Murdo's War Page 5

  They rarely spoke. Sitting a companionable arm’s length from Murdo, Hector placidly puffed his pipe and occasional wafts of rich smoke came to the boy’s nostrils, mixed with fumes from the exhaust. At the other side of the engine, Mr Smith pulled his collar close and pressed his feet against the metal casing to try to find a little warmth.

  As they crossed the western bays the land sank into the sea. The coast was dark, lit only by the stars and the moon on the port bow. Every now and again a pinpoint of light shone out where someone had failed to observe the blackout restrictions.

  ‘Keep her head out a bit,’ Hector said. ‘You’re heading for Eilean Neave. See that big crag there, on the right?’ Murdo nodded. ‘Craig Dubh – nasty wave-bounce if there’s a sea running. Coming in this way you want it about half a mile to port. Island Roan’s always further out than you think.’

  Murdo swung the boat’s head a point to starboard and lined it up against a star. The dark bulk of Island Roan loomed beneath, a night monster heaving itself infinitely slowly from the sea. He glanced down and checked the compass heading.

  ‘West by north?’ Hector said.

  ‘Magnetic?’ Murdo watched the compass card for a few moments. ‘Threequarters north,’ he said with a smile.

  Craig Dubh and Eilean Neave drew abeam and fell astern. Murdo re-aligned the boat’s head on the middle of the dark island that slowly climbed up the wall of sky ahead.

  As they drew close Hector pointed to what seemed a nick in the battery of sheer cliffs that faced the sea, and a few minutes later they were heading in. Murdo passed the tiller to Hector and leaned forward, throttling back the engine to half revs.

  Hector glanced critically at the height of the tide on the barnacled rocks and swung his boat neatly around a patch of tangle and surge at the entrance to the channel. The cliffs drew ever closer, towering above them so that as they reached the gap Murdo had to crane back his neck to see the sky above them. The moon was blotted out and it was dark. The water swelled against the crags with an oily menace. Then they were through and chugging across the moonlit levels of Candle Bay.

  It was a small bay, ringed by steep rocky slopes. A little shingle beach lay at the head. Murdo throttled back still further until the boat was barely under way. Small ripples spread from the bow. Hector swung the Lobster Boy in a tight circle to starboard and headed straight towards the base of a precipitous spur a little to the left of the bay entrance. When it seemed they must surely strike the crag and damage the boat, a pale glimmer of starlight appeared ahead through a hole in the rock face.

  ‘Stop the engine,’ Hector said.

  Murdo pushed the throttle right back, threw the engine out of gear, and switched off. The sudden silence clapped about their ears: then they heard the musical lap of waves under the bow, the murmur of the sea on the rocks, the complaints of a disturbed sea-bird on the cliffs high above them.

  Slowly the boat drifted into a long dark fissure. Using their finger tips, all three guided her through. A minute later they slid out of the other side into a big rock pool protected from the sea by a wilderness of shore rocks. As they reached the middle, Hector dropped the anchor over the side.

  ‘Fender, Murdo,’ he said.

  Murdo slung the two half motor-bike tyres over the side on their ropes, and took up the end of the painter. Gently they bumped. He sprang out on to a surprising concrete jetty built along the rocks.

  Hector held the boat alongside while Mr Smith climbed out, then stepped ashore himself.

  ‘There’s a ring over there.’ He pointed.

  Murdo pulled the boat to the anchor and secured the painter to the heavy iron ring set in a corner of the jetty. The tide was coming in so he left a little slack.

  Hector pulled a watch from his inside pocket. ‘Two hours,’ he said. ‘Not bad going. I thought it would take all of that.’

  He led the way to a small platform-jetty built on the seaward side of the rocks, at the precipitous entrance to the bay. From it a long flight of steps climbed steeply up the crest of a ridge to the top of the cliffs.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ Hector said. ‘I know the path. Don’t use your torches. And don’t rely on the handrail.’ He looked past Henry Smith to the boy. ‘You hear, Murdo?’

  A hundred times more sure-footed, Murdo smiled in the darkness. ‘Aye,’ he said.

  Soon they were high above the sea. Murdo, who brought up the rear, paused to look back. The crag fell sheer away on either hand. He kicked a loose stone over the edge from one of the crumbling steps. Several seconds later it hit the water with a loud splash, too close to the boat for comfort.

  At length, blowing noisily, they came to the top of the cliffs and rested for a moment. The view from the open sea to the shadowy mainland was breathtaking. But the cold air chilled their brows and soon they set off again. As they walked across the rolling pasture and patches of heather, the frozen stems rustled beneath their feet.

  The houses were widely scattered, and from a distance seemed in good repair. When they came close, however, it was apparent that already the northern gales were beginning their work of destruction. Windows had fallen, frosty roofs showed black gaps where slates were missing, a door hung lopsided on one hinge.

  ‘You can tell it’s deserted,’ Murdo said. ‘You can feel it.’

  ‘Aye, it’s a sad sort of place now,’ Hector agreed.

  A few minutes’ walk brought them to the door of the old school, with the schoolhouse adjoining, a simple stone building surrounded by grass and a tumbling wall. For a moment they paused on the threshold. There was a noise of men’s voices from within, then voices raised in anger, and a crash as if something had been knocked over.

  Impetuously Henry Smith knocked three times on the door, and called in a loud authoritative voice.

  There was silence. Murdo shifted uneasily and looked at Hector, then across the island to a rocky outcrop beyond the empty crofts. Nothing moved. He turned back to the dark door. Suddenly the silence was threatening: the deserted school was not what Mr Smith had led them to believe. He pushed his hands through the side slits of his oilskins into warm trouser pockets and drew a deep breath.

  Henry Smith stamped his frozen feet and coughed. He called a second time, his voice modulated and more like that which Murdo recognised.

  A moment later there was the sound of footsteps on bare boards, and a lantern glimmered briefly through a window in the hallway. A bolt rattled, and the door opened a fraction. The fair head of a young man appeared in the gap, but his eyes were not accustomed to the dark and he could not see who stood outside.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said softly.

  ‘It’s me – Henry.’ The Englishman pushed against the door, but it opened no further. ‘Come on, Peter. Let us in.’

  ‘I can’t see you. Shine a light on your face.’

  Henry Smith did as he was told and the door opened a little wider.

  ‘Who’s that with you?’

  ‘Friends, Peter, friends! They’ve come to help. Let us in.’

  The door closed again. There was a murmur of voices in the passage, and hurrying footsteps. Then the door was flung wide. A blond giant of a man stood on the threshold, his face beaming with pleasure.

  ‘Henry!’ he cried. ‘Hello! It’s damn nice to see you. Come in.’ He sniffed harshly and touched the back of a hand to his lip.

  ‘Hello, Bjorn,’ Henry Smith said with a smile. ‘How are you all doing?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ the big man said. ‘Sick of the damn bully beef.’ They filed past him into the small school porch. The children’s

  pegs were hung with an assortment of men’s winter clothing. He closed the outer door and turned to the door into the school room which stood ajar.

  Henry Smith laid a restraining hand on his sleeve. ‘Before we go in; everything is all right?’

  ‘You see. I say nothing. You see for yourself.’

  He seemed a nice fellow, Murdo thought. He was quite young, in his early twenties. Ben
eath his checked shirt you could see the shoulders on him like an ox. Half turning away from them he put a hand to his trouser pocket and produced a handkerchief, pretending to blow his nose, but wiping his mouth. As he took the handkerchief away Murdo saw a red smear of blood upon it. In the light that came from the doorway, Murdo saw a dark split down the middle of his lower lip.

  The room they entered had once been the old schoolroom. It was the full size of the outer building and brightly lit with oil lamps. It seemed to be full of men, though when Murdo came to count them there were, in fact, only nine. Most were fair and they were young, probably none over the age of thirty-five. At the far side of the room a splendid fire roared up the metal chimney of the old pot-bellied stove with a huge pile of sawn-up fence posts and driftwood beside it. A number of bed-rolls lay around the walls, and beside each a large rucksack and a few personal belongings gathered tidily together. Two school tables stood in the middle of the room, set round with an assortment of half-broken chairs and fish-box stools. A few ancient desks, deeply carved and inky, were scattered about like occasional tables, and strewn with an assortment of mugs and books and garments casually thrown down. Someone had found a handful of coloured chalks and the mouldy blackboard glowed with a beautifully executed yacht race. The large schoolroom windows were thickly blanketed with sheets of cardboard and heavy blackout curtains.

  Murdo looked round for some sign of what had been over- turned, but whatever it was it had been straightened again.

  All he noticed was a large wet patch on the floorboards against one wall where it looked as though a mug of tea had been knocked over and hastily mopped up. A few brown drops still trickled down the green paintwork. Although the men were all smiling and talking at once, an atmosphere of tension lingered in the air.

  They clustered about Mr Smith, asking a hundred questions.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ he cried after a while, raising his pink but now slightly oil-streaked hands in the air. ‘Give me a minute. It’s been a long, cold journey, and I want a cup of something hot.’ He looked over at Hector and Murdo. ‘And I’m sure they do as well.’

  ‘Sure,’ big Bjorn said. ‘What you want? Soup? Real coffee? English tea?’

  Hector’s sharp eyes spotted a tin of condensed milk in the middle of the table. Some of his old naval habits remained.

  ‘Cocoa?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Bjorn turned to Murdo.

  ‘Cocoa,’ he said, though in fact he did not like it and would have preferred tea or soup. The peculiar situation and the presence of so many strangers were a bit over-whelming.

  ‘Cocoas all round, then,’ Henry Smith said.

  Bjorn nodded and crossed the floor to one of the broad schoolroom window-sills where a couple of primus stoves stood amidst a confusion of saucepans. He busied himself with a bottle of methylated spirits.

  ‘Well, that’s Bjorn, Bjorn Larvik,’ Henry Smith said, perching himself on the corner of an old school desk and taking charge. ‘Now, let me introduce you all. This is Mr Gunn and Murdo Mackay. He’s got a fine boat, the Lobster Boy. I think we might all be working together.’

  Hector stood near the door and gazed pleasantly around the group. Murdo, at his side, was very aware of the eyes upon him and unsure how to react. He brushed the troublesome hanks of hair from his face and looked back at them without smiling, his eyes very black.

  Mr Smith continued the introductions. ‘Now, our friends from the Thörsen works in Stavanger: Dag… Sigurd… Gunner.’ He nodded towards each man as he was named. ‘Arne… Peter – you met him already at the door… Knut… and Haakon.’

  They seemed a good-natured crowd of men. Though some were watchful, they were obviously pleased to meet the two Highlanders.

  One man stood apart from the others, leaning against the wall and gazing morosely and half contemptuously at the back of Henry Smith’s head. He was dark, thick-set, with a heavy brooding face, and made no effort to conceal his apparent dislike of the two Scots – indeed everyone in the room. One side of his face was flushed and there was a dark swollen mark on his cheek-bone, as though he had recently been struck.

  Henry Smith was counting. ‘Eight,’ he said. ‘We seem to have lost someone.’ Then he turned and confronted the black-browed face behind him. ‘Oh, yes.’ His voice took on a dry edge. ‘Carl Voss.’ The solitary man’s shoulders stirred and his head moved a fraction in a cold acknowledgement of the introduction.

  Bjorn crossed the room with three mugs of black cocoa. He wedged a book under the lid of a desk to make it level and set them on top, with the sticky tin of condensed milk and a jam-jar of sugar, stained with drips. They helped themselves.

  Murdo found himself a seat on a bench against the wall beside the big stove. He wrapped his hands about the scalding mug. Following Hector’s example he had taken a good pour of the con- densed milk and plenty of sugar. To his surprise the cocoa was delicious, thick and creamy and sweet, very different from the thin brown liquid prepared by his aunt. Bjorn passed him a big biscuit tin and pressed him to take a handful. He accepted two.

  Most of the men gathered about Henry Smith and Hector. Murdo sat back and watched them. For a while the conversation ebbed and flowed, and Murdo found himself trying to discover just what it was that made the Norwegians different from other men he knew of the same age. It was not the way they spoke or behaved, there was something about their faces that was different. They seemed fresher, more open and alert.

  As he listened and watched, two things struck him which he was unable to explain. The first was how disinclined to talk about the war they seemed to be. Every man he knew talked about the war; but here, whenever the subject was mentioned, they began to talk about something else. It seemed a bit odd, when they had just left their homes and country because of the German occupation. Evidently they kept up with the news, however, for a grey steel radio stood on one of the broad window-sills.

  The second thing that puzzled him was the excellent English they spoke. Indeed they all, with the possible exception of Bjorn, spoke with hardly the trace of an accent. As he listened, it occurred to him that in a strange way they spoke rather like Mr Smith himself, though of course his English public school voice was very distinctive.

  It seemed a bit rude to ask about it, but finally he turned to Haakon, a heavy and prematurely balding man, who sat close beside him on a tiny infant’s chair, gazing into the open stove.

  ‘How is it everybody speaks such good English?’ He had not intended the question to be quite so direct.

  Haakon shrugged and thought for a moment. ‘I suppose it’s the work,’ he said. ‘We meet a lot of people, and most of us have stayed in Britain for a while, I was at your university in Cambridge for three years.’

  Murdo sipped his cocoa. ‘Everyone seems to know Mr Smith very well,’ he said. ‘I thought he just arranged for you all to come over.’

  ‘No. He crossed to Norway himself with the Resistance to make the arrangements. He won’t say very much about it. The family he was staying with were taken away by the Gestapo.’

  ‘He never even mentioned it,’ Murdo said.

  Again Haakon shrugged. Shortly he joined a group chatting to Henry Smith at the far side of the room. Murdo watched them for a while and saw two pairs of eyes turn in his direction.

  He leaned forward and scorched his legs and face in the heat of the stove.

  Henry Smith heaved himself to his feet and stretched his legs.

  ‘Right. Which way do we go?’

  The man named Gunner lifted a lantern from a hook and handed it to him. ‘Through the house,’ he said, ‘and upstairs.’

  Murdo saw that a small smile hovered about Gunner’s mouth, as at some private joke. He did not like it and it made him uneasy.

  The door into the schoolhouse was at the far end of the room. Murdo followed Mr Smith and Hector out of the light and warmth and into the chill hallway. As they paused at a peeling door, two Norwegians following behind bumped into Murdo and
they all jostled forward.

  The room they entered was stacked to the ceiling with wooden crates and boxes. There seemed to be tons of them. Murdo whistled to himself at the thought of carrying some of the larger crates down the cliff steps.

  The second door opened into a cupboard, but the next revealed a room like the first, only larger, stacked to the roof. Henry Smith gazed from the cases to Hector’s face, to see what he thought.

  ‘The rest are upstairs,’ Gunner said.

  Henry Smith led the way up the steep stairs. A dozen cases stood on the landing, and fifteen or twenty were stacked against the back wall of what must have been the main bedroom of the schoolhouse.

  ‘And that’s the lot,’ Gunner said.

  Hector took a deep breath and wrinkled his brow. ‘Mm,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘What do you think?’ Henry Smith said.

  ‘Hard to say,’ Hector replied. ‘Ten loads perhaps?’ He took the end of a case and lifted it a few inches to test the weight. ‘If they’re all as light as this there should be no trouble.’

  Henry Smith smiled. ‘I’m afraid they’re not. Some of them are rather heavy.’ He crossed to a small box only about eighteen inches square, which stood on a long crate near the window. He put his arms about it, settled his legs, and lifted. His muscles strained, and then the box was in the air, but clearly it was very heavy.

  He put it down again and dusted his hands to remove some clinging dirt. Then he reached into the side pocket of his tweed trousers and pulled out a small metal lever.

  ‘Better let you see what’s in them,’ he said. ‘If I was in your place I’d be wanting some kind of reassurance.’ He shifted the lantern to give himself better light, and began to prise the boards from the top of a case that stood conveniently at hand.

  While he was busy, Murdo went over to the small box near the window and tried to lift it for himself. To his surprise, as he took the box in his strong hands, it hardly moved at all. He set himself more firmly, grasped the rough edges, and heaved upwards. Slowly the box came up until he clutched it against his chest. It was very heavy indeed. Carefully he set it down again. At the far side of the lantern, big Bjorn saw him and smiled. Murdo, who knew that he was quite strong for his age, looked across at the busy figure of Henry Smith. There was more power in those pink hands and that tweed-clad body than he had thought.