Turbulence (5 page)

It was no great delay. In a few minutes, passing under some of the finest mountain scenery I'd seen outside Africa, the
Wee
Lorne
was cranking towards a craggy foreshore where, with foam washing under its stanchions, Blairmore's own pier jutted out into the foot of Loch Long.

I decided I would go straight to Ryman's house, reasoning that, if the building in which I was to live was nearby, I could make myself known to him in the course of establishing myself in my new home.

I stood motionless on the planks of the pier, squinting at the plumes of smoke rising from the stacks of the departing
Marchioness of Lorne
. Its decks were still full of folk bound for Arrochar at the head of the loch and other destinations in between. A fine sight, that twin pillar of blackish-greyish-whitish smoke – leaning at first then streaming backwards, so that it lay horizontally against the clouds.

The steam plumes began to move eastward, back towards the Firth and Glasgow. They would, I knew, break up during the twenty-five miles between here and the city, separating as atmospheric diffusion took effect. I watched only the first stage as the plumes bent at the near end, becoming like question-marks in the sky.

A large, dark seabird – a great skua? – flew among the swirling shapes, to the disintegration of which its own powerful wingbeats were contributing further dispersive energy. Soon the objects of this dark interpreter's attention – I could hear it calling now, a harsh
hah-
hah-
hah
– would become something else, chemically and physically altered by the more powerful forces of the surrounding air.

As I walked up the pier, from behind the little stone hut at the end a strange sight appeared. An anachronism … a horse and trap … The animal was stamping and steaming, blowing a little bubble of froth from its mouth. I stared at the little spoked wheels of the trap. It took me a few seconds to rationalise it. Blairmore time, it seemed, was a long way
behind London time – by a half a century at least!

Stepping out from behind the horse, a rough, gypsy-looking man in his forties completed the Victorian picture. Lifting his whip in salute, he gestured to the back of the trap. He wore a tweed cap and chewed on a pipe – it stuck out of his unshaven, windswept face like a branch from a pollarded tree. He struck me as a not very prosperous farmer, with a dash of drover or poacher.

‘The Ryman house, Kilmun, please,' I said, as he stowed my heavy leather suitcase in a net in the back of the gig, which already contained several parcels and a crate. I climbed aboard, he sat beside me, and with a touch of the whip the wheels were turning and we were on our way.

His name was Mackellar – he gave no first name – and he was, as I had guessed, a farmer. ‘I meet the ferry whenever she comes in,' he said. ‘Pick up the messages, passengers. The messages I pick up for nothing, passengers are fourpence.'

He gave me a hard, sidelong look. ‘Ye have it?'

I nodded, gripping the black-lacquered wood of the seat as we clipped along by the lapping water.

‘You'll be the weather man, is that no' right?' he asked.

‘How did you know?'

‘They've put in a' this equipment for you. On my land. My building as well. Compulsory order. No rent, mind, but that's the government for you, war or no war.' He gave the horse a tap with the crop and our pace increased with a jolt.

I shifted in my seat. ‘Sorry about that. But it is important work, you know.' I tried to think of a simple way to describe it. ‘If there is to be rain, we forecast it to warn the soldiers.'

He gave me another sidelong look, and tapped the horse's flank again. ‘Dae the soldiers no have mackintoshes, then?'

I smiled and turned my attention to the passing country. Once we had left the little hamlet of Blairmore, my spirits were
lifted to see the loch beach on one side and the high hills thick with trees on the other. Scattered scraps of cirrus, the thread-cloud, garlanded sunlit, spruce-covered hilltops. Some showed signs of forestry work, with gaps where trees had been cut down.

‘First time up in these pairts, then?' asked Mackellar.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I was brought up in Africa.'

‘Africa, eh? That's a fair distance, eh? Well, you'll find difference, tha's for sure. Sun and cloud always smirring each other here.'

Coming round Strone Point – which separated the foot of Loch Long from the opening into the Holy Loch – we passed into a long strip of road half covered with vegetation.

‘The folk here call this Midge Lane,' said Mackellar, who seemed to switch randomly between Scots and English. ‘Fine now, but gin the wind dinna blaw nae mair, the midgies come. They ging oot for biting the incomers.'

There was a pause as I tried to translate this to myself. During the hiatus the clipping noise of the horse's hooves filled the hedge-lined lane. A dog barked as we passed a gate and the horse shied, pulling at the leather traces.

‘Don't be frichtened,' Mackellar said, softly. ‘He disnae like the dugs. Nor the midgies either. Great smokin' crowds of them, we get here.'

‘I saw something like that in Africa,' I said eventually, remembering my boyhood in Nyasaland. ‘On a large lake there, they have big clouds of midges.'

Mackellar gave a low chuckle.

‘Ah dinna ken aboot Africa, but ah'll tell ye whit's whit aboot the midgies here. Ye'll see if ah'm wrang. I swear if ye leave the midgies alane, they willnay bother ye. They come tae where there's chappin' in the air, so though they micht dance aboot ye, keep still yersel. Every dunt ye gie them, they'll gie ye back wi interest. Whit's mair, they love the mochy weather, so gin
the sun comes oot, ye gae oot too. And they dinnae fly ower salt watter.'

He gave the horse a proper crack with the whip and round the bluff, as if by inches, Holy Loch angled into view. I saw the heads of two seals stick up out of the water. They looked like soldiers' helmets.

‘Why's it called Holy Loch?' I asked.

Mackellar shrugged. ‘Thair's mony a tale.' He did not elaborate.

The Loch was dominated by the sight of three grey navy ships, each with a covey of submarines moored alongside. The village of Kilmun was strung out in front of them.

We weren't supposed to talk about ship names then – there were warning posters about this everywhere – but I would soon learn that the motherships were HMS
Forth, Titania
and
Alrhoda
. From here the submarine clutch would disperse on their deadly and dangerous missions into the Atlantic Ocean, many never to return.

‘Ye have business wi' the Prophet?' asked Mackellar.

‘You mean Professor Ryman?'

‘We ken him as the Prophet.'

‘Oh.'

‘He gies us advice,' said my nut-brown chauffeur. ‘When tae plant oor crops. When the moon'll mak a cow drap her calf. When the salmon run'll start. How tae mak your ain weedkiller and whit'll keep the midges aff ye. That sort a thing.'

‘But surely country people know all that anyway?'

‘Auld wives' tales,' he said dismissively, upturning the prejudice I had formed of him. ‘Folklore and the like. God knows, my wife has faith in it. She thinks milk boiling o'er means somebody is going to fall ill, that snails an' smoking are unlucky, an' maist of a' that if the burds skirl before a flaw, a stronger blaw's on its way, sic as could tip ye heelstergowdie.'

After asking him what ‘heelstergowdie' meant, I deciphered all this as meaning something like ‘if the birds whirl around before a squall, a stronger wind is on its way, such as might tip you head over heels'. He invariably spoke the Scots more quickly than the English.

‘But I prefer the Prophet's predictions,' he continued. ‘He goes about with a gun. Ye'll see for yourself soon enough.'

The earlier sun had gone. The Holy Loch looked cold and grey now, its surface flecked by a raking pattern of white cat's paws, every rippling line and distortion derived from physics and chemistry, even the clouds reflected in its waters.

‘That's where the Prophet lives,' said Mackellar, pointing with his whip as we approached a solid, square magnolia-painted house set among gardens and situated a little way back from the road behind a stone wall. ‘My ain farm's just beyond.'

On a hillside above Ryman's home (which was Georgian, I suppose, with two bay windows), I saw another wall and beyond that a farmhouse and outbuildings. There were also stables and a cowshed and a barn stacked with hay, together with some glasshouses. In the field between the farm and Ryman's house stood a much older stone building, beside a trough at which two Highland cattle were drinking. Higher up ran a stripe of beech trees. Mackellar told me there was a stream in the middle of the beech wood, with a small bridge across it.

Further still up the hill was the forestry: line after line of forbidding spruce, broken only where logging had taken place – and also by a long steel chute. It looked like a child's slide. ‘The foresters use tha' for getting the wood out,' explained Mackellar, seeing me looking.

We had stopped at the wrought-iron gate of the Ryman house, which was decorated with a solar design surrounded by signs of the zodiac. I wondered for a second if I had strayed
into a location with laws other than those of Newton, a place of signs and wonders, a glen of omens. But then I saw a sundial in the garden and also a large telescope on a pedestal, and somehow with those instruments rationality reasserted itself.

‘That building next to the tree, the auld cot-house, that's where they put your kit,' said Mackellar, pointing up the hillside. ‘There's a bed, but I cannae say it looks very comfortable. I'll take you there.'

‘No, no thank you,' I said. ‘I may as well pay the professor a visit now I'm here. But if you could take up my suitcase, I'd be most grateful.'

‘That I'll dae,' said Mackellar gruffly.

I climbed down from the trap.

‘Now the Prophet,' he said, raising his whip for emphasis, ‘he disnae like folk to bang at the door.' He paused. ‘So you must go in sleekit-like. He'll like you mair, if you make it so,' he added.

The farmer followed this statement with a thrusting movement of the other hand that needed no interpretation. I searched in my pocket for the fare and gave it him. As the trap made its way up to my new home I walked up to the front door of Ryman's house.

I was about to knock when I remembered Mackellar's warning. I pushed against the heavy black door. It was locked.

Behind me, from somewhere across the loch or deep up the Firth, I heard a ship's foghorn sound. It was like the groan of a dying mammoth or mastodon, as if some early drama of evolution was being played out across the archipelagic waters of the Cowal. I stood and waited, feeling uneasy again. This really did, after all, seem an odd, obscure place for the logical transparencies of science to have triumphed, as far from the mechanistic projections of the Ryman number as could be imagined.

Hearing a sound, I turned to see a tall woman emerge from an outhouse behind me. Her blonde hair was scraped under a scarf and she wore a woollen jumper, corduroy trousers and wellington boots. She was carrying an empty hand seed sower, an instrument that allowed one to control the flow of seeds through different outlets. There was something about her that was immediately reassuring.

She gave a start when she saw me, then smiled. ‘I'm supposed to be propagating cabbages,' she said, lifting up the sower's funnel-shaped spout and peering at me mischievously through it. She held out a hand. ‘But I've lost the packet that the seeds are in. Gill Ryman. And you must be …?'

‘Henry Meadows. I'm from the Met Office. I'm staffing the radio equipment in Mr Mackellar's field.'

Gill Ryman. Eyes the colour of the sea and just as changeable, but brighter. Lines of care on her brow and, yes, she looked tired, but she was intriguing as well as reassuring – most of all those eyes, which were filled with the fierce energy of true believers. I didn't know, then, quite how unquenchable was the faith of this bright-eyed huntress of seed, whom I would so terribly harm. It was her faith that saved me, not my own. And it was her intelligence which cracked the number. But on first meeting her, I got no sense of either of these things; she was, instead, the object of misdirected melancholic longings, feelings that I only half understood myself.

Her hand was cold and slightly calloused as I shook it. I
noticed there was scrollwork on the front of her jersey. She was attractive, quite a big woman overall, but also, in an odd way, angular. The mixture gave a sense of strength and frailty in balance, as if she were both fern and flower; it made you wonder what lay beneath.

‘Oh, that's you, is it?' She took off the scarf, shook out her locks, then looked me up and down, like a farmer inspecting a bullock at market. ‘We noticed the men from the ministry had been busy. My husband once worked for the Met Office.'

‘Well, that's why I'm here,' I said. ‘I mean, at your door. I'm a follower of his weather work.'

‘Really? But he gave all that up ages ago. He concentrates on his peace studies now.'

Peace studies. How strange that sounded in wartime. A blasphemy. For a moment I was lost for anything to say. I didn't want to arouse suspicion.

‘All the same,' I said eventually, ‘I am very interested in his mathematics.'

‘I can't promise he will see you, but do come in.'

I stepped towards the front door again.

‘Oh, we don't use that one,' she said. ‘This way.'

I followed her round to the back. I found myself gazing at her well-covered form. She had a roundness across the hips; otherwise she was bony, all knees and elbows and shoulders. Behind the house, stretching up a hillside towards the low stone building and Mackellar's, were vegetable gardens in which I noticed a tall labourer digging.

‘That's the cot-house up there,' she said, gesturing at the old stone building as she opened the back door. Cot-house. Mackellar had used the same odd term, which I later learned was just an old word for a dwelling on agricultural land. The little black Highland cattle I'd seen earlier had moved closer to the stone structure. Now they were gathering round it,
angling down their malevolent-looking horns as if they might lift it from its ancient foundations.

‘Those are our gardens in between.' My gaze drew back down nearer, to the old man, digging.

‘Parsnips,' added Mrs Ryman by way of explanation as I followed her into the hall. Directly, something hit me on the head.

‘Sorry. Should have warned you. That's my husband's special heating system. It hangs from cables. Don't ask me how it works.'

A series of pipes, supported by wires, ran down the centre of the hallway. The whole place smelt strongly of steam and chemicals. I followed her through into a large country kitchen.

‘Cup of tea?'

‘Yes, please.' The kitchen was rather spartan. ‘Excuse me, but – is your husband here?'

‘He's always here,' she said. ‘That was him, digging in the garden.'

‘That was Professor Ryman?' I was amazed.

‘Yes. He does most of the heavy digging. Though we get Mackellar to scythe the grass. I hope he was pleasant to you on the way up from Blairmore. It's a pain, our own pier being out of action; usually you would have been able to walk.'

‘Mackellar? Pleasant enough.'

‘He can be a little surly. And as for his wife …' I was surprised she was so candid.

The kettle whistled loudly. She turned her attention to making the tea – not a pot, just a mug with a steel diffuser in it – then vanished into an adjoining room.

She returned with a bowl of broad beans. ‘Hungry? Go on, try them. They're delicious.'

I took a couple of beans. They had been boiled and sprinkled with salt and were surprisingly good.

‘We don't keep sugar in the house, I'm afraid. Or biscuits. Wallace says there is as much glucose in a broad bean as in a spoonful of sugar.'

I wondered if that was true. It sounded as if it might be, though with so little sugar available at this stage of the war it would have been hard to verify the issue.

‘There now,' she added, handing me the mug of tea. ‘You drink that up and I'll ask if he will see you.' She went out into the garden.

I sipped my tea, which was a bit too strong, then peeped into the drawing room. The walls were whitewashed, and it was plainly furnished with antique black-oak furniture. Sideboards and dressers and the like: the sort of thing people inherit – though I had received nothing like that. It all stayed in Africa.

There were also two threadbare armchairs in the Rymans' drawing room, and a chaise-longue upholstered in pink satin – a rare hint of luxury. The overwhelming impression was one of self-denial, although in one corner of the room there stood a large rocking horse. There were indentations in the wall opposite its head and ears, clearly made by too-enthusiastic usage.

Apart from the chaise-longue and the rocking horse, the only other softening touch was a piece of embroidery in a wooden frame behind glass. It was the kind of fancy lacework you might see displayed in Madeira or Nantes, or even in Nottingham long ago. I realised it was a child's christening gown.

‘I'm afraid my husband cannot see you now,' said Mrs Ryman from behind me. She had returned from the garden without my noticing. There was a little chill in her voice. We both looked at the gown for a moment and she gave a blink. ‘He has some calculations to do once he has finished digging. He doesn't like unexpected visitors.' She expelled air from between her lips. ‘Unexpected anything, really.'

In light of this rebuttal I recalculated my own options, trying at the same time to cover my annoyance. ‘Oh. What a shame. Another time, perhaps?'

‘Sunday lunch,' she said. ‘Do come. The minister will be there.'

I shook her hand, and then she said, with a curious smile, ‘I look forward to it.'