Murdo's War (28 page)

Then suddenly the storm was upon him. The wind sprang out, and snow, thick as feathers, beat in his face, choking, smothering. Horizontally the flakes whipped past, and each flake stung like a needle. They stabbed his eyes and cheeks, burned his ears, so that he turned the crown of his head into the heart of the blizzard. The cold gripped his skull, contracting and contracting, tightening about his brain.

He struggled up the exposed slope where the snow was thin on the ground, and the storm raged against him: he sought shelter in the gullies, and floundered to his waist in drifts. There was no landmark, nothing to see but the snow; nothing to hear but the wind and the noises he made himself; nothing to remember but the struggle and the pain. At times no more than half conscious, only something within Murdo himself refused to submit, and he fought on. Upwards – ever upwards.

And then at last came a time when the slope flattened, and in the dim roaring whiteness that was his world, he staggered to a little cliff and fell beside it. For a second, a minute, an hour, he may have lost consciousness completely. Later he recalled opening his eyes to find himself sprawled in the snow, one arm flung out, his head half buried in a drift. He turned his face into the rock face and lay there for a long time without moving while the blizzard swept past, massive and endless, yet left him alone save for a few soft flakes that drifted down.

Then he was out in it again. The malevolent wind screamed for him in the summit rocks. His hands and face were numb. On he trudged, and on. The ground tilted. Staggering like a drunken man, he half walked, half fell, down from the high pass. Time and again he tripped and lay where he fell, motionless, as if life had departed.

And then, suddenly halting, he realised that the snow had eased. Slowly his eyes swam into focus. The peaks were left behind, a great cliff hung above his right shoulder. He could see the moors and the river below.

With dismay he stared – it was the same glen!

Or was it? He rubbed a sodden red hand across his face to brush off the plastering of snow and slithering gouts of slush. He tried to read the landscape – the river, mountains, moor. Was it the same glen? Surely it was not – no, definitely it was not!

‘Oh, thank God!’ he mumbled, and sat down abruptly in the snow.

It was dark when he reached the river. He peered at the glinting black water, trying to see which way it flowed. It ran to the left. In the little light that filtered through gaps in the cloud, he followed the river down the broad empty glen.

Some time later – he never knew when, or how far he had walked – there, far over to the left, stood the squat shape of an old house, almost indescernible in the gloom. But there was no welcoming, beckoning light this time.

He crossed the quarter mile of heather and rough pasture. The house was deserted. His knocks returned a hollow echo from the empty hall.

It was no time for respecting property. Kicking beneath the snow, almost at once his boot struck an old fence post. With some difficulty he pulled it from the frozen ground, a clumsy weapon covered with grass and snow. A crude blow smashed in the window and sent the glass tinkling to the floorboards inside. He reached through and pushed the catch back, then heaved up the window. For a moment it stuck, then shot up half way and jammed solid. A sharp pain in his frozen hand told him he had cut himself, and putting the palm to his mouth he felt the taste of warm blood. He squeezed through the gap and pulled the window shut behind him.

Inside the house all was black, but slowly his eyes adjusted until he could distinguish dim shapes. He was in what had once been the living room. The place was not very long empty, for paper still clung to the walls and it was dry. A few sticks of furniture remained, and bumping into something soft he discovered, with a feeling almost akin to pleasure, that it was an old burst sofa. He swept some scraps of gritty paper and wood to the floor and slumped heavily upon it. Heedless of the ice and snow that still clung to his clothes, he drew up his legs. Minutes later he was sound asleep.

Outside the clouds were gathering again. The last stars disappeared behind an advancing storm cloak, and the moors resigned themselves to darkness.

DAWN CAME LATE. It was preceded by no lightening in the
east, no glow in the sky: it came, if you could say it came from anywhere, from the ground. Imperceptibly the night gave way to dimness, and dimness to an endless waste of moors, over which the clouds lowered and the snow drove in wild, fierce blasts.

The cold half-light filtered into Murdo’s cottage and stole about the bare rooms, revealing the filth of desolation. He tossed fretfully in his sleep, muttering and half crying out as the dreams raged inside his head. Mountainous black seas, crags, dead men, Hector, tearing hot bullets, the blizzard, Carl Voss, his father, exhaustion throbbed and swam. More and more, as the dawn lightened, he turned and flung his head from side to side. His breathing quickened almost to panting, then suddenly, with a choking cry, he sat bolt upright and woke.

Where was he? Shutting his eyes for a moment he tried to steady the trembling and sickness that convulsed his whole body. But he could not control himself. Rushing to the door he flung it wide, and heedless of the blizzard and icy gale that beat against him, vomited down the side of the house.

It seemed as if he would never stop. Long after there was nothing left his stomach kept heaving, and the sweat stood on his forehead, icy cold in the wind. At length, shivering and weak, he turned back into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

He was ill, really ill this time. Again his stomach cramped and he leaned against the staircase, pressing his brow to one of the struts of the bannisters. Slowly the confusion in his head quietened. Heavily Murdo pushed himself back and made his way to the sofa once more. For a while he just sat, staring wretchedly at the damp soot and rubbish in the fireplace, numb to everything but his own misery. At length he raised his head and looked towards the window. Through the broken pane and narrow strips of glass that were not covered with drift he could see the blizzard. Horizontally, blinding, the flakes swept past. No matter how he felt, he could not go out in that; no-one would venture forth in such conditions. It was a relief. Unless there was another house close by, and he was sure there was not, he must stay where he was. Try to get a fire going, dry out his clothes.

Shivering, he pulled his shirt and jacket tight to the throat, draped a filthy rag of sacking about his head, and ploughed through knee-deep snow to the end of the house. This way and that he peered through screwed-up eyes into the veils of grey, searching for any sign of life. Up and down the glen nothing was to be seen but the empty hillside, the shrouded river sixty yards away, and the driving snow. The wind rushed and whined about the house and few small out-buildings, the cold cut through to his skin. Abruptly, as he forced the front door shut upon it, the noise was cut off. For a moment he stood in the hallway, and his eyes closed. Reluctantly he opened them again and dragged himself on an inspection of the house.

Although it was dirty with the grime of desertion, the building was in good repair. The last occupants could not have been out for more than a year or two. Save for an empty window in the back kitchen, where a pane of glass had fallen out and let the rain in, and two extensive wet patches on the ceilings, there seemed little wrong with it. The black grates were messy, and the second downstairs room had been used by a shepherd, for a couple of liver-fluke tins stood in one corner, and the high mantlepiece was littered with some empty beer bottles, candle stubs and a bit of stained rag. Struck by an inspiration, Murdo poked about among this rubbish, and almost immediately his fingers alighted on a packet of Woodbines with two left in it, and an old match box. He shook the box and it rattled. With a sinking heart he tipped the charred sticks into his palm, but there among the dead matches were half a dozen or more with pink tips, and they were dry.

Almost hopefully he gathered together some paper – a dusty yellowed copy of the
Daily Record
dated the previous summer, some old paper bags that rattled with dry crusts, a
People’s Friend Annual
that had been kicked into a cupboard – and carried them through to the room in which he had slept. The dried-out corpse of a rook straggled awkwardly in the grate. Taking it by the wing tip Murdo tossed it into the far corner. Then he felt up the chimney in case it should have been blocked for some reason, but it seemed perfectly clear. He raked away the damp soot and old ash with his hands, laid the paper in the grate, and smashed a broken chair to a bundle of sticks and splintered wood. Soon a bright yellow fire was leaping up the chimney, smoking heavily as the remaining soot smouldered and the varnish flared on the wood.

One chair, however, will not keep a fire going for long, and hunting through the house, Murdo dragged everything burnable into the living room. It was a pitiful collection. Carefully he fed some more into the blaze. His trousers and jacket began to steam. With the warmth the fever drew on again so that his head swam, and he had to put out a hand to steady himself.

But before he lay down, he needed more wood. There was no shortage, for the whole house was lined with wood, but he felt too weak even to think of how he might tear up the floorboards. There were the doors, however, and going upstairs to a bedroom, he took hold of the door of a small cupboard and wrenched it back against the hinges, then slammed it hard. Again and again he twisted and slammed. The catch broke and the metal buckled. He took the flat of his foot and kicked against the hinges, his head thudding with every blow. The screws gave and the cream-painted door skewed awkwardly to one side. A few more wrenches and it came away altogether. Murdo propped it against the wall and jumped on the boards, then the split planks, and soon had reduced the neat door to burnable pieces. He carried them downstairs and laid them at the side of the fire.

In a while he had built a reasonable stack. It was still not big enough, but for the moment he felt he could do no more. He dragged the sofa across until it was only a foot or two from the blaze, then took off his heavy wet clothes and hung them around to dry. Wearing only his damp underclothes, he huddled towards the fire.

He had shut the door to keep the room as warm as possible, but the back and sides of the sofa gave little protection from the arctic gusts that blew through the broken pane. For a time he tried to put up with it, turning first one shivering side then the other to the flames, but it was impossible. He padded through the dust of snow to the window, and with the faded curtains and two or three splintered boards managed to rig a rough patch. Then he hurried through the hall to the other downstairs room, tore down those curtains also, and carried them back to the fire.

For a few minutes he crouched to the blaze, trying to dry out his underclothes. His shins and chest scorched, his back and the backs of his arms and legs remained cold as ice. Piling the fire as high as he dared he stretched out on the sofa, and lifting the curtains from the hearth carefully arranged them on top of himself like sheets. They were damp against his legs and bare shoulders, but at least they were warm and would soon dry out. On top he pulled a bit of ragged carpet he had found upstairs. Turning to face the fire he twitched the curtains about his chin and drew up his feet. The flames danced and flared; his eyes began to slip out of focus. The heat, gathering in the cocoon of the sofa, made the room swim about him. He closed his eyes.

For three days sickness and fever wrapped him in their web of sleep; not a sound, healing sleep, but a burning unconsciousness that inflamed his mind into grotesque nightmares and dreams that racked his mind as much as the fever racked his body.

Periodically he woke and stacked more wood on the fire, or gathered a handful of snow to drink, moving about the house in a daze of heat and cold, so that when again he collapsed heavily on to the couch and fell asleep, he might never have risen.

If the Germans had arrived at the door, he was theirs. He might not even have woken as they carried him off. But they did not come, indeed they could not come. For two whole days the blizzard blew and the moors were quite impassable.

But the third morning dawned fair. The snow had ceased during the night and the wind had shifted to the south. No longer were the clouds lowering and slate-grey, they were white, and as the morning wore on, chinks appeared and patches of sunlight moved across the moors. Some of the snow on the roof of Murdo’s cottage slipped and fell to the ground with a hiss and a thud. By the evening a listener in the silence might have heard the tinkling of water about him as the frozen runnels began to flow, and a tiny rustling as the snow slumped more heavily on the grass, and clumps of heather broke free from its weight.

That same Wednesday evening brought Murdo’s fever to its climax. The fire was out and the room very cold. But he had put on his clothes the day before, when they were dry, and beneath the covering of curtains and carpet his body was burning hot. The sweat streamed off him, beading down his face and making his hair wet. From head to toe his body shivered violently.

But by ten o’clock his breathing was easier, the trembling had quietened. By midnight he lay calm. The furrows left his brow and the wet hair dried across his face.

It was daylight when he woke. The nightmares were gone. For a long time Murdo just lay there gazing at the ceiling. Brilliant sunshine flooded through the window, revealing all the cobwebs and dust and the filthiness of the rags that covered him. But he was accustomed to them and kept them tucked about his face, for it was warm underneath. A musical noise of trickling water came from the window, and further off a heavy splashing roar like a waterfall.