Rum Affair by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online Page A

Hebrides?”
    I did not. I was prepared to suffer the Hebrides until I came to the one that was called Rum. The others might sink, plop, as of that moment I shook my head.
    “Oh, but how super! You’ll adore them. I like them when it’s very, very wet. It is, often. I walk about in my bare feet and the mud goes squidge. Do you know we’re going to pass Staffa?”
    I knew. Staffa, which has an underground sea cavern and a rock formation superior to the Giant’s Causeway: I knew. I was sick of Staffa. It was beside Iona, the third call; that was all I was interested in. Then Barra and Rodel in the Outer Hebrides. Then the island of Skye; and then Rum. After Rum, Dolly could sink; assuming my portrait was finished. As Victoria prattled on about Staffa, I looked round.
    The sea sparkled. On either side of the Gare Loch the hills were green, and above, the sky was a filmy, spacious pale blue. Just ahead of us, as Victoria, twisting round, picked her way towards the lanes between moorings, were the first of the yachts. Some were quiet, with bare poles, but most were bustling with people. There was chat, and the noise of generators and engines turning over, and the grating sound of ropes in pulley blocks as sails were hoisted; all made thin and harmless by the unconfined water and air. As we began to pass them, Victoria did a very passable if libellous commentary about each.
    Only twenty, I gathered, of the Club’s eighty odd members had entered for this particular race: in any case for reasons of safety (safety?) the smallest were barred. For the rest, there was handicapping of a fairly cursory sort over the two halves of the circuit: before the day’s sail to the Crinan Canal which would give us access to the west coast proper, and again on Thursday, when we restarted from the far end of the canal. Everyone was forced to clock in at a checkpoint on each place to be visited, and only the actual sailing time between islands would count in the end. If the weather was bad, there was no reason, explained Victoria comfortingly, why one shouldn’t lie up in harbour until it improved: in fact everyone usually did. But if there was a good wind, for example, you might find yourself sailing night and day to make use of it. It depended.
    “It seems an odd way of spending a holiday,” I remarked as we rowed past all these frantic small boats occupied, according to Victoria, by vacationing judges, doctors and chartered accountants, accompanied by their wives, friends and occasionally nieces. “But you and Mr Ogden are awfully keen?”
    “Cecil is. Cecil’s marvellous,” said Victoria. Her head screwed permanently over her shoulder, she was digging alternately with this oar and that, avoiding boats big and little. “That’s Weevli. That’s Ballyrow: they’ve got a super new record player; you’ll hear it at Crinan; and there’s Blue Kitten; I’m afraid he practises piping. But Nina’s absolutely dreamy: he plays the Hawaiian guitar: he has a cousin in a group. Crinan’s mad: they all get together and get sloshed. You’ll love it.” She turned round, her way being momentarily clear, and added, referring, I soon realised, to Ogden: “He built Seawolf practically himself. How many men could do that? With his own hands. On nothing, just about: his people are creeps and he’s got a thing about asking for help. You know. But people know the boat is his life, and they appreciate that, around here. He knows all the locals and the anchorages, and people are jolly good and help when they can. They know he’s genuine.” Suddenly, she tossed her hair back and before it was blown straight back over her face by the wind I saw a thin, bony, rather sad face, like a medical missionary who once addressed us at the Home. Victoria said: “He feels a bit spare at times: who wouldn’t, with the hard work and the loneliness. But he’s a rather epic type, really . . . This one’s Binkie.” She indicated the boat we were just about to