In a Veil of Mist

Donald S Murray

• Publisher: Saraband
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781913393007
• eBook ISBN: 9781913393014
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE

A poisoned breeze blows across the waves …

Operation Cauldron, 1952: Top-secret germ warfare experiments on monkeys and guinea pigs are taking place aboard a vessel moored off the Isle of Lewis. Local villagers Jessie and Duncan encounter strange sights on the deserted beach nearby and suspect the worst. And one government scientist wrestles with his own inner anguish over the testing, even if he believes extreme deterrent weapons are needed. When a noxious cloud of plague bacteria is released into the path of a passing trawler, disaster threatens. Will a deadly pandemic be inevitable?

A haunting exploration of the costs and fallout of warmongering, Donald S Murray follows his prize-winning first novel with an equally moving exploration of another little-known incident in the Outer Hebridean island where he grew up.

1

Part One

Beum

- beat2

5

1

John wasn’t sure what made him so clumsy these days – the roll of the sea, the absurd nature of his clothes or the thoughts about Lillian that crowded his head most of the time.

Boom! And she was in there, drinking perhaps, in the Hermitage or the Lime View, with some dark-haired stranger he’d never come across before. The man’s features were always blurred and hard to distinguish, the shadow of a nightmare that might only exist in John’s head. She, however, looked real and convincing, though different every time he pictured her, as if she was trying on every item of clothing in her wardrobe. Sometimes, a red scarf coiled around her neck. Red shoes danced upon her feet. Scarlet lipstick daubed her mouth as she sang along to one of the Nat King Cole songs she loved, unaware of the irony of the words. (Unforgettable…) At other times, she wore the dark blue overcoat he’d bought, the one she had insisted on him getting for her, even though he tried to tell her they couldn’t afford it. They were that short of money at the time. Her long, black hair hung loose upon her shoulders. A cigarette dangled from her fingers. She wore a knitted, pale blue dress. She petted a neighbour’s dog, bending over to tousle its fur. Her features were so clear to him at moments like these that he could even imagine the words she was saying.

‘Oh, John Herrod! He’s nothing to me. Just a big, clumsy oaf who I made the mistake of marrying.’ 6

He tried his best to focus on where he was at that moment. The miles of hostile, barren moor. The fringe of sand in the distance. The dark faces of cliffs. Croft-houses. Crops of potatoes, turnips, oats. And the tight stretch of the Minch, its dark surface split and splintered by the wind. Waves swathed the deck of the Ben Lomond, their spume resembling the veil that Lillian had worn only a year before, and the wedding dress, too, she had on that day. Each time a wave swept over either him or the deck below his feet, he shivered, the shock of its impact reminding him of the coldness she had displayed towards him the last time he was home on leave, how she turned away again and again in their bed.

‘No chance… No possibility… I’m not in the mood…’

He grimaced, wishing he was somewhere else at moments like these, somewhere he might find reassurance, an opportunity to convince himself that his new wife wasn’t spending much of her life in another man’s arms. It was something his mother had warned him about.

‘She’s not ready for settling down. Far too young. Far too restless. You’ll rue the day.’

He had shaken his head, sure that she was misjudging Lillian, believing that his mother would come to the same conclusion no matter which woman he might choose to share his life.

‘You’re wrong, Mum. Give it a while. You’ll get to trust her.’

Yet his mother had been right. He knew that now, for all he tried to chase the thought from his head. Despite all his efforts, the truth of her words kept penetrating, seeping through the armour of the white protective suit – complete with goggles and respirator – that he wore most days. His doubts and suspicions distracted him as he worked, hauling the transit 7boxes into the animal store in the vessel’s hold. His fingers kept slipping, his concentration faltering from time to time. Sometimes his shoulders brushed against others working on the boat, knocking a box from another man’s grasp.

‘Herrod! What the hell’s up with you?’

He had no answer. How on earth could he tell any of these men about what he thought might be happening back home? And even if he did, what the hell could they do about it? Besides, he knew that some of them suffered from a mood that was as dark and distracted as his own. It was the nature of the work that was getting to them: all that shifting of boxes filled with guinea pigs and monkeys from the ‘clean’ to ‘dirty’ rooms; hauling cages to the pontoon that was fixed a short distance away in the seas below Cellar Head on the island. Afterwards, there would be the burning of those animals that had survived the swathe of gas – a flame flickering on the deck, a column of dark smoke rising. The guinea pigs chirruping, fighting off the grip of gloved hands, tussling with the strength of their custodians. The monkeys agitated and angry, as if they were people complaining about their lot, and sometimes sinking their teeth into the human fingers that hauled them in and out of the cages, drawing blood. The monkeys bit them in other ways, their presence down below forcing the men to ask questions of themselves, like why the hell they were here tormenting these poor creatures with gases and sprays.

The officers all had answers, of course. They talked about Korea endlessly, how the Americans had bombed Pyongyang and some hydroelectric dams in the North over the last while, how the likes of McCarthy in the States might be right, that Churchill and his kind were too weak in the way they dealt 8with the Soviets. Perhaps it was time they took more drastic action: an atom bomb or two, some of the gases they were testing here. It was the only way to treat Stalin and his kind. After all, it had brought one war to a sudden end – why not use it to stop the Reds winning this one?

‘Show a little teeth,’ Shepherd would say. He was the biologist in charge of the project, who would underline his boldness by declaring, ‘It’s the only way to get respect from that crowd.’

But John and a number of others only had uncertainties. Some of them – like his fellow Liverpudlian, Lambert – would whisper their grievances from time to time, mourning the dead monkeys they gathered up on the pontoon after the white trail of gas had passed. The two of them stood on it a short time, noting how it sloped in the water.

‘Do you know what I feel like here, Herrod?’ Lambert said. ‘One of the three wise monkeys myself. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no bloody evil. And yet it’s all around me at the moment – that’s all I touch and feel and smell. The rancid stink of downright wickedness. There’s no God or angel that can defend what we’re doing here. Not even Christ Himself.’

John shook his head, preferring not to think about it. Just now he only had one true vision of wickedness. He saw her sometimes instead of the monkeys, that red scarf she wore tight around her throat, that lipstick a slash of blood across her mouth. He would shudder each time he thought about this, knowing that in his rage he was capable of doing something terrible, that he could perform the act with greater force and conviction even than these American pilots who flew daily over North Korea, dropping bombs on those who lived in the villages and townships below their wings.

9

2

It was the dead fish she noticed first. The silvery skin of ling. A clutch of coalfish tangled among seaweed. Other fish stranded on the sand. Too many to be normal or natural. Jessie had stood there for ages watching them, bemused at their arrival on the shore. And then there was the day a couple of seals were washed up, stretched out on the edge of the tide, their flesh squabbled over by gulls, torn and shredded. She had never seen anything quite like it in all the years she had stepped on either Garry Beach or the Tràigh Mhòr, looking for flotsam the Minch had washed up on the tide. Things like nets swept from the deck of a fishing boat, a shattered tree trunk that might have floated in their direction from one of the rivers in the Highlands, even once a thick geansaidh, stripped, perhaps, from a fisherman’s back. These gifts from the sea were always useful. A net could be draped over the top of a haystack. Timber might be used for a roof or even to weigh down a stack of oats or hay. A geansaidh could be washed and mended, given to one of the many bachelors in the village. They were always in need of clothes and they sometimes had no women in their lives to help provide them. A few hours and the click of knitting needles at the fireside and a quick repair could be done, clothing provided that would keep them warm in the winter.

But the fish and seals were strange: the fact that they had 10shoaled up dead on the beach in such numbers. The way, too, there hadn’t been a storm a night or two before, as there so often was on this edge of coastline, bringing all sorts of arrivals to the coast.

Yet odder still was what Jessie encountered a day or two later. She saw it from a distance – on the border of sea and sand – shifting back and forth on the tide, as if it was breathing. It looked like a dirty rag of cloud that had been toppled to earth, though more solid and substantial than that. Like the mound of seals and fish the other day, the gulls were sweeping down to feed on it, calling out and tearing at it with their beaks. She made her way towards the heap, tightening her scarf against the chill of the wind, bracing herself against its force, gasping as she came closer to what the sea had left on the beach. She stepped forward tentatively towards the pile, walking past the cattle grazing on the machair’s edge. It looked as if a clutch of small animals were spread out on the sand, all beasts unknown to her. They weren’t cats and dogs, the creatures that the local crofters often drowned in the sea in these parts – when too many kittens had been born, when a collie had turned on someone or grown too old to round up sheep. Their presence would have no effect on her whatsoever. Far too familiar. No. This was different. Some of these creatures had white fur and small, beady eyes – those that hadn’t had their sight plucked by beaks, that is. They had expressions similar to those of children who had just been born. Others were like rats, but fat and round, as if they had been over-fed. She had never seen either of them before. She shivered when she saw them, tugging tighter her old tweed coat. There was something that disgusted her about the sight, something that wasn’t real or natural. 11

Jessie wondered how they had reached here, what time or tide had brought them this way. For a moment, she wondered if they had anything to do with the vessel, the Ben Lomond, which had been anchored in the Minch, south of the Tràigh Mhòr, not far from Tolsta Head, over the last week or so. Some of her neighbours had said there was something strange about it. It was a large grey boat, a converted tank-landing ship, bulky and oppressive, and then there were these motor boats that kept going back and forth to it, sometimes towards Stornoway, at other times towards some kind of platform that was a short distance away, those on board moving boxes to and fro. Sometimes they even hoisted the motor boats up the side of the vessel. This happened each time the waves grew high and choppy, when the wind rose up.

And some neighbours had seen the red warning flag being raised, a veil of white smoke rising from the pontoon’s deck a few moments later. It trailed across its surface like sea-spray but more persistent and long lasting, misting the crest of waves. Some of the local boats ignored the signal. Pretending not to see the flag, they just carried on fishing. Domhnall Iain, a former fisherman and one of the village’s older men, said it resembled the gas that had cloaked his trench when he fought in the Great War. Others laughed at him behind his back for that, dismissing his words.

‘B’ eòlach do sheanair air. Nonsense. He’s never quite escaped from Flanders. His mind still goes back there from time to time.’

They were always like that, ignoring what they didn’t believe or hadn’t experienced. They were especially like that with Jessie, never quite forgetting the episode she had gone 12through back in the 1920s, when she was barely out of her teens. George had never written to her from Canada or the States, wherever he now was – if, indeed, he lived anywhere at all. One time she had walked across the moor to the other side of the island, visiting one of her relatives, Catriona, who lived with her husband, Tormod, in the village of South Dell. Jessie had the strange notion she could call across the Atlantic to George from that shoreline, standing, perhaps, in the shade of the lighthouse that was a few miles away from their home, relying on the flash of its light to beckon him back to Tolsta. Or even use the foghorn she had heard about, summoning him with its deep, sonorous notes.

It was Catriona who, over the passing years, had convinced Jessie there were other methods she could employ to bring her man back home. Clasping hands and closing eyes, her cousin had uttered one of those loud prayers for which she was known. Some said Catriona did this so that her words could reach the house of her former father-in-law in Tolsta, part of the family who had raised her son, Roderick, after her first husband had drowned, falling from the deck of a fishing boat, his feet tangled in a net.

‘Oh, Lord, take care of Your servant Jessie here. Teach her that there are other ways in which her words can reach the man she wishes to marry, who lives so far away from here now in the New World, where he stays. Teach her to speak instead to You so that Thou might listen, pass on the hopes and dreams, the urgency and desperation of her prayers to the one she loves. Let us hope, that if he is so disposed, he might listen and return here to these shores or – if not – send her the means to make her own way across the seas to America. And 13if not, if there is no future for her and this man, teach her to be content with this, to accept the wisdom of Thy will, in the hope and trust sh...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One: Beum
• Part Two: Fonn
• Part Three: Sèist
• The Author
• Also by Donald S Murray
• Copyright