Miss Pink at the Edge of the World Page 6
Beyond MacLeod’s croft there was a curious area of low green lumps which turned out to be basically dunes and dusted with new grass. The track curved left and ran parallel with the shore. She passed the ruins of an old black house with MacKenzie’s cottage on the right: the conventional two-up, two-down with dormer windows, and gable ends supporting squat chimney stacks.
Inland were the woods surrounding the House and somewhere at the back of them would be Thundergay: Morrison’s cottage.
The last croft on this side of the settlement and before the broch was Catacol which belonged to the MacKays: brother and sister. A girl stood outside the back door feeding some Rhode Islanders. She didn’t greet Miss Pink from where she stood but came across to the fence. This morning she wore jeans and a thick navy jersey. On her feet were a pair of old but good climbing boots. Miss Pink observed her with interest. She had hair the colour of the sand, green eyes and skin like warm brown silk. The mouth was wide and friendly but she had an angled, stubborn chin.
She wanted to talk and Miss Pink was surprised; she had expected a dreamer, a recluse, a girl who would avoid strangers, but then she deduced that Sadie accepted her as a friend of the folk at the House. She admired the hens and inquired about laying. In the middle of a scathing comparison with the MacKenzies’ Leghorns, Sadie looked over the other’s shoulder and stopped talking. Miss Pink turned casually and saw Rita going from the broch towards a burn with what must be breakfast pans. Sadie looked puzzled.
“She’s a queer one.”
“In what way?”
“She’s in trouble.”
“Did she say so?”
“Not really. She was down on the shore last night so I went to talk to her. She was lookin’ at the water and I was after thinkin’ she’d be lonely because the others were gone up to the House and left her behind. But she was like a sick beast that wants to be on its own. She didna want me.”
“She’s unhappy,” Miss Pink said.
“Bridget’s unhappy but she talks to me. Men!” The tone sounded unnatural, an imitation perhaps? Elspeth MacKenzie?
A sleek grey cat trotted across the grass and rubbed itself against the girl’s legs.
After a moment’s careful appraisal during which Sadie waited for comments, Miss Pink remarked that the cat was a fine animal. The girl nodded. Each recognised in the other a person who understood animals.
“This is Ann. She’s a hunter. She catches grouse but don’t you be tellin’ Mr Perry.”
Miss Pink guessed that Clive knew. It was a bit of drama for Sadie. The girl picked the cat up and it settled in her arms, purring loudly and regarding the visitor with brilliant yellow eyes.
“Now,” Sadie said, addressing the animal firmly: ’tis time for you to be startin’ work and you go in the woods today. Mr Perry have shot the squirrel.” She put it down and gave it a shove. It flashed a soft paw and collapsed on its back. “He could have mistook her for a squirrel,” Sadie explained.
“Oh, a grey squirrel!” Miss Pink was relieved.
A young fellow came up from the shore and across the turf, walking firmly but lightly like a stag. He was a masculine version of his sister, but the hair was more bleached, the eyes less vivid: pale where hers were deep green, the skin rougher and darker, the chin heavier. He beamed down at Miss Pink.
“’Tis a fine mornin’ for a walk. Will you be goin’ up to the Head? The climbers left early.”
“Will they manage to get up the Old Man today?”
“No. They’ve got to get down the cliffs first and then the tide will be in. ’Tis too cold to swim — and then the killers is about.”
“Those whales seem to be guarding the stack,” Miss Pink said lightly. “I’m looking forward to seeing them — from a good distance.”
“That’s right,” Sadie agreed. “They’re the only beasts as makes me frightened.” She looked astonished at her own statement. “You goin’ to lift the pots?” she asked her brother.
“They never touch the boat. You know that.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Have they ever upset a boat?” Miss Pink pressed. “Never.” But he looked doubtful. “I can swim well,” he added.
Sadie shook her head vehemently. “You’re stupid. Nothin’ swims as fast as a killer, even the seals. Leave the pots.”
“I’m not goin’ out till late. They might go away by afternoon.”
Miss Pink was looking at his feet. Like his sister he was wearing climbing boots.
“Do you climb too?” she asked.
He smiled. “Not proper climbing: all those long ropes and bits of coloured string and the spikes and links and helmets — ach no! It’s engineerin’ — an’ I’d get in such a confusion if I tried to handle all that gear, I’d fall off!”
Brother and sister laughed uproariously.
“I scramble,” he said with sudden seriousness, watching her reaction to see if he’d used the correct term.
“We go down to the big cave sometimes,” Sadie ventured. “There are mollies on the ledges.”
He placed a large hand on his sister’s shoulder and gave her a playful push.
“Bridled guillemots!” he shouted.
“God, I’ll never get my tongue round that. Them’s mollies with specs!”
Miss Pink was affected by their hilarity.
“Where is this cave?” she asked.
“’Tis just past the Old Man,” Hector told her. “You’ll see it when you get there, or this one will show you when she comes up.”
“Are you coming up too?” Miss Pink asked Sadie.
“I might — when I been round the sheep. Ian asked me to show him where the puffins used to live. They’re gone now because of the black-backs. Nasty old things.”
“Black-backed gulls?”
“We shoot them,” Hector said.
“Oh. You don’t think they have a place in the —” she trailed off.
“In the environment?” He smiled slyly then the smile went and his eyes slid to his sister. “You got to protect the weaker ones.”
*
Rita regarded Miss Pink dully and without surprise as the older woman studied the inside of the broch. The men would have told the girl whom they’d met last night.
“It’s sheltered all right,” she agreed sullenly as the visitor remarked on the immensely thick walls. A small tent was pitched in the roofless green space and Miss Pink wondered about sleeping arrangements.
Rita wasn’t interested in the Old Man — in fact, she was hostile; probably she regretted her outburst at the inn. Miss Pink stayed for only a few minutes and then left the broch by its ragged gateway and walked up the slope of the in-bye land towards the band of cliffs which walled the glen on the south.
The path was good: narrow, but trodden by people and animals, and it rose steadily through the sloping pasture to a gate in the mountain fence. She passed through the gate and turned right, towards the sea.
As she approached the top of the cliffs, she was staring back at the glorious sweep of Calava Bay and beyond: headland after headland receding into the far north. Now she could see the Pagoda, squat compared with the Old Man, and with a reef like a frieze between it and the mainland. Then she looked left and saw above her, with an astonishment that bordered on shock, great overhanging layers of rock pointing out to sea, all red. A small white square like a table top broke the line of the overhangs. She kept moving and in one pace the table resolved itself into a guano-whitened summit which she looked down on like a gull, and below it the tower plunged exhilaratingly to the flat plinth.
“My God!” She sat down to contemplate the phenomenon. There were some herring gulls on the cliffs but there were only fulmars on the stack. A number of excited birds in the air beyond the arête of Farrid Head suggested human activity round the corner.
After a while she rose carefully, for she was nearer the edge than the sheep trod which was itself so close that in places it resembled a tracing of the cliff line. She followed t
he edge inland round a bight in the coast. A stream poured over the lip here and dropped down a depression amid ferns and lush grass and sedums that were strange to her. After fifty feet or so it fell out of sight.
Farrid Head was protected on two sides by rock: towards the sea by the great cliffs, and to the north by the crags which extended inland to demarcate the glen. Miss Pink took one look at these and turned aside to find the path which she had been following originally. It was there, and exploited the ledges on the crags with cunning: running level for short distances and then twisting and turning up weaknesses in walls by means of short staircases. A waterfall splashed down to become the burn that fell over the sea cliffs and when she reached the top she found that this was the outlet from a lochan. The track ran directly south from here and a mile away was a small hill at the back of yet another headland. This would be the westernmost point of the peninsula and after it the coastline lay back, running east and inland to Kinloch. Southward, range upon range of mountains shaded into infinity.
She could hear no voices from the back of the Head; there was only the whisper of a breeze in last year’s grasses and the long call of a golden plover.
She raked in her rucksack for the glasses but although she quartered the moor she could catch no glimpse of the tiny giraffe neck watching her from the heather. So she turned and focused on Scamadale, the houses on the south of the settlement now hidden by the near ground, but Soutra showing quite plainly beyond the river. The front door was open. She looked at her watch: eleven-fifteen; Leila was in no hurry to attend to those pressing chores at the House. She sighed and walked thoughtfully towards the cliff.
Enormous chunks of sandstone stood on the grass and there were rifts in the ground that were festooned with ferns and, sometimes in the bottom, the odd bone in the remains of a fleece.
At the top of one crevice a metal piton had been driven into a crack. A heavy snap link was clipped through the piton’s eye and a rope, knotted to form a loop at the end, ran from the link to the cliff edge, passing between two weathered knobs of bedrock. Taking care not to touch the rope, she peered over the lip.
Below her was a gully, but she could see only about a hundred feet of it. The top section was vertical and below that the angle eased a little and she glimpsed wet earth and broken rock where the ground had been recently disturbed. Then came loose scree on which the end of the rope rested, and some poised blocks — and the sea a further two hundred feet below. She watched a bird labouring over the water, identified as a cormorant only when the neck showed as it passed above jade sand.
“A long way down.”
She started and turned her head. Marcus was beside her, his hand on one of the knobs of rock.
“You startled me!”
“I’m sorry. Where are they?”
“I haven’t seen them yet.”
The stack was hidden from here by the wall of the gully. They turned aside and walked out to the point of the Head and found a place from which they could see the whole of the landward side of the Old Man, from plinth to summit. The fulmars were sitting on every ledge and there was no sign of the climbers.
Miss Pink looked left across space to a buttress slightly lower than the Head, at the foot of which whole masses of rock had fallen to form a jumble of inclined planes jutting seaward, and on the outer tip of the last, a cluster of cormorants stood motionless, some with their wings hung out to dry as if on coat hangers. Behind these fallen blocks the sea moved quietly in the mouth of a black cavern above which a series of ledges was crammed with auks: guillemots, some with the white bridle mark, and all standing to attention like little men in dinner suits.
She watched them until her arms ached from holding the binoculars and when she lowered them she saw that Marcus was standing on the cliff above the cavern, waving, evidently to her, and pointing. She went to join him.
“They’re fast workers,” he said as she came up. “I hope those ropes are firm.”
She looked back at the cliffs under the Head. Now, in the lulls between outbursts from the wheeling gulls, she could hear the faint tapping of a piton hammer, and saw a rope dangling on a different line from that in the gully.
“Where are they?” she asked. “I can hear them.”
“They’re in a corner about two-thirds of the way down: below that second rope. You can see a red helmet now and again. Look: that’s Pincher, with the long hair. That gully they started down doesn’t have a bottom; I’ve seen it when I’ve been out with MacKay to lift his pots. They escaped from it along that ledge, see?” She nodded. “Another fixed rope and they’ll be down. Ah, there’s Stark now.”
A ridiculously tiny figure in a white helmet moved into sight. In his hands he held two coils of rope. He peered downwards and then flung them out and away from the cliff, the coils parting with slow and lazy movements to fall and lie down the rock, caught in one place about twenty feet above the foot of the cliffs.
“That’ll do,” Marcus observed judiciously.
Stark turned and Miss Pink focused the binoculars. He was fiddling with something in his hand, then he took a step back but now facing inwards. He stood poised on the edge for a moment before he went over: sliding down the rope like a spider in reverse, and to the watchers the white rope looked no thicker than gossamer.
She lowered the binoculars. “What’s he using? We didn’t rope down like that.”
“It’s a descendeur: a great improvement; it’s a small, metal gadget with a hole that you put the rope through and the friction on the rope controls your speed as you go down.”
“His back looks terribly vulnerable. I’d want the rope wrapped round me as we used to do it.”
“Actually Clive and I still do,” he confessed, “but then Clive’s conservative. This method is quicker and more convenient. He knows his job, doesn’t he?”
“Marvellous,” she breathed. “You can’t help but admire them.”
He looked at her suddenly, then away. “Is there any reason why you shouldn’t?” he asked casually.
“He seemed rather a pushing young man last evening.”
“He was uneasy in company.”
So was Pincher, she thought, but that was more natural. She wasn’t going to tell Marcus about her meeting with them at the inn, not yet anyway. Aloud she asked: “Is this the side of the Old Man that’s climbed? It looks the most feasible.”
“You can see nearly all of the route; it follows that diagonal line from the plinth — see? — and avoids the slab nearly halfway up by a crack on its right, then crosses to the corner — you can see a ledge there — and takes those top overhangs direct. The bit avoiding the slab’s not visible from this point.”
“Leila must be a natural,” she murmured.
“You’re talking shorthand, Mel. A natural what?”
“Why, a natural climber. She’s only been here a short time and she can lead a thing like that!”
“Oh, Leila’s climbed before.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, but it’s obvious when you climb with her. She was probably introduced to it as a girl and then gave it up for a long time when she got m —— but, of course, she’s not married. Gave it up for her career then?”
“Something like that.” Housekeeping for a brother wasn’t that onerous a career.
Below them Stark was on the shore, looking up. He waved to the watchers and they waved back, mutely congratulating him. Two figures appeared on top of Farrid Head, saw the first arrivals and came across, pausing to study the fixing of the first rope. It was Ian Morrison and Sadie. The girl came and stared at the climbers. Pincher was descending now.
“What a silly way to do it!” she exclaimed in contempt. “They’re after fallin’, sure enough.”
Marcus started explaining the technique but she paid no attention.
“Seen me mollies?” she asked Miss Pink who responded enthusiastically.
The girl’s eyes swept the sea. “Killers is gone,” she told Ian.
“Don’t!” he pleaded. “You’re too near.”
“Silly old thing,” she said.
“He’s quite right,” Miss Pink demurred, and Marcus said sharply:
“Do as you’re told, Sadie. You’re worrying us.”
She looked at them, gauging their seriousness, and then moved back.
“I’ve been all over these rocks.”
“You haven’t!” Miss Pink protested.
“You’d be surprised where she goes,” Ian put in, still watching her as if she were a child that might return to the edge if the grown-ups relaxed their vigilance. “She’s like a fox; she follows Hector everywhere.”
“Can everyone climb in Scamadale?” Miss Pink asked.
He thought for a moment. “Everyone except Jessie and Elspeth.”
“Them too, then,” Sadie contradicted. “All the kids used to go after the birds.”
They stared at her in awe, thinking of these precipices with children on them unroped.
“No one ever fell?” Miss Pink asked in disbelief.
“Never heard of none.”
“The channel’s filled up now,” Ian commented. “They won’t get across today.”
Between the plinth and the mainland rocks was a stretch of deep water and suddenly everyone gasped as a fin, high even at this distance, moved through the green channel. It was followed by four others and they could see blurred shapes below the surface. The climbers had seen them too. Together now on the shore, they stared at the whales with the frozen immobility of rabbits before a pack of stoats.
“That’s given them cause for thought,” Marcus chuckled.
“It would give me cause for retreat,” Miss Pink said firmly.
The whales moved in slow procession towards a couple of lobster floats, and now the animals started to blow: the appearance of black heads and spurts of water, the casual snorting, robbing the occasion momentarily of its sinister air. One rolled and the white belly gleamed like gloss paint. They reached the floats, assembled in a rough arc and stayed there, motionless, the curve of the dorsal fins showing that they were facing towards the channel.