The Dark of Summer Read online

  Eric Linklater

  The Dark of Summer

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  Where I shall live when I retire—where I am living now, on leave from the great watershed—there is, at the top of summer, no darkness at midnight. The day puts on a veil, the light is screened, and a landscape that, in fine weather, appears at noon to be almost infinite—in which long roads and little houses are luminously drawn—becomes small and circumscribed, and the hills and the shore, the sheep in the fields and the glinting sea, are visible, as it were, through a pane of slightly obscuring glass. The landscape becomes an image of the world in which we live. It is not dark, but nothing can be seen as plainly and decisively as the light of noon pretends—noon flatters and deludes us—yet all that can be seen is solid, solid enough for faith, and if one’s heart is whole one can enjoy the beauty inherent in our mystery—a beauty that is, paradoxically, more visible in half-light.

  That night—the night of our discovery—my heart was whole, as for nearly a twelvemonth it had been whole, in spite of my duty that made me a sort of tightrope-walker, treading a narrow crest in history. In spite, also, of my previous waste of life, much of which I had spent in a cold mechanism of existence. For almost a year I had been happy. Within the limits of my own imagination, within the scope of my consciousness, I had been fulfilled. I was skin-tight with love, God’s grace perhaps, and animal joy. My arm—my only arm—was round my lovely wife’s young body, my fingers, the only set I had, were outspread beneath her breast, and as we walked, and looked towards the sea, I recognized the long tentacles of land, reaching round a silver-dappled firth, as a symbol of communion; as my remnant arm was with her bright candour and her beauty.

  I could see, and not see. What I saw was transmuted by the diminished light of the sun that lay an inch or two below the horizon; and what I could not see was made real by an expansion of my faith in the solid substance of the nearer view. I had no complaint against a distant invisibility. Is it an insufferable boast, in our world, to say I was content? Though it be intolerable, it was true then, and still is. And partly the blame (if blame is necessary) must lie on the quality of light that in these northern islands is called ‘the summer dim’—the dimness, or twilight, at midnight, that is—in which can be seen beauty enough for happiness. Not enough, nor nearly enough, for comprehension; yet enough to make comprehension unnecessary. But most of the blame, and none of the twilight, falls on Gudrun. Gudrun has her own illumination, and it was she who had given me faith in the realities of the foreground and distance too.

  We had been married for less than a year, and to touch was still a flicker of fire that could blaze and consume us. We stopped on the road, and kissed, and if I had had my way we would have gone no farther. There was a patch of gorse there, smelling of honey and coconut, and the roadside turf was warm and dry. ‘But no,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t be foolish,’ and her soft Shetland voice in its nonsensical rhythm went up and down, up and down, like the little clapping waves that strike a green-fringed jetty in the sea when a quick motor boat passes. ‘Be sensible,’ she said, ‘and wait till we get home. I want to see the new road.’

  So we walked on to the cart-track that turns abruptly to the right, and the brand-new, black continuation of the road that would presently go down to the beach. With a bulldozer hired from the County Council I had begun, that morning, to cut a path through a belt of peat, a long tongue of peat and dingy heather, that lay athwart the hard foundation of the hill between the house and the narrow, green, serpentine firth a hundred feet below it. Most of our work on the property had had a good economic motive, but the new road was designed for pleasure: it would take us down from the garden gate to a little sandy cove bounded on either side by black rocks, through which, to the north, a narrow stream tumbled, with yellow irises on its banks, and on the other side rose low cliffs where we had found a wren nesting not far from the white-splashed untidiness of a cormorant’s roost.…

  So much for the setting: for the scene which is the end (so far as I can see) of my story, and in one respect was where it began. I am not a professional writer, and I cannot be sure of telling the story as it should be told: there may be devices and tricks of the trade by which a man of letters could magnify certain episodes and give to the whole more ‘effect’—but even without these additions (or, perhaps, subtractions) the story is, I think, worth telling, and that for two reasons.

  I am, in the first place, very much a man of my own times; and this, God knows, is not boastfully said, though a conclusion shot through with gratitude may to some look too much like boasting—I grew up in the knowledge that ‘we had come down in the world’; and by ‘we’ I mean, quite simply, all of us who by birth are British. I was born on July 1ST, 1916, when the battle of the Somme began, that cost us sixty thousand casualties in a single day and destroyed the great army of volunteers with which we began that war; and in the years of my boyhood and my youth I read and was told, again and again, of the vanity of that sacrifice. The Britain to which I was born was in every way shabbier and poorer—materially, spiritually, in political influence—than the Britain my parents had known; and what I found particularly depressing was my mother’s repeated assertion that the very best, the cream and the pride, of a generation had been lost. She herself, it appeared, had known a vast number of young men distinguished by the brilliance of their intellect, their personal courage, or their beauty—and all, all had gone. ‘All but your father,’ she would say, ‘and he, thank God, remains to let you see the sort of men whom our politicians threw away!’

  To an early appreciation of my mental and physical inferiority was added, therefore, a deep distrust of the politicians whose authority, it seemed, we must still acknowledge. Many of my contemporaries grew up under a like influence, and very few of us were unaffected by the endemic fears and anxieties of our time. We heard—at second or third hand for the most part, because we did not live with intellectuals—of the chaos that Marx had made of history, Freud of the human mind—and, perhaps, Einstein of the universe. We saw for ourselves the chaos in our economy that a money famine in America had made. And we in Britain, who had long since reduced patriotism to a small, enjoyable emotion, and never had any faith in messianic politics, watched with bewilderment and increasing fear the dreadful, the inexplicable growth of mass emotion, regimented nationalism, and apocalyptic leadership in Russia, Italy, and Germany.

  That was the world in which my generation grew to something like manhood, and then, for six years, our scrap of manhood was tested in another war. To have survived so much is, I think, something of an achievement, and I admit a persistent sense of wonder about the why and the how of survival. But my own small part in so large a miracle would not, of itself, justify my attempt to write of it; nor, by itself, would it make a story.

  The story I am trying to tell springs from my connection—I being so much the product of my time—with a succession or string of events that began more than two hundred years ago. My connection was in part accidental, in part deliberate; and my life was entangled in the string. I became involved in the affairs and death of a man called Mungo Wishart, a landed proprietor in Shetland, whose mind, to a singular degree, had been shaped, or misshaped, by a family history of long unhappiness: a history that started from sedition, murder, and dark uncertainties, and was continued through purposeless and wasteful litigation to no better end than the deformity of a man’s reason and a new project of sedition.

  If I was a product of my own time and a world in chaos, Mungo Wishart was the offspring of a remembered time when human weakness, enormity of human greed, and extreme of passion had convulsed a little, extinct society of rather stupid, often drunken lairds in one of the remotest parishes of Britain—and time past had done worse for him than time present for me….

  I have admitted that I cannot tell my story as neatly as, I daresay, a professional author would tell it; but I have begun it where I mean to end it—and so, if I am lucky, I may draw a full circle—and I have said as clearly, I think, as is necessary, that it springs from my involvement with the affairs of Mungo Wishart. I have admitted also that the story’s end will leave me happy—clean-contrary, I suppose, to what is expected of a story nowadays—and to that I shall add a claim to have laid, at long last, the ghost that bedevilled the poor tormented mind of Mungo. It is for that purpose I have begun my narrative with the tale of our evening walk—Gudrun and I, enlaced in love, walking to see the new road—for the ghost of an old injustice had had a corporal essence, and we discovered it. We found, in the peat, the body of a dead man.

  The bulldozer was in the blind alley of the new road. An eight-foot-high rampart of peat stood in front of it, and shining black walls confined it. We scrambled up the lower side to admire the view, to consider the descending line of the road, and on the ledge of the cutting a table-top of heather was dislodged by our weight, and slid down. We had time to step on to firmer ground, but when the great clod had fallen away it left a break in the peat, and in the break there was a little surface of something different. The surface of something that h
ad a different texture.

  We went down again, Gudrun helping me, and stood beside it. The surrounding peat was smooth and damp, a yielding solidity, but the foreign surface had the slimy hardness of an old rope left and lost in the sea. It was strangely but certainly something made by human hands and, as though the vegetable peat had resisted total marriage with the human body inside the coat, there was a little cleft about its head and shoulders. We had no doubt as to what it was, and leaping conjecture told us who.

  I remember Gudrun breathing, as it seemed, through a congested whistle, and though I had less cause for emotion I felt, under the quickness of astonishment, a sudden need to protect her against whatever might emerge from this uncovering of an old mystery—of old rascality, perhaps—and I would not let her look closely at the body. I told her we must wait for the morning to make a proper examination, and I took her back to the house. She came readily enough, and said nothing till we stood at the front door, when she asked, ‘Do you think it’s Old Dandy? It must be, mustn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. I don’t suppose Dandy was the only old scamp in Shetland to die of exposure—of drink and exposure—’

  ‘Or to be murdered,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, perhaps he was murdered. But it was a long time ago — it was two hundred years ago — and even murder doesn’t mean much after a couple of centuries.’

  ‘It does,’ she said. ‘You can’t forgive murder.’

  ‘Wait till the morning, and then perhaps we’ll find out more about it.’

  ‘But I’m sure it’s Dandy! So near the house, and for you and me to find him at last! Oh, I’m sure of it.’

  We went to bed and she lay beside me, holding my hand, but almost as separate as some thin, carved effigy on a medieval tomb of man and wife. I knew what thoughts possessed her—I had seen the havoc they made of her father’s mind—but I knew also that she was not haunted, that her mind was not deformed, as his had been, by an old twisted tale of a family so united in hatred that its two bitter branches had clung together in costly dispute that impoverished both of them, and left in both a brooding resentment because the one side still maintained, the other privily suspected, that the lawyers’ judgment had been wrong.

  But Gudrun had inherited neither their bitterness nor shame. She could not forget the story, but it had not darkened her mind nor disabled her judgment. Her father had prevented that. She had turned in revulsion from his bitter spirit, and gone wilfully into exile from all his people and their history. Her mother came of a different stock—a stronger, simpler stock of crofters and fishermen—and because her mother’s character had a placid strength, an untroubled sweetness, and Gudrun had inherited enough of her mother for contentment, her exile from the better blood of her spear-side was untouched by regret. She remembered, with a strong dislike for him, her angry father; but if the old story still teased her, it was only because she had the quick, gossiping curiosity of a country girl and wanted to know what had happened. I had no fear that her excitement and distress would last more than a day or two. Perhaps the night would cure it; for it was not the distress of someone born to unhappiness, but only the shock of dark discovery and a girl’s excitement, ordinary and natural enough.

  If we could find proof, moreover, that it was Dandy who lay in the peat—the drunken, dispossessed old Jacobite whose death was still a mystery—then the unsolved and teasing parts of the story might show more clearly. Supposition might be strengthened. It depended on the state of the body, and I began, with Gudrun still awake beside me, to try and remember the effect of peat on human tissues. Did it preserve or dissolve them?—But I fell asleep before I could remember, and when I woke Gudrun was sleeping like a child in summer, exhausted under a haycock, so I got up quietly, and dressed and went out.

  The men were late as usual, and it was half past eight before they came down to the cutting in the peat. The driver of the bulldozer, who was employed by the County Council, knew nothing of Old Dandy, but my own two men (we shared a fishing-boat and they worked my small farm for me) jumped to identification as quickly as Gudrun, and for twenty minutes or so, while they rehearsed the story, and argued about its details and gave their own explanations of it, no one laid a finger on him. But then, with care and respect in their hands, they began to remove the peat that was so curiously moulded about his body.

  I am no expert on costume of the eighteenth century, but his coat and breeches—hard and well-preserved and a little slimy—were certainly the carefully made dress of a gentleman, not the haphazard clothing of a peasant. ‘Old Dandy!’ said my men. ‘No doubt of that!’ But when we tried to lift him from his grave, we were disconcerted by the lack of substance within his coat. His body, it seemed, had collapsed. He was lying on his face, and the men did not know what to do and were reluctant to handle him, and grew a little shamefaced about their reluctance.

  I knelt and put my solitary arm under his chest, and felt for a solid hold, and like the others admitted a sensation of nausea at the yielding emptiness of the coat. But I tried to raise him, and then, with a little cry of pain, quickly drew back my hand; and that was foolish. For whatever had pierced my finger—my middle finger, at the base—scored a deep cut to the tip of it, and my hand, when I pulled it out, was a mess of blood oozing on black peat.

  I am a little ashamed of my behaviour after that, though I had some excuse for it. It was, after all, my only hand, and in the circumstances it was not unnatural to think of sepsis, of septicaemia, and the total loss of my hand. But I need not have been so precipitate. It was my old habit of fear—long buried, but buried alive, I suppose—that made me exclaim, in too high a voice, ‘O God, look at that! I must see a doctor.’

  ‘It is deep,’ said one of my men.

  ‘It will be poisonous,’ said the other.

  ‘That’s what I’m frightened of. Don’t touch him, or be very careful. There’s something in his chest, it may be a dagger. I’m going to Lerwick to have my hand dressed.’

  ‘You will be needing a driver,’ said the younger man.

  ‘My wife will take me. And don’t touch him till I come back—or be careful if you do.’

  I left them, and in a nervous hurry went back to the house and put my hand under the kitchen tap, and saw the cut finger open pinkly and show pale edges. There Gudrun found me, and I told her what had happened.

  ‘He was murdered,’ she said. ‘I always knew it! And you must go straight to the surgeon.’

  Gudrun was calm and swiftly efficient. It was her turn now to be sensible, as I had been the night before; and I still found common sense miraculous in her, who seemed too young and soft and wild to have any hardness in her mind. She bandaged my finger, she made breakfast for us, and because she was so lovely I thought it a marvel of womanhood that she could do these simple things.

  We drove to Lerwick, down the twisted spine of the island—the long road running from tip to tip of the Mainland of Shetland, that is sixty miles long and no broader than a lizard—and because my fear had gone, leaving only a nervous excitement, I felt, not for the first time, that we were riding on a sort of aery bridge—on a parallel of longitude flying above the natural earth—and indeed the view, now on this side, now on the other, of cliffs dropping suddenly to the white crumbling of a bright blue sea, gave to hallucination a shred of reality. I remembered, in my excitement that was darkened by only a small foreboding, my first coming to the islands, and how I had hated them; and when I looked back at the angry years it seemed that my happiness had been trodden out of me by their iron-shod feet as wines of great quality used to be trodden out by the horny feet of lean, sour-smelling, hungry peasants. It was in the year of touch-and-go, the year of the great alliance, that I first saw the islands that lie in three groups in the Atlantic north of Britain.

  The nearest are the Orkneys, squat and prosperous, divided from Scotland only by the swollen tides of the Pentland Firth; then the Shetlands, long, dark and narrow, poor and picturesque, bearing good sailors and small brown sheep; and lastly, far out to the north-west, the wild, abruptly rising, cloud-hung Faeroes, breeding also sheep and sailors, as if in her extremity nature could rear only what was born with a good coat or a bold heart—and to two of these archipelagos I went, for the first time, in 1941—twice in the same year, in spring and winter—and hated them all for their wind-swept nakedness. But now, because time had had its way with me, I took delight in their nakedness, having eyes to see how comely and how gentle it was.