Gently North-West (3 page)

The cottage, Gently noticed, had a distinctive smell, over and above the smell of frying, a cold, church-like odour and faint seediness, yet with no suggestion of damp. On the living-room walls hung framed texts and one print after Landseer.

‘Did Maclaren farm up this way, then?’ Geoffrey asked, dumping the last of his cases and looking round for his tea.

‘Oh ay, the Maclarens are an auld family up this way,’ Mrs McFie’s hot face said, poking round the doorway. ‘The Major and his faither before him, and his grandfaither – auld Shoggie Maclaren – but the Forestry came here, ye ken, and they got in the Major’s bad buiks over the hill pastures. So the Major ups and sells to Donald Dunglassall except this bit cottage – and takes himself off into England. He’s a man of speerit, is the Major.’

‘I’ll second that,’ Geoffrey grinned at Gently. ‘He’s the most obstinate and litigious Scotsman who ever set foot over the border.’

‘Ay,’ Mrs McFie’s face assented, ‘he’s a one for the law, no doubt. I ken the time he’s had five suits together goin’ in to the sessions at Balmagussie. But Donald Dunglass, he’s another fish – he’s from Glesca, ye ken, not a proper farmer – but he wedded a McGuigan from Cuitybraggan. How will you have your tatties, Mr Kelling?’

The ladies returned looking sprucer, and supper was on the table soon after. It consisted of lamb chops, kidney, liver, fried sliced potatoes and fried oatmeal, or skurly. And strangely, Gently’s appetite, which had been nil when he’d sat down on the couch, was now man enough to deal with these items and the pancakes and honey and jam that followed. Slowly, the journey was easing out of him and being replaced by the cool silence of the cottage. He ate without joining in the conversation, but gazing out of the small deep window opposite him. When he lit his pipe he caught Brenda watching him.

‘So,’ she said. ‘What’s the great man staring at?’

Gently smiled. ‘Just that bit of a peak. I’m going to be neighbours with it for a fortnight.’

‘So,’ Brenda said.

‘So it’s there. And if we’re going to live with it, we’ll have to climb it.’

‘Oh will we then,’ Brenda said, peering through the window. ‘It looks a pretty hairy prospect to me. You’ll perhaps manage the bit through the trees all right, but you’ll soon get stuck when it turns craggy. And even where the trees are it looks sheer. Aren’t I right, Mrs McFie?’

‘Ay,’ said Mrs McFie, coming in that moment to collect the plates. ‘There’s a guid Forestry path up to the Keekingstane, but it’s only for sheep after that.’

You see?’ Brenda said. ‘I’m always right. What’s the Keekingstane, Mrs McFie?’

‘Just that queer rock at the top of the craig – a look-out, ye ken, in the aulden times. They could put a man on the stane and he could keek at what was coming up the glen – they were a terrible lot in those days, aye fightin’ and murderin’ each other.’

‘And there’s a good path to it?’ Gently asked.

‘Guid enough when it’s dry. Ye’ll find a gate just across the bridge, with a Forestry notice beside it.’

‘What do they call the hill?’

Mrs McFie laughed. ‘Ye’ll no’ pull my leg, now, if I tell ye? In Strathtudlem we call it the Hill of the Fairies – though ye wouldna find the name on a map.’

‘The Hill of the Fairies,’ Brenda said. ‘That’s lovely . . . yes, it really is.’

‘Well, you won’t get me up there,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not to meet the Queen of the Fairies in person.’

Mrs MacFie washed-up and bustled away, promising to be in early to cook their breakfast. Though apparently she lived only two doors off she put on a coat for the expedition, and drew a black, bonnet-like hat over her crimped and dyed locks. She turned to give them a last smile as she hastened by the little window.

‘And that’s us,’ Brenda said. ‘Oh, if I had that woman in Kensington! But some millionaire would pinch her if I did. He’d offer her mink, or just marry her.’

‘Well, you don’t know about her cooking,’ Bridget said. ‘You can’t judge it on the basis of one Scotch high tea.’

‘What’s wrong with Scotch high teas at every meal,’ Brenda said. ‘Why not always eat food? They seem to thrive on it up here.’

Gently said: ‘How about a stroll to help the one Scotch high tea settle?’

‘And a dram at the local,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Who knows what the Scots drink among themselves?’

Though it was 9 p.m., the strangely suspended Highland evening was still brilliant in the glen, with sun pouring over the mountains to the west to flood the tops of those to the east. The glen was perhaps fifteen miles long and in the shape of a flattened
S
, so that its steep sides, shaggy with conifers, appeared to fold in on each other in both directions. A broad river flowed through it to join the loch at the southern end, and formed the strath, or alluvial flats, by which the village was built. The strath was meadowland. To the west of the road, where the only buildings were a shop and a garage, extended flowery meadows, intersected by the river, to the edge of the forest that fledged the braes. The houses facing these on the east had doubtless been sited for firm foundation. They made a line of brick and whitewashed fronts separated from the road by rough stone paving. The largest building, the Bonnie Strathtudlem, was late Victorian stone-quoined brick; and few of the other dwellings, with their slate or sheet-iron roofs, seemed likely to post-date it. Directly opposite the village the Hill of the Fairies lifted its blunt peak of grey, rose-tinted rock, and established a separate identity from the braes with a treeless blaze of broken crag.

The two men and two women loitered down the road towards the inn. The satiety of travel had left them now and they felt buoyed and absorbed by the scene about them. The air was soft yet exhilarating and miraculously clear, allowing minute detail of the sunlit tops and ten thousand trees to show vividly. It carried a faint odour of wild chervil, which here still flowered in the meadows, and in its hush one could hear the murmuring of the river from behind a screen of ash and alder.

As they neared the Bonnie Strathtudlem they became aware of other sounds.

‘The devils, they’re having a Gaelic hop!’ Geoffrey exclaimed. ‘Listen, that lad with the accordion is no fool.’

‘Ought we to go in there, Geoff?’ Bridget asked. ‘It’s probably a private affair. We should look foolish if they asked us to make a set in a strathspey.’

‘Oh nonsense,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Probably do us good after a day in the car. Anyway, I’m game – what do you say, George?’

Gently laughed. ‘I could probably tap my feet a little,’ he said. ‘But I’d sooner stroll down that lane and take a look at the river.’

So they passed the Bonnie Strathtudlem, before which a dozen cars were parked, and turned left to a narrow stone bridge which carried a minor road across the river. The river was fast-running and transparent, and made deep pools near the bridge. Staring into the pools it seemed imposible one should miss seeing a salmon or a monster trout. There the water appeared so still, while a yard away it was rushing and white; and under the bridge it positively thundered as it swooped down some concealed declivity.

‘The fishing’s free,’ Geoffrey said, in the indifferent tone of a non-angler. ‘You can hire rods at the inn, Maclaren says. Plenty of trout, or whatever you go for.’

‘Trout will do,’ Gently said.

‘Well, it’s apparently a good spot. Maclaren comes up here for the fishing, that’s why he keeps the cottage on.’

‘My respects to Maclaren,’ Gently said. ‘I begin to admire that man very much.’

The midges buzzed and brushed at their faces, and Geoffrey turned again towards the Bonnie Strathtudlem. The siren strain of the Bluebell Polka was now sounding from that direction. But Gently, casting an eye up the road, had spotted the gate mentioned by Mrs McFie, and wanted at least to view the point of departure of the ‘guid path’ to the Keekingstane.

‘Oh come now, George,’ Geoffrey objected. ‘We all know where listening to you will get us. It’ll just be one thing after another till we’re at the top of that blessed mountain.’

‘Maybe a few steps up it,’ Gently grinned. ‘Just to the first place with a view.’

‘Yes, and up to our knees in bogs before we’ve gone a dozen yards!’

In the end they separated, with Brenda electing to accompany Gently. If they were not down by closing-time, Geoffrey said, he’d alert Whitehall and the Mountain Rescue.

The road over the bridge formed a T-junction with a narrow back-road behind the strath, and almost opposite the junction was the wooden field gate with its bright Forestry notice. The notice informed the public of its privilege to use, but not abuse, the Forestry tracks, but offered no indication of where the track was supposed to be. In effect the gate opened into a grassy tangle of small bushes, broken by rock outcrop and shaded by tall oaks and graceful ashes. To the right a noisy torrent burled down over green, gloomy boulders, and some way off, on the strath side of the road, a large house showed through the trees. Brenda nodded towards the house.

‘We could ask the laird. He should know where the track is.’

‘I think it’s towards the left,’ Gently said. ‘The other way we’d run into that torrent.’

‘If Highness says so. But I’d love to meet a real heather-bashing laird.’

‘They went out with hansom cabs,’ Gently said. ‘Come on. This is the only way that makes sense.’

He led through a thin curtain of underbrush into a grassy space divided by a rivulet, and here a couple of stones which might have been stepping-stones suggested that others used that way. A diagonal line across the opening brought them to a plantation of young firs, where a definite path upward was indicated by a lane or fire-break through the trees. It was rocky and muddy and obstructed with brush and quite unnecessarily perpendicular, and seemed to be going on for ever with no other prospect but more trees.

‘Do you think it’s right?’ Brenda gasped at last. ‘You owe me a new pair of shoes already.’

‘It’s right,’ Gently grunted. ‘There’s someone ahead of us. We keep passing fresh bootmarks and snapped twigs.’

‘Oh hell,’ Brenda panted. ‘These bloody professionals. I’ll tell you something about him too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He’s no stupid English tourist. He’s a native who knows about ‘‘guid paths’’!’

But at last the fire-break came to an end and plunged them into the twilight of some matured firs, beneath which the bare soil, slippery with needles, made them grab for handholds as they clambered upwards. Then there was day-light again. They had reached the lowest of the horizontal breaks, a broad, grassed, friendly-looking strip carrying a fence of sheep-netting. There was a gate in the fence and beside the gate a smooth stone. Brenda plumped down on the stone and gasped and dashed the hair from her eyes.

‘This stone is the first sign I’ve met that the Forestry is human!’

Gently hung himself on the gate, taking great lungfuls of earthy air. In a way the break was disappointing, because it suggested a view it didn’t offer. It curved at each end into the sky, just refusing a glimpse of the glen, while below and above them were merely trees and more trees.

‘We’re not so fit,’ he puffed. ‘Or maybe just not used to mountains.’

‘Do you like your women sweaty?’ Brenda gasped. ‘Oh, why didn’t I listen to Geoffrey? I
like
Geoffrey.’

‘We’re high, I think. We can’t be far from the foot of the crag.’

‘George, you can
keep
the crag.’

‘Look, more bootmarks.’

‘Oh!’ Brenda panted. ‘Oh!’

After ten minutes the sweat began drying and they’d got their second wind; then another push at the track seemed a little less daunting. Beyond the gate it looked docile. Gently was convinced it would soon turn left towards the crag, and Brenda remembered seeing, when down at the cottage, a slanting ridge which could have been the path. So they went through the gate and on upwards, though with not quite the
élan
of the first onset. Now, after each hundred yards or so, they paused to breathe and wipe sweat.

The track indeed turned left: but only after another punishing ascent, followed by a scramble under young firs planted so thickly that beneath them was almost total blackness. Then it bore away in a steep, broken, slippery traverse, pointing to a goal of increased daylight above the dark night of the trees.

‘That’ll be it,’ Gently gulped. ‘There’s a big gap up there.’

‘Alleluia,’ Brenda moaned. ‘I’m not the girl I used to be. My poor, poor shoes.’

‘I’ll buy you some more in Balmagussie.’

‘If you don’t you’re a rotten swine – and you’re a rotten swine anyway.’

The end came suddenly. At one moment they were dragging themselves over the rocks, with trees hemming them on both sides and threatening to bar the way ahead; the next they were out on soft turf, in a nakedness of light that dazzled them, with a soaring rockface on one hand and airy nothing on the other. They had reached the crag. At its foot was no more than a shallow apron of grass, ending in a second precipice and a rockfall which were hidden from below by the trees.

They stood gasping, looking.

‘Worth it now?’ Gently asked.

Brenda shook her head. ‘Nothing’s worth it – but it’s a pretty good view.’

‘That’s the cottage.’

‘So what about it?’

‘Those are the cars.’

‘I’ve seen a car.’

‘Look at the sun on the tops over there.’

‘George.’

‘Yes?’

‘Drop dead,’ Brenda said.

She slumped down on the turf and lay flapping at her face with her hand. Gently grinned at her through his sweat and threw himself down beside her.

The view was majestic. At this elevation the eastern braes had lost their steepness, and showed rolling heathy tops above the line of the forest. Southward the run of the glen was visible to its portal seven miles off, where, terminated on the right by a massive peak, it appeared to launch into the sky. All the loch could be seen. Its slanty reaches lay pale and skylike among the braes, at this end broad, with rushy boundaries, then narrowing to a distant silver arrow. Northward, where a secondary glen came in from the west, the strath broadened to a small plain, and the folding braes grouped around it to form a cauldron of misty woods.