Part 9 (2/2)

Mrs Mackellar put two cups on the table in front of me and her husband. The chipped cups sat on the linoleum tablecloth for a minute or two, cooling, and not a word was spoken among the three of us. Cup steam joined the circus of kettle steam, cow s.h.i.+t and smoke.

Finally we drank the tea, sip by sip. The heat of it was a sensation different from the fire of the whisky. Another flame on the tongue. Once the tea was drunk, in softer tones than I thought her capable of, Mrs Mackellar offered to read my leaves. It seemed rude to refuse.

She stared for a long time at the bottom of my cup, then wrinkled her brow and shook her head. ”Keep those around you close,” she said. ”They are in danger.”

”What did you see?” I asked nonchalantly. Part of me wanted to laugh, another part felt chilled.

”I saw what I said,” she replied, in a tone of quiet finality.

FEBRUARY.

One.

It began with a dull roaring sound. At first I thought it was something to do with the mechanical felling of timber above. Then, growing much louder, it brought me running out of the cot-house-and what I saw was a thin stripe of duck-egg blue cut across the sky. The aeroplane was moving fast. I watched it swoop and curve at the end of its run. Only then did I understand it was the enemy.

Pa.s.sing and turning, the plane came over several times...Good use of the throttle in a short s.p.a.ce, I thought, watching, before becoming concerned-dully, numbly-about being shot. I scuttled back inside the cot-house.

The plane returned two weeks later. This time I really did expect its guns to open fire, so I kept under the eaves of the cot-house as I watched. Looking, though, I realised it was a meteorological reconnaissance plane, a specially converted Junkers-a Ju 290, by then the main long-range reconnaissance vehicle of the Luftwaffe. It was making the kind of low-level photographic sortie known in the RAF as a 'dicey do', meaning an uncertain dice with death, as delivered by anti-aircraft guns.

On the plane itself, I knew, there would be telephoto lenses in the wing-tips for photographing cloud above bomb targets. I wondered why he was so low: I could actually see the psychrometer strapped to the aircraft's nose. It was an instrument used to measure humidity-along with a barometer and an air-speed indicator it was part of the fundamental equipment used by meteorological reconnaissance flights on both sides. Geoffrey Reynolds had had one on the plane that flew me up to Scotland.

The morning after the Junkers appeared for the second time, I got up, shaved, made some porridge and tea for breakfast and went as usual to check my instrument screen. I'd had to get Mackellar to build a wooden fence around the louvred box to protect it from the cattle.

I first checked my gra.s.s minimum-that is, the temperature recorded when the thermometer is exposed to the open air on forked twigs stuck in turf, so called because the thermometer bulb is just in contact with the tips of the gra.s.s blades. Its purpose is to show the reduction of the temperature (by radiation to the night sky) of the layer of air closest to the ground. The next thing was to check the rain gauge.

I had a psychrometer of my own, or hygrometer as they are also called. It was a fiddly business, but not so much as for meteorologists of the past, who had to mess about with a human hair that expanded and contracted according to relative changes in humidity. Now we just use two thermometers, one which is kept wet, the other dry, and note the difference.

As I took the reading, I heard the clank of cow-bells in the distance, so afterwards I went up to the farm to find Mackellar, to ask him if he had seen the Junkers.

The atmosphere in the dairy was thick with the sweet, relaxing smell of milk. Mackellar's lurcher-which didn't seem to have a name-was curled up in a corner, while its flat-capped owner sat on a stool.

”I seen it before,” he said of the plane. ”Pa.s.s us that bucket.”

The cows s.h.i.+fted in their stalls. I asked if I might have a go at milking one. He sat me down by an old cow, which was likely to be more patient with a beginner. I did rather well, though I spilled some of the precious liquid on my trousers.

Later that morning I joined Mackellar as he took the milk down to the local creamery. Sitting in his trap, with the milk slopping in churns behind us and him giving the horse a little tap with the whip now and then, we wound our way through the hills that loured over the Dunoon road. Once again they were encircled with cirrus, looking this time like the eyebrow tufts of an old man.

I felt happy, with only one slight reservation. The second sighting of the plane troubled me, but I didn't know why. How could I? How was I to know it would be quite so damaging to me personally? Or that it was part of a whole dimension of weather intelligence that has largely remained secret even to this day?

There was just a niggle at the time, a suggestion from the corner of the picture, prevising me of danger through the whole. Even though it was full of preparations for war, Kilmun did not seem like the kind of place that might actually be violated by actual conflict. Yet here the war had been, flying above us, as if on an inspection. It meant something, surely; that plane was here for a reason.

The wheels of the trap crunched over the road beneath us, their rhythmic noises blending with the patterns of my thought. Beside me Mackellar's face was like a broken-up layer of rock, furrowed and dark brown, except for his lips, which were paler.

The creamery manager, an aged gentleman in blue overalls going by the name of David Rennie, said he too had seen the plane. Apparently the Home Guard had been put on alert. Rennie himself was a member. He said he was surprised the plane had not been shot down on its way westwards.

Mackellar was unruffled by all this. It was as if nothing could disturb the land for him. For this was his atmosphere, and he knew it. He knew the fields divided by thorn hedges garlanded with wild flowers. He knew the treeline where the forestry ended. He knew the sh.o.r.eline where his boat was pulled up, its interior like a scoop for air, its rowlocks winding spools for his mackerel lines.

In the wind, the feathery lures, brightly coloured, fluttered at the end of the lines: flags on a medieval battlefield. That is what I think of right now, looking out of the porthole at the star-spangled banner flying from the bridge of a United States s.h.i.+p that has come alongside us. It's a NOAA research s.h.i.+p, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel on its way from Cape Town to the Antarctic to study the forces that affect global climate variability. The opposite direction to us, in other words.

What else did Mackellar know? Let me see. Without much conviction of success, I try to conjure back that vanished atmosphere of history, which even as I sit here threatens to slip back into obscurity-or, at least, that wood-panelled corridor of time whose very varnish promises distortion of memory. But what was there...

The long windbreak of beeches that the Rymans called the beech tree walk, though Mackellar's father had planted it. Also the sound the beechmast sh.e.l.ls made, crunching beneath our feet. He knew, too, that the cot-house compulsorily occupied by the Met Office was the oldest building in the area. And he knew that Ryman's house was built on the site of an old rabbit warren, and that now the rabbits had moved further up the hill, nearer to the beech trees.

Mackellar said he could call them closer to him in order to shoot them, by imitating their young. I did not believe him when he first told me this, but many times later I saw him on moonlit nights, hunting rabbits by the beech tree walk. Sometimes he used snares and nets, sometimes a .22 rifle and lamp. I heard shots in the night and the strange, high-pitched noises he also made up there on the hill, the sound of them mixing in with the whistling of the wind as it pa.s.sed through trees and thistles.

A week or so after our trip to the creamery I saw him strangle a rabbit he had caught in a snare. I watched, with horrified fascination, as he took out a knife to remove its intestines. He fed them to his dog, then quickly, expertly, peeled back the rabbit's skin. What was left after the unfolding was something terrible, fetal. I watched as he removed the backbone, cutting away lumps of meat.

I was glad not to be able to accept his invitation to supper that night. I had a good excuse, anyway: the Waafs from Dunoon, Joan and Gwen, had invited me to a dance.

I gunned down to Dunoon on the motorcycle, full of erotic expectation, with the tails of my greatcoat streaming out behind. The dance was being held in an ornate oriental building called the Pavilion, which was decorated with fading posters of the entertainer Sir Harry Lauder, who was a local resident, and a group of high-kicking showgirls called the Glenmorag Follies.

The girls were there to greet me, both fabulously dressed in very bright frocks and made up to the nines. We gave in our coats and I acted the c.o.c.k of the walk as I strolled into the dance hall, a girl on each arm. Heads turned to look at us, I believe-there were lots of servicemen in the hall. But for all their uniforms, I felt most resplendent in my simple black suit and tie. I remember how the girls' dresses switched enticingly over their calves.

After downing a few drinks I asked Joan to dance. Pus.h.i.+ng aside a blonde lock from her forehead, she smiled sweetly, nodding in a.s.sent, and I really thought my luck was in-for I had heroic visions of myself in the romantic department as well as the meteorological.

But as soon as we took to the dance floor, it was clear these hopes were to be dashed. The dance orchestra was called 'The Flying Yanks'-they were a US air-force band-and of course they played American music: jive, swing, jitterbugs and that sort of thing. I did my best, but it was hopeless. I felt stiff-armed, moving like a marionette, whereas Joan seemed to have the hang of it right away, turning with an easy grace, confident in her crossings and recrossings, as if she were as naturally cut out for the pursuit as her brightly sashaying dress.

Things went no better with Gwen, on whose toes I twice trod, and soon, clearly bored with trying to teach me the steps, she called it a day. The pair peeled off, danced with some officers, then mostly with each other. I hung round the bar consoling myself with beer, then bought a bottle of whisky to take home. I felt angry, feeling as if the girls had led me on, but the truth was I had no right to demand special treatment. The young can be so unreasonable in what they expect from the opposite s.e.x.

Two.

Leaving the dance hall, I wandered about with the bottle of shame hidden under my coat. The whisky, I remember, was Whyte & Mackay. Eventually I elected to sit under the statue of Highland Mary, from where I watched the s.h.i.+p lights on either side of the boom that was stretched across the Clyde. I sucked at the neck of the bottle-sucked at it like a baby at the pap while watching the moonlit white clock face on the pier house, or casting jealous glances down at the couples emerging arm in arm from the Pavilion.

I'd had a few girlfriends in my early years at the Met Office, but none of them had turned out right. We'd had the usual hand-holding in the cinema and kisses and increasingly bold delvings, but it always seemed to peter out. Partly it was that I always went for upper-cla.s.s or bohemian women, I suppose because they were furthest from my own experience and therefore most desirable. Most eventually said they found me too obsessive, which was strange because I took the view that a girl might find it attractive for someone to ramble on in a likeably boffinish way. It was still an effort for me to 'perform' this rambling: I'd effectively been emotionally withdrawn since my parents' death.

In any case, it seemed I was inept with girls. It wasn't that I didn't have any s.e.x. I took what was on offer (I'm ashamed to say I lost my virginity while conducting an affair with the landlady of the boarding-house I lodged in at Dunstable during my training), but at this stage the grand pa.s.sion eluded me.

Though the landlady shrieked with pleasure, the moment of losing the blessed thing was unsatisfactory to me. What I remember most was the cherry-coloured curtains in the room. Afterwards she said: ”There, you've done it now.” Or it might have been: ”There there, you've done it now.” One would think these moments stick more firmly in the memory, but as time goes by it seems to get harder and harder to fish things out of the river.

Maybe-I remember thinking this-the problem was that I was actually in love with the weather. Most people might just exchange greetings and chat about that subject, but I have to get technical. Surely there had to be other people like me. Maybe, I thought, taking another slug, I just needed to find a woman who was like that.

Fragments of broken music rose like wisps of smoke from the Pavilion, creeping into my ears, or waiting a while before doing so to mix with the sound of the waves was.h.i.+ng against the pier stanchions, from where a strong smell of fuel oil emanated. I felt unmoored, adrift, dogged by failure.

Wrapped in my Crombie, I sank back on the gra.s.s and stared at the woman above me. Erected in 1896, the statue remembered Mary Campbell, a locally born individual famous for becoming the tragic lost love of the poet Robert Burns. Though Burns was already married and his wife expecting twins, he and Mary exchanged vows on the banks of the River Ayr, swapping Bibles over running water. This is said to be a Scottish tradition (so long as the stream still runs and Bible stays true, the love too will hold), but it all came to naught as she died of a fever. Well, it was appropriately under this embodiment of doomed love, ten and a half feet high, surrounded by railings a year after it was built to keep off vandals, that within a few turns of the hands of the clock, I emptied that whisky bottle and drank myself into a stupor.

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