To the Hilt (15 page)

“Hey,” objected his elder grandson, standing up to face him, “that’s the galactic core of M.100 with all its Cepheid variables in those red stones. We have to keep it safe from the black-hole suction mob.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” his grandfather said dryly.

The boy—Andrew—was eleven years old and already rebellious, hard-eyed and tough. If time took its normal course he would one day succeed James as earl. James might be open to soft persuasion but I wanted to know for sure about his son.

I said, “Andrew, if you had a favorite toy, something you really valued, and someone tried very hard to take it away from you ... suppose he even threatened to hurt you if you didn’t give it to him ... what would you do?”

He said promptly, as if he thought the question feeble, “Bash his face in.”

My uncle smiled. James said with mild protest, “Andy, you would talk it over and make a deal.”

His son repeated stalwartly, “I’d bash his face in. Can we have the Cepheid monitor back?”

“No,” his grandfather said. “You shouldn’t have taken it out of its box.”

“We were looking for something worth fighting for,” Andrew said.

James defended them. “They haven’t done it any harm. What is it, anyway? It can’t be real gold.”

Himself thrust the Cup into my arms, where its weight again surprised. “Put it away safely,” he said.

“OK.”

“It’s a racing challenge trophy,” my uncle explained unexcitedly to his son. “I can’t keep it for more than a year and I need to give it back without dents in.”

The explanation satisfied James entirely and he told his children to look for a substitute galactic goody.

On an impulse I asked him if he would like to spend some of the day playing golf. We both belonged to the local club, where, with varying success, I quite often walked after the elusive white ball, but there were seldom days when we could go out together.

He looked pleased, but said, “I thought you said your clubs were stolen.”

“I might buy some new ones.”

“Great, then.”

He phoned the club, who found a slot for us in the afternoon, and we drove over in good time for the pro shop to kit me out with better clubs than the ones I’d lost: and for good measure I acquired snazzy black-and-white shoes with spikes on, and gloves and balls and umbrellas: also a lightweight blue waterproof bag to carry things in and a trolley like James’s to pull everything along on wheels. Thus reequipped, I went out with my cousin into the wind and rain, which had arrived as forecast, and got happily soaked to the skin despite the umbrellas.

“Will you paint this?” James asked, squelching on wet grass.

“Yes, of course.”

“You’re not really as weird as we all think, are you?”

I putted a ball to the rim of a hole, where it obstinately stopped.

“I paint frustration,” I said, and gave the ball a kick.

James laughed, and in good spirits we finished the eighteen holes and went back to the castle for the nineteenth.

My hands-on relationship with golf was essential to my work, I’d found. It wasn’t that I had much skill, but in a way the failures were more revelatory than success: and I particularly liked to play with James, who laughed and lost or won with equal lack of seriousness.

The only really warm room in the whole castle complex (apart from the caretaker’s quarters) was the home of the vast hot water tank, where ranks of airers dried out the persistent Scottish rains. James and I accordingly showered, changed and left all our wet things steaming, including my sopping new shoes and golf bag, and then ambled back to the dining room for tinctures.

James’s children were in there. The King Alfred Cup, though still in its white satin nest, lay in full glorious view on the polished table under a chandelier’s light.

“You didn’t say we couldn’t
look
at it,” Andy objected to his father’s mild rebuke. “We couldn’t find
anything else
worth fighting a space war for.”

I said to James, “What about the Hilt?”

“Oh yes.” He thought it over. “But we’d only see the replica, and anyway, I can’t let the children through into the castle proper. I promised Himself I wouldn’t.”

“Let’s ask him,” I said: so we found him in his own room and asked, with the result that all of us, Himself, James, James’s wife and children and I, walked the length of the Great Hall and stood round the grilled glass cage, staring down at its floodlit treasure.

“
That
,” Andrew decided, “would be worth fighting a galactic space war for. If it was real, of course.”

“And you, James,” Himself asked, “would you too fight for it?”

James, no fool, answered soberly, making what must have been to him an unwelcome commitment, “If I had to, I suppose so, yes.”

“Good. Let’s hope it’s never necessary.”

“Where is the real one?” Andrew asked.

His grandfather said, “We have to keep it safe from the black-hole suction mob.”

Andy’s face was an almost unpaintable mixture of glee and understanding. A boy worth fighting for, I thought.

Himself carefully didn’t look at me once.

 

 

It was still raining on Monday morning. James took his family to set off south, Himself left to meet his guests and ghillies at Crathie to bother the silver swimmers in the Spey, and Jed arrived to pick me up and set my normal life back on course.

He brought with him a replacement credit card and checkbook which he’d had sent to his house for me, and he’d heard from Inverness that my bagpipes were ready for collection. He had freed one of the estate’s Land-Rovers for my temporary use, and he lent me a fully charged portable phone to put me in touch with events in London and Reading. Reception was poor in the mountains, but better than nothing, he said.

I said inadequately, “Thanks, Jed,” and he shook his head and grinned, shrugging it off.

“There’s a new lock on the bothy, like I told you, and here are two keys,” he said, handing them over. “I have a third. There aren’t any others.”

I nodded and went out of doors with him, and found the boxes from London that I’d left in his car on Saturday evening already piled into the Land-Rover. I’d taken into Himself’s house only clothes in a paper carrier and I left with them (dry) in an all-purpose heavy-duty duffel bag from the gun room. The bag smelled of cartridges, moors and old tweed: very Edwardian, very lost world.

Jed commented on my new clubs.

“Yes,” I said, “but this time I’m storing my kit in the clubhouse. Where do you propose I should keep my pipes?”

Jed said awkwardly, “Are you afraid the robbers will come back?”

“Would you be?”

“You can always stay with Flora and me.”

“Have you noticed,” I asked, “how people tend to rebuild their earthquaked houses in the same place on the San Andreas Fault? Or in the path of hurricanes?”

“You don’t have to.”

“Call it blind faith,” I said.

“Call it obstinacy.”

I grinned. “Definitely. But don’t worry. This time I’ll install a few burglar alarms.”

“There isn’t any electricity.”

“Cans on strings with stones in.”

Jed shook his head. “You’re mad.”

“So they say.”

He gave up. “The police are expecting you. Ask for Detective Sergeant Berrick. He came out with me to the bothy. He knows what the vandalism looks like.”

“OK.”

“Take care, Al. I mean it. Take care.”

“I will,” I said.

We drove off together but parted at the estate gates, from where I headed towards the bothy, stopping only once, briefly, to pay with a replacement check for the new golf gear, and unload it into a locker, which I would have done better to do oftener in the past.

The new keys to the bothy door opened my way into the same old devastation that I’d left there six days earlier.

Nothing looked better. The only overall improvement was that it no longer hurt to move, a plus, I had to concede, of significant worth. With a sigh I dug out of the mess an unused plastic rubbish bag and, instead of its normal light load of paint-cleaning tissues, filled it with the debris of ruined acrylics and everything small but broken.

It was still raining out of doors. Indoors my mattress and bedding were soaked and smelling from a bucketful of dirty paint water. I wasn’t sure what they’d done to my armchair, but it too smelled revolting.

Out of rainy-day habit I’d run the Land-Rover into the shelter of the carport when I’d arrived, but at that point I backed it out again, and bit by bit stacked my ruined possessions in the dry space, painstakingly looking for anything
not
mine, that might have been left behind by my attackers. When I’d finished, all that was left in the room was the bare metal and coiled wire bed-stead, the chest of drawers (empty), one shelf of salvaged books, a frying pan with cooking tools and one easel (two broken). I swept the floor and collected coffee, sugar and sundry debris into a dustpan and gloomily looked at the dozens of superimposed paint-laden footprints on my wood blocks, all left by the types of sneakers sold by the million throughout Britain and useless for identifying the wearers.

In spite of the thoroughness of my search, the only thing I found that I hadn’t had before was not a helpful half-used matchbook printed with the address and phone number of a boxing gym, but a pair of plastic-framed glasses.

I put them on and everything close went blurry. For long distances, they were sharp.

The prescription was stamped into one of the ear-pieces: - 2.

They were, I thought, the sort of aid one could buy off revolving-stand displays all over the world. They were the sort of glasses worn by my attackers. A disguise. A theatrical prop. I wrapped them in a piece of tinfoil from a roll I sometimes used for instant makeshift palettes: one didn’t have to scrape off old dry paint but could simply scrunch the whole thing up and throw it away. Some poverty-afflicted painters used old phone books that way all the time.

I carted the bags and boxes of new gear into the bothy from the Land-Rover and stacked everything unopened on the bare springs of the bed. Then I locked the door, sat for a while in the Land-Rover, thinking, and finally drove off in search of Detective Sergeant Berrick.

Within five minutes the Detective Sergeant had told me he implacably disliked drug dealers, prostitutes, Englishmen, the Celtic football team, the Conservative party, anyone educated beyond sixteen, all superior officers, paperwork, rules forbidding him to beat up suspects, long-haired gits—and in particular long-haired gits who lived on mountains and got themselves duffed up while eating handouts from people with titles who ought to be abolished. Detective Sergeant Berrick, in fact, revealed himself as a typical good-hearted aggressive Scot with a strong sense of justice.

He was thin, somewhere in the tail-end thirties, and would probably soon be promoted to become one of the superiors he despised. His manner to me was artificially correct and a touch self-righteous, a long way from the paternal instincts of his friendly old neighborhood predecessor who had turned bad boys into good citizens for years but was now flying a desk in far-off Perth, made useless by age regulations and the reclassification of paternalism as a dirty word.

Sergeant Berrick told me not to expect to get my goods back.

I said, “I was wondering if you might have some luck with the paintings.”

“What paintings?” He peered at a list. “Oh yes, here we are. Four paintings of scenes of golf courses.” He looked up. “There was paint all over your place.”

“Yes.”

“And you painted those pictures yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any way we could recognize them?”

“They had stickers on the back, in the top left-hand corner,” I said. “Copyright stickers giving my name, Alexander, and this year’s date.”

“Stickers can be pulled off,” he said.

“These stickers can’t. The glue bonds with the canvas.”

He gave me a don’t-bother-me stare but punched up my file on a computer.

“Copyright stickers on backs,” he said aloud, typing in the words. He shrugged. “You never know.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You could put another sticker over the top,” he said.

“Yes, you could,” I agreed. “But you might not know my name is printed in an ink that shows up in X rays.”

He stared. “Tricky, aren’t you?”

“It’s a wicked world,” I said, and got an unpremeditated smile in return.

“We’ll see what we can do,” he promised. “How’s that?”

“I’ll paint your portrait if you find my pictures.”

He spread out on his desk the drawings I’d done at Dalwhinnie station of my assailants, and changed his challenging attitude to one of convinced interest.

“Paint my wife,” he said.

“Done.”

 

 

A few doors along from the police station I visited a shop that was a campers’ heaven aimed at tourists, and there acquired a sleeping bag and enough essentials to make living in the stripped bothy possible, and then drove a long detour to Donald Cameron’s far-flung post office to see if any letters had arrived for me in the past week, and to stock up, as I usually did, with food and a full gas cylinder.

“Will you be wanting to use my telephone, Mr. Kinloch?” old Donald asked hopefully. “There’s something amiss with the one outside.”

I bet there is, I thought; but to please the old beggar I made one call on his instrument, asking the bagpipe restorers if there was any chance of their delivering my pipes either to Jed Parlane’s house or to Donald Cameron’s shop.

Old Donald practically snatched the receiver out of my hand and told the pipe people he would be going to Inverness on Wednesday and would collect my pipes for me personally: and so it was arranged. Donald, restoring the phone to its cradle, beamed at me with expectation.