Cold, Lone and Still

to the kitchen quarters to prepare something which would restore their wasted tissues, Hera dragged me outside and on to the bridge over the River Nevis again.

‘You told me he was dead! You said you fell over him! You said he had been murdered! You said he had a knife in his back! You said he was stone-cold and stiff!’ she babbled. Well, shock has different effects on different people. Now that I had recovered a little, the shock of seeing him had made me reckless.

‘So you believed all that guff,’ I said. ‘Poor old you!’

She smacked my face and, as I suppose I was really somewhat hysterical at the time, this summary treatment had its usual result. I apologised and assured her that I had been certain it was the body of Carbridge that I had seen. I tried to take her hand. She shook me off, turned aside and began to cry.

‘For heaven’s sake, stop it!’ I said. ‘When they’ve had their meal, we’ve got to face that lot again.’ We did. There was much euphoria. There was triumph that they had walked The Way and much exhibiting of souvenirs they had bought in Fort William. Todd, said Carbridge, had been the favourite of the ladies. Tansy and Patsy had both bought him presents.

When they had all turned in for the night, I said, ‘Darling, I did fall over him, I did see him. I did touch him. I could have sworn it was he. I spoke out of turn just now, I know I did, but please don’t hold it against me. I’ve had the most awful shock. You can’t imagine what it was like when that lot walked in. And then, when you turned on me —’

‘I didn’t turn on you. Don’t you think I had a shock, too, after all you’d said?’

‘Yes, of course, but (and, please, I am not intending to start an argument) I do think my shock must have been more severe than yours.’

‘So you were telling me the truth? — or, at any rate, you thought you were.’

‘Darling, I swear I was!’

‘Then,’ she said, with a complete return to her usual forthrightness, ‘we’ll go home first thing tomorrow and when we get back to London you’d better see a psychiatrist. I’m not going to father my children on a man who sees a corpse where no corpse is. All that nonsense about falling over it in a dark passage!’

‘There was a corpse all right,’ I said, ‘but I made a mistake about whose corpse it was. I suppose I was badly rattled, and you must admit that Carbridge is a very ordinary-looking bloke. So far as his clothes are concerned.’

‘Well, I’m glad now that you wouldn’t let me go to the police. Nice fools we should have looked if we had reported finding a dead man who, a day or two later, was able to climb Ben Nevis and eat a hearty supper afterwards.’

‘Look, I made a mistake. Do I have to keep on spelling it out?’

‘I’ve looked a lot of times at the map since we started out. There’s no castle marked.’

‘It wasn’t a castle, I tell you. It was only a ruin and probably wasn’t important even in its heyday.’

‘Can you remember what the place looked like?’

‘I think so. Why? If we’re not going to the police, I shan’t need to describe it to anybody.’

‘Just as well, perhaps.’

‘Could you describe it?’

‘No, of course I couldn’t, but I would be willing to agree to your description if it ever came to the point. A thick mist, like the one we ran into, sends my wits wool-gathering. I never could find my way in a fog.’

I looked suspiciously at her.

‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, with an emphasis I could not account for at the time. ‘I want you to see a psychiatrist or a doctor, or an eye specialist, or even all three, as soon as we get back to London.’

‘I’ll be shot if I do!’ I said hotly. ‘What are you getting at, for God’s sake?’

She smiled in a cat-like way and repeated that I needed my head, my blood pressure and my eyes tested. I could have struck her to the ground. Instead, I attempted a verbal attack.

‘You’re becoming senile,’ I said. I thought the ungentlemanly shaft would hurt her. It did not. She still smiled.

‘Yes, but I wear well,’ she said, ‘which is more than you do. When I was your age, at least I didn’t see things which weren’t there.’

She was four years older than I was, a fact I had always deplored.

‘If you are going to make nasty cracks about what I saw or didn’t see, I shall marry Jane Minch,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘The children will look like plover’s eggs,’ she said. ‘Those freckles! Oh, my God!’

6: A Visit to a Psychiatrist

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We were lucky with the train from Glasgow, where we spent the night. The run from there to Euston passed without incident and, except that I was aware that she was keeping an eye on me, I might have thought that Hera had forgotten all about what had happened. The only spoken reference she made to our excursion in the mist was in the form of a quotation from a nostalgic poem by W. J. Turner. We were reminiscing about our walk along The