O Caledonia (6 page)

 

*

 

September was a beautiful month in Scotland, even by the sea. The air was soft and delicate, the headlands shadowed in mild green and violet, the sea calm, an aftermath of limpid azure in the fading days of warmth. Hector and Vera took the children for a last picnic. Soon they were to move to a place far to the north, a huge place with an unpronounceable name which Hector had been left by an uncle on condition that he allowed his cousin Lila to continue to live there. Vera, at first overjoyed at the prospect of a house of their own at last, had been angry about Cousin Lila, whom she had met once
– ‘
And once was enough. She
'
s very peculiar, even you must admit that, and she reeks of whisky.
' ‘
Poor woman,
'
said Grandpa,
‘
she
'
s had her sorrows. A wee dram never hurt anyone.
' ‘
That
'
s as may be, but it
'
s not a case of a wee dram with her. You can always tell.
'
‘Tant pis!'
yelled Hector, who relished the occasional French phrase,
‘je men fous.
There
'
s room enough for the whole clan. She
'
ll have her own little place at the back and you
'
ll never need to see her. Anyway, look at your family. Particularly look at your Aunt Maisie.
'
At this point Vera became aware of Janet
'
s interested face hovering about the doorway, seized her and bundled her off to find bathing things for the picnic.

At last they were all sitting in the dunes, much farther along the bay than usual, for it was the Glasgow holiday and the nearer beach contained roistering Glaswegian families. Hector and Francis and Janet collected driftwood and made a fire and the smoke for once went straight up into the still air and blinded no one. Rhona helped Vera amuse baby Lulu while they bathed, then she and Vera ran down into the sea while Hector tried to hold Lulu who squirmed and rolled and finally
yelled. Janet and Francis skulked off behind the dunes but Rhona was back in a moment, hugging her, soothing her. It was time for tea. Vera handed round special bags, one for each child. Janet grabbed hers and retreated to a sand throne she had made high above them, near the spikes of marram grass and pink thrift. Vera called her back. ‘Come on; Janet, Rhona's been helping all afternoon. It's time you did something. Let Lulu sit beside you; just hold on to her and don't let her tip over.' Lulu couldn't sit at all and she flopped all over Janet and pulled her hair and put sand in her sandwiches and dribbled on her knee. ‘Stupid baby,' hissed Janet. ‘Why did they have to bring you?' Lulu stared at her doubtfully, put a sandy fist in her mouth, choked on the sand and began to yell again. Vera snatched her away. ‘For goodness' sake, you could make just a little effort sometimes for other people. Look how thoughtful Rhona is, and she's much younger.' Janet flicked sand into Rhona's gentle, beaming face. ‘That's it. Off you go, take your picnic right down the beach and don't come back until you can say sorry.'

Glowering, Janet shambled to her feet and tramped off, gripping her paper bag. She would go as far as possible, so they could hardly see her and so she couldn't hear them. She went towards the sea, where the receding tide had left great shining rocks. She cast a scornful glance back at her family but they were not watching her. They had their backs turned, gathered about the small fire. Janet turned west towards the looming black headland where the cave was. Today she did not fear it. She was powerful with a cold anger; she was an outcast, a tragic dwindling figure soon to be seen no more. When she reached the basalt cliffs and the cave, the darkness would take her. This would be her revenge. Her paper bag began to tear where she clutched it. She decided to sit down and eat her picnic first. She found a long low grey rock, pleasingly warm and dry, and clambered on to it. She ripped open her paper bag and began to eat in a savage, vulpine manner, tearing the rolls apart, chewing with her mouth open,
staring grimly out at the hazed blue sea and the great sinking sun. Gradually her anger left her; she breathed the soft air of early evening, heard the gulls cry, watched them swoop and skim over the tiny waves at the water's edge, over the track of radiance which led to the horizon. She thought of Orion, the blinded giant who had to wade through the farthest depths of ocean, following the setting sun to the limit of the world, and her heart stirred with pity for his lonely fate. She would forgive her family and go back to them. She would even say sorry although she would not mean it.

The headland seemed menacing now and she felt cold. She scrambled to her feet and as she did so she was aware of a strange and dreadful stench all about her. It seemed to come from the rock. She jumped off it and stared at it. Then she screamed loud and long and again and again. She had been sitting on a huge dead bullseal.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

 

Auchnasaugh, the field of sighing, took its name from the winds which lamented around it almost all the year, sometimes moaning softly, filtered through swathes of pine groves, more often malign, shrieking over the battlements and booming down the chimneys, so that the furnace which fed the ancient central heating system roared up and the pipes shuddered and the Aga top glowed infernal red. Then the jackdaws would explode in a dense cloud from their hiding places on the roof and float on the high wild air crying warning and woe to the winter world. ‘A gaunt place,' said the village people, and they seldom passed that way. Besides, the narrow road which ran along the floor of the glen, far below the castle on its hillside, was crossed by two fords, swollen brown and turbulent through the winter months, treacherous and glinting in the brief summer; either way your bicycle would rust up, your car would almost certainly break down in them, you would be soaked through and you could depend on no one helping you. People kept themselves to themselves in those hills and in the village too.

‘Do as you would be done by' went the credo and it meant ‘Ask for nothing and you will be given nothing and no one will ask you for anything either.' On Sundays those of the devout who had transport joined the small congregation in the village church and there Mr McConochie the minister addressed them on the wrath of God. ‘Be ye ashamed,' he thundered, leaning forth from the pulpit propped on his arms like Mr Punch, ‘for ye were born in sin.' Forgiveness there might be in the next world, but not in this, and there would be the Day of Judgement and the separation of sheep from goats to get through first. ‘And ye'll no pull the wool over God's eyes.' The damned sat bleakly upright on the hard bare pews, unflinchingly accepting his verdicts. There was no colour in that church, no flowers, no stained glass, only plain white walls and small windows into the shifting clouds. It was a far cry from Grandpa's church where high cheekboned knights of Christendom leant on their swords in noble contemplation and the damsels they had rescued rolled ecstatic eyes heavenwards and the waning sealight beyond them changed violet to mauve, azure to viridian, while the air was sweet with lilies and roses and Grandpa spoke of love and peace and rejoicing. However, this hill church suited Nanny, whose hat, Janet noticed, bristled with more hatpins than any other of the fierce felt hats in the assembly. Every Sunday Hector would drive them down, explaining how much he wished he could join them and then, regardless of the weather, they would walk back.

The joy of release from Mr McConochie's angry glare and booming voice made all consideration of climate irrelevant. Janet and Rhona frisked ahead, Rhona skipping, Janet pretending to be a horse, cantering and bucking, while Francis, Nanny's favourite, walked beside her carrying their hymn books and regaling her with imitations of the cooking and cleaning staff at Auchnasaugh. Up the windswept road they went, through bare moorland where sheep rose suddenly from the heather and scudded off and only a few stunted rowan trees clung to the steep slope. The mist left cobwebs clinging moist and delicate on the heather, and strands of wool flickered about the thistles. If they looked back they could see the village, unfriendly with its low grey houses, one shop, the church and the Thistle Inn, packed in a graceless huddle down the hill; beyond it the land rose again in barren pastures outlined by drystone walls, until pasture gave way to empty moors. But for Janet it was the view ahead which held all the enchantment she had ever yearned for; in the distance the hills
lapped against each other to the far limits of the visible world; nearer the great forest climbed to meet the moor, ancient rust-trunked pine and delicate silver birch, swaying and tossing over grass so green and fine that only harebell and wood anemone could grow there without seeming crude, even blasphemous.

Once this forest had been the hunting ground of a Scottish king, in the days when Scotland was divided into several kingdoms. A lord called the Mormaer and his family lived then at Auchnasaugh and their son had joined in a plot against the king; for this he was executed, but his parents were exonerated and the king continued to come to Auchnasaugh to hunt the deer. The Mormaer
'
s lady concealed her bitter grief, but from the day of her son
'
s death she wore only the colour green, a colour which the king and his courtiers associated with wanton merriment but which was for her, as for the Greeks and Egyptians, the colour of life and of death, of youth, of love and victory. And so one day, as the king called his hounds aside and plunged his dagger into the quivering throat of a young stag, grounded and bleeding among the moss and the harebells, the Mormaer
'
s lady, hidden in a larch tree in her larch-green dress, hurled her son
'
s hunting spear and transfixed him. Then she was off, leaping and swinging through the high tree branches, on through the forest for a day and a night until she reached the coast and the cliffs and flung herself a hundred feet down into the boulder-strewn breakers. The hounds, who hunted by sight, not scent, saw nothing but their master lying dead beside their quarry and returned to mauling the stag. Over the years occasional travellers claimed to have seen this lady as a flicker of green, gone as the sun passed behind cloud, high in the forest, and she was sometimes invoked by workmen called to deal with the manifold woes of Auchnasaugh
–
the boiler and its pipes, the crumbling battlements, the damp and the roof. They did not enjoy working in this cold and lonely place and would leave abruptly after one of them had met her vengeful figure stalking the stairs. Janet would have liked to have met her too, but as the ancient Auchnasaugh had long since been burnt to the ground and buried and the current one stood two miles away from its site she felt there was no chance. Indeed, for her Auchnasaugh was a place of delight and absolute beauty, all her soul had ever yearned for, so although she could understand that many a spirit might wish to return to it, and she hoped that in time she too might do so, she felt the circumstances and mood of such visitations could only be joyous. She had no fear of its lofty shadowed rooms, its dim stone passages, its turrets and towers and dank subterranean chambers, dripping with verdigris and haven to rats. So running now down the narrow twisting road through the forest, she looked forward to the moment when it dropped to the dark, secret glen, where the great hills rose steeply on each side and halfway up one of them, hidden by its trees, stood the castle.

 

*

 

Hector and Cousin Lila were in the drawing room. Hector had a glass of sherry in hand and Lila was refilling a tumbler from the whisky decanter. Vera peered in through the tall window making gestures at the decanter and the cupboard. She had been cutting the pink roses, which clambered up the front of the central tower and clawed at the windows on wild nights. Roses, azaleas and rhododendrons all grew well at Auchnasaugh, but nothing else did. Vera had planted an orchard at the back, next to the washing green, when they first came there five years ago, and soon all but one of the trees were dead, scorched and blasted by the winds and frozen by the five months of winter snow. The survivor stood, twisted and tortured, producing a few black-spotted leaves each year, a maimed reminder of that pretty dream of apple blossom, a girlish aspiration, an echo of the
douceur de vie
of the southern regions of Vera
'
s upbringing. (
‘
Edinburgh suburbs
'
, said Hector when in a bad mood.)

‘
Come in for a moment, Janet, and play the lyre,
'
invited her father. Lila beamed uncertainly, her ragged black locks hanging over her dark and bloodshot eyes, her tumbler tremulous in her hand. Janet stood by Lila
'
s chair in her social position, one foot firmly planted on the carpet, the other entwining the opposite leg and moving up and down while she slipped the end of a pigtail into her mouth.
‘
Well,
'
demanded Vera, stepping over the low windowsill,
‘
What did Mr McConochie have to say this morning?
' ‘
It was the wrath of God again,
'
mumbled Janet, chewing vigorously at her green hair ribbon.
‘
Take that out of your mouth. Were there any good hymns?
' ‘
We had
“
Work, for the night is coming
”
and
“
There is a fountain filled with blood
”
and
“
Who would true valour see
”
.
'
She liked
‘
Who would true valour see
'
, especially she liked the bit about
‘
Hobgoblin nor foul fiend
'
, it reminded her of Jim the gardener and Miss Wales, the choleric cook. However, it wouldn
'
t do to say this. Instead she adopted a solemn downward stare and withdrew into a pleasant dream in which hunchbacked Jim and Miss Wales were crouched in deadly combat on a steaming marshland and she was riding by, casting an unruffled glance their way, above and apart from their feud, one of nature
'
s elect. A gleam from the occluded sky illumined the fearful pink knob which rose through Miss Wales
'
grizzled hair. Jim
'
s face was darkly murderous. Janet had seen this look when he was clubbing the myxomatosis rabbits and stuffing them into a sack. When he had filled enough sacks he would stow them in the tractor trailer and roar up the back drive and hurl the lot into the gaping maw of the furnace which throbbed and quivered in the boiler room, ineffectually labouring to feed the central heating system.