Miss Pink at the Edge of the World Read online

  “Oh yes. They’ve grown up together. It’s an odd relationship if you look at it objectively. Bridget refers to herself as an intellectual schizoid. I think that she means she can easily become involved in what she calls the scene both in London and here. She can be extremely sophisticated but when she comes home she peels off a layer. But Sadie doesn’t have layers. She’s simple. In an urban environment she’d be called educationally subnormal; they couldn’t teach her anything at school. She’s illiterate but her knowledge in some quarters is quite profound so ‘ESN’ is not correct.”

  “Is her knowledge country lore?”

  “Yes: the sea, marine life, natural history — not as such; she couldn’t give a scientific explanation for any behaviour but if you ask Sadie how wild plants should be cultivated to become productive, or how you should cook edible seaweeds, or whether an oiled bird is worth cleaning, she knows the answer, and most of the time she’s right.”

  “She lives with her brother, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes; he’s simple too, but literate. I’m very fond of Sadie and Hector.”

  “Does she work?”

  “A little spasmodically but at all hours if she wants to. She’s rather unpredictable of course; if it’s a nice day and you leave her doing the laundry, she’ll go to the sheep at this time of year, which is only a fair division of labour because she’s a wizard at lambing and anyone can do the laundry. She likes to go round the ewes before lambing starts so she knows how each one is getting on. She’s quite friendly with people but she’s closer to the animals.”

  “What happened to the MacKay parents?”

  “They died some years ago. The mother survived the father only a month. The MacKays are very dependent on each other. Sadie and Hector live at Catacol.” Leila pointed to a cottage across the mouth of the river where a figure was moving round a beached boat. “There’s Hector at his boat now. He catches our lobsters.”

  “I thought MacKenzie was the fisherman.”

  “He hasn’t put his pots down yet. They take them up in winter because of the storms. Hector’s pots are at the back of the Old Man.”

  “The old man?”

  “The Old Man of Scamadale. That’s what the stack is called.” Miss Pink’s gaze followed her friend’s to the distant pinnacle. “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” Leila went on, “and — undiscovered. No other climbers seem to realise it’s there. This is our own private coastline. If you would like to, we’ll go there tomorrow: to Farrid Head behind the stack.”

  “That would be delightful. Those cliffs look appallingly steep. What’s the rock like?”

  “Like the curate’s egg: good in parts, but at the best it’s splendid.”

  “How much climbing have you done here?”

  There was a short pause.

  “Well, Clive takes me out when we’re not busy, and I go with Hector to lift his pots occasionally and then I potter along the foot of the cliffs and into the caves. It’s much easier to approach the cliffs by boat and it gives a new dimension to the rock: seeing it tower above you before you start. It’s enchanting to spend an afternoon anchored underneath, watching the birds on the ledges and knowing you don’t have to climb on stuff which, to tell you the truth, I’d rather leave alone — the steepest bits of it anyway.”

  “You’ve learned a lot about rock in a short time.”

  “I’m quoting Clive; he’s the expert.”

  “Oh yes, he was one of the leading lights of his day; he and Marcus did some fine first ascents in the Alps. Does he still climb abroad?”

  “No, Scamadale absorbs him completely. He was always interested in reclamation products: making the desert fertile, afforestation, any way of improving land. He qualified as a doctor, did I tell you? Spent the war in the Medical Corps but suffered a sea change when he was demobilised and ended up managing a farm in Herefordshire. The family has money and when Clive’s father died he started to look for his own place, preferably a run-down estate. Then Scamadale came up for sale and he bought it. It was a big gamble because people were concerned but it’s paid off even in financial terms. When he bought the place the tenants were praying for the Forestry Commission to come and provide work. The House hadn’t been lived in for nine years. There were holes in the roof, owls nesting in the attics, and the stinging nettles in the vegetable garden were higher than Clive’s head.”

  “He’s done a grand job. Fortunate for Scamadale to have found a man with money and understanding.”

  “He saved the community. Roddie MacKenzie was in debt even for his rent when the estate changed hands but Clive bought him a boat — and Hector’s too. MacKenzie takes the catch in to Kinloch in the summer and sells it to the tourists and the hotel there. That will be how they repaid Clive. If it weren’t for him, no one could have stayed in the glen, and to these three families Scamadale comes before anything else. The roots go deep.”

  “And have you put down roots too?” Miss Pink asked gently.

  “Could you find a better place to do it?” Leila asked, getting up and removing the coffee things.

  *

  It wasn’t until she’d taken her bath that Miss Pink was reminded of her journey north. She was towelling herself in the dove-grey bathroom and staring shortsightedly up the glen to where the road came down the headwall. There was a flash of sun on glass. She groped for her spectacles, and then went to her room in the front of the house for her binoculars. She lowered them thoughtfully. A white Mini was descending the road.

  She felt a twinge of alarm. But of course, it needn’t be them. How many white Minis were there in the Highlands? And if it were them, why should she feel alarmed? Two boorish young men and a girl who smoked cannabis could hardly constitute a threat to herself or her hosts but — why Scamadale?

  Chapter Three

  Leila had left Soutra earlier in order to supervise preparations for the dinner party so her guest was alone when she set out for the House.

  Walking carefully in her thin shoes and neat navy trouser suit, she looked up from the muddy track to find herself observed by MacQuarrie from the other side of the wall. She paused to admire the massive shoulders and level back. He was deep bronze in colour with a domed head like that of a buffalo. Seeing her interest he mumbled softly through his muzzle.

  “Lonely?” Miss Pink mused. “You like people?”

  MacQuarrie sighed.

  “Life can become monotonous,” she agreed, “when you have no goal — of your own choosing, that is.” Her gaze wandered over the grazing heifers while the bull continued to regard her without much interest. “A young bull might be the answer,” she ruminated. “Natural competition.”

  She had been leaning on the wall but now she turned, sensing company. People moved too quietly in this place.

  “I’m sent to fetch you, Mel,” Marcus Bowles said, and kissed her cheek. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  She looked surprised.

  “Still talking to lesser animals as if they were human, he elaborated, “or humans as if they were animal. Nice Mel.”

  “It’s a matter of self-respect.”

  “Animals have that?” He raised expressive eyebrows.

  “A different kind. With animals, saving face is survival behaviour. With us it’s a matter of artifice.”

  “The same penetrating perception too.” She remembered that acid note and the way his small round mouth contracted to a pout when he was annoyed.

  “You’re looking well, Marcus.”

  His face lit up. “The air agrees with me, but in fact I’ve never felt fitter. Clive and I did the Pagoda today.” The tone was elaborately casual.

  “I haven’t climbed here.”

  “It’s the big stack off the north headland: a hundred and fifty feet high; nothing like the Old Man, of course, but a good Severe, we thought. A first ascent,” he murmured as if it were an afterthought.

  “Good gracious, at your age!”

  He coughed deprecatingly. “I’m not exactly in
my grave, Melinda.”

  They strolled on, to pause at the river bridge and watch the trout. She noted that the Old Man wasn’t visible from here, only from Soutra.

  “Is that a broch?” she asked, indicating a round stone structure like a roofless tower on the south side of the settlement.

  “That’s our broch. The visitors seem to have come to roost there.”

  They both stared at the white Mini which was parked near the tower.

  “More likely they’ve just driven over from Kinloch to enjoy the sunset,” he went on. “People do that, to Clive’s annoyance. We get so few visitors at this time of year that we like to know their business.”

  She was amused by his proprietorial air, but then some people would like to assume possession of a place like this. It was a measure of their craving for values. Poor Marcus; he hadn’t liked her reference to self-respect; had his unkind lady been cruel again? She glanced at the neat figure beside her and noticed that he was growing a little paunchy, despite the spring in his step. The sprightliness was assumed; he looked tired and his neck was going slack below the chin.

  Forty years ago he’d been single-minded, concerned to succeed in everything he undertook. Ladies had been charmed by him, had fallen, then drifted away. Marcus always had himself on a very tight rein. She looked at his deep brown eyes and lugubrious expression and wondered about Marcus at sixty. He caught her eye, smiled with singular charm and took her hand.

  “What a night, Melinda!” He paused. “‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .’”

  His voice was beautiful.

  “You’ll charm the Opposition from its benches,” she said in admiration.

  “I have to charm the voters first,” he reminded her. “But I’d give it all up —” he exclaimed, and stopped.

  She didn’t encourage him to continue; she would not indulge him in extravagance.

  *

  A fire of driftwood, interspersed with peats, burned in the drawing room of Scamadale House, a room that was remarkable less for any ostentatious luxury than for its warm, upholstered comfort and the atmosphere evoked by a wall lined with books, and blown-up pictures of north walls in the Alps. But in daytime the focal point was the window bay where chairs of country Chippendale were grouped in an arc round a solid little tripod table. There, Miss Pink, Marcus and their host sat with their backs to the room, drinking sherry and looking down the grass slope between the rhododendrons and the hardwoods, over MacLeod’s croft, the river mouth and Soutra, along the gaunt cliffs to the northern headland. The stack called the Pagoda was round the corner. The cliffs were of red sandstone, the sun was low and the rock glowed hot and angry above the colourless sea where the skerries floated like low and knobbly plates of pumice stone.

  The host turned from this view to glance at his guests glasses. Clive Perry was a bearded man in steel-rimmed spectacles, large but not clumsy, a man who carried courtesy as easily as his fine suit of Scotch tweed: tweed for the country, but dark because it was evening and the ladies would be dressed.

  Miss Pink had been told all about the Pagoda and now she asked how it compared with the Old Man of Scamadale.

  “Ah, the Old Man.” Clive beamed broadly and exchanged a glance with Marcus. “Now this is a difficult one. Has Leila told you how we feel about uninvited visitors?”

  “MacLeod was very strong on dogs and leaving gates open.

  “You can’t farm where there are tourists. If we were ‘discovered’ the Tourist Board would prod the Council to widen the road but you know what these trippers are like with their caravans. The hairpins would be blocked every day, there’d be accidents, publicity, more people.”

  “And you would be served with a compulsory purchase order for a caravan and camping site and blocks of concrete lavatories,” Marcus put in. He was obviously selective about development.

  “But the worst damage could be a destruction of standards,” Clive went on. “St Kilda was a thriving community until the tourists came, then the islanders became greedy, selfish and lazy. Well, we like to think we’ve learned from St Kilda, and advanced. We’re more prosperous, basically as well as materially, than any other community in the north-west. In real terms our standard of living is very high indeed. But the rot would penetrate very quickly if we became a tourist attraction; we couldn’t resist.”

  “What relevance has the Old Man to the tourists except as scenery?”

  “Climbers. People would come to watch.”

  “How can you discourage climbers? I imagine youngsters have only to see that stack to want to be on the top of it.”

  “Only if it were a good climb.”

  “I see. It’s loose.”

  He didn’t answer directly. “For the visitor it’s inaccessible. The cliffs at Farrid Head are three hundred feet high: overhanging and as unstable as chalk. And if you could get down, you can’t reach the Old Man except at low tide, unless you swim — and who wants to start up what appears to be a very sustained climb wet to the skin?”

  “Surely a boat’s the answer.”

  “We don’t hire boats out. We lend them to friends of course, but it’s known at Kinloch and all down this coast, that there are no boats for hire in Scamadale.”

  Marcus had been growing restive, and he would have heard all this before. Now he excused himself and left them. Clive followed him with speculative eyes.

  Miss Pink said: “I get the feeling that the particular form of ‘progress’ to which you’re opposed is trying to manifest itself already.”

  He nodded. “MacKenzie,” he said ruefully: “the weakest link in the chain. He wants a television mast erected above the headwall — imagine what that would do to our view of the Falls of Lara! I’ve seen television; there was a set in my bedroom the last time I went to London: an ugly and pernicious innovation. It unsettles people, makes them want useless luxuries: the consumer goods syndrome, Bridget calls it. When you’ve bought one object, television tells you that you must buy another in a year’s time because it’s new. Government doesn’t help with its emphasis on growth. MacKenzie has a perfectly serviceable A 30 but he wants a Cortina. What for? There’s only two in the family and you can’t carry sheep and dogs in a saloon. I’ve made it quite clear to him that he’ll go no faster in it than in his present van. We keep to twenty miles an hour on the estate.”

  “Why?”

  “Because animals and pedestrians have priority.”

  “How sensible.”

  “We like it.” A thought struck him. “You’re not writing about us, are you?” he asked, full of horror for what he might have said.

  She hastened to reassure him, feeling that his desire to keep the glen unspoiled was doomed eventually, but appreciating his reasons for it. She’d seen other places overrun by commercial enterprises; she wished that this one might remain inviolate.

  “We do our best,” he told her. “Climbers come, but they’re friends and they keep quiet about our attractions. Fortunately the cliffs aren’t high enough to attract the hard men. But climbers do less direct harm than trippers. How can you improve a breed when people leave gates open? We have two bulls MacQuarrie a Luing with Shorthorn and Highland blood, and his son by a Welsh Black cow. There’s a big future for the Welsh Black cross.”

  The conversation became technical until they were interrupted by the arrival of a young man who was introduced as Ian Morrison, ‘our naturalist’. Clive and the newcomer exchanged news about the weather, and the conditions that might be expected as lambing time approached. In other districts weather might be idle gossip but here, where it was gales which lifted sheds and haystacks, when eagles were a hazard to young lambs — and the killer whales had been seen at MacKay’s lobster pots, Nature was life, not a topic of conversation.

  There were voices in the passage but they stopped suddenly as if switched off. Bridget Perry came in and she was ravishing. Marcus’s set face showed over her shoulder: pale and frowning. She approa
ched her uncle, put her arms round his neck and laid her lips to his hair.

  “Congratulations on the Pagoda, darling,” she murmured intimately: “Another laurel leaf for your crown. She stroked his head and turned lustrous eyes on Miss Pink.

  They were introduced and the older woman mentioned her first sight of the girl. Bridget’s eyes became abstracted.

  “Yes,” she mused, “I suppose it would make a nice picture. Heifits perhaps — The Lady with the Little Dog?” her eyes widened at Miss Pink.

  “You’ll never succeed as an actress while you’re so self-conscious,” Marcus remarked cattily.

  “Who is talking.” It was no question, merely a casual comment. Marcus flinched.

  Leila came in, smiling, a little flustered. She sank on the sofa beside Bridget who squeezed her hand. The party stirred and re-grouped itself. Before she moved, Miss Pink gave a last glance at the cliffs and thought how animate they appeared, waiting in the background. Waiting? Inside the room a table lamp had been switched on in a corner. With this and the dying sun a rich light pervaded the room and in it movements had a special significance as if people were unsubstantial beings floodlit on a stage. She leaned back and allowed impressions to register themselves on her mind.

  Leila sipped her sherry thankfully and relaxed: mute testimony that the kitchen was quietly ticking over and waiting for some small domestic signal to start serving dinner. Clive’s expression as she came in had not been that of an employer for his housekeeper, and his way of handing her a drink was a gentle tribute to — the hostess? The Scamadale women enhanced the drawing room: both in long skirts, Leila in green, Bridget wearing oyster lace over silk, high necked and with loops of jet beads, the costume a foil for her vivid face and piled black hair from which tendrils escaped with cunning carelessness, drawing attention to a neck slender as a doe’s. Diamond drops scintillated below her ears.

  Miss Pink watched the men watching Bridget: Clive with affectionate pride, Marcus brooding with rather too obvious hopelessness, Morrison not watching at all, but speaking to her.