O Caledonia (2 page)

For a while her jackdaw remembered her and he searched for her unceasingly. High above the glen he floated, peering down into the woods where she used to ride. He swooped to the sunken garden below the terrace; there, in the rare warmth of summer, the air perfumed by azaleas, she had fed him with wild strawberries which grew among the ivy at the base of the wall, leaving none for her family. Down the back drive to the derelict stables he flew, then up to the castle again, hurling himself against windows, hopping about the high, hidden chimney pots, bobbing his inquiring head into one after another and provoking furious flusters and punitive forays from the jackdaw colonies within. Each night he returned to her barren room to roost. His house was the only thing in it now. Before, he had always perched on the end of Janet's bed, but now he crept under cover and slept in loneliness. He lost interest in food and no longer joined the family at the dining table, jabbing his beak in the mustard, rearranging the spoons, guilelessly hopping through mounds of mince and cabbage. At last, in desolation, like a tiny kamikaze pilot, he flew straight into the massive walls of Auchnasaugh and killed himself. Janet's sisters found him, a bunch of waterlogged feathers in a puddle, and they buried him. They shed bitter tears for him and for Janet too, then, but they knew better than to mention it.

After that, only the speywives, the fishwives, the midwives, the ill-wishers spoke of her, endlessly rehearsing a litany of blame; for blame there must be, and no one could blame the murderer. Their voices whined and droned, spiteful as the sleety wind which slashed their headscarves across their faces as they huddled by the village bus stop, dreary as the wind which spat hail down the chimney as they took Sunday afternoon tea in the cold parlours of outlying crofts, where the Bible was open beside a ticking clock and rock buns were assembled on snowy doilies, malignly aglitter with the menace of carbonised currants. So they blamed the mother for giving the child all those books to read: ‘It's not natural for a bairn'; they blamed the father for his ideas about education; they blamed everyone and everything they could think of, but in the end there was grim assent: ‘The lass had only herself to blame.' The subject lost its appeal and was closed in favour of the living, who offer continuous material for persecution.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

 

The sixteen years of Janet's life began in wartime on a fog-bound winter night in Edinburgh. Her father came home on leave and looked into the blue wicker basket. He strode to the window and stared out at the discreet square of Georgian houses and the snow dripping from the bare trees. ‘It's about the size of a cat,' he said.

He returned to the war and Janet and her mother went to live with his parents by the sea. The house was a square Edwardian manse, damp, dark and uncomfortable as Scottish houses are, but set solid against the sea winds, facing inland into a beautiful garden and affording a warren-like sense of safety in its winding, stone-flagged passages, baize doors, and lamplit rooms where Grandpa wrote his sermons, his parrot made proclamations and the blackout nightly excluded the warring world. The nursery in the attic overlooked the sea and Janet slept to the sound of foghorns booming out in icy waters; the lighthouse swept its beam over her ceiling, a powerful guardian. She woke to the cries of gulls. Someone gave her a purple silk flower, and she watched it growing towards her through the bars of her cot, as it came out of dimness, its petals lapped in all shades of mauve, violet, heliotrope. She did not know then that it was a flower but, as she lay gazing at it and as the days went by, she loved purple with an intensity that remained always. In that first memory she had found entrancement.

And so the babe grew, among her adoring grandparents, her anxious mother, and Nanny, in her blue print uniform, Nanny
who knew best and could control the ceaseless battle for possession which raged between Ningning the grandmother and Vera the mother. When Janet was fourteen months old, her brother Francis was born, and this brought about a change in the balance of power, for now Ningning could have Janet and Vera could have Francis, a baby each and a most satisfactory arrangement. Grandpa emerged beaming from his study, the blue wicker basket contained its rightful occupant. Vera
'
s pedantic friend Constance wrote to congratulate her:
‘
In the manufacture of human pride, there is no ingredient so potent as the production of a son.
'
Ningning said it all sounded like something from the grocer
'
s. Nanny, always ready with a grim
bon mot
, said that pride came before a fall. None the less, christening photographs show a happy family group, marred only a trifle by Janet
'
s gaping black mouth; she was yelling because the photographer had plucked her thumb from its comfortable residence in her palate. Nanny
'
s face lowered in the background.

 

*

 

At this time there were many Polish officers in the village. The Marine Hotel had been requisitioned for them. They were popular with the lonely girls and the more flighty wives, so that after the war some stayed on and married, while others left behind girls who were even lonelier now, alone with tiny children in the unrelenting chill of a Calvinist world. A home for these Unmarried Mothers was opened; it was named after Janet
'
s grandfather, a tribute which the family felt he should have declined. He silenced them with talk of Mary Magdalene.

The manse was always full of people coming to talk to Grandpa in his study, and on Friday evenings Ningning often gave modest dinner parties, modest because of wartime restrictions but merry in spirit. Nanny disapproved fiercely of these occasions, retiring to bed even earlier than usual with her stone hot-water bottle. She was a fearsome figure at retirement time, stomping about the kitchen in her huge white flannel nightie; her hair, which by day was scraped back into a tight bun bristling with pins, at night swung about her back in a wiry grey pigtail.
‘
Tears before bedtime,
'
she would mutter as she banged the kettle about, obliterating sounds of laughter and, worse, the clinking of glasses,
‘
There
'
s some should know better,
'
as she flapped and thumped up the stairs to the nursery and settled creaking into bed with
The People's Friend
the cold air was suffused with peppermint as she sucked a vengeful Pandrop.

On one such evening Grandpa was off at a conference, and Vera was away, bicycling around Scotland in search of somewhere else to live, far from her mother-in-law. Ningning had invited some Polish officers to dinner. Polish officers were the guests Nanny hated most, apart from merry widows. That evening she lay awake for a long time, listening to distant laughter and imagining the ingestion of the evil water-coloured spirits which Poles always had about them, even bulging in their uniform pockets. They were singing too,
‘
And not hymns either
'
, as she said later. At last she heard Ningning go into the kitchen and fill the kettle. She heard her put it on the stove. They must be going soon. She was almost asleep when the smell of burning roused her. Down the stairs she billowed, and there in the steam-filled kitchen was the kettle, boiled dry on the stove, and Ningning dead on the floor: a heart attack. From the far side of the hall, behind the dining room door, the sounds of revelry continued.

Janet knew nothing of Ningning
'
s death, for she continued to see her, holding her hand as she climbed the stairs, walking beside her in the sunlit garden up the long path between low, fragrant box hedges to the raspberry thicket, hurrying past the droning beehives. Once they stood together in the greenhouse under the rampant tomato vines. Ningning picked a tiny scarlet tomato and rolled it carefully over her palm, weighing it, treasuring it; then she gave it to Janet to hold. The leaves engulfed them in warm underwater light, smothering and pungent. At midday when Janet and Francis were playing in the garden, someone would beat a gong to call them in for their rest, and just before they heard the gong, Ningning would wave to them from her bedroom window. One day Vera came out to fetch them because the gong was broken. She saw Janet waving and asked what she was doing. It was then that Janet was told that Ningning had gone and would not come back; she did not see her again.

She became devoted to Francis; she loved the way his beret sat on his round head, over his round face. She loved his stout form, snugly buttoned for winter, in coat and leggings and gaiters. She loved the way she could make him laugh, and the shining of his eyes in conspiratorial merriment. In the garden stood an old laburnum tree with rippling satin bark. There, in a fissure of the trunk, Janet found some handsome, striped shells and brought them in to give to Francis after their rest. Carefully she arranged them by her pillow. When she awoke, she put her hand out to find them; they had gone. Instead, dreadful horned creatures were contracting and elongating with silent purpose across her sheet, clambering over the peaks and troughs of the blankets, silhouetted monstrously against the curtained light. In terror she screamed and screamed for Ningning, who did not come. Nanny came and was angry;
‘
You
'
re a dirty girl, Janet, bringing in the likes of thon.
'
She threw them out of the window.

And now there was a new baby, scarlet-faced, black-haired Rhona. Nanny and Vera were, preoccupied. Francis and Janet spent their mornings banished to the garden and the wet fallen leaves; they stumped about, endlessly filling and emptying a small wooden wheelbarrow. When the sun shone they stared at the rents in the clouds, searching for glimpses of God. Nanny had told them about God
'
s watchful and punitive presence and his place of residence. Janet dreamed about going to heaven, up a ladder from the beach, into the blue sky; God greeted her at the top, clad in a butcher
'
s striped apron. In the afternoons Nanny put on her coat and her felt hat, skewered to her head with an abundance of jewel-bright hatpins, and they
went out walking, one on each side of the pram, the baby prone within. When Francis was tired, he was allowed to sit in the end of the pram, but Janet must walk.

‘You're a big girl now.' She didn't want to be a big girl. It seemed she was punished for something which happened without her choice or knowledge. Her dismal feet discerned miles of walking, interminable pavements, a vista of life-long streets. In the draper's shop there were consolations. The oily smell of the paraffin heater and the clean smell of piles of linen and furled spools of cloth offered a warm, ordered atmosphere. In tall, glass-fronted cupboards behind the long dark counter were gleaming reels of thread in every colour. Janet was mesmerised by the rusts which shaded to orange, to coral, almost imperceptibly to pinks; the deep glory of crimson, and the holy splendour of all the purples. Which purple did she like best? She could have dedicated all her day to resolving this question.

It was then that she saw the grey, knitted donkey; it was standing on the counter. Her heart lurched. Its packed, cubic body reminded her of Francis; she wanted to hug it so tightly it might be squashed, she wanted to keep it for ever. Its gentle, dreamy face and drooping ears indicated that, like herself, it preferred standing about to brisk exercise. Her knees were weak with longing. Each night before she went to sleep she thought about the donkey and added a silent coda to her spoken prayers, begging God to send it to her. She mentioned her great desire to the grown-ups, but was told that it was not her birthday, and it would not be her birthday for a long time. A long time. What if someone bought it first? But each time they visited the draper's shop the donkey was there, and Janet began to think that God was keeping it for her. One afternoon the garden gate opened and a woman came in. She was carrying the grey, knitted donkey. Janet's heart stopped for a moment and then a great flood of happiness, gratitude, religious fervour swept through her. She seemed to float towards the visitor, smiling and stretching out her hands. She could not speak, but she could hear, ‘How's your mother, Janet? I've brought a present for your darling baby. I saw it in the shop as I went by; I couldn't resist it.'

Later that day, when Rhona was sleeping in her pram in the garden, Janet and Francis carted barrowload after barrowload of sodden leaves and laboriously piled them over her. Then they brought earth from the chilly flower beds with their stands of rustling sepia stalks, and scattered it in clods and handfuls over the leaves. Puffing and panting, they toiled back and forth all afternoon. At last Rhona was out of sight, even the outline of her was obliterated. She was silent, she was effaced. Janet would have liked to put the pram out of sight too, at the bottom of the garden, for now no one needed it, but she couldn't undo the brake. She went in to tell her mother the important news:

‘A nasty rat has buried your baby. She's gone now.'

Later at the nursery tea table the baby, who had emerged unscathed from her tumulus, beamed adoringly and impartially at Nanny, Vera, Grandpa and her assassins. The grey donkey, infinitely unattainable, stood on the high cupboard. Janet and Francis had been spanked. They were in deep disgrace, and they could not be trusted. Janet did not care. A splinter, a tiny shard of ice crystal, had entered her heart and lodged there.