Stormy Petrel

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?’

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.’

‘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.’

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.

‘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.’

‘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 Plough, 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.

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.

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.