‘Just foreign registrations,’ said Frazer.
Frazer started the engine again. Gently he let in the clutch and the car waddled out of the drift. He took the middle of the road, and at no more than twenty-five miles an hour we went all the way down to the bridge and up the next climb all the way to The Bonnet.
He pulled into the yard there. There was a crunch of gravel and a soft splintering of ice. The BMW was already parked but none of us remarked upon the way its driver had nearly killed us.
‘I’m not sure I’d enjoy it,’ said Frazer, talking of the voyage but studying our faces as if to see the effect the near-accident had had on us. ‘I’m a destroyer man myself … like to keep my head above water.’
I would have described Frazer as an office-boy, but if he wanted to play Long John Silver it was all right by me.
‘Peace time,’ pronounced Ferdy, ‘a submarine trip north is no different to trailing Russians round the Med in an intelligence trawler.’
‘In winter the Med’s a damned site rougher,’ I said.
‘You’re right,’ said Ferdy. ‘As sick as a dog, I was, and I could see that Russian cruiser as steady as a rock all the time.’
‘Your second trip, wasn’t it?’ asked Frazer.
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, you chaps never do more than one a year. It’s over and done with, eh?’
‘Are you buying?’ Ferdy Foxwell asked him.
‘Then it’ll be small ones,’ said Frazer. The wind bit into us as we stepped from the car but there was a fine view. The hills at the other end of the valley obscured the anchorage, but to each side of the summit I could see the Sound and the mist-shrouded islands that continued all the way to the grey Atlantic breakers. The wind sang in the car aerial and tugged at the chimney smoke. We were high enough to be entangled in the fast moving underside of the storm clouds. Ferdy coughed as the cold wet air entered his lungs.
‘All that air-conditioned living,’ said Frazer. ‘You’d better take your briefcase – security and all that, you know.’
‘It’s only dirty underwear,’ said Ferdy. He coughed again. Frazer went around the car testing each door-lock and the boot too. For a moment he looked down at his hand to see if it shook. It did, and he pushed it into the pocket of his trench-coat.
I walked across to the BMW and looked inside it. There was a short oilskin coat, a battered rucksack and a stout walking-stick: a walker’s equipment.
It was a tiny cottage. One bar; a front parlour except for the warped little counter and flap scorched by cigarettes and whittled with the doodles of shepherds’ knives. On the whitewashed walls there was a rusty Highlander’s dirk, an engraving of a ship in full sail, a brightly shone ship’s bell and a piece of German submarine surrendered in May 1945. The landlord was a shaggy-haired giant, complete with kilt and beer-stained shirt.
There were two customers already drinking, but they had taken the bench near the window so we could stand around the open peat fire and slap our hands together and make self-congratulatory noises about its warmth.
The beer was good: dark and not too sweet, and not crystal clear like the swill that the brewers extol on TV. The Bonnet’s had flavour, like a slice of wheat loaf. Frazer knew the landlord well but, with the formality that Highland men demand, he called him Mr MacGregor. ‘We’ll have another fall of snow before the day’s through, Mr MacGregor.’
‘Is it south you’re heading, Mr Frazer?’
‘Aye.’
‘The high road is awful bad already. The oil delivery could not get through that way: he made the journey by the road along the Firth. It never freezes there. It’s a wicked long journey for the boy.’ He prodded the peat fire with a poker and encouraged the smoke to turn to flame.
‘You are busy?’ asked Frazer.
‘Travellers. People walk, even in winter. I don’t understand it.’ He made no attempt to lower his voice. He nodded impassively at the two customers by the window. They were looking at large-scale walker’s maps, measuring distances with a tiny wheeled instrument that they rolled along the footpaths.
‘Travellers, walkers and spies,’ said Frazer. The wind banged on the tiny window panes.
‘Ahh, spies,’ said the landlord. He came as near as I’d ever seen him to laughing: the two men in the window seat looked like some inept casting director’s idea of Russian spies. They had black overcoats and dark tweed hats. Both wore coloured silk scarves knotted at their throats and one man had a closely trimmed grizzled beard.
‘We’ll have the other half, Landlord,’ said Ferdy.
With infinite care the landlord drew three more pints of his special. In the silence I heard one of the other men say, ‘In our own good time.’ His voice was soft but his accent had the hard spiky consonants of the English Midlands. In the context of our remarks the sentence hung in the air like the peaty smoke from the fireplace. What in their own good time, I wondered.
‘Well, what’s been happening out here in the real world?’ said Ferdy.
‘Nothing much,’ said Frazer. ‘Looks like the German reunification talks are going ahead, the papers are full of it. Another car workers’ strike. The Arabs put a bomb in the Tokyo Stock Exchange but it was defused, and Aeroflot has started running its own jumbos into New York.’
‘We get all the big news,’ said Ferdy. ‘And American home-town stuff. I could tell you more about the climate, local politics and football scores of the American heartland than any other Englishman you could find. Do you know that a woman in Portland, Maine, has given birth to sextuplets?’
It had begun to snow. Frazer looked at his watch. ‘We mustn’t miss the plane,’ he said.
‘There’s time for one from this man’s stone bottle,’ said Ferdy.
‘The stone bottle?’ said MacGregor.
‘Come along, you hairy bastard,’ said Ferdy. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’
MacGregor’s face was unchanging. It would have been easy to believe him deeply offended, but Ferdy knew him better than that. Without taking his eyes from Ferdy, MacGregor took a packet of Rothmans from his pocket. He lit one and tossed the packet on to the counter.
MacGregor went into his back parlour and reappeared with a jar from which he poured a generous measure. ‘You’ve a good palate – for a Sassenach.’
‘No one would want the factory stuff after this, Mac,’ said Ferdy. MacGregor and Frazer exchanged glances.
‘Aye, I get my hands on a little of the real thing now and again.’
‘Come along, MacGregor,’ said Ferdy. ‘You’re among friends. You think we haven’t smelled the barley and the peat fire?’
MacGregor gave a ghost of a smile but would admit to nothing. Ferdy took his malt whisky and tasted it with care and concentration.
‘The same?’ asked MacGregor.
‘It’s improved,’ said Ferdy.
Frazer came away from the fireplace and took his seat at the counter. MacGregor moved the malt whisky towards him. ‘It will help you endure the cruel blows of the west wind,’ he said.
So he must have rationalized many such drinks up here on the bare slopes of the Grampians’ very end. A desolate place: in summer the heather grew bright with flowers, and so tall that a hill walker needed a long blade to clear a lane through it. I turned an inch or two. The strangers in the corner no longer spoke together. Their faces were turned to watch the snow falling but I had a feeling