The Stormy Petrel Read online

  STORMY PETREL

  Mary Stewart

  www.hodder.co.uk

  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

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Dedicated to

  Culcicoides Pulicaris Argyllensis

  with respect

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Stewart

  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.

  So when he rang up that evening to tell me he was taking a fortnight’s leave towards the end of June and what about a trip north as soon as term ended, I did feel as if the fates themselves had taken a hand.

  ‘I’d been planning that very thing.’ I told him about the advertisement, and he was enthusiastic. I let him talk on about harriers and divers and skuas and all the rare and marvellous birds that would no doubt be waiting around to be photographed, and then put in the usual cautious query: ‘And Ruth?’

  ‘Actually, no, not this time.’ The usual casual answer. ‘She doesn’t like the Highlands, you know that, and she’s got rather a lot on just at present. She’s planning to take a holiday abroad later on, after John and Julie go back to school. But if you can get this place . . . It could be really good. Most of the young birds will still be at the nest, and if the weather lets up, we might get across to the Treshnish Isles as well. Look, Rose, why not? It sounds great. Why don’t you go right ahead and get the details, and then we’ll be in touch again?’

  And so it was arranged. I wrote that night to the box number.

  And got my ivory tower.

  2

  The Isle of Moila is the first stop past Tobermory. It is not a large island, perhaps nine miles by five, with formidable cliffs to the north-west that face the weather rather like the prow of a ship. From the steep sheep-bitten turf at the head of these cliffs the land slopes gently down towards a glen where the island’s only sizeable river runs seawards out of a loch cupped in a shallow basin among low hills. Presumably the loch – lochan, rather, for it is not large – is fed by springs eternally replenished by the rain, for nothing flows into it except small burns seeping through rush and bog myrtle, which spread after storms into sodden quagmires of moss. But the outflow is perennially full, white water pouring down to where the moor cleaves open and lets it fall to the sea.

  The island’s coast is mainly rocky, but, except for the northerly crags, the coastal cliffs are low, thrusting out here and there into the sea to enclose small curved beaches. Most of these are shingle beaches, but those facing west are sandy, the white shell sand of the Atlantic shore, backed by the machair, that wonderful wild grassland of the west coast, which in May and June is filled with flowers and all the nesting birds that any photographer could wish for.

  When I first saw Moila it was on a beautiful day in the last week of June. My term had ended a few days before the start of Crispin’s leave, so we had agreed to travel up separately, and meet on Moila itself. The island ferry, as I had discovered, sailed three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays; it went from Oban to Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, and then called at Moila on its way to Coll and Tiree. I had also discovered that there would be little, if any, use for a car on Moila, so both my brother and I had arranged to travel up by train.

  It was a pleasant journey. I took the night train for Fort William, which stops at Crianlarich at seven in the morning. With a three-hour wait there, I ate a large breakfast, did a quarter of the day’s crossword, then boarded the little local train that runs through Glen Lochy and past the northern end of Loch Awe, to finish at Oban on the west coast. The ferry for the outer isles was due to leave at six on the following morning, so I checked into the waterfront hotel where I had booked, then spent the day exploring Oban, and went to bed early. At half past five next morning I boarded the ferry, and was on the final stage of my journey.

  The sea was calm, and Oban, caught in the clear light of a summer morning, looked charming and toylike, as we sailed sedately out between the islets and castle-crowned rocks, with seabirds drifting in our wake, and everywhere, even over the smell of salt and wind, the scents of summer. Idyllic. Just the setting for an ivory tower.

  Or so I still hoped. Nobody I had spoken to in the train, or on the ferry, had ever visited Moila, which must support, so I was told by one slow-spoken Highlander, no more than thirty folk in all.

  ‘So you’ll be right back to nature, and let us hope that the natives are friendly.’ The twinkle in his eye was reassuring, but when we tied up at Tobermory and the purser pointed out to sea where a gr
oup of small rocks (or so it seemed) showed strung out on the horizon like a mother duck with her ducklings after her, I felt a cowardly twinge, and found myself wondering what the ‘relatively mod cons’ could be.

  ‘Yon big island, see? That’s Moila,’ said my guide.

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Och, they’ve all got names, but I could not tell you what they are. There’s no folk there, only the birds.’

  ‘Can you get to them?’

  ‘Oh, aye, with a bit of luck, on a fine day. Parties do go out, folks with cameras to film the birds. You’re one of these bird watchers, are you?’

  ‘Not really. But my brother’s very keen. He’s coming to join me later this week. Do you know if we’ll be able to hire a boat in Moila?’

  But here he had to leave me to attend to stores which were being brought on board, and some twenty minutes later I could see the place for myself.

  The ferry was not big, but she dwarfed the harbour – she had to stand off from the jetty and land us by boat – and indeed the village. As far as I could see, there were some eight or nine cottages strung out on a narrow road which circled the bay. The building nearest the jetty was the post office-cum-shop. A home-made notice informed me that it was kept by M. McDougall, who also did bed and breakfasts. Some fifty yards away was a white-washed building surrounded by a stretch of asphalt; the village school, I was to discover, where on alternate Sundays the minister from Tobermory came over to hold a service. A narrow river, little more than a stream, lapsed gently over its stones past the post office. It was spanned by a narrow humpbacked bridge of the picturesque variety that is guaranteed to damage any car that uses it. But, as I had been warned, there were no cars. One battered Land Rover stood outside the post office, and leaning against the schoolhouse wall were a couple of bicycles. No other forms of transport. Nor, as far as I could see, did the road continue beyond the end of the village.

  And my cottage, I had been informed, lay at the other side of the island.