'You do what he tells you, do you?'
He laughed. 'Sometimes.'
'Why didn't you offer me a job that day you took me down to see the Duchess?'
'Didn't know anything about you, did I? Besides, I'm just the old man's bastard. Makes a difference, doesn't it?'
'I didn't know,' I said.
'Well, now you do.' He turned and reached for the bottle on the table. 'Like another drink before you go?'
'No thanks.'
But he poured it all the same, handing me the glass and topping up his own. 'Here's to our better acquaintance.' He was grinning.
I raised my glass perfunctorily, the whisky raw in my throat and my mind on the future. 'He said you needed a skipper to run supplies to a rig on the Dunlin.'
He nodded. 'Deepwater IV. That's right. You'd be skippering the Mary Jane. That's the boat I've taken on charter. The usual diesel job, about sixty-five feet long, registered tonnage forty-five.' He finished his drink. 'The old man said you'd like to sleep on it.'
'Why offer the job to me?' I asked.
He shrugged. 'Why not? You're my half-brother.' He was grinning again. 'There's always fiddles running supplies for big contractors whose only concern is speed, so keep it in the family, that's what I say. Makes sense, doesn't it?'
'Maybe,' I muttered, and I put my glass down. 'I'll be going now.'
He nodded, seeing me to the door, the lamp in his hand, and the likeness to his mother very pronounced. 'I'll see you in the morning,' he said. The door closed and I was alone in that strange twilit world that was neither day nor night with the glimmer of water lapping the rocks below me. The moon was just rising, ragged patches of cloud drifting across it and a glimpse of stars.
I walked slowly back up the track, going over in my mind that strange meeting and feeling trapped — trapped by the sort of person I was, and by the system which didn't allow me to escape from my own past, the things I had done before I turned to the sea. If only they would leave me alone. But I knew they wouldn't. And now my own father, the man whose past I had come north to seek — for support, for strength — and he was there in that straggle of buildings, a part of the net that had closed around me. What had he been doing all those years?
He hadn't said, of course. He had evaded all my questions. But instinctively I knew, some deep communication between us — that plaque, that quote from Browning, it still applied — a man deeply unhappy, alone and embattled within himself. It wasn't just the face, the terrible twisted features. I had seen it in his eyes. He, too, was unable to escape the things he had thought and done as a young man. I felt weighed down, utterly crushed by this glimpse of an older, distorted reflection of myself. My God! Was this the road he had trod, drifting along the line of least resistance? And myself doing the same, knowing what my answer would be.
I had known it ever since he had offered me the job. I couldn't face another court, the police, prison, and my own world against me — anything was better than that. Even working with that little bastard Sand-ford. I laughed at that, laughed so loud I frightened a seabird from the verges of Loch of Cliff, the shadow of it taking wing against the clouds. If only I were a bird and could take wing! But I was grounded and the earth hard and hostile, his face grinning in the lamplight.
I reached the cottage at last and went to bed, alone and my mind in a turmoil of self-hate, as it had so often been. I couldn't sleep and the moon came clear, its shadows moving slowly across the tiny room with its sloping ceiling close under the eaves.
Two days later I took over the Mary Jane in Balta Sound. She was a typical island fishing boat, her wooden hull painted black, two tallish masts and a neat little white wooden wheelhouse. The crew were all Shetlanders and she stank of fish. We hosed her out and scrubbed her down, but in the three and a half months I operated her for the Sandford Supply Coy we never entirely got rid of the smell and I suspect that everything we carried out to Deepwater IV, particularly the meat, became tainted in the course of the passage.
In all that time I had no word from Gertrude. Ian had delivered the Land Rover back to her, and when she had read my letter, she had just taken the keys and slammed the door in his face. I hadn't expected her to understand. How could she when I didn't understand myself? All the labour of getting that trawler back into service, the problems and difficulties we had faced together, the shared experience of that one night, all thrown away. I had asked her to phone me, but I knew she wouldn't. It was finished — an episode. The reality was here, on this scruffy boat, with a bunch of men who, among themselves, talked a language that was almost foreign, even Jamie, the mate, who came from Yell.
At first we loaded at Toft on the Mainland side of Yell Sound. Later, when Ian learned that the police were satisfied I had shipped out in some trawler, we loaded direct at Lerwick to save the cost of the truck journey north. He was careful with his money, the only new piece of equipment on the boat a ship-toshore radio. And he had a signwriter paint the name of his company on each side of the wheelhouse. He was inordinately proud of the fact that he was chairman and managing director of The Sandford Supply Coy Ltd.
It was a fairly good summer for weather, and with not even a gale to relieve the monotony I seemed to live in a sort of vacuum, unconscious of the world outside. Once, when we were in Lerwick, I took a taxi out to The Taing, but the house was locked, the voe empty, so presumably it was true what Jamie had heard, that the Duchess had gone back to her old trade of fishing, and Gertrude with her.
We listened to the radio a lot, and sometimes I heard the news, but it didn't seem real — little but gloom and violence, and North Sea oil the only ray of hope. They seemed to think the drillers could magic the stuff ashore and in the Utopia that would follow, inflation and unrest would disappear in a cloud of fairy smoke.
At the end of August, I think it was, Ian came on the R/T to tell me North Star had drilled another dry hole. And the very next day, on our way into Lerwick, I heard on the radio that half the board of VFI had resigned. A fortnight later the results of the DTI enquiry came right at the beginning of the news bulletin; the Company's licence to operate as a bank under Section 123 revoked and the report such a damning indictment that I wondered where Villiers would find the money to go on drilling, his VFI shares almost worthless now and his financial reputation equally low.
And then Deepwater IV reached her planned depth in a dry hole and we stayed with her on stand-by for the three days it took them to clear the seabed and move to the nearby Cormorant field. She was on summer contract only up here in northern waters, for she was one of the new generation of drilling ships that maintain station over the drill site with variable direction screws linked to a computer beamed on the seabed. No cumbersome equipment like North Star, no anchors, no cables and winches. It was impressive to see the economy of time as she moved from Dunlin to Cormorant, the divers down in their bell the instant she was locked on to the seabed sonar and no supply ships risking men's lives and costing money to anchor her.
As soon as she was spudded in we were relieved by a large trawler. The Deepwater contractors were operating for a different consortium now and a spanking new supply ship, straight from a Norwegian yard, began ferrying sealed containers of food with the drill pipe and other equipment. We were out of a job and Ian ordered us back to Balta Sound.