He made his way along the slippery walk towards us, stepping across the gaps with commendable agility.
‘Let me take that.’ He extended a hand, and then smiled in embarrassment as he noticed that the shiny metal case was padlocked to a shoulder-chain under my coat.
‘Help Mr Foxwell,’ I said. ‘He never fastens his.’
‘Neither would you if you had any sense,’ puffed Foxwell. The man squeezed past me and I had a chance to look down at the oily scum, and smell the diesel, and decide that Ferdy Foxwell was right. When I reached the brow – the horizontal fin – of the next submarine I rested the box and looked back. The young officer was bowed under the weight of Ferdy’s case, and Ferdy was stretching his arms to balance his two hundred pounds of compact flab, teetering along the gangway like a circus elephant balancing on a tub. Six weeks was a long time to spend in a metal tube, no matter about sun lamps and cycling gear. I picked up the case loaded with spools and tape recordings, and remembered how I sprinted across these brows on the outward journey.
A red Pontiac station wagon came along the jetty, slowed at the torpedo store and rolled carefully over the double ramps. It continued along the front until turning off at the paint shop. It disappeared down between the long lines of huts. The curved huts were shiny in the rain. Now there was no human movement, and the buildings looked as old as the black granite hills that shone rain-wet above them.
‘Are you all right?’ Frazer asked.
I shouldered the wet case as I started down the companionway to the jetty. The hatch in the sentry hut slid open an inch or two. I could hear the radio inside playing Bach. ‘OK, buddy,’ said the sailor. He slammed the hatch shut as a gust of wind hammered the hut with rain.
There was a panel van behind the Ford. A bad-tempered Admiralty policeman grumbled that we were two hours late and about how the Americans couldn’t make tea. He scowled as he signed for the cases and locked them in the safe in the van. Ferdy shot him in the back of the head with a nicotine-stained finger. Frazer saw the gesture and permitted himself a thin smile.
‘Perhaps a tot?’ said Frazer.
‘I wish I had your job,’ said Ferdy Foxwell.
Frazer nodded. I suppose we all said that to him.
There was the clang of a steel door. I looked at the nuclear submarine that had taken us to the Arctic and back. We civilians were always permitted to leave first. Now there was a deck party assembling forward of the conning tower, or what I’d learned to call a sail. They faced several more hours of work before the sub’s second crew arrived and took her to sea again.
‘Where is everyone?’
‘Asleep, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Frazer.
‘Asleep?’
‘A Russian sub came down through the North Channel and into the Irish Sea on Wednesday morning … big panic – hunter killers, sonar buoys, County Class destroyers, you name it. Yards of teleprinter. Seventy-two hours of red alert. We were only stood-down last night. You missed the pantomime.’
‘They were frightened it was going to put guns ashore in Ulster?’ Ferdy asked.
‘Who knows what?’ said Frazer. ‘There were two Russian intelligence trawlers and a destroyer off Malin Head, too. You can see they’d be worried.’
‘So?’
‘We stopped Class A Radio traffic for five and a half hours.’
‘And the sub?’
‘They tracked it out past Wexford yesterday afternoon. Looks like they were just taking our pulse.’ He smiled as he unlocked the door of his car. It was well cared for, and all dressed up in black vinyl, Lamborghini-style rear-window slats, and even a spoiler.
‘They’re tricky bastards!’ said Ferdy resignedly. He blew on his hands to warm them. ‘Who said something about splicing that damned mainbrace?’
Frazer got into the driver’s seat and twisted round to unlock the rear doors. ‘It might have been me,’ he said.
I reached under my oilskin coat and found a dry handkerchief to polish the rain off my spectacles. Frazer started the car.
Ferdy Foxwell said, ‘Never mind the dollars and the cinnamon toast and grain-fed steaks … six weeks without a drink: it’s positively unnatural.’
Frazer said, ‘Not all the skippers are as bad as Fireball.’
Ferdy Foxwell settled back into the rear seat of the car. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall and broad enough to carry it. He was in his early fifties but still had enough brown wavy hair to visit a smart barber once a month. But his hair was no more an advert for the barber than were his rumpled suits for his Savile Row tailor, or his curious inability to spell for the famous public school to which he’d also sent his two sons. ‘A drink,’ said Ferdy. He smiled. His crooked, gapped teeth needed only gold wire to complete the image of a mischievous child.
The Admiralty van containing our tapes went at the regulation fifteen miles an hour. We followed at the same pace, all the way to the exit. It was a double compound, with a large check-point at each gate, and the wire twenty feet tall. Newcomers were always told that HMS Viking had been a prison camp during the war but they were wrong, it had been an experimental torpedo testing unit. But it would have done, it would have done.
The dog handlers were drinking hot coffee in the guard tower and the dogs were howling like werewolves. The sentry waved us through. We turned on to the coast road and went down past the housing, the Officers Club and cinema. The streets were empty but the coffee-shop car park was full. The lights of the housing were lost in a flurry of sea mist that rolled in upon us. The Admiralty van continued along the coast road to the airport. We took the high road, climbing steeply up the narrow road that leads to the moors and the pass over the Hamish.
Defoliated by Iron Age farmers, the land is now good for nothing but a few black-faced sheep. This ancient tilted edge of Scotland has only a scattering of poor soil upon the hard granite that does not weather. I felt the wheels hesitate on an ice patch, and ahead of us the higher ground was grey with last week’s snow. Only the red grouse can survive outdoors on this sort of moorland, sheltering under the heather and feeding upon its shoots, moving gently all the time so that the snow does not bury them.
From here the valley formed an enormous stadium, roofed by the hurrying black clouds. Halfway up its steep far side there was a huddle of grey stone cottages smudged with smoke from open fires. One of them was a cramped little pub.
‘We’ll stop for a drink at The Bonnet?’
‘You’ll not get me past it,’ I said.
‘My God, it’s cold,’ said Ferdy, and rubbed the condensation from the window to see how far it was to the pub.
‘There’s the one I’m going to get next year,’ said Frazer. A large light-blue BMW was on the road behind us. It had a left-hand drive. ‘Second-hand,’ Frazer added apologetically. ‘It shouldn’t cost me more than a new one of these. My next door neighbour has one. Says he’ll never buy another English car.’
Cars, politics or climate, for a Scotsman they were English if bad, British if good. Perhaps he sensed my thoughts. He smiled. ‘It’s the electrics,’
