Stormy Petrel Read Free Page B

reeds and thistles and islanded with stretches of bracken. Once we were out of sight of the village there were no trees except, here and there, thorns dragged sideways by the wind and shorn close by the weather. The track grew steeper, and twisted. Now to either hand was heather, at this season still dark and flowerless, except where patches of the early bell heather splashed their vivid purple across grey rock. The whins, those perpetual wonders, were blazing gold, and everywhere over the stretches of grass between the bracken spread the tiny white and yellow flowers of lady’s bedstraw and tormentil. The very lichen patching the grey rocks was bright mustard-gold, like flowers. Away to the right I saw the flat gleam of the loch.
    Nothing could be heard above the noise of the engine, but I saw a lark spring skywards out of the heather, and another, a few minutes later, sink to its rest. A pair of grey-backed crows – hooded crows – flew across the track, and then, as the Land Rover topped the rise and started down into a narrowing glen, a buzzard soared up in leisurely circles, to be lost over the crest of the moor.
    Then we were running gently downhill beside a burn, towards the distant gleam of the sea. Here, in the shelter that the glen gave from the Atlantic gales, the trees crowded close, and reasonably tall. Oaks, mostly, but there were beeches and ash trees, with birch and hazel everywhere, tangled with brambles and wild honeysuckle. Along the edge of the burn were thickets of alder and hawthorn standing knee-deep in foxgloves.
    The track levelled out, the glen widened, and there below us was the bay.
    Otters’ Bay was very small, a pebbled crescent backed by a storm beach of smooth boulders. Thick black curves of dry seaweed marked the reach of the tides. To our left a high cliff cut off the view, and to the right a lowish headland jutted well out into the sea. Narrowing my eyes against the Atlantic glitter I could see the line of a path that climbed from the bay and on over the headland to the west. And beyond the crest of the headland, hazy with distance, the shape of a hill, smooth and symmetrical, like a drawn-up knee.
    Then the Land Rover came to a halt beside a rough jetty made of stacked boulders tied down with fencing wire, and there, backed against the cliff a short way above us, was the cottage.

3
    The cottage was bigger than I had expected. Originally it had been built on the usual pattern, a tiny square hallway, with doors to either side leading into the two ‘front’ rooms, and a steep enclosed stair up to the twin bedrooms under the pitch of the roof. But someone, fairly recently, had done a job of conversion; the two downstairs rooms were thrown into one, with the staircase half dividing them. The sitting room, to the right, had a pleasant fireplace, and was adequately, if not well, furnished with a couple of easy chairs, a low table, and a doubtful-looking sofa pushed back against the staircase wall. The ‘kitchen-diner’ on the other side boasted the usual cupboards and what looked like home-made worktops, and a table near the window with four chairs drawn up to it. On the worktop stood an electric kettle and a toaster, and these were the only ‘mod cons’ to be seen.
    A door at the rear led to a narrow room which ran the width of the cottage and had originally been the ‘back kitchen’ or scullery and wash-house. Under one window was a modern sink and draining-board, with an electric water-heater fixed to the wall above it. Beside this stood the cooker, installed, apparently, by someone who distrusted the island’s electricity supply; it was a gas cooker, and had been placed there to be within easy reach of the cylinders of Calor gas that stood just outside the window under a lean-to, beside a stack of peat. That was as far as modernisation had gone: the other end of the scullery was just as it had always been, with the old deep sink for laundry,