’ Jim winked and nodded his head in Sam’s direction. Charlie laughed.

‘Come on then, jump in, princess,’ he said to Sam. ‘Last ride of the night. It’s been a busy evening.’ He gave Jim a meaningful look as the old-fashioned lift descended to the white-tiled foot tunnel buried beneath the Thames. At the bottom, Charlie sang a sad song as he watched them go.

‘Let’s face the music,’ he warbled and the words pursued them as they walked.

‘Why is he singing that song?’ she asked.

Jim quickened his pace. ‘Charlie makes a song and a dance out of everything. Race you to the Isle of Dogs.’

She chased Jim and her short legs failed to match his adult strides even though he was running backwards and shouting profanities that passed over her head and echoed round the tiles. Halfway across he stopped, abruptly, and walked over to the side of the tunnel and, as she caught up with him, she saw he had pushed one of the white tiles with his finger and lifted it away from the wall.

‘Stop it.’ Horrified. ‘You’ll let the water in.’

‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to let the water in. I’m the one who makes sure there aren’t any leaks. I’m the bloody plumber.’ He laughed. And she laughed too. For some reason. She watched him curiously as he peered into the dark space in the white wall, stuck his hand in quickly, retracted it, pushed the tile back into place. In the strange silence of the tunnel she thought she could hear the river water rushing past above her head. She felt a wave of panic engulfing her.

‘The walls are caving in.’

‘Don’t be silly. Hold my hand and we’ll run back together. You’re safe underground with me.’

She wouldn’t be there in the first place, she thought, if it wasn’t for him. But she did what she was told and held his hand and felt the strength of his grip. Together they paced through London’s red clay while Jim marvelled at the magic of the Victorian’s underground engineering. Charlie was waiting for them when they reached the south side and he whistled his mournful tune all the way back to the surface. Let’s face the music. Later, when she tried to recall that evening, it took on the hazy quality of a haunting dream and she could no longer be certain whether Jim really had taken something out from a drop-box behind the tile and slipped it into his pocket or whether she had just imagined it. All she had to hold on to with any certainty was the feeling of sickness in her stomach, the tightness in her chest, the rising panic. And even then, she wasn’t sure whether the fear was reaching out to her or she was clinging on to it.

She wiped an unexpected tear from her eye with the back of her hand, took a deep breath as she steamed against the wind, towards the memorial. More oxygen plus red blood cells equals stamina, she chanted and felt the power surging around her body. As she caught up with Jim, she veered to the right to overtake but he barged her, hard, making her stumble and he ran on to reach Kitchener’s brick memorial first.

‘I won,’ he shouted.

She yelled, breathlessly, ‘You cheated.’

‘I still won.’

‘You’re past it, Dad.’

He winced and she regretted her words.

She slumped down with her back anchored against the tower, watching the skerry-strewn coastline beyond the sheer drop of the sandstone cliff, and ran through the Beaufort scale in her mind, the roaring wind paining her ears. High waves, breaking crests, white foam: force eight. Tom strode nonchalantly up the hill to join them, anorak pulling against his frame. He read the memorial plaque.

‘So this marks the spot where Kitchener and his crew went down with the HMS
Hampshire
,’ he said.

They were respectfully silent for a moment as the breakers pounded the cliff way down below. A furiously flapping puffin cut across the headland and set a course for the open sea.

Tom sat down on the grass next to her. ‘I wonder how many men drowned here.’

‘Hundreds.’

‘How long do you think anybody could survive in that water?’

‘About two minutes I should think. Your country needs you,’ she said, pointing at Tom, ‘to waste your life for a completely unnecessary cause.’

‘What do you know?’ Jim said scornfully.

‘The First World War was a total waste of life,’ she retorted. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Hindsight always gives you easy answers. The certainty of the armchair perspective. Right and wrong are not so clear when you’re in the middle of it, out there patrolling in the dark. Then it’s harder to make judgements. Then there’s no time for riding moral high-horses. Sometimes you don’t even know where you are. You might think you’re fighting for one side, put your head down and get on with it, and when you finally have a chance to breathe, you stand up and realize you’re in a completely different battlefield. Somewhere else entirely.’

Tom looked as if he was about to say something, but he kept his mouth shut. She couldn’t quite bear the reverence, the brotherhood, the respect for all things macho and bloody. Take the toys from the boys.

‘Anyway, wasn’t Kitchener on his way to fix up a dodgy deal with the Russians when his ship went down?’ she said. ‘Wasn’t there some story about a Russian agent being involved? Somebody wanted Kitchener out of the way for some reason or another.’

She felt the heat of Jim’s glare.

‘Conspiracy theory,’ he said dismissively. He clenched his jaw as he shifted his sight to the far horizon, the vanishing point, the place where the
Hampshire
was swallowed up by the sea. She tried to see what he could see, stared at the chopping waves and the dark spaces, let them fall into a pattern. Seals. Submarines. Shadows. And then she spotted the anomaly, the hard grey outline: the pointed prow of a boat.
The
Inquisitor
.

‘Let’s move it,’ said Jim.

Southbound along the narrow path that clung to the cliff edge, the fulmars bobbing along beside their feet, inches away from being blasted against the hard rock, skuas making them duck and shield their heads with their arms. Kitchener’s Memorial shrank behind them, nothing but a chess piece now. The cliff face eased out marginally into a more forgiving angle, scars of sheep tracks zigzagging the slopes.

‘Now this is the place,’ said Jim, ‘where I used to pick mushrooms. Look.’ He pointed toward a narrow gulley running off into oblivion. ‘I can see some down there. Who’s coming with me to pick them?’

‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait here.’

‘Afraid of heights, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ said Tom.

‘That’s your funeral,’ she said. ‘It’s that way.’ She nodded her head towards the cliff edge.

She flumped on the springy grass mattress. A stream trying to find its course along a small gully nearby caught her attention; the wind was so strong now it was blowing the water vertically into the air as it hit the edge of the cliff. She considered the meandering creek denying gravity and thought of Liz watching her husband and daughters disappearing over the edge at the same spot ten years earlier. For a moment, she was eight again, laughing at the wind with her sisters. And in her head the wind was tugging at Jim, pulling his fingers back from the rocks, flinging him to feed the waves below. She sat up, tipped on to her hands and knees and crawled towards the brink, lichen-starred stone rasping her palms. Jim and Tom were nowhere. But beyond the lines of curling waves, she spotted the dark shape of
The
Inquisitor
again, visible for a few seconds in the spindrift before vanishing down a trough and reappearing further along the horizon, pursuing a dogged course parallel to the coast, shadowing their path. She pictured Jim and Tom, two dark dots moving across the pale cliff face like nits crawling across a forehead. They would be clearly visible even from a distance. What was Jim doing? Signalling his presence? Creating a diversion?

The black crescent moon of Jim’s head emerged above the cliff’s edge, followed by his triumphant smirk. Tom straggled behind and collapsed on the ground beside her, his face taut and wan. Jim opened his cupped hands to reveal a pile of white fungus.

‘Mushrooms,’ he said.

‘Puffballs,’ she replied, giving the stuff a dirty look.

‘Mushrooms. Anyway, puffballs are edible.’

‘Well you’d probably eat babies’ brains if somebody offered them to you with a nice bit of bread to mop up the juice. I’m certainly not going to have any.’

‘I wasn’t offering you any.’

He retrieved his Swiss Army Knife from his windcheater pocket, wiped the malingering slivers off the blade with his hanky, folded it lovingly, slipped it into his haversack. And she wondered whether he had brought the Walther with him, whether it was in there too, nestling at the bottom of his bag.