Stormy Petrel

First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Hodder and Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Mary Stewart 1991

The right of Mary Stewart to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN: 9781444715088

Book ISBN: 9781444715071

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

Dedicated to

Culcicoides Pulicaris Argyllensis

with respect

CONTENTS

1

I must begin with a coincidence which I would not dare to recount if this were a work of fiction. Coincidences happen daily in ‘real life' which would be condemned in a mere story, so writers tend to avoid them. But they happen. Daily, they happen. And on this particular day they – or rather it – happened twice.

I was working in my room, when a knock at the door heralded the entry of four second-year students. Usually I welcome them. They are my job. As English tutor at Haworth College in Cambridge I deal with them every day. But on this sunny afternoon in May, as it happened, I would not have welcomed any intruder, even the gyp with a Recorded Delivery letter announcing a big win on Ernie. I was writing a poem.

They say that after the age of thirty, or marriage, whichever comes first, one can write no more poetry. It is true that after the age of thirty certain poets seem to be incapable of writing much that is worth reading; there are notable exceptions, but they only serve to prove the rule. Actually, I believe that the marriage rule applies only to women, which says something for what marriage is supposed to do for them, but on that sunny Tuesday afternoon neither of the disqualifying conditions applied to me. I was twenty-seven, unmarried, heart-whole for the time being, and totally immersed in my work.

Which is why I should have welcomed the students who wanted to talk to me about the poetry of George Darley, which a misguided colleague of mine had included in a series of lectures on the early nineteenth century, and in so doing had worried the more discerning of my students, who were failing to see any merit there. But I had been visited that morning by what was usually at this state of the term a rare inspiration, and was writing a poem of my own. More important than George Darley? At any rate better, which would not be difficult. As a struggling poet in the late twentieth century, I often thought that some early poets achieved publication very easily. But I did not say so to my students. Let them now praise famous men. They do it so rarely that it is good for them.

I said ‘Come in,' sat them down, listened and then talked and finally got rid of them and went back to my poem. It had gone. The first stanza lay there on my desk, but the idea, the vision had fled like the dream dispelled by Coleridge's ill-starred person from Porlock. I re-read what I had written, wrestled with the fading vision for a few sweating minutes, then gave up, swore, crumpled the page up, pitched it into the empty fireplace, and said, aloud: ‘What I really need is a good old-fashioned ivory tower.'

I pushed my chair back, then crossed to the open window and looked out. The lime trees were glorious in their young green, and, in default of the immemorial elms, the doves were moaning away in them like mad. Birds were singing their heads off everywhere, and from the clematis beside the window came the scent of honey and the murmur of innumerable bees. Tennyson; now there, I thought, was one of the really honourable exceptions to the rule, never failing, never fading even in old age, while I, at twenty-seven, could not even finish a lyric that had seemed, only a short while ago, to be moving inevitably towards the final tonic chord.

Well, so I was not Tennyson. I was probably, come to that, not even George Darley. I laughed at myself, felt better, and settled down on the window-seat in the sun to enjoy what was left of the afternoon.
The Times
, half-read and then abandoned, lay on the seat beside me. As I picked it up to throw it aside a line of small print caught my eye: ‘Ivory tower for long or short let. Isolated cottage on small Hebridean island off the coast of Mull. Ideal for writer or artist in search of peace. Most relatively mod cons.' And a box number.

I said, aloud: ‘I don't believe it.'

‘What don't you believe, Dr Fenemore?'

One of my students had come back, and was hesitating in the open doorway. It was Megan Lloyd, who was the daughter of a Welsh farm worker from somewhere in Dyfed, and who had earned her place in College with a brilliant scholarship. Short, rather thickset, with dark curling hair, dark eyes, and freckles, she looked as if she would be most at home with dogs and horses, or with bared arms scrubbing a dairy down, and perhaps she was, but she was also very intelligent, highly imaginative, and easily my best student. Some day, with average luck, she would be a good writer. I remembered that I had promised to see her about some poems she had written and had nervously asked me to read. She looked nervous still, but half amused with it, as she added: ‘Surely,
The Times
? It's not supposed to get things wrong, is it?'

‘Oh, Megan, come in. Sorry, was I talking to myself? It's nothing, I was off on a track of my own for a moment. Yes, I've got your file here, and yes, I've read them.' I went back to my desk, picked the folder up, and gestured her to a chair. She looked back at me with no expression at all in her face, but her eyes were twice as big as usual, and I could see the tension in every muscle. I knew how she felt. Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

So I went straight to it. ‘I liked them. Some of them very much. And of course some not so much . . .' I talked on about the poems, while she slowly relaxed and began to look happy, and even, in the end, cheerfully argumentative, which, with Megan, was par for the course. At length I closed the folder.

‘Well, there you are, as far as I'm able to judge. Whether some of the more, shall I say, advanced judgments of the day will concur is something I can't guess at, but if you want to try and publish, go ahead and good luck to you. Whatever happens, you must go on writing. Is that what you wanted to hear?'

She swallowed, cleared her throat, then nodded without speaking.

I handed her the folder. ‘I won't say anything more here and now. I've written fairly detailed notes about some of them. I think it would be better – and we would both find it easier – if you looked at those in your own time? And of course if there's anything you don't understand, or want to argue about, please feel free. All right?'

‘Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much for all the trouble. It was just that I – that one doesn't know oneself—'

‘Yes, I know.'

She smiled, her face lighted suddenly from within. ‘Of course you do. And in return, am I allowed to give
you
some advice?'

‘Such as what?' I asked, surprised.

She glanced down at the empty hearth, where the crumpled page had fallen and partly unfurled. It would be obvious even from where she sat that the sheet contained lines of an unfinished poem, disfigured with scoring and the scribbles of frustration.

She repeated, with a fair imitation of my voice, but with a smile that robbed the echo of any sting of impertinence: ‘“Whatever happens, you must go on writing.”' Then suddenly, earnestly: ‘I can't read it from here, but I'm sure you shouldn't throw it away. Give it another go, won't you, Dr Fenemore? I loved that last one of yours in the
Journal
. Please.'

After a pause that seemed endless, I said, rather awkwardly: ‘Well, thank you. But in term time . . . One can't choose one's times, you see.'

‘Can one ever?'

‘I suppose not.'

‘I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that.' Suddenly embarrassed, she gathered her things together and started to get to her feet. ‘None of my business, but I couldn't help seeing. Sorry.'

More to put her at her ease again than for any other reason I picked up
The Times
and showed it to her.

‘I was trying, you see. A Hebridean island – it does sound like a place where one could work in peace, and they have actually called it an “ivory tower”. There, I've ringed it.'

She read the advertisement aloud, then looked up, bright-eyed. ‘Mull? An island off Mull? You've answered this?'

‘I was thinking of it.'

‘Well, isn't that something? Ann Tracy and I are going to Mull this summer. Two weeks. She's fixing it up, I've never been, but her people used to spend holidays up there, and she says it can be fabulous, weather and midges permitting. What a coincidence! It sounds just the thing – like fate, really, after what you were saying. You will answer it, won't you?'

‘It looks as if I'd better, doesn't it?' I said. ‘I'll write this very evening.'

But fate had not quite finished with me. That evening my brother Crispin telephoned me.

Crispin is a doctor, a partner in a four-man practice in Petersfield in Hampshire. He is six years older than I am, married, with two children away at school. He would have preferred, I knew, to keep them at home, but Ruth, his wife, had overruled him in that, as she did in quite a few other matters. Not that Crispin was a weak man, but he was a very busy one, and had to be content to leave the management of their joint lives largely to his highly capable wife. They were tolerably happy together, as marriages seem to go, a happiness achieved partly by agreeing to differ.

One thing they different about was holidays. Ruth loved travel, cities, shops, theatres, beach resorts. Crispin, when on leave from his demanding routine, craved for peace and open spaces. He, like me, loved Scotland, and made for it whenever he got the chance. There he walked and fished and took photographs which later, when he found time, he processed himself in a friend's darkroom. Over the years he had acquired real skill in his hobby, and had exhibited some of his studies of Scottish scenery and wildlife; his real passion was bird photography, and through the years he had amassed a remarkable collection of pictures. Some of these had been published in periodicals like
Country Life
and the wildlife journals, but the best had never been shown. I knew he had a private hope that some day he might make a book with them. When our vacations coincided, we often holidayed together, content in our respective solitudes.