behind the reception desk remembered Catriona and greeted her with a smile.
“How’s your brother?” she enquired sympathetically. “But he was lucky, wasn’t he?”
If one considered that lying paralysed on the ground while all around one the world went up in flames, filled with the screams of the dying, then yes, Magnus had been lucky, Catriona acknowledged, but the girl meant well, so she smiled and asked if they had a vacant room.
“I’m sorry, Miss Peterson, but we don’t. You see, a party of oilmen flew in from Aberdeen this afternoon and can’t get out again until the weather lifts.”
Oilmen! Catriona grimaced distastefully over the word. The Shetlanders had learned to live with their intrusion into their lives; to accept their busied coming and going from the mainland to the huge oil terminal at Sullom Voe and the sea-rigs.
“Look,” the receptionist suggested helpfully, “I’ll ask them if they’ll mind doubling up and leaving a room free for you. I’m sure they won’t. They’re out at the moment, but I’ll get someone to shift their things and tell them when they come back.”
She spoke with the assurance of someone inured to climatic conditions which could suddenly imprison travellers against their will, and pored thoughtfully over the register, before pencilling out a name and writing Catriona’s in its place.
She herself had no compunction about depriving the man of his room. And besides, hadn’t Magnus often said that oilmen could sleep anywhere?
She hadn’t bothered to bring a change of clothes, but there was a chemist’s where she could buy a toothbrush and other necessities and she could rinse her undies out to dry overnight. Thanking the girl with a grateful smile, she slipped out once again into the murky afternoon.
It was dark already, but she found her way unerringly to the small chemist’s. He too asked after Magnus, and Catriona supplied him with a noncommittal answer. In her handbag was the prescription Mac had given her for the sleeping tablets Magnus needed to stop him having those terrible nightmares where he relived his accident over and over again. Physically her brother was as he had always been, but mentally he was maimed and crippled, a victim of the paralysing fear inherited from his accident.
Shivering, Catriona stepped out into the street, her vivid imagination picturing the scene; the unending oil-fields and tank farms; the hot desert sands; all so clearly drawn for her in Magnus’s letters home. For as long as Catriona could remember he had wanted to be a geologist, and he had loved his job with United Oil. But to them he was just another employee, expendable and unimportant. Impotent anger flared in her eyes, her hatred of the huge oil conglomerates and everything they stood for overwhelming her. Magnus had once been a part of that world; the world of oil and tough, hard men, but all that had ended in the Middle East on a night of terror and pain when the black sky had turned scarlet with hungry flames and people sitting safely behind desks many thousands of miles away had been too greedy to take precautions to remove their men from the danger of Arab insurrectionists, who had swept the huge oilfield with bombs and machinegun fire, and Magnus, stunned by a vicious blow from a rifle, had had to lie helpless behind the flames until he was rescued.
The mental agony he had endured could never be atoned for, and Catriona’s hatred for the men who had allowed this to happen to her brother had grown over the months of watching him fight against the fear that night had bred deep inside him.
Until it was conquered he refused to return to his work, claiming that he was useless as a geologist while he carried this terrible burden of fear and that he could not trust himself in any situation where men’s lives might be at stake, not to turn and flee like a terrified child.
It was this knowledge of the extent of his fear which tormented him night and day, and which Mac and Catriona were fighting so desperately to overcome, and as her brother lost heart, Catriona’s rage grew. If United Oil had been more caring of its employees and less greedy for its oil Magnus would not be hiding himself away on Falla, blenching at every mention of other oilmen, sickened by the thought that he could no longer include himself among their number. Oilmen were fearless; and it was this myth which Catriona was fighting so valiantly to explode. Everyone knew fear; and she was sure that once Magnus could be brought to accept this he would be well on the way to recovery.
Mac had said that Magnus might recover faster among other people, but her brother flatly refused to leave Falla, sinking into the withdrawn silences which so dismayed Catriona as she remembered how he used to be. What he was suffering from was something akin to shell-shock, or so Mac had told her. Catriona only knew that she would give anything to have her brother restored to his old self. He had not even demurred when Catriona told him that she was giving up her training course in order to be with him—a sure sign that he was not his normal self.
The small hotel foyer was crowded when Catriona got back. A group of men stood by the bar, their presence filling the room; tall, rugged and dressed in worn denims and tough leather jackets, they proclaimed their trade to Catriona without her needing to overhear a word of their conversation. Oilmen! She turned her back on them with bitter eyes. She hated them and everything they stood for. That her hatred was illogical she could not deny, but that did not make it any the less real, and she acknowledged that its existence was due to Magnus’s accident.
One of them, a tall burly redhead, caught her eye as she squeezed past on her way to the reception desk. She gave him a freezing look in response to his openly admiring smile and as she turned her head, saw him address a comment to the man standing beside him facing the bar. The man turned, green eyes raking Catriona assessingly, a helmet pushed back on thick dark hair, his appearance that of a man accustomed to giving rather than receiving orders. Something in his glance made Catriona’s anger quicken; it was not appreciative as his redheaded companion’s had been, but rather dismissive, and Catriona felt herself flushing beneath his cool appraisal. The redhead spoke and his eyebrows rose, and Catriona knew beyond doubt that she was the subject of their conversation. His eyes dwelt for a moment on the soft thrust of her breasts beneath the thick Shetland wool jumper she was wearing and were then averted as he made some response.
What had they been saying about her? Catriona wondered as she reached the reception desk. Since her return to the island she had had nothing to do with the oilmen, but she had heard surprisingly good reports of them from the crofters and knew that several of the local girls had found themselves boyfriends from their ranks. There had been no tentative, shy admiration in the look she had received, though. It had been openly and blatantly sardonic. Long after the man ought to have been forgotten and her dinner had been consumed, Catriona found him lingering intrusively in her thoughts. The noise from the bar was steadily growing in volume; signs that the oilmen were enjoying themselves and obviously intended to continue doing so, and rather than return to the bar Catriona decided to go straight to her room.
The owner of the hotel was behind the reception desk and greeted her like an old friend. She asked for her key and checked the weather forecast for the morning. As she had hoped, it was good.
“You’ll get nothing like this on Falla?” Richard Nicholson murmured, glancing towards the bar.
“No, thank goodness!”
The asperity in Catriona’s voice made him frown.
“They’re no a bad bunch really. Noisy perhaps, but it’s natural that they should want to let off steam after a turn on the rigs. You’ll have been stocking up for Christmas,” he commented when Catriona made no response. “How is Magnus?”
“Getting better,” Catriona replied noncommitally. “Well, I’d best be on my way to bed. I’ve got an early start in the morning.”
They
