‘What is Pat’s lure like?’ he asked when Pat had taken himself off.
‘Actionable, I should say,’ said his mother. ‘A fearsome object.’
‘Does he catch anything with it?’
‘Oddly enough, yes,’ Tommy said. ‘I suppose there are suckers in the fish world just the same as in any other.’
‘The poor things just gape with astonishment at sight of it,’ Laura said, ‘and before they have time to shut their mouths the current has swept it in. Tomorrow’s Saturday, so you can see it in operation. But I don’t think that anything, even Pat’s unholy creation, will lure that six-pounder in the Cuddy Pool to the surface with the water the way it is just now.’
And of course Laura was right. Saturday morning was bright and rainless and the six-pounder in the Cuddy Pool was far too dismayed by his imprisonment, far too obsessed with his desire to go higher up the river, to be interested in surface distractions. So it was suggested that Grant should go trout fishing in the loch, with Pat as gillie. The loch was two miles away in the hills, a flat pool on a bleak bit of moor. When it was windy on Lochan Dhu the gale took your line out of the water at right angles and held it stiff as a telephone wire. When it was calm the midges made a meal of you while the trout came to the surface and openly laughed. But if trout fishing was not Grant’s idea of the perfect occupation, being gillie was obviously Patrick’s idea of heaven. There was nothing, from riding the black bull down at Dalmore to demanding threepence-worth of sweets from Mrs Mair at the post-office with the aid of a ha’penny and menaces, that Pat was not capable of. But the joy of messing about in a boat was still something that he could not provide for himself. The boat at the loch was padlocked.
So Grant set off up the sandy path through the dry heather, with Pat at his side and one pace in the rear like a gun dog on its best behaviour. And as he went he was conscious of his own reluctance and wondered at it.
Why should there be any qualification in his pleasure this morning, in his delight in going fishing? Brown trout might not be his idea of a sporting contest, but he was glad enough to be spending the day with a rod in his hand even if he caught nothing whatever. He was supremely glad to be out in the open, alive and at leisure, with the familiar spring of peaty turf under his feet, and the hills before him. Why the small unwillingness at the back of his mind? Why, instead of taking a boat out for the day on Lochan Dhu, did he want to hang round the farm?
They had walked for a mile before he had flushed the reason from the cover of his subconscious. He had wanted to stay at Clune today so that he could see the daily paper when it arrived.
He had wanted to find out about B Seven.