O Caledonia (7 page)

The horror of this was comparable only to the times when Miss Wales boiled lobsters and they would scream a high thin scream and wave their inky antennae and scrabble at the steep sides of the great black cauldron. None of the grown-ups paid any attention to Janet
'
s desperate pleas for intervention, for mercy for these creatures; in fact, they became angry;
‘
Don
'
t interfere Janet. It
'
s none of your business, you don
'
t know what you
'
re talking about. And don
'
t answer back.
'
She could not bear it. The kitchen was the one part of
Auchnasaugh which she avoided. Besides Miss Wales' resentful presence and distressing scalp, besides Jim with his bloodstained trousers and his hands ingrained with soil and blood and death and his hinged knife with fur and entrail fragments stuck to its blade, there was almost always a wide enamel bowl containing salted water tinging to rose pink. In this water lay two skinned and headless rabbits, pale and foetal, slaughtered innocents for all to see. The next day, when they were being forced to eat their rabbit stew, outside the French windows on the lawn and up the steep bank where a thousand merry daffodils blew in the spring breezes, rabbits would be scampering unaware.

‘You will finish it up. You will not leave the table until you have finished.' This was the rule for all meals, for all courses, and many were Janet's counter-stratagems, some more disgusting than others. While patting her lips daintily with her voluminous table napkin she could systematically disgorge her mouth's contents and enfold them in the snowy linen. At the end of the meal napkins were rolled, ringed and placed tidily in a drawer. Janet would return in stealth and shake the grisly wreckage out of the window; the feral cats who lived in the rhododendron thickets would streak out and crouch greedily over it. Near the dining table stood an old harmonium, long disused and silent. Behind its pedals a substantial cavity offered a refuge for food too repulsive even to enter her mouth, chiefly herrings and kippers. It was quite easy to drop her napkin, bend down to retrieve it and, with a deft flick of the wrist, lob the fish into the dark recess. Vera's dog Clover could be relied upon to clear it out later.

Once, when chewing lettuce leaves (thirty times for every mouthful), she discovered a slug in her mouth. It felt enormous and thrashed about. She was afraid that if she screamed they would tell her to stop making a scene and swallow it. She managed to spit it out unseen. It was vast; ribbed, grey and viscous. She put her plate on top of it. The plate danced. In desperation she seized it by the rim on each side and with all her strength pressed it downwards. There was a squelching sensation; the plate was still. A thin trickle of frothy liquid seeped on to the table's gleaming chestnut surface. Janet sat rigid, praying so hard that the words seemed to mass visible and solid in the air before her, ‘Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me'; but it was not God's forgiveness she craved, it was the slug's; and never could this be given, so she must carry her guilt with her for ever. ‘Come on, Janet, wake up, it's lunchtime, go and wash your hands,' they were shouting. She shambled gloomily out of the drawing room.

The dining room at Auchnasaugh had once been the ballroom, lofty, corniced and swagged with fruits and flowers; chandeliers still glimmered through layers of dust, swaying in the draughts. Now, at the end of the summer holidays, in late September, one massive table spanned its far end, overlooked by a great mirror. The grown-ups sat with their backs to the mirror and the children faced it, so that they might see what they looked like if they chewed with their mouths open or dropped food down their chins. In the mornings only Nanny joined them and they swallowed down their porridge in silence, desperate to escape to the wild outside world of the rhododendron thickets, stables and animals. Sometimes tinker children would emerge from the bushes, noiseless and scrawny as the feral cats, and make munching faces at them through the windows; they vanished into shadow the moment Nanny turned her stare.

Pudding today was pink junket, the delicacy so relished by Miss Muffet; it reminded Janet of the blanching rabbits in the kitchen bowl, but she had perfected a way of ingesting it with almost no physical contact by tipping tiny fragments into the very back of her mouth and swallowing quickly. Soon the ordeal was over. She looked at her family. Hector was flushed and jovial from his sherry, looking forward to an afternoon when he and the dogs would disappear in his car for a run in the hills. Vera as usual was dreamy and detached, her eye occasionally lighting lovingly on the newest baby, Caro, harnessed in her high chair and opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish as Nanny's pinkly laden spoon advanced and retreated. Janet had heard Vera telling her friend Constance that she only really liked babies and found children annoying. In fact, she had said, it was possible for a mother to dislike her own child. Constance, who was childless and a psychologist, had much enjoyed this confidence and embarked on a lengthy interpretation. Janet had tiptoed away from the nursery door where she had been listening in the hope that the newly arrived Constance would be commenting on her intelligence and beauty. Her suspicions about Vera were now confirmed. Anyhow she had no need for a mother. She had the dogs, the cats, her pony and all the woods and hills and waters and winds of Auchnasaugh. And she had books.

She looked in the mirror at the assembled faces of her siblings. Francis the freckled and green-eyed was sitting far away from her. He was no longer her closest friend; he had defected to Rhona. Rhona was good at tennis, she loved swimming, her neat little fingers could tie an exquisite trout fly in no time at all. Her bicycle worked because she looked after it. Besides all this, she was pretty and kind and loving. ‘You've done well with that one, Vera,' remarked Constance, leaving unspoken the corollary of how badly Vera had done with Janet. ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,' Grandpa had said, defecting too, on one of his last visits. He had been very ill and when he came in Rhona had run forward to help him sit down by the fire; she set his stick beside him and brought his tea. Janet had clambered on to the arm of his chair, knocking over his stick and joggling his tea into the saucer, so that she could show off about having learnt the Greek alphabet. It was on that same visit that Grandpa had looked at Lulu, four years old, angelically blonde, weaving a little posy of ivy tangled snowdrops and he had said to Janet, ‘You were like that once, a beautiful wee thing. But now you're plain, my dear, very plain.' He had not meant to hurt her, she was certain of that; he was not a worldly man. But hurt her it did, like a punch in the solar plexus. Now, looking at her sisters' faces, blonde and cherubic or dark and flowerlike, and looking at her own pallid frizzy-haired reflection, she was overwhelmed by prickling tears. Her name was dreadful too; all the others had names with some romance about them; even Rhona had a suggestion of inappropriate turbulence, a tawny river in flood rushing and foaming about its boulders. But Janet had nothing; its only possible association was with junket.

Grandpa was dead now and she could never regain her place in his affections. His church was gone too, pulled down to make way for a car park for the gin-drinking patrons of the Golf Hotel and Club House. Francis and Janet had been taken to his funeral. It had been terrible standing in the great Victorian cemetery in Glasgow, while a violent rainstorm beat about them, darkening the grief-stricken faces of the monumental angels, smashing the petals of the funeral flowers, whisking hats into the long wet grass. An umbrella rocking in the wind poked Janet's eye and allowed her at last to weep. Afterwards she and Francis had been sent to walk through the streets of Pollokshields, while the grown-ups drank tea and ate fruit cake and had things to discuss. She remembered the clanging of trains passing by on the suburban network, and saturated posters peeling off the advertising hoardings. The air reeked of petrol and made her feel sick. All the others had gone to see Grandpa in hospital before he died. Janet had not gone; she had forced two fingers down her throat and made herself vomit because she was afraid of what she would see there. Hector and Vera had left her behind with surprising alacrity. And now that was that, and there she was in the dining-room mirror – plain, treacherous and guilty. Outside, sombre clouds were massing and a squall of rain splattered the windows. ‘Never, never, never,' she said to herself. The bright day had gone.

Lila had not been present at lunch. She rarely attended meals, nor did Vera encourage her to do so. Sometimes Hector,
flushed with preprandial bonhomie, would urge her to join them, but she would give her vague, sweet smile, shake her head and move off in her strange gliding manner into the dark winding passages, pungent with Jeyes fluid, which led to the back quarters where she had her demesne.

Lila
'
s two rooms overlooked a small and ancient lawn whose turf was underwater green even in winter. Beyond was the washing line and the blighted apple tree, and then the giant hogweed grove, forbidden in the summer months when its great heads of flowers swayed in menace against the windy sky and its serpentine stems reared triumphant and rutilant.
‘
An army terrible with banners,
'
Janet thought, and those banners bore their dread device.
‘Noli me tangere
'
and
‘Nemo me impune lacessit',
they hissed as their huge leaves scarcely lifted in breezes which scattered the petals from the roses and made the rhododendrons roar like the sea. Now in early autumn they stood withdrawn and spectral, parched skeletons drained of their venom, and occasionally, without warning, one would crack, rend and plunge in airy slow motion to the ground, there to lie in majesty like the great Lord of Luna. It had pained and angered Janet that they should be called hogweed, uncouth in sound, doubly insulting in intention, and she was overjoyed to find that their real name was indeed heroic:
Heracleum giganteum.
In her thoughts they were still Lords of Luna, but she now referred to them as Heraclea and tried to persuade others to do so too. No one would, not even Lila, who at this time of year would bring these broken ghosts into her room and sit in the afternoon dusk gazing at the shadows they cast on the white walls as her fire smouldered and her seven-branched candelabrum flickered and glowed.

About the room were many other desiccated trophies: bracket fungi like Neanderthal livers, long-dead roses in jam-jars green with algae, bracken and rowan berries hung in shrivelled swags round the mirror frames, straw hats pinned to the walls, dust lying heavy on the brims, turning their wreathed flowers a uniform grey. The crumpled rugs bore a patina of cigarette ash, the ashtrays brimmed, books
lay open on the floor and tables, stained with coffee, dog-eared and annotated. These books were in Russian, for Lila, like the Heraclea, originated there. In one corner of the room a low archway led into a turret and here Lila's cat Mouflon slept on a pile of old fur coats draped ineffectually over a mighty stack of empty whisky bottles. The aromas of ancient tom and evaporating spirits combined with Schiaparelli's Shocking and Craven A tobacco to create an aura of risque clubland. On the mantelpiece, just visible behind a watercolour of the cat and a spilling powder compact, was the curled corner of a photograph of Lila's deceased husband, cousin to Hector. Lila had met him long ago in Russia, where he had been employed as a naval adviser to the Tsar's fleet, and when he had asked her to marry him she had been unable to think of any polite way of saying no. So he had brought his silent black-eyed bride to Scotland, and the Revolution had happened and she had never gone back; all her past was gone.

At Auchnasaugh she had been neither happy nor unhappy, passing her days in reading, dreaming, painting watercolours of animals, landscape, mushrooms, and politely refusing all contact with the world beyond the glen. She collected wild flowers and pressed them in albums, she brought in baskets of fungi and identified them from their spore prints, covering any empty floor space in great sheets of paper dotted and oozy with deliquescent fruit bodies. For thirty-five years she had kept a record of mysterious botanical presences and absences. Sometimes people saw her sitting on a moorland boulder, staring into space, or scrabbling with a trowel at its mosses and lichens, or gliding through the woods with the curious veering gait, the bowed head and solitary absorption of the mushroom seeker. It was generally supposed that she was mad and a sorceress as well. Her rare visits to the village did nothing to help her reputation; she would sit bolt upright in the back of Vera's car, shawls wound about her head and across her face, looking neither to right nor left, a widowed queen. Vera would take her list into the shop, the shopkeeper would bring her box out and pack it into the boot, she would hand the money through the car window, and not one word would she say. As the car drove off the village children would appear, pointing and jeering, but they were also afraid of her.

Lila's husband, Fergus, had been dead for many years now, gone into the silent past with Lila's Russia. Janet asked her if she wished she were back in Russia, if she missed her life there. ‘It's over,' she said, ‘It's the past. It doesn't matter now.' And as to Fergus: ‘It's a long time since I last saw him. I don't remember him very well. There's nothing much to be said.' Much, however, was said in various places about the manner of Fergus's death. Hector and Vera said that he had collapsed and died from a stroke, precipitated by an old war wound. Nanny said that Lila had poisoned him with her nasty toadstools and he had died in convulsions of agony, his screams echoing down the glen, unheard by his deaf old father, and unheard or unheeded by Lila who had retired with a nightcap. This story was popular in the village. In fact, said Lila, it had been the doing of her cat Mouflon, whom Fergus had hated. Mouflon had been young and playful then, and during dinner he had skittishly made off with Fergus's trout. Fergus had leapt up and hurled his plate at him. He missed the cat but broke the plate. Mouflon fled with the trout to a high shelf and crouched there, snarling and devouring. Fergus was puce with rage; he began to rant about Lila's devotion to her cat and her mushrooms, her failure to make friends of his friends, her refusal even to acknowledge acquaintances. ‘You may pass through life without friends, but you can't manage without acquaintances.' Lila could, and did, but this she did not say. Instead she diverted him, spoke admiringly of his prowess at the wheel of his Lagonda, his joy, his ink-blue close-couple coupé, swan-curved of running board. She pretended that she would like to go for a drive with him the next day. Fergus was mollified. He told Lila about his dentist's admiration for his teeth and how the dentist had said that as teeth went these were Rolls Royces and he had riposted that they should be Lagondas. To prove his point he would
now bisect a Fox
'
s Glacier Mint with one snap of his front teeth. He set the small gleaming iceberg in position; Lila watched, dreamy in the candlelight; down came his teeth like the blade of a guillotine, down hurtled Mouflon, a ginger streak from the high shelf, embedding his claws in Fergus
'
s neck. Fergus gasped, jerked backwards, inhaled the half glacier mint and choked to death. Lila thumped him and shook him to no avail. It was over very quickly. Beneath the table the cat Mouflon licked the other half of the mint, twitched his whiskers in distaste and sauntered off to Lila
'
s mushroom chamber. Presently she joined him there. After all, nothing could be done until the morning.