Cold, Lone and Still

5: The End of a Holiday

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It was between nine and ten miles to Kingshouse from Inveroran and, as the challenge from Carbridge could now be ignored by Hera, she agreed to make an easy business of next day’s journey.

We left the hotel at half-past nine, and by the time we reached the beginning of the climb up the Black Mount when we left the head of Luch Tulla I realised that Hera was very tired. There seemed nothing to do but to press on or return to the Inveroran hotel, have lunch there and then try to get a lift in a car or lorry to carry us to Ballachulish, Kinlochleven or even all the way to Fort William itself.

When I suggested this, however, she vetoed it in such a forceful manner that I realised it was useless to argue, so we began the ascent. The surface of The Way on this stretch was good, but the track became extremely exposed and windy. However, the weather remained fine and the mountain views were wonderful and so was the expanse of Rannoch Moor we saw before we descended.

We rested for a while on Ba Bridge and watched the tumbling water as it swirled over its rocks brought down from the mountain crags, but there was more climbing to do and, although I stopped and pointed out a rough track which would have taken us to the road and the chance of a lift, Hera refused to consider the project and lowered her obstinate head to the wind as we looked over to where Schiehallion reared his noble pyramid out of the moor.

I have always thought about this extraordinary mountain ever since I first met its magical name in J. A. Ferguson’s one-act play Campbell of Kilmhor and shall never forget the closing speech by the old woman Mary Stewart after the heroic and defiant death of her son Dugald. He told the despicable Campbell, ‘Till ye talk Rannoch Loch to the top of Schiehallion, ye’ll no talk me into a yea or nay.’ Apart from that, it was during rehearsals of this play that I had fallen in love with Hera. She had been cast as the girl Morag Cameron, while I played the tiny part of the toadying and sycophantic James Mackenzie. Amateur material were the whole lot of us, but the play itself carried us through, although I wouldn’t go bail for our Campbell’s Scottish accent! However, I digress, as the lecturer said when he was extolling the beauties of the Clifton Blue butterfly and stepped backwards off the cliffs at Beachy Head.

Slowly, and with many pauses for rest, although it was too wet everywhere to sit down, we made progress towards Kingshouse. Of one thing I was determined. If the hotel there could accommodate us, we were going to stay there at least a second night. We had allowed a fortnight for the holiday and still had a day or two in hand, but, apart from that, there was nothing to stop us from putting in another week if we felt so inclined. Our return tickets to London from Glasgow were valid for a month, so no problem there, and I had money enough to cover any extra expenses and could get more in Glasgow if we needed it.

At last the climbing was over and The Way began to descend. I knew, however, that to get to Kinlochleven there was more climbing ahead of us and I was becoming more and more anxious about Hera’s powers of endurance. She knew what I was thinking, for, when we stopped to admire the view we got of Buachaille Etive Mor, she said, ‘Stop worrying, Comrie. Women are much tougher than men. We have to be.’

We passed the way to the ski-lift and came on to a well-surfaced road and a car park. We passed Blackrock Cottage and then, thankfully, we found that The Way took us downhill again and across the moor to the remote but more than welcome Kingshouse hotel. I enquired at once about the possibility of extending our booking and, to my great relief, this turned out to be possible.

The hotel and its pine trees were grandly situated under the protection — or the menace — of mighty Beinn a’Chrulaiste and all around were other mountains and the moors. Fortunately Hera was so greatly taken with the setting that she made no objections to my booking us in for an extra night and, although I knew she would never admit it, I am sure she was relieved to think that we were to take a whole day off from walking.

I had one other card up my sleeve, but I had to be wary about how and when I played it. To get to the Kingshouse hotel we had had to cross a main road and I knew from the guidebook that a bus route went along it to Fort William. It was my intention to insist, when the omens seemed favourable, that we should catch a bus and finish our journey that way. I thought of complaining of blisters on my feet, but the necessary evidence for this was lacking. I wondered whether I could fake a sprained ankle, but this would be inconvenient later if I had to cry off climbing Ben Nevis, a project on which she had set her heart.

In the event, I adopted neither subterfuge, but opted for yet another night at the hotel, pointing out to Hera that a stay of three nights entitled us to a rebate on the day-to-day terms charged, although whether this was the case I neither knew nor cared. Finally I put it to her bluntly that I had booked us for the third night as well as the second one and that she must please herself about what she wanted to do, but that I was determined to stay.

‘We’ve covered sixty miles since we left Drymen,’ I said. ‘A good deal more, if you count the extra miles we covered when we lost our way in the mist. We’ve proved our point, don’t you think?’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ she answered. ‘I don’t terribly care for your protective attitude. It isn’t really protective, you know. It’s mere self-assertion and male vanity. I detest this ‘women and children first’ nonsense. On a ship the sailors are the people to be considered. As for the Victorian ideal of the captain’s either being the last to leave the vessel or even going down with it, I never heard such poppycock! The leader ought to be the principal survivor, not the inevitable casualty.’

‘Why?’

‘For obvious reasons, I should have thought. Where would the sheep be, if the shepherd died?’

‘So what exactly are you getting at?’

‘Go and get us more drinks and I’ll tell you. You see,’ she went on when I returned, ‘you were very quick to hustle me away from that corpse. I won’t blame you for that, except to say that it was high-handed and unnecessary.’

‘You didn’t really want to see a murdered man, particularly somebody we knew,’ I said.

‘But are you sure that it was somebody we knew? You only flashed your torch on him before you were grabbing me by the arm and dragging me back to that other room and then forcing me to get back to our road.’

‘What is all this? Of course we had to get back on to our road. We had to get to the hotel.’

‘I still think that, if you saw what you say you saw, we ought to go to the police. There might be all sorts of things for them to find out.’

‘We’ve been into all this.’

‘Look, when the mist came down and we lost our way, how far ahead of us were the other four?’

‘If there still were four of them. The Minches might have left Todd and Carbridge by then. Everybody else had left them.’

‘In any case, whether there were four of them or just the two men, they might have got to that turning we took long before the mist came down. Why should they have gone off the track? What made them leave The Way and go junketing away across country? It’s too far-fetched to suppose that they were trying to take a short cut by the same route we had chosen. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘They may have heard about the ruins and wanted to take a look at them.’ I knew this could not be true. Hera picked up the suggestion and threw it away.

‘The ruins are not mentioned in the guidebook. Besides, Carbridge wanted to get to Fort William quickly. He wasn’t any too pleased when Perth and the students spent that time at Inchcailloch on Loch Lomond and he dropped them altogether later on because they wanted to linger and collect bits of rocks and things. Why should he — or any of the others, for that matter — have wasted their time and energy going off the marked route?’

‘You tell me,’ I said.

‘When you went charging down that dark passage you talk about, did you slip?’

‘No, I fell over the body, as I told you. If you’re thinking of blood, it coagulates pretty quickly unless the chap is a haemophiliac’

‘Why wouldn’t you let me see him?’

‘Oh, my dear girl, don’t be morbid!’

‘I might have been able to do something.’

‘Don’t talk so daft. He was dead, frozen, and as stiff as a board, I tell you.’

‘I still think we ought to go to the police.’

‘No. And that’s flat. We hardly knew the chap and it’s no business of ours what’s happened to him. We’ve had all this out before. Heaven knows what sort of scandal we might get ourselves mixed up in, apart from the ghastly business of interviews with the police and being quizzed by reporters and having to appear in court at God knows what inconvenient time. They don’t even hold inquests up here, I believe. It’s straight into the rough stuff if the Procurator Fiscal thinks there’s a case to answer, as in this instance there damn’ well would be.’

‘All right,’ she said reluctantly. ‘You’ve made your point, but I’m not going to say I’m happy about it. That poor man!’

‘Probably only got what he asked for.’

‘I didn’t realise how callous you can be.’

‘That’s not callousness, it’s only common sense. And now snap out of it.’

But, of course, neither of us could do that, and it was a silent and not exactly a compatible pair of love-birds who resumed their journey a couple of days later. However, encouraged by my unusually high-handed victory, I laid down the law again and, to my astonishment, this time she capitulated without a fight.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Let’s take to the main roads and do Ballachulish and on to Fort William, if we can pick up any transport, but heaven knows how the buses run in these parts.’

However, we were in luck. We had not been waiting at the roadside for more than ten minutes before a whacking great car with a man and a woman in it pulled up and the man put his head out. From the size of the vehicle and the fact that it had a left-hand drive, I guessed that the couple were from the States and this proved to be the case. Moreover, they were bound for Ballachulish, so we could not have been more lucky.

Needless to say, we did not mention the dead man, but they were greatly interested when they heard about The Way. The woman asked innumerable questions. I was on tenterhooks in case Hera should give away, after all, the secret of our visit to the ruins and the gruesome discovery I had made there, but she was discretion itself and as the car diminished the distance between Kingshouse and our destination, I became easier in my mind.

The couple were inclined to dismiss the magnificent Grampians as mere foothills compared with their own Rockies, but allowed that, compared with the mountains of Switzerland and Austria, those in the Highlands had ‘atmosphere’. In any case, whatever the views of the couple and however subversive they were, neither Hera nor I was prepared to quarrel with them, for we were much too grateful for the lift to be in any mood to argue with the kindly and voluble Americans. It was not until almost the end of the journey that we discovered that they were really bound for Oban and had come miles out of their way for our sakes. After we had crossed the bridge at Ballachulish, they took us all the way to Fort William.

‘Think nothing of it,’ the driver said. ‘My wife is wild to see Glen Coe where the massacre took place, so we were bound for Ballachulish anyhow. All we need to do is go back-along and then pick up our route south. At Oban I aim to take pictures and then cross the only bridge over the Atlantic. Boy! Will that be something to tell the folks back home!’ He was referring to the bridge which connects the mainland to the little island of Seil on the road from Oban to Easdale. I remembered it well from the coach tour with my parents, for I had been young enough to believe that the coach really was going to cross to America.

The youth hostel at Fort William was about three miles from the town shops, but it was marvellously well situated, as I knew, for the climb up Ben Nevis. It was a Grade One hostel, had one hundred and twenty-eight beds, cooking facilities and a shop, but meals were not provided, so we bought our own food from the hostel store. When we went into the kitchen to cook it, who should be there but Rhoda and Tansy. They had put up at a hotel for three nights and then come on to the hostel. They and we were the only people at the hostel when we arrived. The weather was fine and the other hostellers either had not yet arrived or were out enjoying themselves. I became more and more grateful to the kindly Americans for the welcome lift they had given us from Kingshouse to Fort William, for, if we climbed Ben Nevis on the morrow, it meant at least a seven-hour stint and some rough going, even by the easiest ascent. To have cut out the long miles and overnight stop if we had completed the walk was a marvellous bonus. We crossed the bridge opposite the hostel and looked around us. It was pleasant in the glen, but I had climbed Ben Nevis once before, and I knew that conditions could be very different when we reached the summit. Hera was all eagerness and anticipation, so I warned her that the way up the great (and, to my mind, very ugly) mountain was not only arduous in places, but could be extremely dull.

‘But think of the view from the summit!’ she said.

‘Well enough, so long as the weather holds and the Ben isn’t capped by cloud.’

‘It won’t be. We haven’t come all this way for nothing. If it’s no good tomorrow, we can wait a day, can’t we?’

‘We’re only booked in for tonight and this is a very popular hostel,’ I pointed out.

‘Then we’ll go to a hotel. Why not?’

But she was not to climb Ben Nevis on that holiday, for, because of the most startling and utterly unforeseen circumstance, we were out of that hostel as soon as next morning’s breakfast was over. We lost no time in making for the railway station and in taking the train for Glasgow. We were fleeing, as it were, from a disembodied spirit and terrified, so far as I myself was concerned, not for my life, but for my reason. At about seven o’clock that evening when, taking advantage of the fact that only a few hostellers had drifted in, Hera and I had cooked and eaten our simple supper rather earlier than we really wanted it, a lot of hostellers, all chatting and laughing, came in. Among the crowd were four people we knew. The next moment Hera and I were hailed by Carbridge, Todd and the Minches, all very much alive, although tired, they said, from their climb. To clinch matters, we were joined an hour later by Perth and the students. They had climbed with the others, but had stayed longer on the mountain to add little bits of lava and granite to the collection they had already made at Inchcailloch and along The Way and had despatched to London to avoid having to tote so much heavy material on the rest of their march.

When Carbridge and his companions came in, I heard Hera give a peculiar little cry. As for me, I was so flabbergasted that I could feel my head swimming and I suppose I came as near to fainting as I have ever been in my life. However, it was Carbridge all right and as full of effervescence and bonhomie as ever. He appeared to have forgotten our dispute and my high-handed action at Crianlarich, and soon the ‘old boy, old boy’ stuff began again, and the advice to Hera: ‘My tip, fair one, is to avoid that climb unless you go up by pony.’

Before the footweary but triumphant quartet — Jane’s feet must have responded to my treatment — had gone to the kitchen quarters to prepare something which would restore their wasted tissues, Hera dragged me outside and on to the bridge over the River Nevis again.

‘You told me he was dead! You said you fell over him! You said he had been murdered! You said he had a knife in his back! You said he was stone-cold and stiff!’ she babbled. Well, shock has different effects on different people. Now that I had recovered a little, the shock of seeing him had made me reckless.

‘So you believed all that guff,’ I said. ‘Poor old you!’

She smacked my face and, as I suppose I was really somewhat hysterical at the time, this summary treatment had its usual result. I apologised and assured her that I had been certain it was the body of Carbridge that I had seen. I tried to take her hand. She shook me off, turned aside and began to cry.

‘For heaven’s sake, stop it!’ I said. ‘When they’ve had their meal, we’ve got to face that lot again.’ We did. There was much euphoria. There was triumph that they had walked The Way and much exhibiting of souvenirs they had bought in Fort William. Todd, said Carbridge, had been the favourite of the ladies. Tansy and Patsy had both bought him presents.

When they had all turned in for the night, I said, ‘Darling, I did fall over him, I did see him. I did touch him. I could have sworn it was he. I spoke out of turn just now, I know I did, but please don’t hold it against me. I’ve had the most awful shock. You can’t imagine what it was like when that lot walked in. And then, when you turned on me —’

‘I didn’t turn on you. Don’t you think I had a shock, too, after all you’d said?’

‘Yes, of course, but (and, please, I am not intending to start an argument) I do think my shock must have been more severe than yours.’

‘So you were telling me the truth? — or, at any rate, you thought you were.’

‘Darling, I swear I was!’

‘Then,’ she said, with a complete return to her usual forthrightness, ‘we’ll go home first thing tomorrow and when we get back to London you’d better see a psychiatrist. I’m not going to father my children on a man who sees a corpse where no corpse is. All that nonsense about falling over it in a dark passage!’

‘There was a corpse all right,’ I said, ‘but I made a mistake about whose corpse it was. I suppose I was badly rattled, and you must admit that Carbridge is a very ordinary-looking bloke. So far as his clothes are concerned.’

‘Well, I’m glad now that you wouldn’t let me go to the police. Nice fools we should have looked if we had reported finding a dead man who, a day or two later, was able to climb Ben Nevis and eat a hearty supper afterwards.’

‘Look, I made a mistake. Do I have to keep on spelling it out?’

‘I’ve looked a lot of times at the map since we started out. There’s no castle marked.’

‘It wasn’t a castle, I tell you. It was only a ruin and probably wasn’t important even in its heyday.’

‘Can you remember what the place looked like?’

‘I think so. Why? If we’re not going to the police, I shan’t need to describe it to anybody.’

‘Just as well, perhaps.’

‘Could you describe it?’

‘No, of course I couldn’t, but I would be willing to agree to your description if it ever came to the point. A thick mist, like the one we ran into, sends my wits wool-gathering. I never could find my way in a fog.’

I looked suspiciously at her.

‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, with an emphasis I could not account for at the time. ‘I want you to see a psychiatrist or a doctor, or an eye specialist, or even all three, as soon as we get back to London.’

‘I’ll be shot if I do!’ I said hotly. ‘What are you getting at, for God’s sake?’

She smiled in a cat-like way and repeated that I needed my head, my blood pressure and my eyes tested. I could have struck her to the ground. Instead, I attempted a verbal attack.

‘You’re becoming senile,’ I said. I thought the ungentlemanly shaft would hurt her. It did not. She still smiled.

‘Yes, but I wear well,’ she said, ‘which is more than you do. When I was your age, at least I didn’t see things which weren’t there.’

She was four years older than I was, a fact I had always deplored.

‘If you are going to make nasty cracks about what I saw or didn’t see, I shall marry Jane Minch,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘The children will look like plover’s eggs,’ she said. ‘Those freckles! Oh, my God!’