'Coffee please. I'll be driving all night.'
She led me through into the flagstoned kitchen, and as she set the lamp on the table, she looked at me angrily. 'You don't think of my reputation, do you — coming here at this time of night. It will be all over Hamnavoe.'
'I'm sorry,' I said. I was thinking of the last time I had been in this house, the difference in my reception. 'I needed transport-'
'So you come to me.' She began filling the kettle. 'First my ship, and now-' She turned the tap off. 'Anybody else, anybody at all, and we would have kiss, just a mutual longing for sympathy and under-landing, and her face was wet with tears.
We stood like that for a long time, oblivious of everything. And we were relaxed. We were no longer righting each other. We had surrendered to something stronger than ourselves, and standing there with my inns round her, the softness of her body, the pressure of her lips, I felt a strange surge of confidence, a feeling that I had found myself at last — that I knew where I was going now and had the strength to get there. It was a marvellous, quite ecstatic feeling, and not explainable in any way.
'The kettle,' she murmured, and pushed me away. The kettle was boiling its head off and we were suddenly both of us laughing for no apparent reason, except that we were happy.
She leaned forward and switched off the gas. She was smiling now, holding out her hand to me and leading me out of the kitchen. The bedroom looked straight out across the voe and I remember a pale line of light to the west reflected on the water.
Then we were together, and for a long time, it seemed, the world stood still and there was just the two of us, everything beyond that tiny room, beyond the absolute harmony of ourselves and our bodies, as though it had never been, all stress gone, an obliteration in ecstasy.
I had never had this sort of an experience before, the giving and taking without restraint. Love is not a word normally used by trawlermen, but at least I knew a when it happened. And afterwards, there was a lot to talk about, sitting smoking together over coffee in the kitchen.
She put up a parcel of food for me and by then it was full dawn with the cloud all gone and the greenish pink glow of the sun just beginning to limn the line of the hills on the far side of Clift Sound. We kissed and she clung to me a moment, murmuring something about being careful and not doing anything stupid. But she didn't try and stop me. She knew it was a thing I had to do. 'There are ordnance survey maps behind the seat,' she called to me as I drove off. I waved, and then I was up the track and over the hill, with time to wonder what the hell I thought I was doing when I could have stayed with her. But that, I knew, would have been anti-climax after what we had just experienced. At least I was doing something, not waiting around until Gorse arrived.
Up by Scalloway I turned on to the main road and kept going north along the shores of Asta and Tingwall lochs with the sky a brilliant green shading to duck's egg blue and the steep slopes of the hills standing back above the water as the sun's glow increased in the east. There were flecks of mackerel cloud ahead and soon all the great bowl of the dawn above the peat hills was aflame. By then I had put Gertrude out of my mind; my thoughts were now concentrated on the journey ahead and what I would find up there at Burra Firth.
The sun was bright in the mackerel sky and it was warm as I drove through the dale between the black peat hills of Mid and East Kome. Coffee and sandwiches by Loch of Voe, then more black-peat diggings to Dales Voe and up over Swinister to Sullom Voe, where a ship was offloading material at the jetty and the wartime camp had been adapted for the use of the contractors building the oil terminal for the Brent and Dunlin fields. I was able to fill up with petrol here, and in the hotel, now full of contractors' men, instead of tourists, a surveyor who had just arrived gave me a copy of one of the London papers. I hadn't had a chance to read a newspaper for several weeks, but the world didn't seem to have changed. I glanced at the headlines over my coffee and it was all gloom — strikes, disruption, shortages, and Britain as always on the verge of bankruptcy. It seemed incredible that union bosses and more of the media men didn't come to Shetland and see for themselves the brighter hopes for the future.
An hour later I was at Toft, a north wind driving down Yell Sound, the waters broken and streaked with white. Standing on the pier I couldn't help thinking what a target Shetland could become when half the lifeblood of industrial Britain was passing through these islands. On Mainland of Shetland the people were of fairly mixed race, infiltrated over the years by Scots and others, but when I crossed into Yell, and farther north to the last island of Unst, I would be among purer Viking stock, men closer to the Faroese, the Icelanders and the Norwegians than to Britain. And if Iceland became wholly Communist, or the Russians moved across the Pasvik River into Finnmark in the north of Norway, how would these men react? In this watery land, touched with the old glacial hand of the last Ice Age, England seemed very remote and London a whole world away.
Sitting in the Land Rover, reading the paper while I waited for the ferry, I came across the headline:
VILLIERS HITS BACK AS VFI SHARES TUMBLE. It W3S an account of the DTI Enquiry in London into the Star-Trion deal and Villiers was challenging his detractors to risk their own money on the West Shetland shelf — The trouble with our country is that politicians and their bureaucratic masters are only interested in equality in poverty — in how a meagre cake can be shared more fairly — when they should be bending all their energies instead towards increasing the size of that cake by every means in their power. This is what I am doing, and shall go on doing — whatever the cost, whatever the risk. Call me a buccaneer if you like — that is a term of abuse thrown at me by Mr Swingler, my own Conservative member. All right, I am a buccaneer, and when times are hard, as they are now, Britain is the loser that there aren't more of us, but when North Star brings in another field — as I am confident it will — you won't call me a buccaneer then. You'll pay tribute to my sagacity, claim me as the shareholders' friend, while others will call me a capitalist and scream for nationalization of my company.
The ferry was halfway across now, and I sat watching it crawl like a steel beetle across the foam-flecked waters of the Sound, seeing in my mind the man I had talked to on North Star at bay in that courtroom, angry and obstinate, fighting back with all that extraordinary vitality and energy of his. I turned to the City page. There had been a run on VFI shares, now standing at a new low and less than half the price they had been when the market as a whole had bottomed after the Arab oil embargo. I was thinking of North Star then, of its loneliness out there in the march of the westerlies, and of its extreme vulnerability under the orders of a man near desperation and periodically under the control of a toolpusher whose luck appeared to have run out.
Tailor-made to our purpose.
The ferry berthed while I was thinking about that purpose, about who would gain. Not the workers. Nor industry. Certainly not Britain. The direction my thoughts were taking scared me and I drove on to the ferry feeling as though, in crossing the Sound, I was moving into another world, a step nearer the destiny to which all my life had been a preparation. It was not a nice feeling.
From Flukes Hole on the other side I took the lesser road that ran up the western coast of Yell. From Gutcher it is only just over a mile across Bluemull Sound to the island of Unst and then six miles on a good straight road to the main port of Baltasound, another two to Haroldswick. There, in a little house behind the harbour, up near the school, an old man who understood the use of words took me into a strange wild world of myth and legend. He had bright bird-like eyes, intensely blue in the dark wind-wrinkled face, large gnarled hands, and a voice so soft, so lyrical in speech, that to hear him talk was like listening to music. His name was Robert Bruce — 'That's no' a verra good name to have in the island of Unst.'