Charles watched the sun-gold surface of the burn change in seconds to dull brown and then become pockmarked with heavy drops of rain. He heard a rustle of P.V.C. behind him as Frances tried to rearrange her position at the foot of the tree to keep the maximum amount of water off her book. The rain was no less cheering than the sun.
As he knew from previous experience, if you do not like rain, there’s no point in going to the West Coast of Scotland. The whole area is wet. Wet underfoot like the surface of a great sponge. Everywhere the ground is intersected with tiny streams and it is never completely silent; there is always the subtle accompaniment of running water. The wetness is not the depressing damp of soggy socks and smelly raincoats; it is stimulating like the sharp kiss of mist on the cheek. And it is very relaxing.
Charles twitched his anorak hood over his head and thought how unrelaxed he still felt. Suffering from anoraksia nervosa, his mind suggested pertly, while he tried to tell it to calm down. But it kept throwing up irrelevant puns, thoughts and ideas. He knew the symptoms. It was always like this after the run of a show. A slow process of unwinding when the brain kept working overtime and took longer than the body to relax.
The body was doing well; it appreciated the holiday. Clachenmore was a beautiful place, though it hardly seemed worth putting on the map, it was so small. Apart from a tiny cottage given the unlikely title of ‘The Post Office’, there was just the hotel, a solid whitewashed square with a pair of antlers over the door. Every window offered gratuitously beautiful views-up to the rich curve of the heathery hills, sideways to the woods that surrounded the burn (free fishing for residents), down over the vivid green fields to the misty gleam of Loch Fyne.
So the situation was relaxing. And being with Frances was relaxing. Arriving at a strange hotel with an ex-wife has got the naughty excitement of a dirty weekend with a non-wife, but with more security. And Frances was being very good, not talking about defining their position and not saying were they actually going to get a divorce because it wasn’t easy for her being sort of half-married and half-unmarried and what chance did she have of meeting someone else well no one in particular but one did meet people, and all that. She seemed content to enjoy the current domestic idyll and not think about the future. A line from one of Hood’s letters came into his mind. ‘My domestic habits are very domestic indeed; like Charity I begin at home, and end there; so Faith and Hope must call upon me, if they wish to meet.’
But he did not feel relaxed. He did not mind lines of Hood flashing into his head; that was natural; it always happened after a show; but there were other thoughts that came unbidden and were less welcome. He closed his eyes and all he could see were the writhing coils of the fat grey earthworms he had dug for bait that morning. That was not good; it made him think of worms and epitaphs. What would Martin Warburton’s epitaph be? He opened his eyes.
The fish seemed to have stopped biting. Earlier in the day he had a good tug on his borrowed tackle and with excitement reeled in a brown trout all of five inches long. Since his most recent experience had been of coarse fishing, he had forgotten how vigorous even tiny trout were. But since then they had stopped biting. Perhaps it was the weather. Or he was fishing in the wrong place.
Even with the rain distorting its surface, the pool where he was did not look deep enough to contain anything very large. But there were supposed to be salmon there. So said Mr Pilch from Coventry who came up to Clachenmore every summer with the family and who liked to pontificate in the lounge after dinner. ‘Oh yes, you want to ask Tam the gamekeeper about that. Actually, he’s not only the game-keeper, he’s also the local poacher. Only been working on the estate for about five years, but he knows every pool of that burn. Good Lord, I’ve seen some monster salmon he’s caught. They put them in the hotel deep-freeze. Mind you…’ Here he had paused to attend to his pipe, an aluminium and plastic device that looked like an important but inexplicable electronic component. He had unscrewed something and squeezed a spongeful of nicotine into the coal-bucket. ‘Mind you, what you mustn’t do is ask how Tam catches the fish. Oh no, I believe there are rules in fishing circles. But, you know, he goes through the water in these waders stalking them, and he can tell the pools they’re in-don’t know how he does it, mind-and he’s got these snares and things, and his ripper. It’s a sort of cord with a lot of treble hooks on. Well, he whips them out of the water on to the bank and then gets the Priest out-you know why it’s called the Priest? It gives the fish their last rites. Vicious little device it is, short stick with a weighted end. Anyway, down this comes on the fish’s head and that’s another for the deep freeze. Highly illegal, but highly delicious, eh?’
However the salmon were playing hard to get. So were the trout. So, come to that, were any fresh water shrimps that might be around. Obviously the recommended bunch of worms on a large hook ledgered to the bottom was an insufficient inducement. Charles turned to Frances, and put on his schoolboy party-piece voice. ‘A recitation-The Angler’s Farewell by Thomas Hood.
“Not a trout there be in the place,
Not a Grayling or Rud worth the mention,
And although at my hook
With attention I look
I can ne’er see my hook with a Tench on!”’
Frances clapped and he bowed smugly. ‘Ithangyoulthangyou, and for my next trick, I was thinking of going for a walk to work off some of Mrs Parker’s enormous breakfast in anticipation of her no doubt enormous lunch. Do you want to come?’
‘I’m nearly at the end of this book actually and I’m quite cosy.’ She looked cosy, tarpaulined in P.V.C. mac and sou’wester, crouched like a garden gnome at the foot of the tree.
‘O.K. What are you reading?’
‘Your Mary, Queen of Scots.’
‘Oh Lord. That’s not my book. I should have given it back. Borrowed it from someone in Edinburgh. Ha, that reminds me of Anatole France.’
‘Hm?’
‘“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those that other people have lent me.” A quote.’
‘I didn’t know you were given to gratuitous quotation.’
‘The bloke who lent me the book would have appreciated it.’
Some Victorian spirit of Nile-source-searching prompted him to go upstream towards the spring that fed the little burn. Any hopes of finding the source before lunch were soon dashed by the stream’s unwillingness to get any narrower and the steepness of the gradient down which it came. Centuries of roaring water had driven a deep cleft into the rock. Tumbled boulders enclosed dark brown pools, fed from above by broad creamy torrents or silver threads of water.
The banks were muddy and the rocks he had to climb over shone treacherously. More than once he had to reach out and grasp at tussocks of grass to stop himself from slipping.
At last he came to a part of the burn that seemed quieter than the rest. There was still the rush of water, but it was muffled by trees arching and joining overhead, which spread a green light on the scene. Here were three symmetrical round pools, neatly stepped like soup plates up a waiter’s arm.
He identified the place from Mr Pilch’s descriptions in the lounge after dinner. ‘Some of the pools up there are incredibly deep, just worn down into the solid rock by constant water pressure. Makes you wonder whether we take sufficient notice of the potential of hydro-jet drilling, eh? Mind you, it takes a few centuries. Still, some of those pools are supposed to be twenty feet deep. Tam claims to have caught salmon up there, though I can’t for the life of me imagine how they get that high. Maybe by doing those remarkable leaps you see on the tourist posters, eh?’
But Charles did not want to think about Pilch. The enclosing trees and the muffled rush of water made the place like a fairy cave. It was magical and, in a strange way, calming. Puffed by the climb, he squatted on his heels at the foot of a tree, and started to face the thoughts which regrettably showed no signs of going away.