North Star

by Hammond Innes

  Mclver’s son Robbie was just going to bed, a short, broadshouldered man with his father’s high voice. He accepted my request quite cheerfully, pulling on his gumboots and going out to the barn to get the van. Overhead a child began crying and Robbie’s wife appeared in a dressing gown with her hair falling to her shoulders and began heating some milk. The atmosphere in the croft kitchen was warm and friendly. The old man poured me a dram. ‘I was with old Mr Petersen when he first began fishing out of Hamnavoe. That was quite a while back before my father died and left me the croft.’

  ‘Did you live at Hamnavoe?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye. My wife, she’s dead now, but she was from Hamnavoe.’

  ‘You’d know the Sandfords then.’

  ‘Albert and Anna?’ He nodded, cackling to himself. ‘There’s a rum pair. And that son of theirs –’ He paused, his glass halfway to his lips and the moist blue eyes fixed on me. ‘Randall? There were Randalls at Hamnavoe once.’

  The door banged open and Robbie McIver came in. ‘Ready when you are.’

  I got to my feet, but he waved me back. ‘No, finish your drink. And I’ll have one too, Father.’ It gave me a chance to ask him whether he had ever met Alistair Randall. But he hadn’t. ‘It was after the war that I came to Hamnavoe. Your father, you say?’ And after that he seemed to close up, staring at me curiously as though the revelation had somehow produced a barrier between us.

  ‘You were saying something about the Sandfords’ son. Is Ian Sandford the only son?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘What were you going to say about him?’

  But he shook his head. ‘It’s getting late. You’d best be going now.’ And he nodded to Robbie, who downed the rest of his drink and opened the back door for me. I was conscious of their curiosity as I stepped out into the northern twilight. There was a light drizzle falling and I realized that here in Shetland it was hardly the normal hour to be visiting a young widow alone in a remote house. Robbie maintained a discreet silence, driving carefully and nursing the old van on the bends.

  It was just past eleven when we turned down the track to The Taing. There was a light on in one of the upper windows of the house. ‘Looks like she’s just going to bed. Do you want me to wait for you?’ He said it casually, his eyes on the track and his tone innocent of any attempt to pry.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not if the Land-Rover’s there. I have some business …’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ He nodded to show his understanding and I knew he didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Well, it’s there all right.’ We were coming down the hill to the house now and the headlights showed the Land-Rover standing at the door, the black waters of the voe beyond.

  He drew up beside the Land-Rover and I got out, standing uncertainly, looking up at that lighted window. The night was very still, the fine drizzle soft on my face, and I was suddenly seeing it from her point of view, the contract cancelled and myself coming like a fugitive out of the night. I dumped my things in the Land-Rover and then moved hesitantly towards the door, no longer sure of my reception and conscious of Robbie watching me curiously. My knock sounded loud in the stillness. Light streamed out as the bedroom curtains were whisked back. Then the window opened and Gertrude’s voice called down to enquire who it was.

  ‘Mike Randall,’ I said. ‘Can I talk to you a moment? I want to borrow the Land-Rover.’

  There was a pause. Then she said, ‘Wait a minute and I’ll come down.’

  She came to the door in her dressing gown. Her hair was held with a band of ribbon and she had an oil lamp in her hands. ‘It’s very late.’ She was staring past me at the van. ‘Is that Robbie?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Petersen,’ he answered.

  Her gaze came back to me. ‘You put in to Scalloway then.’ There was a long pause, her eyes looking directly at me, a puzzled expression, as though she couldn’t make up her mind. And then suddenly she was smiling, to herself, as though at some private joke. ‘So that’s why you’ve come – for the Land-Rover.’

  I nodded.

  ‘How long do you want it for?’

  ‘Three or four days,’ I said.

  I could see her working that out and then she nodded. ‘All right. You’d better come in then.’ She pushed the door open wide and called to Robbie that he needn’t wait. ‘Captain Randall will take the Land-Rover and I will settle with your father.’

  ‘Okay, Mrs Petersen.’

  ‘Thank him, will you please,’ she called as the van’s engines started up again. I raised my hand, but he was already backing and turning. I watched as the red tail lights climbed the hill and disappeared over the top. Everything was still then and we were alone. ‘Are you coming in, or do you want just to take the Land-Rover and go?’ She sounded uncertain of herself, her voice sharp and trembling slightly.

  ‘I need some money,’ I said. ‘For petrol.’

  ‘Then you’d better come in. You need to explain, too.’

  ‘All right.’ I went in then and she slammed the door behind me. ‘You like some coffee or something stronger?’

  ‘Coffee please. I’ll be driving all night.’

  She led me through into the flagstoned kitchen, and as she set the lamp on the table, she looked at me angrily. ‘You don’t think of my reputation, do you – coming here at this time of night. It will be all over Hamnavoe.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I was thinking of the last time I had been in this house, the difference in my reception. ‘I needed transport –’

  ‘So you come to me.’ She began filling the kettle. ‘First my ship, and now –’ She turned the tap off. ‘Anybody else, anybody at all, and we would have been all right, the contract running all summer and the mortgage paid off. But no,’ she added, busying herself with lighting the butane gas stove, ‘it has to be you who come here out of the blue.’ She slammed the kettle down on the lit ring, turning suddenly and facing me, her face flushed. ‘Why do you want the Land-Rover? Where are you going?’ And when I didn’t answer, she said, ‘You’re going to Burra Firth. Well, isn’t it? Isn’t that where you’re going?’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Just give me some money, whatever you can spare. You’ll get compensation and I’ll sign anything –’

  ‘I don’t care about the compensation.’ She said it with a stamp of her foot, and then she turned quickly, fumbling for the cups and saucers. Her head was bowed and I knew that if I turned her face towards me I would find it wet with tears. I hesitated, thinking suddenly of Fiona, remembering how she would turn tears on and off. But this was different. This was a determined, self-reliant woman. The cups rattled on the tray and I took a step forward. Then my hands were on her shoulders, I don’t know why. Sympathy? The desire for human contact in my loneliness, knowing she was lonely, too?

  I felt her stiffen, heard her whisper, ‘Why did it have to be you?’ And then her body seemed to relax, leaning back against mine, as though giving up some sort of struggle. My hands slid down to the softness of her breasts and she put her head back, turning her face towards me, and I kissed her, feeling her lips tremble under mine. There was no passion in that first kiss, just a mutual longing for sympathy and understanding, and her face was wet with tears.

  We stood like that for a long time, oblivious of everything. And we were relaxed. We were no longer fighting each other. We had surrendered to something stronger than ourselves, and standing there with my arms round her, the softness of her body, the pressure of her lips, I felt a strange surge of confidence, a feeling that I had found myself at last – that I knew where I was going now and had the strength to get there. It was a marvellous, quite ecstatic feeling, and not explainable in any way.

  ‘The kettle,’ she murmured, and pushed me away. The kettle was boiling its head off and we were suddenly both of us laughing for no apparent reason, except that we were happy.

  She leaned forward and switched off the gas. She was smiling now, holding out her hand to me and leading me out of the kitchen. The bedroom looked straight out across the
voe and I remember a pale line of light to the west reflected on the water.

  Then we were together, and for a long time, it seemed, the world stood still and there was just the two of us, everything beyond that tiny room, beyond the absolute harmony of ourselves and our bodies, as though it had never been, all stress gone, an obliteration in ecstasy.

  I had never had this sort of an experience before, the giving and taking without restraint. Love is not a word normally used by trawlermen, but at least I knew it when it happened. And afterwards, there was a lot to talk about, sitting smoking together over coffee in the kitchen.

  She put up a parcel of food for me and by then it was full dawn with the cloud all gone and the greenish pink glow of the sun just beginning to limn the line of the hills on the far side of Clift Sound. We kissed and she clung to me a moment, murmuring something about being careful and not doing anything stupid. But she didn’t try and stop me. She knew it was a thing I had to do. ‘There are ordnance survey maps behind the seat,’ she called to me as I drove off. I waved, and then I was up the track and over the hill, with time to wonder what the hell I thought I was doing when I could have stayed with her. But that, I knew, would have been anti-climax after what we had just experienced. At least I was doing something, not waiting around until Gorse arrived.

  Up by Scalloway I turned on to the main road and kept going north along the shores of Asta and Tingwall lochs with the sky a brilliant green shading to duck’s egg blue and the steep slopes of the hills standing black above the water as the sun’s glow increased in the east. There were flecks of mackerel cloud ahead and soon all the great bowl of the dawn above the peat hills was aflame. By then I had put Gertrude out of my mind; my thoughts were now concentrated on the journey ahead and what I would find up there at Burra Firth.

  The sun was bright in the mackerel sky and it was warm as I drove through the dale between the black peat hills of Mid and East Kome. Coffee and sandwiches by Loch of Voe, then more black-peat diggings to Dales Voe and up over Swinister to Sullom Voe, where a ship was offloading material at the jetty and the wartime camp had been adapted for the use of the contractors building the oil terminal for the Brent and Dunlin fields. I was able to fill up with petrol here, and in the hotel, now full of contractors’ men, instead of tourists, a surveyor who had just arrived gave me a copy of one of the London papers. I hadn’t had a chance to read a newspaper for several weeks, but the world didn’t seem to have changed. I glanced at the headlines over my coffee and it was all gloom – strikes, disruption, shortages, and Britain as always on the verge of bankruptcy. It seemed incredible that union bosses and more of the media men didn’t come to Shetland and see for themselves the brighter hopes for the future.

  An hour later I was at Toft, a north wind driving down Yell Sound, the waters broken and streaked with white. Standing on the pier I couldn’t help thinking what a target Shetland could become when half the lifeblood of industrial Britain was passing through these islands. On Mainland of Shetland the people were of fairly mixed race, infiltrated over the years by Scots and others, but when I crossed into Yell, and farther north to the last island of Unst, I would be among purer Viking stock, men closer to the Faroese, the Icelanders and the Norwegians than to Britain. And if Iceland became wholly Communist, or the Russians moved across the Pasvik River into Finnmark in the north of Norway, how would these men react? In this watery land, touched with the old glacial hand of the last Ice Age, England seemed very remote and London a whole world away.

  Sitting in the Land-Rover, reading the paper while I waited for the ferry, I came across the headline: VILLIERS HITS BACK AS VFI SHARES TUMBLE. It was an account of the DTI Enquiry in London into the Star-Trion deal and Villiers was challenging his detractors to risk their own money on the West Shetland shelf – The trouble with our country is that politicians and their bureaucratic masters are only interested in equality in poverty – in how a meagre cake can be shared more fairly – when they should be bending all their energies instead towards increasing the size of that cake by every means in their power. This is what I am doing, and shall go on doing – whatever the cost, whatever the risk. Call me a buccaneer if you like – that is a term of abuse thrown at me by Mr Swingler, my own Conservative member. All right, I am a buccaneer, and when times are hard, as they are now, Britain is the loser that there aren’t more of us. but when North Star brings in another field – as I am confident it will – you won’t call me a buccaneer then. You’ll pay tribute to my sagacity, claim me as the shareholders’ friend, while others will call me a capitalist and scream for nationalization of my company.

  The ferry was halfway across now, and I sat watching it crawl like a steel beetle across the foam-flecked waters of the Sound, seeing in my mind the man I had talked to on North Star at bay in that courtroom, angry and obstinate, fighting back with all that extraordinary vitality and energy of his. I turned to the City page. There had been a run on VFI shares, now standing at a new low and less than half the price they had been when the market as a whole had bottomed after the Arab oil embargo. I was thinking of North Star then, of its loneliness out there in the march of the westerlies, and of its extreme vulnerability under the orders of a man near desperation and periodically under the control of a toolpusher whose luck appeared to have run out.

  Tailor-made to our purpose.

  The ferry berthed while I was thinking about that purpose, about who would gain. Not the workers. Nor industry. Certainly not Britain. The direction my thoughts were taking scared me and I drove on to the ferry feeling as though, in crossing the Sound, I was moving into another world, a step nearer the destiny to which all my life had been a preparation. It was not a nice feeling.

  From Flukes Hole on the other side I took the lesser road that ran up the western coast of Yell. From Gutcher it is only just over a mile across Bluemull Sound to the island of Unst and then six miles on a good straight road to the main port of Baltasound, another two to Haroldswick. There, in a little house behind the harbour, up near the school, an old man who understood the use of words took me into a strange wild world of myth and legend. He had bright bird-like eyes, intensely blue in the dark wind-wrinkled face, large gnarled hands, and a voice so soft, so lyrical in speech, that to hear him talk was like listening to music. His name was Robert Bruce – ‘That’s no’ a verra good name to have in the island of Unst.’

  I thought he was referring to the early Scottish king, but no, he was harking back to a Laurence Bruce – ‘the Great Foud of Zetland’, he called him – a tyrannical land-grabber who, from his castle at Muness, had held all Unst in the thrall of Scottish law during the last days of the first Elizabeth when James was still only king of Scotland. It was a strange, haunting story, a Romeo and Juliet legend of the north, and at first I did not understand why he was telling it to me.

  When I had arrived in Haroldswick I had gone to the Post Office, and because I had to explain my need of accommodation, I said I was an ornithologist. Birds were the main attraction for visitors and it would allow me to walk the hills around Burra Firth without exciting comment. The Bruces had just had a cancellation, so I had been sent to them. But Robert Bruce, a retired schoolmaster living with his sister, now occupied his time helping with the preservation and marking of seabirds on the western cliffs and I don’t think it took that shrewd, beady-eyed little Scot long to realize I was no ornithologist. So instead of talking about birds, he told me the story of Edwin and Helga, and how, to escape the wrath of her people, whose leader had been murdered by one of Bruce’s minions, she had rushed her lover to the family’s little boat and sailed for Yell in a northerly gale, past the great cliffs of Vallafield, to be lost for ever in the roaring tide race off the entrance to Bluemull Sound.

  It is too long a story to repeat, and I have forgotten much of it – and in any case the beauty of it was in the telling. But what I do remember is Bruce’s guile and greed, his despicable ruthlessness, and the fierce, law-abiding determination of the islanders who h
ad sailed an open boat three hundred miles to Scotland to lay their just complaints before the King in Edinburgh. ‘And do you ken why the Scots were in Zetland?’ Bruce asked me, his bright eyes fixed on me like the Ancient Mariner. ‘Because the islands were handed over to them as a pledge for a Danish princess’s dowry. The people were subject only to the Scots king, retaining their own laws and customs, but history is strewn with conditions of treaty unfulfilled and Bruce, as gauleiter for the Crown, violated them with a vengeance.’ Looking at me very closely, he added, ‘In this lonely island of Unst we are very vulnerable to big northern shifts of power.’

  And then, as his sister took the blackened kettle from the hob and made the tea, he began telling me an older island story, of the Pictish inhabitants a thousand years ago who, when their brochs were destroyed and all their lands taken by Vikings from the fjords of Norway, had been forced to retreat into the great caverns of the south-west from which they emerged only at night. ‘They were the trolls, you know, the little people of superstition – call them dwarfs, gnomes, fairies, it’s all the same – you watch for them at night, mind your children don’t get stolen and put out offerings to placate them. That’s what the early Norse did and only Coul, the old priest man, captured from the Celts of the south, ever saw the caves in which they had found refuge, and he died just after they had let him go.’ He told me the story then of Gletna Kirk, the church Coul tried to build and which they destroyed in the night, thinking it was to be another of the invaders’ strongholds.

  But by then my head was nodding. It had been a long day and I drank my tea and went to bed, to wake once, briefly, in the night and remember how the old man had harped on successive waves of Northern invaders.

  In the morning, after breakfast, I went with him up the road to Burra Firth, about a mile and a half to where a track branched northward. ‘You’ll not be finding many birds up there, not unless you go right to The Noup and that’s a good long tramp by Saxa Vard.’ The blue eyes watched me curiously from under his peaked cap. ‘Better you come with me up Milldale to Tonga. There’s all the birds you could ever want there and I can show you Goturm’s Hole.’