Rum Affair (13 page)

Around us were the other boats of our class – sixteen now, Lenny said. Two had dropped out at Ardrishaig and two more at Crinan, due to affairs of business, family, and poor winter upkeep. Now we were widely separated.

“Funny thing,” said Lenny to nobody in particular as we went spinning past
Binkie,
“their Sniffa went off at Crinan, and they slammed the saloon door in me face.”

“Who did? Bob and Nancy Buchanan?” said Rupert. “You were sloshed, Lenny. They entertain every layabout that has been in port.”

“Not this time,” said Johnson amiably. “They had the cabin door locked all through the canal. Was it a gas leak?”

“Naw,” said Lenny. “Drip from the water pump into the engine compartment. Fancy that, now. Getting nearly as particular as
Seawolf,
aren’t they, as to their company?”

Why waste time talking about workmen? Johnson’s hand over mine adjusted the tiller, while I saw Lenny below spilling cream and whisky into the coffee. The sky was a pale, shining blue, laddered with shimmering floss where the high cloud was streamed by the wind. On the horizon, as we opened the Sound of Iona, the mid-blue of the sea met the sky in a filming of mist. If only the damned tub were a helicopter.

At teatime, we anchored off Iona Island itself, with its cathedral, four-square as a fishing boat, perched above a thumbnail of sacred white sand in a blue and purple and emerald sea. Rupert fled ashore to check in, and even Michael strolled on deck to study the form. Hennessy and his
Symphonetta
lay there already. But our other rivals were behind us, with one rare exception. Ogden’s
Seawolf,
sailed, Johnson said, like a one-legged tricycle, had somehow got into the anchorage first.

Victoria herself, whom Rupert brought back from the checkpoint to celebrate, was filled alternately with jubilation and with gloom. By flogging both themselves and
Seawolf
to death, Cecil had got to Iona in excellent time but a state of disrepair so extreme that their departure this side of Christmas seemed (said Victoria) highly unlikely. Even now Cecil was on board
Seawolf
(said Rupert) mending the rudder with string. And since
Seawolf
was temporarily out of commission, Ogden had sent Victoria (said Rupert) to go to Staffa in
Dolly
for her share of the champers.
Seawolf,
when mended, would follow. It looked to me, just then, as if Victoria had had just about all she could take of
Seawolf
and Ogden.

I had heard – who hadn’t? – about Duke Buzzy’s champers. The Duke, who sailed Buckingham Palace with stabilisers, was in the habit of awarding an annual prize to any Club yachts venturing to make the extra short passage to Staffa. The prize took the forms of two crates of champagne left, as a rule, in the recesses of Staffa’s large cave.

Two years out of three, had said Rupert, nobody got the champagne, either because Duke Buzzy wasn’t sailing that way that year; or he was sailing but couldn’t put a launch in to deposit it; or because the Duke got the champagne in, but none of the Club yachts managed to get it out. Outside the island of Staffa, said Rupert, there was virtually no anchorage. If you were agile and lucky, you could drop a hook there for a short time in calm weather. If not, not. And absolutely bloody not.

Today was calm. And Duke Buzzy’s
Vallida,
said the checkpoint, had not only sent the crates into the cave, but Hennessy had already been there for his pick. The remainder, Johnson with
Dolly
was now going to lift. “What about the race?” I demanded of Rupert.

He looked surprised. “This isn’t part of the race. We’ve checked in,” he said.

I said, with what patience I could manage: “I know. But shouldn’t we give the champagne a miss, and take advantage of the whole thing to check out? We’d have a head start over everyone but Hennessy, and we’d soon catch him up.”

“It isn’t done,” said Rupert. And added: “Don’t you want to see Fingal’s cave?”

O heresy! The quick answer was no. I stood as we chugged over to Staffa, and Johnson pointed out the low green hills of Mull on our right, and the long mouse-like ridge of Coll to our left. Ahead, dimly indigo on a mist bed, floated still others: a flat cockscomb of rock called, it could not be, Eigg; a stub to the left of it named, they said, Muck; and beyond, a toothy fragment of the Red Cuilins of Skye.

To the left of these, wild and high and quite prodigally hilly, like a sketch by a child, was the island of Rum where Kenneth’s laboratory was, and where Kenneth himself ought to be. I stood staring by the bare pole of the mainmast while Johnson dropped anchor beside a whorl of stacked peats made of pumice stone, and I plodded down the companionway as soon as the dinghy was lowered. I wasn’t going to be left alone on board
Dolly
with Michael.

Then I saw Michael was in the dinghy already. Pride would not allow me to return. I got in, Lenny started the outboard, and we went snarling off.

I recalled that Michael had already played the Mendelssohn overture five times on Johnson’s tape since we came alongside Mull. I was going to Staffa because I couldn’t avoid it. Michael was going to see if Felix had flunked on his homework.

Also we were both going because we noticed suddenly that we had an audience after all. The steamer
King George V
with, Rupert said, six hundred concert-going tourists had heaved into sight and dropped anchor, prior to disgorging all six hundred into Fingal’s cave. We should, said Rupert, manage to reach the cave and come back before the first boats arrived. The path used by the tourists, he also kindly made plain, ceased before penetrating the inmost bay of the cave. They wouldn’t even see Duke Buzzy’s champers.

We landed, and Johnson, declaiming (“. . . The pillared vestibule, expanding yet precise, the roof embowed . . .”), helped ashore first me, then the barefoot Victoria. Lenny, prompted by Johnson, got back into the dinghy and departed to lend first aid to the unfortunate Cecil, drifting behind us on
Seawolf.
The rest of us set off, all five, along the volcanic footpath which leads from the minuscule harbour, past the PRIVATE PROPERTY notice, and into the mouth of the phenomenon known as Fingal’s cave.

I forgot, as fast as I heard it, all that Johnson then told us of Staffa. What is columnar basalt? I didn’t know, nor did Michael. I knew that the cliff surrounding the jetty was made of thick charcoal columns, some half-fallen, some upright, some faggoted sideways to show their neatly packed ends, like a stack of shorn logs. Bleached to honey, they sank below the green water, and from the boat I had seen them continue, a cropped host of columns below the green sea; a razed forest, a broken city of temples, the upraised sliced face of each stalk glimmering jade and viridian and turquoise like a handful of coins.

Here, our path was a honeycomb of truncated columns, sealed together here and there, by courtesy of Messrs MacBrayne. Above to our right the dark ribbing towered, creased as elephant hide, up to stony tissues and the green sward on the top; while the sea swirled and lapped below on our left, and ran in and out of the petrified stack behind which
Dolly
lay.

Behind me, Michael walked carefully with Rupert, saying nothing. Ahead, Johnson was talking gently to Victoria about Cecil Ogden. It was possible, I supposed, that Victoria was sustaining her friend in his weaknesses purely for his own good and not her own. Possible, but extraordinary. What good would Cecil Ogden ever do anyone, after all?

The causeway ran like a ledge round the south-east cliff face of Staffa, and then turned sharp right. I cannoned into Johnson, who caught me, black eyebrows lifted. I turned, and there was the cavern.

If anyone cares, Fingal, I am told, is a mythical Celtic giant. His cave is nearly seventy feet high and forty feet wide at the entrance, with the sea running inland to its full length of over two hundred feet. If anyone cares.

To me, it was a black booming vault lined with columns, grey, rose, lilac and charcoal, of natural basalt. Uneven, crowded columns hung from the roof and stuck up through the opaque peacock water, thinning here to bright green, which lay surging and lapping below us, darkening as it moved away from the sunlight and into the depths of the cave.

On our right, the causeway we were following turned along the right wall of the cave and continued, guarded from the water by iron stanchions and wire roping, almost to the far end, where a barrier had been erected. Johnson leading, we started along it.

It was dark. We walked on the honeycomb, which fell away on our left, stalk upon broken stalk, into the deep seafloor of the cave. To my hand, on the right, were the massive ribs of the fall, its surface pitted with loving inscriptions. Behind us, in the bright blue day at the cave mouth, the next wave had entered – a swell that darkened the vent and ran, silent and spume spotted, into the unquiet sea of the cave, easing like oil over the drying stalks of its margin.

It rolled below us, thick, thundery green, and on to where the cave narrowed and ended. There was a growling, rising fast to a roar. A storm of glimmering foam flashed at the cave end, rearing high in the blackness, then retreated. And as it declined the cave gave forth a new sound: a great, tinny clatter of laughter, a pouring of primeval scorn, a vast, roaring, continuing rattle of inhuman amusement.

My skin rose in goose pimples and Johnson turned back, still talking about Ogden, and stood with me at the wire fence which guarded the drop. “Queer, isn’t it,” he added. “It’s the stone beach at the end, getting sucked back by the tide. What d’you think, Mr Twiss? Too many minims?”

Michael’s face was silkily white. Some things frightened Michael very easily. But I knew he would not give in. He was hypnotised by the sound.

Johnson glanced at him, and at Victoria, and at Rupert who, having gone ahead to the end of the path, had vaulted the barrier and was hunting, whistling, for the champagne. Johnson said: “I have had an idea. Ringside seats, with refreshments, before the masses arrive. No, not the champagne. Duck under there and sit down, and we’ll see what
Dolly
can do.”

What
Dolly
could do was to produce five polythene sachets from Johnson’s hip pocket, with a dry Martini with olive in each. Trying to drink a dry Martini from the snipped end of a sachet is a task calculated to preserve anyone from mysterious terrors. There was a good deal of giggling, and Victoria dropped her olive. Michael jumped down after it.

It was to annoy me, no doubt, but it was a sad mistake, for athletic Michael was not. There was a clatter, a cry, and as Johnson vaulted down after him, Michael disappeared into the water.

Only for a moment. The swell lifted him again as Johnson’s arm reached him, and single-handed Johnson slid him onto the rocks, where he lay, cocked at various levels, seawater running out of his mouth. Johnson gave him a few experimental press-downs, evacuated the rest of the water, and turning Michael over said briskly: “It’ll sell for tinning. Has he fainted, do you think?”

We were all standing above him by then, cautiously, with our Martinis fizzing inside us. I said: “He always faints. Should we leave him, perhaps, for
King George V
to retrieve?” I was in no mood for meeting six hundred people in this bloody cave. Waving from yacht or dinghy, yes. Within touching distance, emphatically no.

No one answered me. Victoria, kneeling, was taking dear Michael’s pulse. Rupert, sitting, was stacking champagne in a haversack. Johnson, the only one standing, said: “Rupert!”

He was looking down into the water. Rupert joined him.

What was it? Michael’s wristwatch? Another Martini? The olive? A twittering noise outside caught my ears and I said: “Listen. People outside on the causeway. The
King George
must have landed its boats.” No doubt I sounded annoyed. There was slime on my printed lawn sleeve, and I had no wish to sign autograph books.

Rupert said simply: “Christ!” I walked forward to see what they were staring at.

It was a mine. A new mine. A live mine, rather fetchingly patterned, bumping to and fro here in the cave.

I had not come so far, I had not achieved ninety thousand pounds and all those small safe vaults of diamonds to die under ground with a shipload of trippers. I turned to scramble back up the path just as Johnson’s hand took a grip of my arm.

“No! You would only attract them here quicker. Victoria, get out fast. Warn the
King George
people off. This is a small one as mines go, but it could bring the roof down and pretty well swamp the causeway and boats . . . Tina! Give her a chance to make herself heard, and then follow the crowd to the boats. If they see you first, they won’t listen – they’ll mob you. Rupert and I will stay here and do what we can.”

He was a fool. Before he finished speaking a monstrous wave had begun its slow roll from the mouth of the cave and glided past us, towards the black, lazy orb at our feet. The mine lifted, glinting on the massive green back, and subsided, swaying, as the comber passed on and with a roar, a crash and that appalling death rattle of stone, hit the end of the cave.

Soon, with the next wave or the next, the mine would glance sideways against the tiered wall of the cave. Or in the end, with all the press of water behind it, it would be hurled by that roaring fury against the beach of smooth, chuckling black stones, and buried here, in this ridiculous hole, I should die.

“What about him?” said Rupert. I had forgotten Michael existed.

Shoeless, stripped to the waist, Johnson was already half into the water. It was twenty-five feet deep. What did he think he could do? But he turned and said formally, in my direction: “That is up to Madame Rossi entirely.”

Hell . . . oh, hell! Who cared about Michael? But how would it look, afterwards, if I abandoned him now? If there was an afterwards.

I knelt, and grasping Michael by his Turnbull & Asser silk shirt, I began to shake him like a half-eaten mouse. At the same time I addressed Johnson with clarity. “Why don’t we get out? You could carry him. What can you do here?”