September (1990) (58 page)

For, meeting him for the first time, she had been wary. Though prepared to like the young man whom Alexa had chosen to love, she kept her defences well up, determined not to be taken in by any brittle veneer of too-obvious charm. His dark good looks, his tall frame, his bright and intelligent blue eyes had caught her slightly off-balance, and the fact that he was the son of Penelope Keeling had further taken the wind from her sails. That was another thing that had occurred to cloud her day, for Noel had told her that Penelope was dead, and for some reason she found it painful to come to terms with this. Filled with the regrets of hindsight, she knew that she had no person but herself to blame for the fact that she had never again got in touch with that vital and fascinating woman. And now it was too late.

"What isn't the same?" he prompted gently.

She gathered her flying thoughts. "My picnic."

"It's a splendid picnic."

"But different. Missing out. Henry is not here, nor Edmund, nor Isobel Balmerino. This is the first time she's missed my birthday celebration, but she had to go to Corriehill to help Verena Steynton arrange the flowers for the dance tomorrow evening. And as for my darling little Henry, he is now committed to boarding
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schools for at least ten years, and by the time he is free to come again, I shall probably be six feet under the turf. I hope I shall be. Eighty-eight scarcely bears thinking about. Too old. Perhaps dependent on one's children. My only fear."

"I can't imagine you being dependent on anybody."

"Senility comes to us all eventually."

They fell silent. Out of this silence another spatter of distant and sporadic gun-fire echoed towards them over the hills.

Violet smiled. "They, at least, seem to be having a successful day."

"Who's shooting?"

"I suppose the members of the syndicate who happen to be here just now. And Archie Balmerino is with them." She turned to smile at Noel. "Do you shoot?"

"No. I never even owned a gun. I didn't have that sort of an upbringing. I lived in London all my life."

"In that wonderful house in Oakley Street?"

"That's right."

"What a fortunate young man you were."

He shook his head. "The shaming thing is that I didn't consider myself fortunate. I was sent to a day
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school and thought myself very hard done by, because my mother couldn't afford to send me to Eton or Harrow. As well, my father had taken off by the time I was ready for school, and married some other female. I didn't exactly miss him, because I'd hardly known him, but in some strange way it rankled."

She did not waste her sympathy on him. Instead, thinking of Penelope Keeling, she said, "It is not easy for a woman to bring up a family on her own."

"Growing up, I don't think that ever occurred to me.

Violet laughed, appreciating his honesty. "Youth is wasted on the young. But you enjoyed your mother's company?"

"Yes, I did. But from time to time we had the most stupendous rows. Usually about money."

"That's what most family rows are about. And I don't imagine that she suffered from materialism."

"The very opposite. She had her own philosophy for living, and a selection of homespun truisms which she would come out with in times of stress, or in the middle of some really acrimonious argument. One of them was that happiness is making the most of what you have and riches is making the most of what you've got. It sounded plausible, but I never quite worked out the logic."

"Perhaps you needed more than wise words."

"Yes. I needed more. I needed not to feel an outsider. I wanted to be part of a different sort of life, to have a different background. The Establishment. Old houses, old families, old names, old money. We were brought up to believe that money didn't matter, but I knew that it only didn't matter provided you had plenty of it."

Violet said, "I disapprove, but understand. The grass is always greener on the other side of the hill, and it is human nature to yearn for what you cannot have." She thought of Alexa's little jewel of a house in Ovington Street, and the financial security she had inherited from her maternal grandmother, and knew a small stirring of disquiet. "The worst is," she went on, "that when you achieve that green grass, you often discover that you never really wanted it at all." He stayed silent, and she frowned. "Tell me," she said abruptly, coming straight to the point, "what do you think of us all?"

Noel was taken aback by her bluntness. "I . . . I've scarcely had time to form an opinion."

"Rubbish. Of course you have. Do you think, for instance, that we are Establishment, as you term it? Do you think that we are all very grand?"

He laughed. Perhaps his amusement disguised a certain embarrassment. She could not be sure. "I don't know about grand. But you must admit that you live on a fairly lavish scale. To achieve such a life-style in the south, one would need to be a millionaire ten times over."

"But this is Scotland."

"Precisely so."

"So you do think we're grand?"

"No. Just different."

"Not different, Noel. Ordinary. The most ordinary of folk, who have been blessed with the good fortune to be raised and to live in this incomparable country. There are, I admit, titles, lands, huge houses, and a certain feudalism, but scratch the surface of any one of us, go back a generation or two, and you'll find humble crofters, mill workers, shepherds, small farmers. The Scottish clan system was an extraordinary thing. No man was any man's servant, but part of a family. Which is why your average Highlander does not walk through life with a chip on his shoulder. He is proud. He knows he is as good as you are, and probably a good deal better. As well, the Industrial Revolution and Victorian money created an enormous and wealthy middle class out of a lot of hard-working artisans. Archie is the third Lord Balmerino, but his grandfather made his pile in heavy textiles, and he was raised in the city streets. As for my own father, he started life as the barefoot son of a crofter from the Isle of Lewis. But he was blessed with brains and a talent for book-learning, and his ambitions led him to scholarships, and eventually to study medicine. He became a surgeon and prospered and attained great heights-the Chair of Anatomy at Edinburgh University and a knighthood. Sir Hector Akenside. A resounding name, don't you think? But he always remained a man without pride or pretension, and for this reason was not only respected but loved."

"And your mother?"

"My mother came from an entirely different background. I have to admit that she was rather grand. Lady Primrose Marr, the daughter of an ancient and well
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connected family from the Borders, who had, through nobody's fault but their own, become totally impoverished. She was very beautiful. Famously so. Small and elegant and with silvery-blonde hair, piled up on her head, so that it looked as though her slender neck might break with the weight of it. My father set eyes on her at some ball or reception in the Assembly Rooms, and fell instantly in love. I don't think she was ever in love with him, but by then he was something of a personage, and well-to-do to boot, and she was intelligent enough to realize on which side her bread had been buttered. Her family, although they could scarcely approve of the match, raised no objections . . . they were probably only too glad to get the girl off their hands."

"Were they happy?"

"I think so. I think they suited each other very well. They lived in a tall and draughty house in Heriot Row, and that is where I was born. My mother relished Edinburgh, with all its social life, the coming and going of friends, the theatre and the concerts, the balls and receptions. But my father remained a countryman with his heart in the hills. He had always loved Strathcroy, and had come every summer for his annual fishing holiday. When I was about five, he bought the land south of the river and built Balnaid. He was still working, and I was at school in Edinburgh, so to begin with, Balnaid was simply a holiday home, a sort of shooting lodge. To me it was paradise, and I lived for the summer months. When he finally retired, he retired to Balnaid. My mother thought it a rotten idea, but he had a stubborn streak to him, and in the end, she simply made the best of it. She filled the house with guests, thus ensuring a fourth for bridge, and a dinner party every night. But we kept the house in Heriot Row, and when the rain fell with unceasing venom, or the bitter winds of winter blew, she invariably found some excuse to return to Edinburgh, or take herself off to Italy, or the south of France."

"And you?" '

"I told you. For me it was paradise. I was an only child, and a great disappointment to my mother because I was not only dreadfully large and fat, but plain as well. I towered over all my contemporaries, and was a total failure at dancing class because no boy ever wanted to be my partner. In Edinburgh society, I stuck out like a sore thumb, but at Balnaid it didn't seem to matter how I looked, and at Balnaid I could be just myself."

"And your husband?"

"My husband?" Violet's warm smile transformed her weathered features. "My husband was Geordie Aird. You see, I married my dearest friend, and at the end of over thirty years of marriage, he was still my dearest friend. Not many women can say that."

"How did you meet him?"

"At a shooting party, up on the moors of Creagan Dubh. My father had been asked to shoot with Lord Balmerino, and because my mother was away on some Mediterranean cruise, he asked me to accompany him. Going shooting with my father was always the greatest of treats, and I went to great pains to be useful, carrying his cartridge bag, and sitting, quiet and still as a mouse, in his butt."

"Was Geordie one of the guns?" asked Noel.

"No, Noel. Geordie was one of the beaters. His father, Jamie Aird, was Lord Balmerino's head keeper."

"You married the gamekeeper's son?" Noel could scarcely keep the astonishment out of his voice, but there was admiration there as well.

"I did. It smacks a little of Lady Chatterley, doesn't it, but I can assure you it was not like that at all."

"But when did this happen?"

"The early 1920s. I was ten and Geordie was fifteen. I decided he was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen, and when it was time for the luncheon picnic, I took my sandwiches over to where the keepers and the beaters sat, and ate them with him. You could say that I set my cap for him. After that, he was my friend; I was his shadow, he took me under his wing. I wasn't alone any more. I was with Geordie. We spent whole days together, always out of doors. He taught me to cast for salmon and guddle for trout. Some days,we walked for miles, and he showed me the hidden corries where the deer grazed, and the high peaks where the eagles nested. And after a day on the moor, he would take me home to the little house where his parents lived . . . where Gordon Gillock, Archie's keeper, lives now . . . and Mrs. Aird would feed me bannocks and scones and pour me strong black tea from her best lustre teapot."

"Did your mother not object to this friendship?"

"I think she was quite glad to have me out of the way. She knew that I would come to no harm."

"And did Geordie follow in his father's footsteps?"

"No. Like my own father, he was a clever and academic boy and he did well at school. My father encouraged him in his ambitions. I think he recognized something of himself in Geordie. Because of this, Geordie won a place at the Grammar School in Relkirk, and after that was apprenticed to a firm of chartered accountants."

"And you?"

"Sadly, I had to grow up. All at once, I was eighteen, and my mother realized that her Ugly Duckling had become an Ugly Duck. Despite my size and my lack of social graces, she decided that I must Come Out-do a season in Edinburgh and be presented to Royalty at Holyroodhouse. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but Geordie had gone from me and was living in lodgings in Relkirk, and I worked it out in my own mind that if I was complaisant about this dreadful scheme of hers, then perhaps she would in time accept the fact that Geordie Aird was the only man in the world I would think of marrying. The Season and the Coming Out were, as you can imagine, a total failure. A charade. Dressed in enormous evening gowns, all satin and glitter, I looked like a youthful Pantomime Dame. At the end of the season I remained unsought, unwanted, and unengaged. My mother, deeply ashamed, brought me home to Balnaid, and I did the flowers and walked the dogs . . . and waited for Geordie."

"How long did you have to wait?"

"Four years. Until he had qualified and was in a position to support a wife; I had money of my own, of course. A trust, which came to me when I was twenty
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one, and we could quite easily have managed on that, but Geordie would not hear of it. So I went on waiting. Until the great day came and he passed all his final examinations. I remember I was in the wash-house at Balnaid, giving the dog a bath. I'd taken him out for a walk, and he'd rolled in something disgusting, and there I was wrapped in an apron and soaking wet and smelling of carbolic. And the wash-house door was flung open, and there stood Geordie, come to ask me to marry him. It was the most romantic moment. And since then, I've always had a soft spot for the smell of carbolic."

"What was the reaction of your parents?"

"Oh, they'd seen it coming for years. My father was delighted and my mother resigned. Once she'd got ove
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gonizing over what her smart friends would say, I think she decided that it was better for me to marry Geordie Aird than stay a spinster daughter, getting under her feet and interfering with her butterfly life. So, on an early summer day in 1933, Geordie and I finally wed. And for my mother's sake, I submitted to being laced into stays, and buttoned into white satin so stiff and gleaming that it was like being encased in cardboard. And after the reception, Geordie and I got into his little Baby Austin and we trundled all the way to Edinburgh, where we spent our wedding night in the Caledonian Hotel. And I remember undressing in the bathroom and taking off my going-away dress, and unlacing my stays, and dropping them, with great ceremony, into the waste-paper bin. And I made a vow. No person is ever going to make me wear a corset again. And no person ever has." She burst into lusty laughter and struck Noel a thump on his knee. "So you see, on my wedding night, I said goodbye, not only to my virginity, but my stays as well. It's hard to say which gave me the most satisfaction."