O Caledonia (8 page)

Her life was little changed by Fergus
'
s permanent absence. He had always passed long periods away, in Glasgow or overseas on his mysterious naval business, and when he was at home he spent most of his time fishing for trout in the burn which ran along the floor of the glen, or for salmon in the brawling whisky-coloured river which cascaded from the hills, leaping impatiently past its boulders, raucous and jostling until it reached the long tranquil stretch of water which brought it to Loch Saugh, the sorrowing pine trees and the solitary swan. In the evenings they met with Fergus
'
s aged father in the drawing room; there they drank whisky, played cards and listened to John McCormack in plangent lamentation for lost faces, lost loves, the past for ever eddying away. The servants had long since gone, pedalling through the dusk to the village, all except Jim the hunchbacked gardener who tramped off up the hill to his mother
'
s lonely croft on the edge of the moor. Night enclosed the glen and roofed it with stars. Wind stirred the great trees; owls hooted. At ten o
'
clock Fergus went out to the dynamo shed where their erratic electricity supply was produced by a sullen generator and switched it off. Up the stairs they went, their Tilley lamps fitfully reflected in the great stained-glass window; a drift of cats followed them; the
dogs ran ahead. At dawn Lila would come down again, escorted by the cats, and repair to her mushroom room, or, in the autumn, to the woods in search of specimens. After Fergus's death she moved a bed down to the tiny room next to the mushroom chamber and slept there instead, still spending the evenings with her father-in-law, until he too died. Now she sat alone in her room and played John McCormack on a more modern gramophone and drank her whisky as she read or painted. And now she drank whisky in the afternoons, staring balefully at the foggy windows.

Vera had hoped, when they first came to Auchnasaugh, that Lila might wish to help with the children; she visualised her as a cross between a doting and quaintly dotty aunt and an eccentric family retainer, who would know her place but find fulfilment in a modest share of their family life. She would be grateful to Vera for brightening her drab existence. Lila had countered by dropping cigarette ash in the baby's cot and providing a steaming bowl of daffodil bulbs cooked in parsley sauce for the children's lunch, claiming that they were onions. Nanny said she would be obliged to leave if that woman was allowed in the nursery again and so contact with Lila was limited to downstairs. At first the children would shriek with terror as she materialised soundlessly behind them in the corridors or out of the dripping winter afternoon, but soon they grew used to her and as time passed Janet, who had taken to reading Edwardian books about isolated, misunderstood young girls whose intelligence and courage were noticed only by one adult friend, decided that Lila was fitted for this part. Her only regret was that neither of them was crippled.

Lila, although not effusively welcoming, did not appear to mind Janet's visits to her room; she continued to do whatever she was doing and Janet moved about fidgeting with things and asking questions about mushrooms and Russia. Lila would not talk about Russia but was happy to show her her beautiful old botanical volumes. Janet had begun to learn Latin and was intoxicated by the plant names:
Clitocybe nebularis,
Asterophora, Flammulina,
or
Rosa gallica, Rosa mundi, Rosa versicolor
,
Potentilla fruticosa.
She set these names to hymn tunes and wandered about chanting them. Vera forbade her to pick or handle mushrooms. Janet had no intention of obeying. One day, Lila had promised, they would go together on an early morning fungus foray. Janet was aware of the hostility which hung between Vera and Lila and she wished to be on Lila's side. So, on this rainswept Sunday afternoon, the last weekend of the summer holidays, Janet made her way, by a devious route in case her mother was watching, to Lila's murky chamber and sat reading
Lorna Doone
while the wind boomed down the chimney and lashed the chestnuts from their leafy branches and whirled the jackdaws and rooks into a wild confusion beneath the racing clouds.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

 

It was Hector's belief that a girl was an inferior form of boy; this regrettable condition could be remedied, or improved upon, by education. For this reason he had started a boys' school for his daughters to attend. And so in term time Auchnasaugh was transformed, full of boys and benches and clattering boots. Another of his beliefs, and one which he shared with Vera, was that children should study languages from an early age and learn poetry by heart. Miss Christie read them ‘Hiawatha' and even her bleak Aberdonian tones could not dispel its glories: ‘Minnehaha, laughing water!' (
Potentilla fruticosa!)
Rhythms and rhymes galloped through Janet's head. For this reason too she loved learning Latin, the pleasing oddity of declensions, the greater eccentricity of principal parts –
tango, tangere, TETIGI, tactum.
She had been learning French since she was four and when she was ten she started Greek, whose words were even more astounding than Latin. But best of all was the poetry.
Smith's Book of Verse for Boys and Girls
began with narrative poems. ‘It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea.' Janet enjoyed these, as usual visualising herself as the heroine bound to the mast or drifting in elegant death along the shoreline: ‘O is it weed or floating hair?' But then she discovered the ballads, Sir Patrick Spens, Otterburn, True Thomas, The Unquiet Grave. The wind and snow and waters of the world she knew were there, inhabited not by her family or Miss Wales the cook or the chilled and prosaic churchgoers, but by fiercer lonely figures driven by passion and savagery, love for ever lost and yet for ever held, old feuds, undying jealousies, a moral code of pagan nobility without pity.

 

I leant my back unto an aik

I thought it was a trusty tree,

But first it bowed and then it brake...

 

Ye'll set upon his white hausbane

And I'll peck out his bonny blue e'en

I hacked him in pieces sma'

 

It was mirk mirk night

There was nae starlight

We waded through red blood to the knee

For all the blood that's shed on earth

Runs through the springs of that country.

 

Last night I dreamed a dreary dream

Beyond the Isle of Skye

I saw a dead man win a fight

And I think that man was I...

 

The sound of the wind, the dawn wind, and the sound of the sea, eternally mournful, cruel, tender, were in those pages, were in Janet's head and heart and blood.

On summer afternoons, when Hector and Vera thought that she was on the cricket pitch, a place she feared, she slipped away through the rhododendron jungle to the mossy silent path which led to the old hen house. The hens had all escaped long ago. Rab the hero dog had slaughtered most of them. He was condemned to wear a bloody corpse slung round his neck – primitive aversion therapy. Now and then a solitary Rhode Island or a snowy Leghorn would emerge from the bushes, peer about, squawk in horror and retreat. No one cared. The flock of hens had been another of Vera's attempts to introduce some element of gentle domesticity to the unyielding landscape of the glen, and like her orchard it had not prospered. However, the dank shadows of the hen house, its rotten lichened timbers and shafts of sunlight, received Janet's taciturn presence and gave her sanctuary. Here she spent the long afternoons reading, and copying her favourite poems into an exercise book. Sometimes she would go farther up the path and come to the wide grassy clearing where the two gaunt old swings, tall and angular as guillotines or gallows, dominated the slope; there, with minimal effort, it was possible to soar to great heights, the steep bank falling away beneath, the black pine branches against the blue sky rushing outstretched to embrace her. The scent of the pines, the throb of wood pigeons, the shearing glissade of the circular saw at the distant wood mill and the perfect arc of the swing, as it rose and sank and rose again, lulled her into a trance of happiness. One day, as she swung, she watched a pheasant lead her brood of chicks through the long fine grass. Suddenly the mother bird sank low to the ground, the little ones ran straggling and cheeping towards her, and a great shadow fell across them, across Janet too, as she whirled round and round, unwinding from the twisted chains of the swing. A huge eagle was passing slowly above her, impervious and purposeful, its wings scarcely beating. It drifted on up the glen until in the distance it spanned the rift between the hills, a creature greater than its landscape.

Not all afternoons passed so happily, however. Janet was expected to benefit from the masculine activities available, to puff and pant her way down the drive on early morning runs, to play cricket in the summer and rugby in the winter. She loathed games and was notably bad at them, cringing as the cricket ball hurtled towards her skull, dropping the bat and jumping out of the way. Nor could she catch balls, nor could she throw them. It was even worse in winter on the rugby pitch, in the scrum where boys would seize her plaits and wrench them; she would overbalance and fall flat on her face in the squelching mud while their great boots trampled over her. Mercifully, fog descended on the glen in late afternoon and she could ebb backwards into it, unnoticed, unmissed, until the straining, baying packs of players were scarcely visible. Then she ran for the shelter of the trees and fled up the hill to Auchnasaugh, sliding in through the back doors and vanishing into its dark passages until it was safe to be seen, when the lights glowed warm in the old ballroom and eighty boys were clamorous over tea, and beyond the tall uncurtained windows trees and hills withdrew into lonely self-
absorption in the wet dusk.

It was a rigorous life, but for Janet it was softened by the landscape, by reading, and by animals whom she found it possible to love without qualification. People seemed to her flawed and cruel. She saw Vera
'
s small unkindnesses to Lila, Lila
'
s lack of feeling for anyone save her balding cat, the boys
'
savagery. Everywhere there was hideous cruelty to animals. Once as she rode past the sawmill she saw a deer hanging in an open-sided lean-to. They had chopped off its head and its legs to the knee. Then there was the frightening and constant seethe and surge of eruptive anger in Nanny, in Mr McConochie who grew more and more like horrible murderous Mr Punch or like the passage he himself had read them, describing John Knox in infirmity and old age, leaning weakly on the edge of the pulpit, but by mid-sermon
‘
like to ding that pulpit in blads and fly out of it
'
, his eyes fixed and sparkling with menace, his complexion choleric. She recognised in herself a distaste for people, which was both physical and intellectual; and yet she nurtured a shameful, secret desire for popularity, or at least for acceptance, neither of which came her way.

The boys regarded her as an unwelcome intruder into their masculine world and a potential spy. Girls were sissy. She tried to prove her worth: she climbed the great chestnut tree which hung above the woodshed. The next task was to wriggle on your stomach to the end of a branch and then swing from it and leap across the void on to the steep corrugated iron roof, skid to its edge and land on your feet on the ground. Janet stood helplessly high among the yellow leaves clutching the trunk, feeling her feet slithering on the damp bark, watching the conkers tumble past her to the ground. Dizzy and dappled lay the sunlit grass below. She could not move. She looked at the sky. The sun was watching her, the clouds hung motionless. The boys were watching her too, silent but mirthful. Soon the familiar chant began:
‘
Sissy, sissy. Cowardy cowardy custard, dipped in the mustard. Sissy, sissy, girly, girly, girly.
'
‘
I can see your knickers. We can see your knickers.
'
In desperation she let go with one hand and tried to jam her kilt between her legs. She slipped and hurtled head first to the ground, a sharp scent of earth and leaves, an agonising jolt, a flash of lightning, darkness. The darkness did not last long; she opened her eyes; the boys had melted away and Vera was standing above her, her face contorted with fury.
‘
What in the world are you doing, Janet? Have you no sense at all? If you can
'
t get up a tree without falling out just don
'
t climb trees.
'
Janet got cautiously to her feet; her head ached and she felt sick.
‘
Are you all right now?
'
added Vera as a sort of bitter after- thought. Janet nodded dumbly.
‘
Good. Well, off you go and play with the others. And take more care in future.
'

Janet stumbled over the gaping shards of fallen chestnuts and made her way painfully down the path through the beech trees to her pony Rosie
'
s field. Rosie was grazing but when she saw Janet she lifted her head and whickered and trotted to the gate. Janet sat on the gate and buried her face in Rosie
'
s mane and breathed in her warm tarry smell; Rosie nuzzled her jersey, champing over her last few blades of grass, leaving a trail of green slobber across the Fair Isle pattern. Janet hugged her tightly. Here was comfort, here was communion. A great peace descended on her, bestowed by the still autumn air, the sweet perfume of the pines, dark on the hillside before her, the great love she felt flow from her into Rosie, flow back from Rosie to her. Calm and tranced she walked up through the beeches again and saw two red squirrels leaping along their sinuous branches; they leapt and curvetted, stopped dead, flourished their tails and were off again, swift and smooth, fleeting like light up the trunks, so bright and merry and joyous that she wanted to shriek with delight. Thus armoured, it mattered nothing to her that the boys were sulking because Hector had forbidden them to swing from the chestnut tree.
‘
The boys must not bounce on the corrugated-iron roof,
'
he had pronounced, giving every vowel its maximum resonance and rolling the r
'
s into a thunderous finale.