I nodded and went out. Surely to God I couldn’t be mistaken. Field handed me my coffee. ‘Sugar?’ I shook my head. The radio was playing softly — some jazzed-up singer mouthing of love. ‘You met my daughter, Marjorie, I think.’ I nodded, my mind still on Braddock. ‘I thought perhaps you’d care to drop in this evening. We’re not far, just beyond the church at Rodil; one of the old black houses. As a painter it might interest you. About nine o’clock. Would that suit you?’
It was kind of him, almost as though he’d known what it was like to lie alone in a small tent on the shores of a loch with a gale tearing at the nylon canopy. I felt I was very near to remembering that face then, but still the connection evaded me. In a newspaper, or a magazine, perhaps. I thanked him and added, ‘But I believe I’m staying the night in the quarters here.’
He turned to Ferguson. ‘Will you be along tonight, Mike? Marjorie’s expecting you.’
‘Yes, of course — my lords and masters permitting.’
‘Then bring Mr Ross with you.’
It wasn’t the sort of face you could forget, just like an axehead, keen and sharp in the features and broadening out to the head. I was still thinking about this when Cliff Morgan said he was going over to his quarters and suggested I might like to see his radio equipment.
Outside, the rain had stopped and the overcast had lifted. ‘That’s the warm front — it’s passed over us, you see.’ The wind was still as strong, west now and colder. ‘Whatever Braddock says, Colonel Standing was right to recall Adams. This is no weather for a helicopter landing on Laerg.’ The quarters were only a step from the Mess. He led me down a long passage and stopped at Room Number 23. As he unlocked the door, he said, ‘I don’t sleep here, except when I’m calling Canada or some place that means staying up half the night. I’ve billeted myself out with a widow and her daughter in one of the crofts in Northton. Very irregular, but I like my comfort, you see.’ He smiled and pushed open the door. There was a bed thrust close against one wall, a bureau and wardrobe huddled in a corner; all the rest of the room was taken up with his equipment. ‘Since I published that book I’ve been able to buy all the things I couldn’t afford before. It’s been produced in the States and translated into German, Italian and Swedish. Now I have everything I need; very complete it is now.’ He switched on, seated himself at the keyboard with his earphones. ‘It’s the weather I’m interested in. But you know that, of course. Now I want to find one or two ships who can tell me what it’s like out to the west and north of here.’ His hands, delicate as a pianist’s, were fingering the dials, deftly tuning. The tall cabinet full of valves began to hum gently. And then his right hand thumbed the key and the soft buzz of his call sign sounded in the room. He was lost to me now, silent in a world of his own.
I sat on the bed, smoking a cigarette and watching him. Time passed. I found some paper in the bureau and began to sketch him. Periodically he spoke, but to himself rather than to me: ‘The Kincaid. An old freighter that, six thousand tons. She’s outward bound for the Saguenay to pick up a cargo of aluminium. Reports wind north-easterly, force four … Bismuth — that’s one of the Hastings on air reconnaissance five hundred miles west of Ireland; reporting to Bracknell.’ He picked up two more ships out in the Atlantic, and then he was talking to a trawler south-east of Iceland. ‘Arctic Ranger. Wind veering northerly and a swell coming down past the east coast of Iceland. Getting quite cold up there. Temperature down to thirty-eight and flurries of snow. Wind increasing, around thirty-five knots.’ He took off his earphones. ‘I think I’ll go up to the office now and see what Ted has on the teleprints.’ He switched off.
‘Worried?’ I asked. I had finished my sketch and was lounging back on the bed.
‘No, not worried. Uneasy, though. And if it develops as I think it might.’ He pushed his chair back and stood there a moment, running his hand through his thick dark hair, biting on the pencil clenched between his teeth. ‘It would be unusual — so early in the season. In January now.’ He gave that quick little shrug of his that always seemed accompanied by a sideways movement of the head, and then he was pacing up and down; half a dozen steps and then about and retrace them, back and forth with his eyes on the ground, not seeing anything but what was in his mind. He could have got the habit from his time in prison, but I thought it more likely to be the loneliness of his job. He was a solitary. Why otherwise become a meteorologist and then take to operating a ‘ham’ radio station as a hobby? There are countless men like Cliff Morgan — intelligent, sensitive, artists in their way. They get on all right with women, but escape from the competitive male world by burying themselves body and soul in work that is concerned with things rather than people — impersonal things. With Cliff it was the impersonal forces of the earth’s atmosphere, his human contacts mostly made at one remove through the tenuous medium of the ether. I wondered what he’d do if he met opposition — direct opposition, man to man, on his own ground. I thought perhaps he could be very tricky then, perhaps behave with quite astonishing violence.
He had stopped his pacing and was standing over me, staring down at the sketch I’d drawn. ‘You work pretty fast.’
‘It’s just a rough,’ I said. ‘Pencil sketch of a man who’s made his work his life.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, I can relax. Indeed I can — if she’s pretty enough. But then there’s not much difference, is there now; women and weather, they both have their moods, they can both destroy a man. That’s why storms are given girls’ names. Do you need that sketch? I mean, if you were just drawing to pass the time.’
I saw he really wanted it. ‘It’s your paper anyway,’ I said and I handed it to him. He stood for a moment looking down at it. Then he placed it carefully on the keyboard. ‘This trip to Laerg,’ he said. ‘Do you have to go — I mean now, tomorrow morning?’
‘Of course I’m going,’ I told him. ‘It’s what I’ve wanted ever since I returned to England.’
He nodded. ‘Well, let’s go over to the Met. Office and see what makes. But I’m telling you, man, you could have it very rough indeed.’
‘No good telling me,’ I said. ‘Better tell the skipper of the landing craft.’
He didn’t say anything, and when I glanced at him, his face was clouded, his mind concentrated on a world beyond the one in which we walked. Two big towing trucks went grinding past trundling red-painted trailers piled with stores. I don’t think he even saw them, and in the Met. Office he went straight to the teleprint file and without a word to Sykes settled down at the desk to mark up a weather map.
Now that I knew something of the set-up, the Met. Office seemed somehow different — familiar ground like the bridge of a ship. The rain had stopped and it was lighter, the visibility much greater. To the left I could see the single hangar standing in the drifted sand like a stranded hulk. It was the only building in sight. Ahead, the wide windows looked out across the tarmac to a sea of dune grass rippling in the wind, humped and hollowed, as full of movement as the sea itself. And beyond the grass-grown dunes was the white blur of broken water, wind-blown waves moving in long regular lines towards the Sound of Harris.
Standing there, with the instruments of meteorology all around me, it wasn’t difficult to slip into the mood of men like Cliff Morgan, to visualise the world they lived in, that great amorphous abstract world of atmosphere. I found myself thinking of Laerg, out there beyond the sea’s dim horizon. I had seen photographs of it — etchings, too, by the Swedish artist, Roland Svensson. It was the etchings I was thinking of now, for I was sure Svensson had caught the mood of the wild wet world better than any photograph. Unconsciously I found my legs straddled as though to balance myself against the movement of a ship. A few hours and I should be on my way, steaming towards those sheer rock islands that for over thirty years had existed in my mind as the physical embodiment of an old man I had greatly loved.