A Dark and Distant Shore (7 page)

Henry’s dinner-table conversation was very good value, far more amusing – if no less silly – than Lucy’s small talk.

‘Stimulus!’ he would exclaim. ‘That is what the mind requires! How otherwise to nourish that originality that is the greatest of all intellectual refinements? Even our great universities fail there, Mr Telfer, sir! In their emphasis on Classical studies, they put a higher premium on memory than originality!’ Mr Phillpotts was a veritable fount of exclamation marks.

‘Quite,’ said Magnus after a moment, remembering his own brief excursion into Classical studies. ‘Oh, quite! I’d certainly prefer that brat of mine not to be condemned to all that declining and memorizing and construing.’

Lucy, not very sure what ‘construing’ meant, said, ‘No, indeed!’ and then visibly wondered whether she oughtn’t perhaps to have said, ‘Yes, indeed!’

Vilia swallowed a giggle. Henry Phillpotts was a perfect fraud. He looked clever, with his piercing blue eyes, shock of badly cut black hair, and high complexion. His clothes were eccentric. Indoors, he wore a cassock of Madonna-hair brown with velvet cuffs, supplemented outdoors by a wide-brimmed, shallow-crowned hat in bright red, not unlike a cardinal’s, or a kind of brimless toque that bore a perilous resemblance to the papal mitre. And his mind was the most complete ragbag, stuffed with unrelated shreds and tatters. Quotations from Dante and Paracelsus, Chaucer and Racine, Avicenna and Machiavelli, tripped from his tongue when the literary mood was on him. When he felt theologically inclined, it would be Clement of Alexandria, or St Thomas Aquinas, or John Davenant. But it always sounded as if he had been studying some eclectic dictionary of quotations rather than the originals. And he was utterly fascinated by figures from the past of whom no one else had ever heard. Not Dionysus the god, but Dionysus the Areopagite. Not St Paul of Tarsus but St Saturninus of Toulouse. Not King George of Merrie England but King George of Podiebrad.

Fortunately, he and Luke took to each other from the start. Henry was just what the boy needed to shake him out of the sullens. He was loud, he was slightly mad, but he was full of life, and it was impossible to be dull when he was around. Luke, once more the centre of someone’s attention, began to improve.

It was perfectly clear to Vilia that Magnus and Lucy were congratulating themselves on having made an excellent choice of tutor. Neither of them was precisely needle-witted, and since Henry – who, though silly, wasn’t a fool – took care to sound intellectual in their company, they failed to realize that his views were anything out of the common run. They decided their son was in good hands, even if they weren’t very peaceful hands.

And then Vilia’s comfortable sense of superiority suffered a reverse. Lucy began to wonder whether the house at Ramsgate was, after all, quite spacious enough to accommodate not only Mr and Mrs Telfer and their servants, but Luke and Vilia and Henry Phillpotts and the schoolroom staff as well. Magnus made a show of resistance, but not for long. In the end it was decided that Mr and Mrs Telfer should have two peaceful months at Ramsgate on their own while the children went to Kinveil, under the eminently responsible supervision of Luke’s new tutor. Even without knowing what she later discovered – that Lucy had hinted to the Duchess of Argyll, who had passed the message on to the Duke, that the Telfers’ need for a tutor was of the most vital urgency – Vilia’s conviction grew that Lucy was a good deal cleverer than she had supposed. With exasperation, she also discovered that she was beginning to feel a kind of amused affection for her.

The journey north was a sensational success. The party travelled in a majestic berline, with servants tacked on wherever there happened to be space, and a pile of boxes and the kind of trunks known as ‘imperials’ loaded on the roof in such a way as to make the carriage look like a mobile mountain. Magnus had decreed that, since they were in no great hurry, they should take their own horses, which meant that they could only cover three ten-to-twelve-mile stages in the day.

With the coachman and groom on the box, and Sorley and Vilia’s maid on the outside seat, it made an impressive turn-out, and one that the ostlers at the coaching houses remembered for years to come. The horses, two bays and two greys, were very sweet goers on the road; the only problem was getting them there. Three of them were merely snappish about being fitted into the traces, but the fourth, a bay known as Moonlight Flit, was in the habit of lying down in the stable yard and refusing to get up again until he had the full attention of all the ostlers, half the post-boys, and the coachman’s long, curled whip.

It took three weeks to cover the six hundred miles between London and Kinveil, and the travellers – except for the governess – enjoyed every minute of it. Vilia, especially, had been transfigured from the moment the journey was decided on. In London, this had been apparent only in a kind of controlled excitement, more spring in her walk and more light in her eyes. But with every mile out of town she became more vibrant, until, by the time the coach reached Baldock, she was almost fizzing with high spirits. After the months of pale, unsmiling restraint, it was a revelation to everyone except Sorley. It was also extremely catching.

Only the governess failed to respond, sitting in petrified silence for most of the way, remonstrating faintly from time to time. It was really not
comme il faut
for a young lady to start up a chorus in the yard of a public inn, as Vilia did one day when the travellers were watching the coachman trying to rouse Moonlight Flit.

Here
’s to our horse and
to
his right ear,

God
send our master a
hap
-py New Year!

Nor did a young lady hang out of a carriage window warbling Gaelic folk songs at the top of her voice. And as for playing backgammon in the evenings – ‘shaking dice boxes in a common hostelry!’ – the poor woman was ready to die of shame. Vilia paid not the slightest heed.

It was a truly splendid three weeks. Admittedly, the accommodation deteriorated sadly as soon as they crossed the Border. Few people other than cattle drovers travelled much in Scotland as yet, and Luke remembered his father complaining that there wasn’t an inn on the whole road fit for a gentleman. But Luke and Vilia were approaching Kinveil, and didn’t mind, while Henry, who had a curiously ascetic streak, scarcely even noticed that there were no carpets on the floors, no cushions on the chairs, no curtains at the windows, and little to eat but porridge, eggs, salt fish, and barley bread.

In the evenings, they raided the brown holland book bag that travelled with them in the coach in search of something to fit their mood. They wept over
Clarissa,
yelled with laughter at
Humphry Clinker,
gasped over
Marmion.
They declaimed from Shakespeare, and never was there such a ranting as when Henry played Lear, never such a doom-struck Lady Macbeth as Vilia. Never, Luke prided himself, a more poetic Hamlet, and certainly never a younger one – not even that infant prodigy of a few years before, the famous Master Betty. Luke wondered whether the stage mightn’t be his forte.

At Ballachulish ferry the boatmen had lost one of the rowlocks for the oars. The tide rushed up the strait, the oars slipped and skidded, the boatmen puffed and blew, and the coachman fell overboard and had to be fished out by the groom. When they reached the other shore, Henry paid up dutifully and gave the oarsmen their expected dram of mountain dew – not, he made it clear, in recognition of their seamanship but out of gratitude to Providence for their safe landing.

At Fort William, Moonlight Flit lost his tail. This, Vilia said, was standard procedure. Local fishermen liked horsehair for their trout lines, and any horse stabled at an inn was bound to be at risk. It didn’t improve Moonlight Flit’s appearance or his temper.

At Fort Augustus, Henry decided to hire a boat to row his charges up to the mouth of the river Braddan. They could just as well have gone by the new road, but Henry thought that would be insipid. Surrounded by a grinning audience of military veterans from the Fort, and canal workmen resting their barrowloads of soil and rock, he haggled like a peddler in a native bazaar with the boatman Rory Mor and his three strapping sons.

‘Two shillings,’ Henry said firmly.

‘Och, no. I wass chust going out after the fush.’

‘Fish?’ said Henry. ‘You’re a boatman. It’s your duty to carry passengers! Two-and-sixpence.’

‘No, no. There iss no duty about it at aal. And the weather iss chust right for the fushing.’

‘It’s outrageous.’ Henry tipped back his cardinal’s hat. ‘Three shillings.’

‘Och, no. Anyway, I would neffer be getting that great big coach on my boat.’

‘Of course you would. Three-and-six.’

‘No, no. Come away, boys. Let uss be getting off after our fush and leave the chentleman to make other arrangements.’

Henry knew when he was beaten. The coach and horses went by road, while Rory Mor and his sons received the exorbitant sum of four shillings for rowing half a dozen passengers half a dozen miles up the loch.

Vilia enjoyed this interlude very much, being entirely on Rory Mor’s side, but once they were on the road again she became progressively more silent. Luke didn’t even notice at first. He was too interested in the progress the road had made in the last year. It was strange, even to a child, to see the endless grey-gravelled scar winding from one horizon to the other, from nowhere to nowhere, a raw and glaring scribble in the wild majesty of the landscape. The human vision that had brought it into being was not yet justified, for the final stretch was still incomplete. The cattle that would cross from Skye to thunder along the beautifully engineered highway, fifteen feet wide, with careful run-offs and banked-up sides, had no access to it yet, while the few humans who lived along its route continued to make their barefoot way over the soft, resilient mosses and heathers of the hills. In use, perhaps, it would begin to look as if it belonged. Unused, it was a gratuitous smack in the face of Nature. Even on a blazing June day there was something unnerving about rounding a shoulder of mountain to see ahead a great sweep of rocks and waters, tumbling on and down, into and out of narrow passes – a vista of startling greens, lichened greys, sparkling silver, sandstone reds and peaty blacks, stretching far to the horizon and the blue glitter of the distant sea. And slashed through it all the thin gravel highway, empty, bare, blind, and somehow malevolent. On Luke’s previous journey, he had found nothing oppressive in this towering wilderness. Now, he was attacked by a stronger sense of isolation than ever in his life before.

They were all silent. It came as the strangest shock, rounding a bend, to see pitched in a sheltered dell by the roadside a few tents, with a handful of labourers supping their midday brose. They gazed at the travellers incuriously. The coachman’s impervious London face stared straight ahead, and the groom sat as motionless as if he had been stuffed. Luke and Henry, from their lumbering cocoon, bowed in a stately way and passed on with never a word spoken. It was as unreal as a dream.

Luke glanced at Vilia. She sat absorbed in a corner seat, her bare head resting on the leather squab cushion and her eyes turned unseeingly on the bright world outside. There were deer on the hills. A pair of lapwings, large and crested, circled the carriage, shrieking to distract it from the vicinity of their nest. A male wheatear, dazzlingly elegant with his grey back, peach-gold breast, and kohl-rimmed eyes, surveyed it doubtfully from a cairn by the roadside, and then flew off with an admonitory chack-chack that was audible even over the gritty rumble of the wheels.

Vilia ignored it all. Luke glared at her. He knew she was going to spoil everything. Pessimistically, he decided that the wan, socially correct young woman of the city was the real Vilia, and that the vitality of the journey was merely a sign that she was overwrought. Now she would revert to her company manners, he thought. She was going to inspect all that his grandfather had done in his years at Kinveil – the thriving forestry development, the kelp manufacture, the stone cottages that were beginning to replace the turf houses of old, the new mortar in the castle walls, the repaired roof, the pretty stables he had built on the mainland in preparation for the day when the road should be complete, the flourishing kitchen garden. Inspect it all, and criticize – though not in words – like a returning owner inspecting the work of some conscientious but insensitive steward. For almost three weeks, Luke had succeeded in pushing his forebodings about this visit to the back of his mind. Now they returned in full force.

The sun was sparkling brilliantly on the water when they arrived, the far hills were smoky and two-dimensional like some theatre backcloth, and the fields sulphurous with new green. A lamb cried for its mother. The westerly breeze ruffled the feathery leaves of the rowan tree that guarded the end of the causeway, the tree that protected against the evil eye. Unless a witch, placing her hand on it, cursed the dwelling beyond.

Mungo Telfer was waiting for them. He had been able to see the carriage for almost five miles.

Cool, neat and contained, Vilia held out her hand to him, just as she had held it out to Lucy Telfer at St James’s Square eight months before. ‘This is most kind, Mr Telfer,’ she said, and curtsied politely.

Mungo didn’t even see Luke at first. He was much too interested in Vilia. Taking her hand in both of his, he held it, gazing into her eyes with a look of complete absorption in his own. ‘Welcome home,’ he said.

It was too much for Luke. With a shout of ‘Grandpa!’ and a wide, glad smile on his face, he ran forward and then turned to range himself beside the old man and welcome Vilia to Kinveil. He wanted to be sure she remembered that she was only a visitor, whereas he belonged there.

The first evening was agony. Desperately, Luke wanted to rush out of doors and scuffle along the shell-strewn sands, or scramble up to some viewpoint from which he could see the long, shimmering path leading over the water to the red-gold feet of the sinking sun. It would have been enough just to lean on the castle parapet and breathe the pure, salty air, and savour the calm and the quiet, and the rose-rimmed hills in the afterglow.