Miss Pink at the Edge of the World Read online

  Now, westwards, she saw the bay that was called Calava demarcated by splendid headlands jutting into the pale and shining sea. The northern point was several hundred feet high, that to the south was dwarfed by another behind it which matched the neighbour across the bay. She stared in an enchantment that had nothing to do with climbing; she could admire a cliff for its lines unassociated with the quality of the rock. There were skerries and rocky islands, and in that brilliant but silent world the seascape had an air of unreality. It was like the coastline of Valhalla.

  The shore of the bay was hidden by the ground immediately ahead of her. She saw that the northern headland stood at the end of a band of cliffs which stretched inland towards the outlet of the long loch on her right. She surmised that the southern headlands were the termination of a similar band, the inner end of which she was now approaching from the top. Squeezed between the bands was the glen of Scamadale.

  She eased the Austin forward and came to a notice which said, not unexpectedly, steep hill engage low gear. She had motored in the Alps but nevertheless she felt a shiver of excitement. She was still several hundred feet above sea level.

  She came slowly down an incline through a rock gateway where a loose gully had scattered stones on the tarmac. Almost immediately there was a hairpin. On the straight she glanced seawards, catching a momentary glimpse of pale sand and gleaming surf, of vivid green fields and white houses, then came the next hairpin and the next, the distances between each increasing. Now, in the apex of the cirque formed by the rock bands, bare trees climbed a depression and water dropped in a long cascade.

  The hill ended and the road ran out between stone walls where sturdy cattle grazed in the fields. There was some woodland with Scotch firs among hardwoods already in leaf. The birches here were quite green and the air was mild and smelled of the sea.

  The road ran beside a shallow river. She stopped at a gate where a path led across a paddock to the back of a whitewashed cottage. On her left was a stile and a field of new grass running up between rhododendrons and trees to lawns and the façade of a fine stone house, two storeys high, white with big windows and a roof of green slates. It looked functional but pleasant and prosperous.

  The settlement had an uncanny air of abandonment. No one moved on the lawns of what must be Scamadale House; her quiet approach had attracted attention only from the cattle. Then, looking seawards, she saw that the line of the strand was broken by two figures that appeared from behind a solitary rock in the centre of the bay. They were too far away to distinguish details but they were slim and, to her surprise, she saw the breeze flutter ankle-length skirts. The women were moving slowly as if engrossed in conversation. She had switched off her engine and now she heard the soft murmur of the sea threaded distantly with the cries of birds.

  “You’ll be lookin’ for Miss West.”

  She’d heard no one approach. She turned and found herself being studied by an old man from the other side of the gate.

  “That’s right,” she agreed, taking in the weather-beaten face and the sharp eyes. “My name is Pink.”

  “I’m MacLeod. Miss West’s croft is over the water.” He turned and pointed across the river. “That’s Soutra. We were expectin’ you last night.”

  “I stopped on the way; it was raining and getting dark.”

  “Aye, ’tis better to come into Scamadale by daylight. Nasty old road that is in the dark. My, but you’re hardy to drive all that way on your own!”

  “Oh, I put my car on the train as far as Perth.”

  “You did! On the train you say? Indeed now and how can they make a waggon big enough to take a car?”

  “It goes on a flat truck. It saved me five hundred miles of driving.”

  “Five hundred miles!” He stared at her in disbelief. “But that’s more than halfway to Iceland.”

  “How long have you had the road?” she asked.

  “Since Mr Perry came. Before that we used to go and come by the sea, when we weren’t cut off by storms. ’Tis a wild coast. In the war we lost nearly all our young men; goin’ round to Kinloch they were in Lachie MacLeod’s boat with Lachie’s wife. She was my cousin. They were after takin’ her to the doctor with something wrong with her insides.”

  “How many were lost?”

  “The four men and Jeannie MacLeod. They must have gone down off Farrid Head —” he pointed to the southern headland “— for that’s where we found the wreckage, and the bodies came back with the tide, one by one into Calava Bay. With their menfolk gone, the widows and children went away; Thomasina MacKenzie married again — over quick, some said — but we stayed: the old woman and me, and we took in the MacKenzie children and my cousin Lachie’s girl, Elspeth — her that married Roddie MacKenzie. Now there’s only the six of us left, with the MacKays.”

  “Six,” she repeated thoughtfully, staring at the fields. “How well you keep it.”

  “Ach, aye.” The tone was casual to an extreme but the old eyes shone with pride. “What do you think to the cattle, ma’am?”

  As she replied with superlatives (but they were fine cattle) an old woman came out of the cottage. She was round-shouldered and her rosy face was poked forward like a tortoise’s, blue eyes fixed unwaveringly on the visitor. She wore a man’s cap and a shabby red velvet gown, its hem looped up to a belt of binder twine, the décolletage filled with a polo-necked jersey in canary yellow. The looped skirt exposed green woollen stockings and Austrian climbing boots.

  “We were expectin’ you last night, miss.”

  Miss Pink, reflecting that introductions were meaningless if everyone’s identity was known, explained. She had got out of her car to meet Mrs MacLeod and, looking up the glen as she talked of her journey, seeing with her mind’s eye trains, Perth, supermarkets, she was struck by their sudden remoteness and she realised that, to Scamadale, Iceland must indeed be nearer than Cornwall. Iceland was only a few hundred miles across the familiar sea but there were aspects of life inland from this glen which would be incomprehensible to its inhabitants and thus unpredictable and dangerous. The sea only took the community’s young men but who could tell what an alien environment might do?

  Mrs MacLeod was asking anxiously if she liked lobsters.

  “Very much. Are you catching them already?”

  “MacKay is,” MacLeod said. “She wants to know because you’re after havin’ lobsters tonight.”

  “Well,” Miss Pink breathed. “What a treat!”

  “She does the cookin’,” MacLeod explained.

  Presented by a sudden vision of the cloth cap and velvet gown in a stainless steel kitchen Miss Pink’s eyes sought some harmless distraction and she looked towards the shore where the two girls were now strolling back to the big rock, hair and skirts lifting in the wind.

  “That’s Miss Bridget and Sadie MacKay.” MacLeod saw her interest. “You’ll be meetin’ Miss Bridget tonight.”

  “Too thin,” his wife said. “I’ve got to feed her up.” Her eyes bored through Miss Pink’s well-cut suit and exposed the solidity beneath. There was an eloquent silence broken by the crofter.

  “Young Morrison’s invited too; he’s writin’ a book about the birds and the beasts here.” The tone was indulgent.

  “He can’t be expected to know,” Mrs MacLeod put in earnestly. “He’s only been here two months.”

  “He don’t believe us.”

  “Ach, he hasna said that.”

  “I asked him what he was puttin’ in about the sealwomen and he said it was a book of facts, so there’d only be seals. You know what he was meanin’ by that, ma’am?”

  “That seal-women were not facts.”

  “Aye. We’ve always had them in these parts, at least till my grandfather’s time. He had a cousin what found one in his nets and he brought her home and lived with her for three months.”

  “Then what happened?” Miss Pink was wide-eyed.

  “She went back to the water in the autumn. That’s when they breed. He wasn’
t good enough, see?”

  His wife clicked her tongue. “You and your old stories! You should hear them singin’ on a still night, miss; they get in the caves and the rock makes it sound more — more —” she glanced at her husband.

  “Eerie.”

  “You can hear them a long way across the water. You won’t hear them now though; the killers is in.” She shuddered.

  “Killers?”

  “Whales,” MacLeod said. “I’d shoot them but Mr Perry won’t allow it. Morrison says they’re harmless.” But for Miss Pink he would have spat.

  She looked at the sea and then at the foreground which showed so much evidence of good husbandry. A great deal of common sense and initiative had been put into Scamadale, and even hard-headed business. The juxtaposition of superstition and science was intriguing — for there was science here. She asked about the breed of cattle.

  “Luings.” He pronounced it ‘lings’. “You’ll be seein’ my bull now, he’s runnin’ with the heifers on Miss West’s croft.”

  “MacQuarrie the Second?”

  They both gaped at her, then MacLeod recovered himself.

  “Miss West told you.”

  “Of course. And I know that you’re the stockman apart from almost everything else. You’re also in charge of the horses. No wonder you look so well.”

  “He only stopped goin’ after the deer last year,” Mrs MacLeod said proudly.

  He saw the younger woman start and grinned mischievously. “Ach, them days is over. I’m near seventy now but I’ve had some good times dodging the policeman and Sir Harold’s keepers — his estate marches with ours halfway to Kinloch. But since Mr Perry came to Scamadale we go out with him, all above board. He don’t let any of his shootin’; it’s just for close friends and us.”

  “How pleasant to find an estate that’s not let to a syndicate.”

  This time he failed to control himself and a gobbet of saliva plummeted on the grass. “Money! ’Tis evil. Folks come here — we can’t stop them, ’tis a public highway — in their big cars and nothin’ to the skirts on their wimmen, and silly little dogs that’s clipped — like a horse in winter but in patterns more like a tree — well, you’ll have seen it no doubt —”

  “Poodles,” Mrs MacLeod put in helpfully.

  “She knows, woman. An’ the sheeps is so frightened they run because the creatures is so strange, not because they can bite. Dogs! And if they run at lambin’ the harm’s done, isn’t it? And then all the gates is left open and old tins in the fields where they picnic, and walls knocked down — why, a family of children can do more harm in an afternoon than MacQuarrie when he’s feelin’ like a walk up the glen. I’d shoot them.”

  “He don’t mean it.”

  “Well ’tis money is the cause of it all. They havena learned to behave. They’ve got no manners. I only got to look at you, ma’am, and I know you close gates, and if you’ve got a dog, ’tis a gun-dog and you trained it. But these folk that come here, they got some money and all they can think of is gettin’ more to save them bein’ poor again. They got a big car, but they want one bigger; they’ve got a television so they want one in colours. And they got no feelin’ for the land. They’re just plain greedy like the old black-backs.”

  He looked up the slope to Scamadale House. “We’ve got everything here,” he went on more quietly. “You say eatin’ lobster’s a treat to you but we can eat lobster and chicken all through the year if we want. Time was when folk in Scamadale lived on dried fulmars and puffins in winter and used their oil in lamps. Now we got the electric, and venison out of those big ice boxes of Mr Perry’s, and we got the best beef in Scotland. We live like lords in Scamadale.”

  *

  “I met the MacLeods,” Miss Pink said, reaching for a third piece of shortbread and checking herself.

  “Murdo and Jessie?” her friend asked. “Do have some more; you’ve lost weight. MacLeod’s quite a character, and he can talk the hind leg off a donkey.”

  They were sitting on a flagged terrace outside the cottage called Soutra. Beyond the terrace wall the waves broke on the shore. To the south, the big headland dropped into the sea and at its foot, planted like an exclamation mark, rose a tall stack, its base fretted with foam from which every now and again a white fountain rose and fell like a film without sound.

  Miss Pink took another piece of shortbread.

  “I wasn’t prepared for this,” she said.

  Every piece of the Scamadale puzzle seemed subtly out of alignment. One started with what appeared to be a thriving rural community but a closer look revealed a strange breed of cattle, seaweed for fertiliser, horses in the fields that were working Percherons, all muscle and bone — and now in a cottage on the shore, with a peat stack outside the gate and a great northern diver floating aimlessly on the waves and uttering his mad loon call, a lady in Fortnum and Mason tweeds served coffee from a stone pot that could have come from Harrod’s.

  Miss Pink had met Leila West only once before: eighteen months ago, on a trip to Italy. Of the other’s past life she knew very little; there was something about keeping house for a brother who had been a forester in India but who died, and then various positions as housekeeper to English expatriates until she had drifted home to roost in Scamadale.

  She was a strong, compact woman with an attractive face: fine bones, a good tan and large hazel eyes with the skin a little lined at the corners. The eyes had the kind of expression that wasn’t indicative of suffering but of its memory. She was in her early forties; young to take up residence in such a remote community and to be completely grey. But the grey was very becoming: coarse and creamy and caught back in tortoiseshell combs. There was a secret here, of this Miss Pink was certain, but she felt no inquisitiveness; it was a fact docketed in her mind but not examined.

  “I hadn’t realised,” she went on, “how — beautiful is such a hackneyed word how unworldly your surroundings would be.”

  “That’s only the appearance. In fact, we’re a thriving community. I know Scamadale is remote geographically, but we’re not recluses.”

  “You seem to have struck the perfect compromise,” Miss Pink observed: “a kind of para-primitiveness aided by technology. MacLeod says he has everything. You too?”

  “Do you know, I really have to think hard,” Leila admitted. “I do need a new radio, but I shall buy that next time I go to Inverness. I’m annoyed that the library hasn’t sent a book I wanted on herbs . . . but you mean basic things, of course.” She looked towards the settlement on the other side of the river. “No,” she said softly, “I have everything.”

  Miss Pink’s mind pricked its ears; present secrets were usually less intimate than those belonging to the past.

  “Clive would like you to come to the House this evening,” Leila went on. “Marcus Bowles is here and Clive’s niece.”

  “Bowles the climber?”

  “Yes, you know him? I forget we’re all climbers.” She bit her lip.

  “You climb too?” Miss Pink asked in surprise. It was news to her, which was odd because climbers are as loquacious as any sportsmen.

  “I’ve been initiated now. Have you known Marcus long?”

  “I had a season with him in the Alps before the war. He wasn’t married then, of course. We haven’t kept in touch.”

  Leila looked interested.

  “Just a short-lived affair,” the older woman confessed. “Marcus was far too much of a go-getter for me. I would never have made a tycoon’s wife — property development, isn’t it? — and now a politician! Too public a role for me.”

  “Well, he’s not a politician yet — and won’t be unless he mends his ways.”

  “Now what can you mean by that?”

  Leila hesitated and stared at her friend with calculation.

  “You’ll know as soon as you see them,” she said, as if taking a decision. “That’s the point: he’s so obvious. Did I mention Bridget in my letters?”

  “I know she’s Perry’s niece,
and I saw her on the shore. MacLeod told me who she was.”

  “Yes, she was down there with Sadie. She’s a very attractive girl, lives in London most of the time. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was small and Clive became her guardian and she came to Scamadale to live. She went away to school, of course. She’s twenty-three now and wants to work in television. I believe she’s quite a promising actress; she’s had some good parts already and she’s certainly got the looks, and the confidence. She’s something of an exhibitionist — no, that’s the wrong term; she dramatises things. At the moment she’s here to lick her wounds — she tells me. She’s getting over an unhappy love affair: ‘trying to recover her identity’ is how she puts it.”

  “I see.” Miss Pink was pleasantly neutral.

  “Yes.” Leila sighed. “A very attractive girl — and Marcus is making a complete fool of himself. I’m sure he followed her here. She’s known him for ages, since she can remember, I suppose. Marcus and Clive were friends when they were at university.”

  “If he followed her here perhaps he’s the man with whom she’s been having an affair.”

  “No, definitely not. She treats him very off-handedly, quite cruel at times, although he is something of a sitting duck. It’s so undignified — and there’s his wife and three grown-up children, why, he’s a grandfather! And he’s standing at the next election. I don’t know what’s come over him.”

  “It’s not uncommon for elderly men to be infatuated with young girls,” Miss Pink pointed out. “Which party is he standing for?”

  “Labour.”

  “That is awkward. Such a respectable party where their intellectual candidates are concerned, but I expect it will blow over. It will be his last wild oat.”

  “That’s what Clive says — privately. He’s very tolerant and kind to both of them. His house has become a haven for blighted lovers: Bridget’s words, not mine. I said she could be unkind, but I think that stems from the fact that she’s been badly hurt herself, despite her flippancy.”

  “I suppose she’s known Sadie MacKay for some time?”