‘How long are you here for?’ Derwent was leaning on her chair now. His mouth was full and what the women’s mags called sensuous. He was probably an ace lover, could teach her things Martin hadn’t dreamed of.
‘My plans are very … er … fluid,’ she drawled, and drained her third glass of champagne.
Chapter Eighteen
Morna stared at the mist-shrouded hump of land emerging from the grey and wind-torn sea around it, growing slowly larger as the boat lurched south of it, seeking shelter in its lea. Waves were slapping at the prow, cascading over, sending up rocket showers of spray. Her feet were soaked, still in Bunny’s sneakers, the rest of her dry but freezing beneath the filthy yellow oilskins which flapped around her ankles, engulfed her hands.
‘Is that it?’ she shouted, pointing to the island and trying to project her voice above the engine noise, the bellow of the wind.
The boatman shook his head, bawled back something indecipherable. He was a sullen man, heavily built with greyish stubble dirtying his chin, grizzled brows above granite-coloured eyes, his torn black oilskins covered with a fine white film of dried-on salt and spray. He was steering a course between the hump, which had turned from speck to blur to rock to island, and the chain of smaller islets clustering round its southern tip. The sea was calming as they reached the shelter of the cliff-face which broke the rude force of the wind.
Morna dared relax. She had been gripping the side of the boat since they pulled out of harbour and hit the open sea. The craft seemed so tiny—twenty feet of tinderwood tossed on the waves, dwarfed by the vast sea surrounding it, the deep vault of the sky. It seemed hubris to attempt a crossing in an open boat with no cabin, no shelter, nothing but a rough wooden bench to sit on, a couple of ancient life-jackets flung on the deck with a tangled pile of water-proofs, a coil of rope, and a few rotten stinking fish.
Yet St Abban had made a longer crossing still, in a rowing boat with one rudimentary sail, twelve centuries before motors were invented. He’d had neither chart nor compass, only the occasional miracle to save him from disaster. Her own miracle had been to find a boat at all. She had arrived in Glasgow on the Monday evening, too late to catch the last train up to Oban, had spent the night in a cheap hotel, caught the first train in the morning, travelled in pouring rain through bleak and hilly moorland, expecting to wait days, at least, before she could persuade a boat to take her over. Hadn’t David said the tides were treacherous, the local fishermen unwilling to make the crossing even in the summer? She had made enquiries at the pub, was told to speak to Ruari who was drinking in a corner, his shapeless trousers tied with a piece of string, his jersey stained with oil. He seemed as reluctant as she had feared to take his boat out, shy of her, suspicious, a man who hoarded words like coins, doled them out grudgingly. Even when he did speak, she could hardly understand him. His accent was so broad, he appeared to be talking in an alien tongue, one which she could translate only piecemeal.
She spent that night in a room above the pub, begged the landlord’s wife to help, act as go-between. She had to bribe her, bribe Ruari, too, the following morning, when she approached him for the second time, tipped out the entire contents of her purse into his broad and calloused hands. He kept shaking his head, muttering to himself, his mood only changing as she added still more notes. The tide had changed as well, the fierce wind moderated. He stood on the quay, gazing out to sea as if forbidding it to challenge him or thwart this godsent chance of making money.
They had set out at lunchtime, when the tide was right—she, scared at first by the pitch and toss of the boat, frightened she would disgrace herself by sicking up her breakfast. Now her stomach had adjusted to the motion, was even declaring it was hungry. She broke off a corner from David’s crusty loaf, crammed it into her mouth. She had brought him presents, precious things—fresh vegetables and salads, French bread, French cheeses, fruit—rare treasures on his small and barren island. She tossed a piece of crust to one lone gull, hovering over the boat, watched the huge span of wings descend, soar up again with a screech that ripped the sky. She wanted to shout herself, with sheer relief. All her worries about making the trip at all, her concern over Chris, her fear that David wouldn’t welcome her, even her dismay at her own impulsive behaviour in bolting out of Disneyland, giving way to panic, had been blown clean away by the purging wind. She was healed now, back to normal, with a whole wide ocean to herself, the first land rising out of it, not David’s island yet, but one equally mysterious, its black and brooding cliffs embroidered with the white of countless bird droppings.
Black and white were new. Everything had been grey before—slate sea pearling into gunmetal sky, gulls’ wings shadowing silver-dappled clouds, grey blur of the horizon. She herself felt anything but grey. If one’s mood were an organ like lungs or liver, something with shape and colour you could take out and examine, then hers would be plump and healthy pink. She had phoned America that morning, finally got through after seven ‘no-replies’ at what was the early hours for them. Chris sounded high, even tipsy, had just got in from a dinner and a cabaret.
‘Don’t fuss, Mum. I’m fine. You do your own thing and I’ll do mine, okay?’
Morna recognised the Bunny jargon, felt a stab of guilt since her garbled evasions of the truth were transgressing Bunny’s philosophy of openness and trust. She tried to steer closer to the facts. The French job had … er … fallen through, but when she got back to Weybridge, there had been a letter from David (‘Who?’) waiting on the doormat, begging her help with some difficult translation work. She had decided in the circumstances, with both Chris and Bea away, to join him on his island since he couldn’t leave himself and there were tricky matters of interpretation, problems with the shorthand and …
Would Chris see through the intellectual padding, suspect some crass liaison? Her daughter seemed hardly to be listening, was carrying on a conversation with someone in the background. Morna could hear whispering and giggling, a deep male voice which wasn’t Neil’s.
‘So, you don’t mind if …?’
‘Why should I? It’s your life, Mum. Bunny says oughts really foul us up and …’
‘What do? This line’s awfully bad, darling.’
‘Oughts. You know, shoulds, musts, duty. We’ve gotta sling ’em out with all the other mental garbage. Stay as long as you like, Mum. I might stay on here, in fact. We’ve just been discussing it.’
Morna replaced the receiver as if it were a heavy load she had been carrying for too long. She was free—free to take a real vacation chosen by herself, not inflicted on her by Father Clarke or Bunny. She almost believed in that fictitious letter waiting on the doormat. After all, she had David’s other letters, and unlike Bea and Chris and the French bureau of commerce, he did need her help. She had still not completed his translation nor totally solved the mysteries of the shorthand, and there were parts of the work she longed to discuss with him, especially now that she had read more widely, deliberately swotted up his subject and his century so that she could be of more use to him, understand the issues which concerned him, grasp the problems of the early Church.
And now she was actually on her way to him, to a once-famed cradle of that early Church, crossing the same stretch of sea which he had crossed four months earlier, marvelling at its beauty. The wind had dropped a little, the first glint of sunlight changing sullen grey to turquoise, the clouds gold-flecked and parting, and every subtle gradation of green and blue gleaming beneath the surface of the waves. She could see a trawler on the skyline, a froth of gulls streaming behind it like a wash, the sea scored and furrowed as it dipped towards them. She waved to the boat, the only craft but theirs, the only sign of human life on that endless expanse of water.
No wonder David had described St Abban’s Island as a fortress when it was so difficult to reach. Two centuries after Abban’s death, the Vikings had descended, sacked the monastery, slaughtered all the monks, held the place as a base for other raids, been succeeded in the
ir turn by waves of rebels. Pirates had used it as a hide-out, warring clan chiefs plotted there against the Scottish king, ruling it like kings themselves, free from interference. Jacobites had fled there, been hounded out and brutally attacked by English redcoats. Ships had foundered on it—over fifty since records had been kept, and who knew how many before that? The islanders had got fat (and drunk) on wrecks, had even prayed to God to send them a ship or two in lean times, especially one with hard liquor in the hold.
Morna stamped her feet to warm them up, blew on her freezing hands. She could do with a tot of something strong herself, to help thaw her out a bit. The cold was getting fiercer as they left the chain of islets behind, hit the full force of the wind. She tried to duck away from it, shut her eyes against the drenching spray. Ruari rummaged in a locker for a piece of heavy canvas, flung it over her.
‘Thanks!’ she shouted, but the word was blown away, shredded into spume.
He was obviously contemptuous of her clothes, had glanced at her with something like derision when she first stepped into the boat in a cream cotton jacket and the sneakers. She had rifled through her case to find something warm and waterproof, but she had packed originally for sunny California, not winter in the wilds, and half her clothes were still at Bunny’s anyway. In the end, she had dressed in layers—a summer dress on top of a pair of linen trousers, two blouses over that, and then the jacket. She felt stiff and cumbersome, like a bulky parcel wrapped too tight, yet still unprotected from the groping wind. Ruari had prodded the pile of oilskins with his boot, jerked a thumb at them. Now nothing showed beneath the yellow water-proofs except half her face and that was numb. She had never imagined that cold could be so violent. Spray was lashing at her face like hailstones, her eyes streaming from the sting of salt, her lips white and crusted with it. She was swallowing salt, breathing it, fighting blindly with the flapping corners of the canvas as it was tugged and tortured by the wind. She snatched it back, wrapped it more tightly round her so that even her face was covered, huddled in the bottom of the boat, hardly daring to look out at the huge troughs and towers of waves seesawing around them.
How could the boatman remain so calm, impassive? He was drenched himself, water running down his oilskins, struggling to stand upright at the wheel, yet his countenance devoid of all emotion. He had hardly said a word since the moment they set out—needed all his concentration for the shift of the tide, the swiftly changing currents. Would he die like that, go down without a cry? His leather face was crisscrossed with a maze of tiny lines, his mouth a black hole where he had lost more than half his teeth. She guessed he was an islander himself, since David had told her that none of the smaller islands had resident doctors or dentists, and that trips to the mainland cut into precious working time. Easier—and cheaper—to lose one’s teeth. Some had lost more than that. One of the few remaining inhabitants on David’s island had been crippled for over sixty years—had broken her leg as a child, let her mother set it as best she could, and had been hobbling around with sticks and grim endurance ever since.
Ruari had a limp himself. She was totally in his hands, this gammy-legged, probably near-illiterate man who was king of the ocean. David had said that the local boatmen were often more skilled than the captains of vast transoceanic liners, had frequently to pit their tiny craft against riptides, whirlpools, submerged and hazardous rocks. Only now did she understand the dangers, begin to realise what courage Abban had shown, bobbing around in his nutshell of a boat amidst what he saw as sea monsters and demons. She had been amazed to read what distances those early monks had sailed, fighting hunger, thirst, fatigue and every hazard, yet trusting God to bring them safe to port.
Ruari was shouting something, gesturing out to sea, pointing at a smudge of land emerging from a cloud bank, the faint outline of a cliff-face dark against white cumulus. That must be it—St Abban’s Island, David’s. She crouched in the prow of the boat, her eyes just above the gunwale, so that she could watch the cliffs take shape—cliffs more than three hundred million years old, so David had said. On such a time scale Abban was almost a contemporary. She liked the thought of that. She had come to love the saint—slight of stature, the chronicler had written, but great of soul; a man with the courage of a lion who could weep for an injured spider, and who saw both lions and spiders as proof of the craftsman God’s inspired invention.
She wished he were sailing with them now, as they drew closer to the island and she began to make out the sharp skewers of rock standing up around it like a fortification. They had somehow to steer a passage through that ring of sword points and on a sea already seething from their impact, as if furious that brute and solid rock should interrupt its sway. The boat was bobbing like a flimsy paper cup as it hit the currents ripping out like snares. There were also reefs, sub-merged beneath the water, showing as dark stains as the waves hurtled back from them.
Morna held her breath as the boatman steered a zigzag course, judging his distances so finely it seemed that they were missing destruction only by a hair’s-breadth. The water looked as if it were boiling in a kettle, smashing on to the rocks, hissing and sucking into crevices, exploding in sheets of spray. The cliff face was now rearing up in front of them, growing taller and more menacing as they heaved towards it—the granite sculpted into twisted crags above, hollowed into caves below, clawed and pummelled by a fuming sea. The boat was so close now to the barbed and barnacled sheets of rock, it seemed that the cliff itself was plunging up and down, rising and falling with the waves, spray whirling through the air, seabirds blown and battered by the wind, the whole scene in violent motion. One false move and their tiny craft would be driven on to those knife-edged crags, grated like a nutmeg against their jagged surface, splintered into firewood.
St Abban had reached the island in a raging storm, circled it a dozen times with no hope of landing, his few brave monks faint from hunger and already reciting the prayers for those drowned at sea. He had viewed the storm as the work of devils or perhaps a Sign from God that this was not to be their chosen resting place. He fell to his knees as twenty-foot waves crashed across the boat, begged God to reveal his Holy Will. Immediately, the storm abated and a friendly seal led them to a calm and sheltered inlet. They landed. Abban prayed again, this time for sustenance, since he could see neither blade of grass nor scrap of soil. Instantly a flock of mysterious white birds metamorphosed into angels who fed the monks with heavenly ambrosia.
No such miracle for them. Wind and wave were both relentless, the dark shadow of the cliff falling on them like a pall, as one black cormorant flapped frantically away, as if warning them to make their own escape. Morna could see no proper harbour, only a small grey slash among the darker rocks, which grew slowly larger, revealed itself as a crudely fashioned wedge of stone and concrete running into the sea. A few old car tyres had been suspended along its sides in a pathetic attempt to make it safer, break the impact of any craft skilled enough to reach it. But that craft had first to escape the pincer-claws of rock which fringed the narrow inlet, seemed to have been placed there by some vindictive god demanding his toll for landing. There was no guiding seal, no angel, just one lone boatman adjusting speed and engine within the few feet of safety which marked survival from extinction. Morna’s hands were trembling as she gripped the gunwale, struggled to keep her balance against the pitch and judder of the boat.
Suddenly, their speed increased. They appeared to be charging towards the concrete wedge, the engine revving up as if gasping its distress. She was jerked from her seat as Ruari wrenched the wheel round, thrust the lever into reverse. The boat slowed, shuddered, turned half circle, then miraculously moved parallel to the landing slip.
He ripped away the sheet of canvas, picked up her suitcase, flung it on to the roughly concreted stone and gestured after it, yelling above the engine noise. Even without the rant of wind and wave, she couldn’t understand him. She stared, bewildered, trying to lip-read, realised with a sickening dread that he wanted her to j
ump. He hadn’t even secured the boat. It was still plunging in two directions at once—thrown up and down on the swell while threshing backwards and forwards from the quay. Even as she dithered, she could see the gap widening, the surging expanse of wave between her and safety.
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘I can’t. I daren’t. The sea’s too rough. I’ll never …’
Her words were flecks of spray, empty froth. Ruari was shouting again, more urgently, grabbed her arm, pushed her to the edge of the boat. She tucked up her oilskins, stared at the tiny landing point, now level with her, now rearing up above her, as the waves hurtled back and forth. Supposing she missed it, fell into that sea to be pounded against the cliff face like a piece of jetsam?
‘I c … can’t,’ she yelled again, felt a sudden jab from behind as Ruari shoved her out. For one terrifying moment, she felt nothing beneath her feet; empty space whirling round and past her, the slang and heckle of the wind outshrilling her own shriek of fear. She reached out her hands to break her fall, landed with a thud on solid ground, remained sprawled on all fours, shaken and disorientated, uncertain whether she was lying on the quay or on some lower slab of rock from which the sea would prise her like a puny crab. Her hands were grazed and throbbing, something warm and sticky trickling down her leg. She ignored the leg, dared to look up; the pain of the grazes fading into staggering relief as she realised she was safe, spreadeagled on the quay, the sea roaring at her sullenly as if galled that she’d escaped it.
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