From London Far (15 page)

For Mr Properjohn had doffed his dressy sporran, acquired a great quantity of authentic Hunting Stuart tartan from which he caused to be made, not only a new kilt, but a great many window curtains, applied himself to a variety of books on grouse and geese, and had bought a shooting-box on the mainland some three miles away. Here he frequently resided, the comfort of an invalid uncle, and here he occasionally entertained parties of polyglot gentlemen considerably less well-entered in sporting matters than himself. There had been a deerstalking which was vastly comic, and a sort of battue against the pheasants in which the bag had consisted of a gillie and the wife of the Reverend Mr Grant; and this was vastly comic too, although at the same time embarrassing and extremely expensive. By the less ribald inhabitants it was commonly supposed that the gillie had been an infralapsarian, that Mrs Grant had been engaged in converting him to sound supralapsarianism, and that Mr Properjohn himself, being sublapsarian to the core, had proceeded ruthlessly to the extirpation of heresy. The wiser sort, however, realized that such stories gain ready currency in a community doggedly Calvinist on the surface and sceptically Catholic below, and that the matter must therefore have borne some other colouring. But only the faintest rumour of these things reached Castle Moila, where Mr Properjohn never ventured to intrude, and the unsavoury operations in the air above which – despite his eagerness to initiate them – he now appeared to regard as of very little account amid the multitudinous undertakings of Macrocosmic Chemicals.

But still the Flying Foxes swung and bucketed past each other on their elevated journey, great iron contraptions hauled and supported by unending steel cables which ran from pylon to pylon across the sound, swooped low over the castle and lower still over the anchorage, and then ran out on a series of stunted pylons to the gleaming mass of Inchfarr. Had Mr Properjohn been interested, indeed, he could with a telescope have commanded a view of this farther terminus of his system from the tartan-swathed windows of his shooting-box on the lower slope of Ben Carron. But that he should be interested was, after all, not to be supposed, for one load of guano is very like another, and the whole process, although of inestimable value on the food-production front (a fact, it would seem, not without influence in bringing Mr Properjohn several official privileges), had very little of variety or excitement to recommend it.

On one occasion, it is true, the jaws of a passing Fox accidentally opened and precipitated upon the Western Ward enough phosphates to fertilize flag-irises and buttercups by the million. And on another occasion Miss Dorcas, having reason to visit the Great Ditches in search of certain medicinal herbs which she supposed to grow there, found a small marble faun, in a posture not the most decent for such an encounter, lying as if unaccountably dropped from the sky. Miss Dorcas suspected the
Luftwaffe
and Miss Isabella discerned some attempted enchantment by Great-aunt Patuffa. Shamus was called to dispose of this problematical object; was greatly shocked by it; removed it as if for instant consignment to the ocean and finally put it cannily by as something which might well draw money from an English visitor.

It was some months after this that two English visitors arrived. They were an elderly man with the shrewd but abstracted eyes of a scholar and a young woman sufficiently distinguished to carry off what was by no means a perfectly fitting coat and skirt. Hamish Macleod rowed them across to Moila. Shamus received them beneath the portcullis. That they were altogether strangers to the district was evident from the fact that they asked for Mr Properjohn. Shamus, whose ignorance of the language rendered him particularly sensitive to its intonations, thought that there was a shade of emphasis or resolution about the manner in which this name was pronounced. He took one look at the elderly man, rather more than that at the girl, and bolted for Miss Dorcas.

Miss Dorcas advanced across the base-court and observed that the Travellers – for they were decidedly that – stood engaged in rapid consultation. Miss Dorcas thought this a little odd. But her manners being Highland – which is to say perfect – she paused once to pick a buttercup, once to shoo away a sow, and so delayed an encounter until the conference was over. ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Our man has no English, but I gather that you seek Mr Properjohn?’

The scholarly man bowed – which was eminently a Traveller’s way of replying to such a question.

‘Then I fear that there has been misapprehension. I am Miss Dorcas Macleod, and only my sister – who is Miss Macleod of Moila – and myself live in the castle. Mr Properjohn lives at Carron Lodge on the mainland.’

‘We are exceedingly sorry.’ The scholarly man made motions of withdrawal; at the same time he held with his companion a mute correspondence which Miss Dorcas did not fail to observe. And again she thought it a little odd. The stranger, however, was of polished manners, and Miss Dorcas judged it likely that he was a man of much observation – perhaps, indeed, of extensive views. And, having these good early-Georgian characteristics, he ought not to be turned incontinently away.

‘The castle’, Miss Dorcas said, ‘is lonely. We must not part with these suburban civilities. Pray enter and refresh yourselves!’

‘Thank you. My name–’ And Miss Dorcas observed the scholarly man to hesitate and look at her fleetingly with quite remarkable penetration, so that she felt obscurely that she was a comma or a colon in a suspected place. ‘My name is Meredith – Richard Meredith. My friend is Miss Halliwell. We are altogether strangers here, and stand a little in need of information with which it would be kind of you to furnish us. We will come in most gladly.’

‘Then let us make no more ado.’ And Miss Dorcas turned and spoke to Shamus in Gaelic this for the purpose of giving orders that Mrs Cameron should bring whisky and oatcakes to the solar. The girl called Miss Halliwell, she noticed, glanced at her with quick wariness as the unintelligible words were spoken; and she noticed, too, that as they crossed the base-court and rounded the great bastions of the Inner Ward, her companions kept well to the wall and looked with veiled apprehensiveness about them. No doubt they had been much bombed, Miss Dorcas thought, and were a little shy of the open. Miss Dorcas sympathized with them. Of late she had herself been uneasy when moving about the courts of the castle. She preferred being indoors – and most of all preferred thinking of tunnels, catacombs, and caverns. This troglodyte habit in Miss Dorcas, although doubtless the consequence of shocking goings-on among her brothers and sisters during their nursery years, had been exacerbated of late by the Flying Foxes. It was not so much the contraptions themselves, creaking and straining on their course overhead, as the oblique and sinister line traced by their shadows on the tussock-grass and clover and meadowsweet of the empty and desolate courts that now got Miss Dorcas down. The curve and swoop, the sudden fore-shortened or elongated wing-shadow of a gull, had here for many years given a rhythmic pleasure to her eye. Now the steady shapeless creep of these things filled her with obscure alarm.

Mr Meredith was glancing upwards. He was wondering whether it would be civil to remark upon the incongruous objects. Somewhat nervously, Miss Dorcas forestalled him. ‘Your friend Mr Properjohn, as you no doubt know, carries out certain quarrying operations on the island of Inchfarr. The great buckets which you see overhead are the means of transport to the mainland.’

‘Dear me!’ said Mr Meredith, and peered again with a sort of puzzled attention overhead. ‘And has there been this activity for long?’

‘For a number of years. I seemed to remember that the machines were in operation shortly before the outbreak of war.’

‘No doubt’, said Mr Meredith, ‘it has been work of national importance.’

‘We did it for money.’ Miss Dorcas was uncompromising. ‘Subsequently we learnt that it was useful – it is a fertilizer, you will understand – but it was for money that we let the things be put up. What would you think it was worth?’

Mr Meredith considered this carefully. He paused and surveyed the dark-honey-coloured stone that ran out like the two paws of a couchant lion round the anchorage; he looked back at the dull purple mass of Ben Carron and forward again to where, through a crumbled arch rising above a floor of poppy and ragged robin, blue–green water veined with indigo led the eye to a gleaming shoulder of Inchfarr. Then he had another look at the pylons and cables of the Foxes. ‘A substantial sum,’ he said decidedly.

‘Precisely so.’ Miss Dorcas was pleased. ‘Your friend offered my sister a sum of money which – though with little knowledge of such things – I have subsequently felt unaccountable.’ And Miss Dorcas looked from Mr Meredith to Miss Halliwell, her mind obscurely working. ‘You must see our water-closet,’ she continued – the more startlingly because in exactly the same tone – ‘and our tiled bathroom in the Outer Enceinte.’

‘We shall be delighted.’ Mr Meredith spoke with a level voice and faintly arched eyebrows. It was his first indication that the lady who had received him lived something on the farther side of eccentricity. Castle Moila was famous alike in legend, history, and fiction. To these courts Magnus Barelegs had brought fire; Donald, Lord of the Isles, a traitor’s promise; Macleod of Lewis a gratricidal knife. Here had come Prince Charles Edward, thwarted of a throne, and daughters of a hereditary Captain had offered him manchets and wine. Of these walls Walter Scott had dreamed, sitting in an Adam house in an Edinburgh square, and had peopled them with romantic and loquacious shades. Now Flying Foxes swept above them, and obscurely prompted an ancient gentlewoman to invite inspection of a bathroom and a privy. Meredith found this last association altogether incomprehensible.

‘So out of Mr Properjohn’s quarrying you at least got some solid and prosaic comfort?’ It was Jean Halliwell who spoke, having found the concatenation of ideas less mysterious.

‘There has been that to be said for it.’ Miss Dorcas looked at the young woman with approval. ‘To sell the sky above our heads for money in a bank would be unpardonable. To exchange it for a hot-water circulation was rational. But it appears that rational actions are not always quite the right thing. For now I know it was a mistake.’ As Miss Dorcas spoke there came from overhead the creaking sound of a cable straining over pulleys, and a large black shadow crept out from a corner of the courtyard they were about to cross. Miss Dorcas looked another way. ‘Of how my sister feels in the matter I cannot be assured. It must be confessed some years since she opened her mind to me.’

The idiom of Miss Dorcas, Meredith was thinking, suggested that the Misses Macleod must have enjoyed the attentions of a superior governess far advanced towards senescence when they were themselves scarcely in sight of long frocks. But this was a reflection of very minor interest. What was significant was this: that Moila, which ought to have been the lair of a ruthless foe, was actually in the occupancy of two harmless gentlewomen rejoicing in a tiled bathroom and a water-closet.

Or so it appeared. Meredith was not altogether unfamiliar with that species of romantic fiction in which persons of the most benign and estimable exterior, unreservedly respected by all good men, suddenly drop the mask and reveal themselves as being the very fiends whose abominable crimes have held whole regions in fearsome awe. Could Miss Dorcas be like this? And when they were shortly led into the presence of her sister, Miss Macleod of Moila, would that lady receive them with a frank and inhuman glee and incontinently hand them over to several naked Ethiopian executioners? Or would there simply be a furniture van waiting in the next court?
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself…
But in some great chamber within there had been pacing Lady Macbeth, invoking no nimble air, but
the dunnest
smoke of hell
. Was the elder Miss Macleod similarly engaged now?

‘I envy you such a home,’ Jean Halliwell was saying. ‘The air is wonderful.’

Meredith felt inclined by some surreptitious act of natural magic to avert this omen. But Miss Dorcas was shaking her head in a manner comfortingly devoid of all sinister suggestion. ‘There is a great
deal
of air,’ she said. ‘It is undeniable that the castle is
airy
– particularly where there is no roof. But we do not know that the quality is to be recommended. On the east coast of Scotland there is ozone. But here the atmosphere is commonly muggy. And this makes various domestic appointments particularly desirable. Drying cupboards, for example, well supplied with hot pipes. Of course, one could get away from it by burrowing.’

‘By burrowing?’ said Meredith mildly.

‘Or tunnelling. I dare say you are aware that the London Tubes are full of ozone?’

‘I have heard something of the sort said. But I imagine that to be because electrical–’

‘And thus we may suppose that at a certain depth ozone would be obtained.’

It was evident that anything with which Miss Dorcas would positively interrupt a guest must be in the nature of an
idée fixe
. ‘Of course one could travel,’ suggested Meredith. ‘A lateral progression, as it were, towards North Berwick or St Andrews, even if it involved a journey of a hundred miles, might be less laborious than the necessary perpendicular excavation in what appears to be the living rock beneath the castle.’ Meredith paused happily on this; he observed that Miss Dorcas was one who would follow such a well-turned period; and this gave him confidence that she was a reliable sort of person after all.

‘Do you, in fact, travel much?’

‘Dear me, no.’ Miss Dorcas’ tone was surprised. ‘The mode of life of my sister and myself is retired. The fact is that on the mainland we have a relative, our Great-aunt Patuffa, whom we do not at all trust. But we have been given to understand that her malign power will not extend over water. And for this reason we do not leave the island. Are you fond of Rome?’