Restlessly I got up at about four in the morning and, locking my door behind me, took my bagpipes up into the mountains, seeing my way by starlight, humbled by the distance of those flaming unvisited worlds, melancholy with the insignificance of one self in the cosmos and thinking such unoriginal thoughts as that it was much easier to do harm than good, even unintentionally.
As always the melancholy drifted away into space and left acceptance. Some people clung to angst as if it were a virtue. I let it go with relief. Optimism was a gift at birth. Bottles were half full, not half empty. When I took up the pipes in the dawn and blew the bag full of air, it was marches and strathspeys I played into the brightening silence, no longer the sad regrets of the piobaireachd.
Zoл Lang, the real Zoл Lang, now lived in an old body. Through all her ages, persisting into her fanaticism, the essence of Zoл Lang had triumphed. The shell was but a crab's carapace, grown, hardened, shed and grown again. I played marches for her this time as a salutation.
She would never find the Kinloch hilt if I could prevent it, but I would pay my foe the most intense respect (short of capitulation) that I could.
I never counted time up there on the granite heights. The grey dawn turned to a brilliant blue sparkling day and I reckoned I would go down to the bothy only when the lack of breakfast gave me a shove. Meanwhile I played the pipes and marched to the beat and filled the whole optimism bottle slowly with uncomplicated joy at being there in that wilderness, alive.
Too good to last, I supposed.
I was aware first of a buzzing noise that increasingly interfered with the drone of the pipes, and then a helicopter rose fast over the ridge of the mountain at my back and flew overhead, drowning out all sound but the deafening roar of its rotor.
I stopped playing. The helicopter swooped and wheeled and clattered and circled, and while I still half-cursed its insistent penetrating din and half wondered what on earth anyone would be looking for in that deserted area at that early time on a Sunday, the helicopter seemed like a falcon spotting a kill, and dropped purposefully towards its prey.
The prey, I realised in dismay, was the bothy. I sat down and folded the pipes across my knees, and watched.
The helicopter made a sort of circuit and approached the bothy from in front, hovering unsteadily over the small plateau there, sliding through the air to one side of my parked replacement jeep and finally settling onto the ground the longitudinal bars of the landing support.
The noise of the engine faded, and the speed of the rotor fell away.
I watched in extreme apprehension. I sat as motionless as the mountain itself, aware that unless I moved or put my head above the skyline I was invisible from below against the jumble of rocks.
If the four robbers had come…
If the four robbers had come they wouldn't catch me up in the mountains, but they could again break into my house.
They could destroy my painting.
I felt as if it were a child I'd left there. A sleeping child. Irreplaceable. I wondered how I could bear it, if they destroyed it.
After what seemed time for several deaths the rotor blades came to rest. The side door of the helicopter opened and one man jumped out. A small figure, far below.
One.
Not four.
He looked around him then walked forward out of my sight, and I knew he must be trying the front door of the bothy. He reappeared, looked into the truck, stuck his head into the helicopter door as if talking to someone there, and then in obvious frustration walked to the edge of the plateau and stood looking down the valley towards the road.
Something about the set of his shoulders as he turned back towards the helicopter brought me recognition and floods of relief.
Jed, I thought. It's Jed.
Blowing a scant lungful of air into the bag on my knees I squeezed it and played four or five random notes on the chanter.
In the clear silent air Jed heard them immediately. He whirled and looked up towards the mountains, shading his eyes against the eastern sun. I stood up and waved, and after a few moments he spotted me, and made huge circular movements with an arm, beckoning, beseeching me to come down.
Not good news, I thought. Helicopters were extreme.
I went down to join him, though not with happy haste.
'Where the hell have you been?' he demanded, as soon as I was within earshot. 'We've been trying to phone you for hours.'
'Good morning,' I said.
'Oh, shut up. Why do you think you've got that portable phone?'
'Not for lugging around on the mountains. What's happened?'
'Well…' he hesitated.
'You'd better tell me.'
'It's Sir Ivan. He's had another heart attack.'
'No! How bad?'
'He's dead.'
I stood motionless, just staring at him.
I said stupidly, 'He can't be dead. He was better.'
'I'm sorry.'
I hadn't thought I would care so much but I found I cared very much indeed. I'd grown fond of the old guy in the past three weeks without realising the depth of my feeling.
'When?' I said. As if it mattered.
'Some time late yesterday. I don't know exactly. Your mother phoned Himself before six this morning. She said you'd given her your number but she'd phoned you from five onwards and you didn't answer.'
I said blankly, 'I'd better phone her at once.'
'Himself said to tell you that Sir Ivan's daughter is now re-routing all calls, and she wouldn't let him get back to your mother. He says she has taken complete charge and is being unreasonable. So he told me to find you by helicopter and fly you direct to Edinburgh to catch the first flight south. He said you could do without arguing with Patsy Benchmark.'
He was right.
We went into the bothy. Jed seemed struck dumb by the painting but agreed to take care of it again, wrapped in its sheet. We loaded it into the jeep; also my pipes and other belongings. I collected a few travelling things into the duffle bag. We locked the bothy door.
'Jed,' I said awkwardly, aware of how much I owed him.
'Get going.'
We didn't need, I supposed, to say more. He waved me away into the helicopter and watched until it was circling in the air before setting off homewards in the jeep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My mother wept.
I held her tight while she shook with near-silent sobs, the grief deep and terrible.
I wondered if she had ever cried in the dark for my father, privately broken up under the public composure. I'd been too young then to be of understanding comfort to her, and also I'd been too immersed in my own feelings.
This time, when I arrived at Park Crescent, she turned to me on every level, and there was no doubt at all that her emotions were intense and overwhelming.
From life-long habit, though, after the first revealing half-hour, she stiffened her whole body, damped all movements, powdered her face and presented, at least to the world if no longer to me, the outward semblance of serenity.
Ivan was not in the house.
When she could talk, she told me that at bedtime the previous evening she'd heard Ivan cry out, and she'd found him lying on the stairs.
'Such pain…'
'Don't talk,' I said.
She told me at intervals.
She had been in her nightclothes, and he in his. She didn't know why he had been downstairs. There was no need for him to go down to the kitchen for anything. He had water and a glass beside his bed, and there was the tray of other drinks in his study. He hadn't told her why he was coming upstairs. He seemed to be out of breath, as if he'd been hurrying, but why should he have been hurrying, it was after ten o'clock?