Silver Fin Page 10

  A mile or two before Glenfinnan they turned north off the main road and on to the winding route that led to the little West Highland village of Keithly. Keithly was built of low, solid, grey stone houses, huddled and crouching in the shelter of low hills, ready for anything the fierce winters up here could throw at it.

  Max’s cottage, however, was not in the town itself and they drove through the narrow high street, past the pub and the post office, before pulling on to a rutted dirt track that followed the course of a small river deep into a pine forest.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s doing to the suspension, driving up and down here all day,’ said Charmian as she wrestled with the wheel to negotiate a particularly tight bend, ‘but they’re pretty well built, these Bentleys, thank God.’ She turned to James and smiled. ‘It may seem isolated at first, but there’s plenty of people in and out. There’s a nice couple who have been looking after your uncle: May Davidson and her husband, Alec. May’s been cooking for him and cleaning and generally keeping house for years now, and Alec’s taken over the garden, now that Max is too weak. Then the doctor’s up here most days and an old gillie called Gordon who helps Max with his fishing…’

  ‘Does he fish a lot?’

  ‘Oh, goodness, yes. Didn’t you know? It’s his whole life. That’s why he bought the cottage in the first place – because it’s slap bang on the river and has full fishing rights. He’s never without a rod in his hand. I think he wants to be buried with it.’

  They rounded the final bend, and there was the cottage, nestling in a small clearing, so overgrown with clematis, honeysuckle and rambling roses you could barely make out the building beneath. James reckoned that when all the plants were in flower, the cottage must disappear completely.

  And there was Uncle Max.

  James was glad that Charmian had warned him in advance, because Max looked very unwell indeed. His sagging skin was a pale yellowish colour and he’d lost so much weight, his clothes hung loosely on his body. He was using a walking stick. He had always had a limp, caused by a wound he had suffered in the war, and James thought it was very exciting, but now he was clearly finding it hard to walk. He was desperate to make the effort, however, and he strode over to meet the car as briskly as he could, so that James was reminded for a moment of the dashing, handsome man he had once been.

  James’s earliest memory of his uncle was when he had taken him to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1925. Uncle Max had been an impossibly glamorous figure then: tall and lean, with the proud, strong build of a soldier. James remembered getting off the train at Wembley Park station and holding tightly to his uncle’s hand as he forced his way through the crowd. He remembered seeing the huge wooden structure of the roller coaster towering above them, and he remembered how safe and protected he had felt with Max.

  But the man standing before him now, stooped and feeble, seemed like a different person.

  ‘James,’ he wheezed, and clasped his nephew by the upper arms. ‘Marvellous to see you, lad. Welcome to my little kingdom…’

  He sounded dreadfully short of breath, and the effort of speaking sent him into a barrage of wet coughs that came from deep down inside his chest.

  James waited for them to die down, and Max wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to my barking. Here, let me grab your bag.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ snapped Aunt Charmian. ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort.’

  ‘You don’t have to treat me like a baby, sis,’ said Max with a touch of humour.

  ‘If you behave like a baby, I’ll treat you like a baby,’ said Charmian, opening the boot of the car and hauling the suitcase out herself. ‘I’ll take the bag. You go on in and show James the lie of the land.’

  The cottage was actually quite a lot larger than it appeared at first sight. It had originally been two cottages and a cowshed, but Max had knocked some walls down and turned the whole building into one single house. James’s room had been the hayloft and was tucked up under the rafters of the old cowshed.

  ‘Careful how you go, or you’ll be forever bumping your head,’ said Max, slapping one of the heavy wooden beams that formed the sloping roof.

  ‘I’m used to it,’ said James. ‘My room at Eton’s half this size.’

  He looked around. The walls were covered in wallpaper patterned with roses very much like the ones growing outside. There was a neat little iron-frame bed, bare wooden floorboards with a colourful woven rug, and near the bright-blue door stood a chest of drawers with a vase of fresh wild flowers and an oil lamp on it.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s rather a lot of my old things in here,’ said Max, showing James a shelf of tattered books. James spotted a few familiar titles – Treasure Island, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Jungle Book, King Solomon’s Mines. A second shelf held a row of painted plaster figurines: two dogs, a cat, a monkey and a dragon.

  ‘Shooting prizes,’ said Max. ‘From the fair. I must have been about your age when I won those, and look here…’ He showed James a small painting of a stag. ‘All my own work!’

  ‘You painted it?’ said James, smiling.

  ‘Fancied myself as an artist once. Studied in Germany for a while before the war… Nothing ever came of it.’

  James went over to check the view from the window. He could see the wide, shallow river and the trees beyond.

  ‘Fancy a cast or two?’ said Max, joining him. ‘See if we can’t catch us a couple of finnock for our lunch.’

  ‘Finnock?’

  ‘Sea trout. Fresh from the Atlantic. There’s a lovely spring run on at the moment. The river’s starting to come alive with fish. Had a good lot of rain a couple of days ago so she’s in spate, but the water’s clearing nicely.’

  ‘I don’t really know much about fishing,’ James apologised. ‘You might as well be speaking Japanese.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make a fisherman of you, lad. Isn’t she a lovely river?’

  ‘Yes… I suppose so.’

  ‘You know, James, you can look at a river, you can walk by a river, you can paint it, you can throw stones into it, but if you want to be a part of the river, then you need to fish it. When you stand in a river, fishing with a fly, you’re part of nature, you’re a heron, you’re a kingfisher, you get to know the river like an old friend. Sometimes you’ll get lost in it; standing there, you’ll forget what you’re doing, and then, bang, you’ve a fish, the line goes heavy, it moves in your hands, like a dog shaking its head, and then it’s you versus the fish…’

  For the next couple of hours Max showed James the rudiments of fly-fishing, how to thread the rod, how to tie the hooks, and how to cast, flicking the line back over your shoulder, then snapping it forward in a movement like knocking a nail into a wall with a hammer, so that the line whips out over the water and drops the fly exactly where you want it.

  James enjoyed learning how to cast, but he got frustrated waiting for a fish to bite. He felt a tug at one point, but lost it. Max didn’t even get a tickle.

  ‘That’s the thing with fishing,’ he said, sitting down on the bank and taking out a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘You never know what’s going to happen. I think if you were guaranteed to catch a fish every time, you’d soon grow bored of it.’

  James wasn’t so sure about that. It was too much of a disappointment not to actually catch anything. He watched as Max put a cigarette into his mouth and lit it, greedily inhaling the smoke. Max had one brief look of pleasure, before he was convulsed with a series of body-wrenching coughs that were painful to watch. James thought they’d never stop, but at last Max recovered. His eyes watering, he wiped his lips again with his handkerchief and studied the gold-banded cigarette. ‘I don’t suppose these things are doing my poor old lungs much good,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘So why don’t you stop?’ said James as Max painfully cleared his throat.

  ‘Why indeed? Well, for one thing it’s too late, the damage
is done. I’m going to die sooner rather than later.’ With that, Max launched into another horrible storm of coughing. ‘So I may as well – cough – enjoy myself – cough – while I can…’

  ‘I don’t think I will ever smoke,’ said James.

  ‘Good for you…’ Max managed to gasp. ‘Here’s to the certainties of youth. You know, James, I was certain of a lot of things when I was a boy, but sadly, as you grow older, your certainties crumble. Life has a habit of sneaking up on you and playing you dirty tricks. I started smoking during the war. We all did then; we couldn’t have cared less, even if we’d known that the cigarettes would kill us, because we had only one certainty: that we were going to die in those filthy trenches. Death was the only thing we could be sure of.’

  James was thankful that he had missed the war. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like to fight, to have to kill another man or risk being killed yourself.

  ‘My father never talked about the war,’ he said.

  ‘None of us do, it’s best to forget. But for me the war was a little more complicated. I was not allowed to talk about it at all.’ Max raised his eyebrows at James.

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked James.

  ‘A lot of what I did in the war was secret.’

  ‘My father hinted at things,’ said James. ‘But that was all.’

  ‘I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now. Though I’ve had to keep things under my hat all these years. I was what you might call a spy.’

  ‘Really?’ said James. ‘A spy. How exciting.’

  ‘You think so? If constant, belly-rotting fear is exciting. It certainly didn’t feel so at the time. At the time it just meant that I was terrified, morning, noon and night. They recruited me in France. I’d been wounded, nothing serious, caught a bullet in the leg… Here.’

  Max rolled up his trouser leg and showed James a small puckered dent just above his knee. ‘Went clean through, but I couldn’t walk for a bit. Met a chap in the hospital, got talking. They were looking for a fluent German-speaker and, as I’d been out that way before the war, I was pretty proficient at it.’

  Max was off in a world of his own now, not looking at James, staring away down the river, talking almost to himself. James realised that most of what he was saying he had never told anyone else before; it was as if he were trying to unload all his memories while there was still time. He told James of the briefings, of his promotion to the new rank of Captain, his training in codes and passwords, poisons and unarmed combat, his forged papers, the network of other spies who would help him. And he told how he was smuggled by boat far behind the enemy lines, where he had to pose as Herr Grumann, a railway engineer, and keep a detailed record of train movements. Then he described the long days and weeks pretending to be someone else, praying he wouldn’t be discovered, and giving his weekly reports to his contact to smuggle back to France.

  And then he stopped and just sat, staring silently into the water.

  ‘What happened?’ asked James after a long while. ‘Were you ever captured?’

  Max turned to look at him. He seemed slightly surprised, as if he’d forgotten that James was there.

  ‘That’s another story,’ said Max, ‘for another day. Come along, we’d best be getting back. Charmian will be wondering where we’ve got to.’

  Charmian had roasted a chicken for lunch and they ate it with steamed carrots, potatoes and spring greens, freshly picked, firm and brightly coloured. James savoured every single mouthful. After the muck at Eton, it was like eating the food of the gods.

  ‘Do you know anything about a boy called Alfie Kelly?’ James asked as Aunt Charmian brought a big apple pie to the table.

  ‘Dreadful business,’ said his aunt, cutting into the pie and releasing a delicious cloud of steam that smelt of apples and sugar and cinnamon.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Max, who looked very tired and on the verge of falling asleep at the table.

  ‘You remember, Annie Kelly’s boy. I told you about him, young lad about James’s age who’s gone missing.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Max, and his whole face came alive. He sat up straighter in his chair. ‘I did a bit of asking around myself. He was very keen on fishing, you see. Always keep a lookout for fellow anglers, James. Popular opinion is that he fell in some river somewhere trying to catch a fish, which is preposterous. He’d know these rivers, know the dangers. And where’s his gear? No sign of it. Gordon says he thinks he might have gone up to Loch Silverfin. Says he saw him a couple of times, heading off in that direction just before he disappeared, although nobody from Keithly goes up that way now. If I were in better shape I’d hike up there and take a look myself.’

  ‘But nobody’s allowed to fish on Loch Silverfin,’ said Charmian, serving James a plate of pie.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Max. ‘That would have been a challenge for the lad. My God, what I wouldn’t give to have another cast at those waters. The fishing used to be some of the best around. But I don’t like that place. They’re an odd bunch up there. If you ask me, that Lord Hellebore’s up to something.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said James, nearly choking on his mouthful of pie. ‘Did you say Lord Hellebore?’

  10

  The Bamford & Martin Sidevalve, Short Chassis Tourer

  ‘Lord Randolph Hellebore,’ Max explained, ‘owns the castle and most of the land around here.’

  ‘His son is at Eton,’ said James.

  ‘That’s right. I heard that. Do you know him?’

  ‘He’s a couple of years older than me,’ said James, not wanting to give anything away.

  ‘Yes,’ said Max. ‘Interesting business. When the old laird died, a few years back, without an heir, Randolph and his brother, Algar, inherited the place, although his brother died soon afterwards in some kind of accident, I gather. The castle was pretty much falling down, the family was heavily in debt and nobody expected Randolph to move back over here, they thought he’d just sell it all off, but he turned up and set to work with his American can-do attitude. Managed to save the place, and how.’

  ‘He’s very rich, isn’t he?’ said James.

  ‘Rich as Croesus. I met him once, a year or so ago; seemed friendly enough, if rather loud. Popular with the locals, though. He’s built a new school and a village hall. They’re forever having dances there. Wants to be accepted. Wants very much to become a proper British lord. But I don’t trust him. He’s very secretive, got men all about the place with guns.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Claims it’s for security. He’s a got a small arms factory there, but he’s definitely up to something.’

  ‘What?’ said James. ‘What do you think he could be up to?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Max, putting down his spoon. ‘What do I think? I don’t know, James. All we have to go on is rumour, and my training taught me one thing: information is the most important weapon in your arsenal. The more you know, the better equipped you are. As I say, if I wasn’t such a blasted ruin of a man I’d go up there and find out what I could. Rumour and gossip are no good to any man, though they keep the womenfolk happy.’

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ said Charmian. ‘I’ve heard you and your cronies down at the pub gossiping like a bunch of old hens.’

  Max grinned at James. ‘Doesn’t do to tease your Aunty C., eh, James?’

  ‘It certainly does not,’ said Charmian. ‘I can hold my own with any man.’

  ‘Now don’t be modest, sis, you could thrash any man I know.’

  Max started to laugh, and the laugh turned into a cough. Charmian caught James’s eye and gave him a reassuring smile, then poured a glass of water and passed it over to her brother. After a minute or so, he managed to stop coughing and gratefully drank the water down.

  ‘I think you’d better take it easy this afternoon,’ said Charmian quietly.

  ‘The lad won’t be here forever, Charmian – let the boys have some fun, eh?’

  ‘Will you be back on the river?’
r />   Max grinned at James. ‘I’m not sure that James quite shares my enthusiasm,’ he said. ‘But I do know something he’ll be interested in…’

  ‘There she is,’ said Uncle Max, swinging the big barn door back on its rusted hinges. ‘Isn’t she a pretty thing?’

  It took a few moments for James’s eyes to become adjusted to the darkness, but then, as the sun came out from behind a cloud, it sent a shaft of light down through a high dirty window and lit up a car, sitting on the stone floor like a patient beast.

  ‘She’s a one-point-five-litre Bamford and Martin Sidevalve, Short Chassis Tourer,’ said Max proudly, stepping up to the car and wiping dust off the bonnet with a clean cloth.

  James didn’t know a great deal about cars, so most of what his uncle said meant nothing to him, but at that moment, as he set eyes on the small, sleek, powerful-looking machine, he knew that he wanted to find out.

  Max switched on a light and James got a proper look at it. It was a two-seater, built for speed, with a long, high bonnet like the snout of a dog, and a rounded rear end like a boat. It was white, with black running boards that swept up over the narrow front wheels. Two big, gleaming head lamps, like crabs’ eyes on stalks, jutted up above the front bumper and, behind the low, square windscreen, a large steering wheel waited for someone to take hold of it and race away.

  ‘A little dusty, but she still runs all right,’ said Max as he folded the roof back behind the seats. ‘She’s built for the road, really, but I raced her a couple of times at Brooklands, you know, before I got ill. Just for fun. Never won. Too hot-headed. Always tried to go too fast and lost it on the bends. One time I even took on the great Tim Birkin.’

  ‘Really?’ said James, wide-eyed. ‘The racing driver?’

  ‘That’s your man,’ Max chuckled. ‘Showed me a thing or two, I can tell you. Couldn’t see him for dust, except for the occasional glimpse of his famous blue-and-white polka-dot scarf. Come on, let’s take her for a spin.’