That Summer

by Andrew Greig

  ‘Built by some tobacco manufacturers,’ he said, ‘but for now it’s all ours. Said to be haunted, great snooker room. Wizard, eh?’

  I got out of the car and breathed the cool, foreign air. Very thin and earthy and a stink of bracken. There was no background light at all, and the stars were coming out all over the shop. The sound of a piano came over the gravel, someone stumbling through a lugubrious ‘My Funny Valentine’. Sounded like Tad’s playing, heavily accented and eccentric as his speech. Then I thought of Sniff Burton, his light touch on the piano, and I heard again the stones in his coffin rattle by my ear. And I thought of Stella and how at least she wasn’t being bombed at work.

  ‘Wizard,’ I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mid-September

  The diary as always is written in pencil. Steadier than before, the tip kept to a draughtsman’s point. But it’s heavily smudged in places with what seems like earth or plant stains. And now the entries are longer and more detailed.

  This was his one time out in the helter-skelter weeks of that summer, his time to think and see his position, if he could bring himself to do so. But there is little of that. Most of it is absorbed in recording what he did. It seems to have been important to him, the physical detail, as if it were a handhold he was holding on to, above a drop too great to contemplate.

  Through the neat but smudged pages, the map references that hold good yet, the dog-eared corners and the grease stains, it isn’t hard to see him as he walks alone into the Cairngorm mountains.

  *

  He walked quickly along the rough track from Linn of Dee towards Forest Lodge. It was late afternoon and the clouds were low. Rolls of mist tangled with the lower slopes and cut off the tops of the hills up ahead. Even with map and compass, a less than ideal day for heading into the wilderness.

  He walked on, gradually getting in a rhythm as the track drifted on uphill. The big army backpack, stuffed with clothes, cooking gear, food, sleeping bag, notebook and maps, cut into his shoulders and slumped in at the small of his back. He began to sweat and increased his pace.

  After an hour or so, the path sloped down to Forest Lodge, which turned out to be a closed-up shooting lodge surrounded by a broken stand of Scots pines, their red trunks glowing in the diffused light. He dumped his pack, lay face-down by the river and drank.

  The mist parted, a breeze blew away the midges. He propped his pack against a boulder and sat back against it with the sun in his face. After a while he reached into his breast pocket, took out a new packet of ten bought in Braemar and lit one, cupping his hand against the breeze.

  The coldness of the water, the harsh, sweet smoke, the sun filling in the bags around his eyes, all present and immediate. The clamour in his head that had kept him muttering all the way up the track had started to die down a little. He wanted more of that, more silence.

  He got to his feet, filled the battered metal water bottle, pulled on the pack and set off again.

  The way became smoother, with fewer loose stones. Mostly it was dry earth and mud. He took satisfaction in the way his body propelled along, and the haze of yellowish dust that blew from his feet towards the lowering sun. It was good to feel his body do its stuff without being strapped into a machine.

  He wondered if Dusty Miller was back to their billet yet in his car. He’d offered to come along, seemed quite keen, but Len wanted this for himself. He’d spent a few days with the squadron, sleeping and resting and going off to Aberdeen for a couple of riotous nights, the village being dry. Now the word was they’d be recalled to front-line duties soon, for the bomber fleets were still streaming into London. Some of the lads had borrowed shotguns and gone to take advantage of an offer of some grouse shooting. He knew he’d killed enough and straight away asked permission to go off for three days in the hills. Granted, but that was all the time he could have.

  He crossed a river, noting how low it was from the dry summer, jumping from boulder to boulder, then carried on as the path steepened. His ankles were tiring and the soles of his feet were hot, and his mind was still as full and burdensome as his backpack. The sun was sinking into a cleft in the mountains as he rounded the corner and the path split in two. He took out the map and checked it to see if he was where he thought he was and which way ahead to take.

  He found the river he’d crossed, the rising contours then the parting of the ways. Yes, this was the glen, a long follow-up beside a stream and there was Corrour Bothy marked on the left-hand side. The path went right by it and even in the dusk he shouldn’t miss it.

  He put the map away then paused. It was very quiet, just the brief Go back! Go back! of a grouse, the faint stir of the breeze over the heathery ground. There was no distant droning aeroplane and not a person in sight. He hoped the bothy would be empty. He looked up the glen, took a deep breath and straightened his back, then he put one foot in front of the other and kept doing that till he arrived.

  *

  He hadn’t remembered it taking so long. He slung down his pack at the door, lifted the catch and went in. Good, it was empty. A tin of dried milk, some firewood by the open hearth, a solitary sock hung on the makeshift drying-line.

  Memory leaves out the drudgery, he thought. Anyway, I was with Leslie and we’d come singing most of the way and talking the rest, exchanging teenage certainties. I’d spoken passionately in favour of the Peace Pledge. Les was going to join the army and get abroad, out East he hoped. How young that all seems now.

  He went outside and stood for a couple of minutes, listening to the burn and getting the feel of the place. Isolation is safety and there are no bears or wolves now. The only thing to be scared of round here is himself.

  As if movement could brush away the memory of a head blown off its shoulders, he quickly picked up his pack and went inside.

  He found the torch and made the place his. Spread out the sleeping bag on the dirt floor, made a pillow from his spare sweater, put his diary and pencil beside it. He unpacked the stove, filled the little tin reservoir from his bottle and lit the meths. The flames were yellow and directionless and cast his shadow huge on the wall.

  He filled the kettle from his water bottle and put it on to heat. He hesitated then went down to the little river and squatted down to refill the bottle. For a moment he saw himself there, small in the throat of the glen, squatting patiently by a stream with head bowed, so small as to be scarcely there at all. But there, just the same.

  He came back to the bothy and pulled the door shut behind him. He laid out his food supplies, found his twist of tea and added some to the hissing kettle. He took off his boots, folded his trousers under the head of the sleeping bag then got inside, more for comfort than necessity. He experimented with propping the torch up on his boot until he got the right angle, then he lay on his side, opened the diary and began to write up his walk.

  He finally wrote One cannot be the same again – Killing – Perhaps we deserve to die. Then he lay for a while on his back, watching the torchlight make faces on the ceiling as the hard dirt floor pushed into his hip bones. He thought of what Stella had said in her last letter, how the more you care, the more you lose. It was hard to argue with that. But what’s the alternative? The alternative is closing yourself off, and you die anyway. What’s so great about that?

  Johnny Staples, Shortarse, St John, Bo Bateson and the handsome, gentle Geoff Prior. Bunny, Junior Johnstone, Sniff, the old CO. All gone. Sergeant Mackay taking the wrong option on his third sortie and flying straight into a bomber. They seemed to have been dead for ages. They’d be dead for ages more. Not ‘gone west’, just gone. To their families their deaths must still be fresh as his own name carved into the tree, and like it would be gradually obscured and then finally blown over and that would be an end to it. Forgotten for ever on this earth.

  He switched off the torch. He let go. He slept.

  *

  The morning came in grey and cold. His hips were aching as he turned over on the floor. He rolled over
, groped for matches and lit the stove, put on the kettle. Then he stood up, let the sleeping bag drop off him, and padded over to the door. Opened it into a grey wall.

  The mist had come in overnight. He could only just see the stream. Not the cleverest day for the hills. He considered jacking it in, walking back out and hitching back to base. Possibly only pride or some kind of stubbornness kept him from deciding to do that. Certainly he was tempted to get back to warmth and company, the company of his own kind, beer and laughter or a good penny dreadful novel, whatever it took.

  Instead he had a pee against the wall, came inside and got back into his bag and began to grope around for porridge oats.

  An hour or so later he was ready for the off. Thermos, sandwiches, map, compass, spare sweater – at least the pack was a lot lighter today. He looked closely at the map and identified the small stream that came down the bit of slope he could see. He could use that as a guide, looked like it went up nearly onto the plateau then petered out. He’d have to make a decision then whether he could navigate to the first summit, Angel’s Peak. Fair enough. Give it a go.

  He stuck the map back in the pocket of his waxed jacket, pulled the hat – damp already, brimmed with little droplets of water – down tighter, then put his feet to the slope.

  *

  Some immeasurable time later, for he’d been fully absorbed in his increasing heart-speed and in placing each foot on the rough ground, he scrambled up the last of the slope and came out onto the plateau. The wind was stronger and colder up here. The mist moved in solid blocks with thinner wispy bits strung between them. At first the visibility seemed better, then it didn’t.

  He stood for several minutes, getting colder, examining his map for features to navigate by but really there weren’t any. The plateau he’d remembered with Leslie as being great walking ground, firm and open, was the end of the world. All he could do was take a map bearing on the summit and trust it. He could roughly keep the rim of the plateau on his right, that would be some kind of a guide.

  He took the bearing and, holding the compass in his fist, set off over ground that, like the future itself, only appeared when he got there. There were a lot of minor contours that weren’t on the map, and various peat hags, all of which tended to make him deviate from his course. He tried fixing on something on the line of the bearing, like a particular tuft of grass, but as he got closer he tended to lose it. So instead he orientated his body to the general compass direction and tried to follow that.

  Distance was hugely magnified in this blanked-out world, and time went different, just as it did in combat, both stretched-out and very brief. He wished he’d checked his watch at the edge of the plateau, so he’d have some idea how long he’d been on this course. He looked now then sometime later realized he’d forgotten it. At least, he wasn’t sure if the time he remembered was right, and without anyone else to check with, he realized there was no way of knowing.

  He was quite occupied with this for a while and was trying to work out a system of noting down the time, or inventing a movable dial on a watch or compass by which one could mark the last time one had looked at the watch. Would that work? But what if one doubted where one had last looked at it?

  The fact was, to hang on to some degree of certainty and sanity, it was necessary to either be very sure of yourself and have no doubts at all, or else have someone else with whom one could cross-check, and at worst end up lost together. And what was the point in writing a diary if not a way of marking things down so they weren’t misremembered later?

  He noticed the ground was beginning to fall off steeply to his right and he could just make out scree instead of steep turf. He checked the map. Either this was the last slope up to the summit, or … or it wasn’t, and he’d gone right past it.

  He vectored in a bit from the edge and hurried up the slope, feeling the clutch of anxiety in his breathing. If he wasn’t where he thought he was, he had no idea where he was. Then out of the mist came a darker looming, and the looming turned into a heap of stones. A summit cairn. He had to assume that was Angel’s Peak. If it wasn’t, he’d gone badly wrong.

  He leaned against the cairn, reassured by its solidity, and had half a flask-top of tea. The view was non-existent. Whatever the purpose of this trip, it wasn’t for the views.

  Next stop: The Devil’s Point. From one extreme to the other, he thought. He took the bearing and set off into nothingness.

  *

  This section was a trickier piece of navigation. The side-slope kept trying to push him off the bearing, and there was no plateau rim to fall back on. This was right across the humping wilderness of the plateau. Under normal conditions, a pleasant, simple, joyful stroll. But these were not normal conditions. In fact, he was virtually blind.

  This time he checked his watch before starting, kept repeating the time to himself. He’d estimated the distance from the map and calculated the likely time to Devil’s Point under these conditions. All he could do was keep going as he was and hold to his trust in the map and whatever faith he had in himself.

  He must have been walking more quickly on account of anxiety, for as he checked his watch one more time and reckoned he should be about there in five minutes, he saw the bulk of a sheep off to his left. Then it turned into a short man. He was about to wave then it turned into a stubby cairn. He hurried over to it and touched its top. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered aloud to whatever, and his voice sounded queer and unpractised.

  Now assuming this was Devil’s Point – great view, thanks very much – things got a bit simpler. A bearing near due west on a little lochan in a dip. If he hit that lochan, he knew where he was for certain because there was no other on this part of the plateau. From there he’d have a choice between following the stream down off the plateau, or carrying on up to the third summit, Monadh Mor.

  This time he didn’t stop for a drink or snack. He was too keen to find that lochan, he clung to the idea of it, arriving at its stony shore and knowing for certain where he really was. He took the bearing and hurried off.

  *

  The slope was long and undulating and he went fast on the downhill bits, trying not to panic.

  As he peered into shifting mist, looking for the least sign of anything, his right foot caught, his weight carried him on and he fell full-length and awkwardly. He lay winded, feeling shaken and foolish. Then he carefully extracted his foot from the rabbit hole, got to his knees and tried to stand up.

  His ankle held. He took a couple of steps, felt a pain but it was fading. Very, very lucky. If he turned or broke an ankle up here, in the mist and maybe twenty miles from the nearest person, he was in trouble. Up on the plateau under these conditions, it was nothing like summer.

  He walked on, rather more carefully.

  The slope steepened to his right and there was a burn. He stopped and checked the map. It might be one of two streams. If he was in Place A, he needed to bear off to the left for four hundred yards. On the other hand, if he was in Place B, he’d overshot and needed to turn back and follow the stream back to the lochan. He really wasn’t sure.

  He started off to the left then hesitated. It felt wrong. He looked back and at that moment the breeze opened up a long tunnel into the mist and he saw back the length of the stream. It didn’t look like it was draining from a lochan. In that case it was heading for it, yes? He checked the compass and carried on into the grey.

  He felt very alone. It seemed like days since he’d seen another person. The sense of connectedness he’d had with Stella and even at times with the lads, that was still there, still true. But he was learning the truth of the opposite: that in another way, and at other times, one really was alone. It was down to him, just as it was in the sky. Just as it was for Stella, in front of her screen.

  It came to him with a shock, like when the plane had suddenly flipped over on its back when he’d been bombed on take-off, that she really was someone else. She existed for herself, not for him. However loving she might be, she wa
s the centre of her world.

  He slowed, faltered. But that’s what makes her so worth it, he thought. That’s exactly why it’s worth while. Because she’s not me. Because I’m not her. Because we’re not each other.

  Then out of the mist came a low sound of water. A few steps more and he was standing at the edge with the tiny wave breaking at his toes. ‘Thank you,’ he said again. He’d found the lochan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Mid-September

  Foxy Farringdon had asked me out of the blue the week before, just as I was leaving work. Her parents were having a bit of a do. Wedding anniversary. Would I like to come for the weekend to the Hampstead place?

  I stared at her, touched and taken aback. I was about to say yes, when I remembered.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve made a date with my friend Maddy,’ I said.

  ‘No matter,’ Foxy said gaily. ‘Bring her along as well. We’ve plenty room and she sounds a fun gal.’

  ‘She is that,’ I agreed.

  So I put it to Maddy and to my surprise she was all for it. A trip to the Smoke, do some shopping, drink loads of someone else’s booze. And men! Cartloads of men, smooth, loaded ones who wouldn’t stand on your feet when you dance. There’d be music, wouldn’t there?

  ‘From what Foxy says, they’ve got a ballroom and they mean to use it,’ I admitted.

  ‘It’ll be a scream. A scream,’ she repeated. ‘Oh come on, let’s go!’

  Unlike me, she didn’t seem in the slightest intimidated by the prospect of staying with a family of posh strangers. Why, they might even have a butler. A hoot.

  We’d been warned about the bombing that had been going on for days now, but the way we looked at it, London was a big city and the buildings much stronger than flimsy huts. We were probably safer there than at work. Mrs Mackenzie came over all emotional and even hugged me goodbye in a stiff kind of way, though the hint of water in her eyes might just have been at the thought of the loss of income if I never came back.