The Burry Man's Day (2 page)

When set against all of this, Cassilis was very small beer indeed, or so Frederica’s letter led Daisy and me to believe; neither of us knew the place. To be sure her Mr de Cassilis was a Mr de Cassilis of Cassilis which is always nice – I rather like being Mrs Gilver of Gilverton if it comes to that, although I would not call myself a snob in most ways – but he was a
Mr
de Cassilis, and a cousin come back to the old place from across the Atlantic what is more, and although Frederica reported that Cassilis Castle was a real castle and not just a house with a silly name and small windows, the estate itself she said was tiny. We had been amused and puzzled, then, to learn that shortly after arriving Frederica had found herself suddenly promoted above all her neighbours into the post of Lady Bountiful for the imminent celebration of the Ferry Fair. How this could have happened in a neighbourhood so heaving with more suitable females was beyond Daisy and me. (The Rosebery noses had to be particularly out of joint, for the family had only just built a splendid new town hall for the village and could reasonably have expected a lifetime of gratitude.) We could only surmise that no one on the committee had got to know Frederica very well yet.

I am far from being an Angel in the Home myself and am capable of mucking things up in ways that most adults of normal intelligence find incomprehensible, but Frederica made me look like an ambassador, his wife and his entire staff of diplomats rolled into one. To take just one example: at her first big party in New York where a great many of her guests were members of her husband’s family, that is to say Felsteins, and most of the others were friends of theirs – various Levys, Cohens and the like – Frederica had taken it upon herself to serve a roast suckling pig as the centrepiece of the dinner. One would have come a lot further than Perth to Queensferry, then, to see what she would make of presiding over the Ferry Fair. However, one thing that must be said of Frederica is that she knows her limitations and when she invited us it was made very clear that we were there to help, not just to watch and giggle. There is a phrase in the Army, I believe – to be booted upstairs – meaning to be promoted far enough beyond one’s competence to prevent one doing any actual damage and Frederica, by drafting in Daisy and me, had in effect booted herself upstairs. We were to make the speeches, fire the starting pistols and judge the competitions, leaving her to smile and look decorative, which task – unless the years had been very unkind to her – she would have no trouble carrying off at all.

Daisy and I converged indeed, almost drove into one another at the Cassilis gate lodge in fact, and she hopped out of her motor car and into mine to trundle up the drive together.

‘Hello, darling,’ she cooed. ‘Hello, Grant. Heavenly shade of lilac, Dandy.’ I blinked. My frock was white.

‘The stockings, I mean,’ Daisy went on.

‘Ah, well, yes. Thank you,’ I said. The stockings were white too, but white over sunburn
is
a peculiar colour; I had spent the previous day with the children to stop them whining about being left behind now and had lain a little too long on the riverbank in my bathing dress.

We bumped over a humpbacked bridge spanning a little burn, rounded a copse and then Cassilis Castle lay before us.

‘Good God,’ said Daisy. ‘It’s a castle. I mean, it’s a
castle.’

I knew exactly what she was getting at. Frederica had told us it was a castle, and so we should have been surprised to see Tudor beams and horsehair plaster, but even so. What faced us now was a tower six, possibly seven, storeys high and about fifty feet square, built out of huge craggy lumps of grey stone. It sat plonked on top of a steep, grassy hill, which was utterly unadorned by trees or even the shrubs and flowers one might look for – positioned, that is, the way that castles used to be when their occupants needed a good view of approaching marauders and a clear run to pour their boiling pitch down. There was no obvious door, nor any windows on this side at least, just arrow slits and what looked suspiciously like the outlets for slop channels. We might have concluded then that this was an earlier version, kept as a garden ornament, and that the real Cassilis Castle lay somewhere beyond, but as we drew nearer the signs were against it: there was bright new timber on the roof behind the crenellations and new glass winked in the arrow slits and pistol crosses. Furthermore, on top of the roof I could see coloured cloth billowing halfheartedly in the warm air and a chance puff of stronger wind showed me just for a second a lion rampant, a Union Jack and a Stars and Stripes. No doubt about it, then, we had arrived.

I rounded the bottom of the hill and saw that on this side a track just wide enough for the motor car zigzagged up to the castle walls. Cheeringly, there were a few windows round here as well and a door, massive and heavily studded with black iron rivets, through which Frederica now burst to stand hopping up and down and waving both hands like a jazz dancer as we approached. Daisy and I stepped down, although Grant remained in her seat with her mouth hanging open.

Frederica beamed and hunched her shoulders at us in the way she always did when planning some devilment or other and immediately, as though a spell had been cast, the years fell away.

‘Buttercup!’ Daisy and I shrieked in chorus and threw our arms around her.

‘No!’ Frederica shrieked back. ‘Absolutely not. If Cad hears you he will never call me Freddy again. Besides, it’s
much
too accurate these days, don’t you think?’ She patted her hips and shook her curls and, granted, both hips and curls were very buttery indeed and disconcerting when attached to the face and voice of the thin, brown-haired, most unbuttercuplike Buttercup of my memory.

‘Yes, what about your hair?’ said Daisy. ‘A touch of the Oscar Wildes, was it?’

Buttercup chortled. One could always say anything to her and never cause offence.

‘No, my darling. Not “gold from grief”, I’ve had it this colour for years. It’s called April Sunrise – isn’t that killing? But thank the Lord it was gold already when the mourning came along, otherwise – shriek! Edith Sitwell. I’ve brought cases of it with me, if you’re interested.’

She cast piercing looks at my dark head and craned to see under Daisy’s hat but made no actual offer, saying only: ‘Hmm. We’ll talk later.’ Daisy and I grimaced at each other.

‘Now, come in and see the castle,’ said Buttercup. ‘You won’t believe it.’

‘I don’t already,’ said Daisy, but Buttercup had turned away and did not hear her.

Inside the massive door, a narrow stone passageway with a rounded ceiling and an uneven floor led to the corner of the tower and a spiral staircase. Up this we trooped, with Buttercup urging us to caution saying that one got used to the bevelled steps in the end but it took a day or two.

‘That’s the Great Hall,’ she said as we reached the next level, ‘but look here first.’ We stopped in the doorway to the Hall and peered down at the floor of the passage, finding under our feet an iron grille which showed us to be standing just above the front door.

‘It’s a murder hole,’ said Buttercup. ‘You hide up here with your bow and arrow and if the guests get past the doorman but they still look unappealing – peeyong! Dead.’

‘Handy,’ I said and walked into the Great Hall.

Great was the word. I could have driven my motor car into either of the two fireplaces and I was sure that two were needed since the room seemed so huge I could hardly believe the outside of the tower contained it. Perhaps though it was just the cold, our echoing footsteps and the fact that it was almost totally empty that made it appear so cavernous. For decoration there was only a display of swords laid out in a complicated pattern like a sunburst on one end wall and the furniture consisted of the kind of table, thirty feet long or so, in rough-hewn wood polished only by the greasy hands of centuries, that one imagines Henry VIII dining at and then sliding underneath. I wondered just how far Buttercup might be taking all of this, and how I should be able to face Grant after gnawing turkey legs and heaving flagons on to my shoulders in my new beaded chiffon.

‘The chairs aren’t here yet,’ said Buttercup, needlessly. ‘Nor the tapestries to help with the draughts. And then upstairs again . . .’ She plunged off towards the spiral staircase and we followed.

Upstairs again was a little better. A drawing room and a library, each with a window, no swords and some furniture, although still with stone floors and gargantuan fireplaces, and by the time we went up yet further to the bedrooms it was beginning to look almost cosy, at least one could imagine that a caveman would think it was the Ritz and I had given up planning to offer my excuses and leave.

‘There are only six bedrooms,’ said Buttercup, ‘but look how clever we’ve been. The walls are so thick and there are these little chambers simply all over the place, sleeping chambers I think, or private closets or whatever, but . . .’ She threw open a door in what was to be my bedroom to reveal a dressing room just big enough for a single bed and a tiny wardrobe. An arrow slit above the bed gave a wink of light. Just for a moment I wished Hugh were there so I could see his face.

‘And this one,’ said Buttercup, springing over to the far side of the room and flinging open another door, ‘is the dearest little bathroom.’ One could only imagine what an architectural historian would make of the gleaming chrome pipes and eau-de-nil bath shaped like a shell bolted on to the stone walls, but my spirits lifted no end. Of course Buttercup could not have spent fifteen years with American plumbing and then come back to dry closets and stone chutes to the garden. Perhaps I would be all right after all.

‘There’s just one last thing I have to show you,’ said Buttercup. ‘All the way to the bottom now.’ She sped off back down the staircase and Daisy and I descended gingerly after her, clutching the iron rail and feeling the way with our stockinged toes, our shoes in our hands.

‘The kitchen!’ Buttercup announced, entering a room right opposite the front door. It was a vaulted cavern as big as the hall above and fifteen feet high, with not a single window, not even an arrow slit, and a floor crisscrossed with channels in the stone. At the far end a blue and white enamel stove lit by electric lamps stood against the wall beside an ancient bread oven big enough for all three of us to have sat in. Opposite were a pair of gleaming white china sinks and at one of these a cook was working with her back to us, her shoulders eloquent with suppressed fury.

‘Don’t mind us, Mrs Murdoch,’ sang Buttercup, waving us over to the corner. ‘Now, what about this?’ We were looking through another grille in the floor to a stone-walled chamber, perfectly round and so deep we could barely make out the bottom.

‘An oubliette!’ Buttercup cried, eyes dancing. ‘Well, a prison pit, anyway. Can you imagine anything more romantic! Just think. They would throw the poor unfortunates down there and leave them to die. And the smells of the kitchen would waft down through the grille and torture them while they starved. Only we can’t think what to do with it, can we, Mrs Murdoch?’

The cook turned and gave her A Look but said nothing.

‘We had thought it would make a larder,’ Buttercup went on, ‘but we’d have to put in a ladder and Mrs Murdoch doesn’t fancy it. And anyway, there are so many other wall chambers for larders and suchlike we hardly need it.’

‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘And do you really think you’d want to keep your food there, darling? I mean, if people died in it.’

Mrs Murdoch turned on her way from the sink to the stove and keened towards me yearningly, but Buttercup only laughed.

‘Oh, we don’t worry about all that, Dandy darling. It was years ago. They’d be dead now, anyway.’

I suppose this made some kind of sense.

‘So I think we’ll just bash through from downstairs and use it as a cupboard,’ Buttercup said, sounding regretful.

‘Downstairs?’ said Daisy.

‘The dungeons,’ said Buttercup. Then: ‘Damn! The basement, I mean. We haven’t quite given up on the idea of persuading the servants to take up residence down there, but Cad reckons that calling it the dungeons doesn’t help.’

Mrs Murdoch threw a tray of scones into the stove and slammed the door with a clang.

‘Where are they now, then?’ said Daisy through a mouthful of warm scone, half an hour later. ‘The servants, I mean.’

‘They’re in the old house,’ said Buttercup. ‘I mean the new house. The house, you know. Where we were until the castle was ready.’

‘There’s a house?’ Daisy asked, piningly, and I had to bite my cheeks not to giggle, but Buttercup did not see me through the gloom.

‘Oh yes,’ said Buttercup. ‘A boring Georgian square. The de Cassilis family hadn’t lived in the castle for simply aeons until Cad came back. Aren’t people dull? And the servants are all still there. I keep telling them how much easier it would be for them to sleep here in the dun– . . . basement. We’ve fitted it up beautifully, you’ve no idea. But if they’re silly enough to want to tramp half a mile through the park every night and morning good luck to them. They’ll come around, I rather think, in the winter.’

‘But what makes you imagine they’ll stay?’ I said. ‘Servants these days just don’t stay unless you treat them like the gods of Egypt.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Buttercup. ‘We’re on the second lot of maids already. Third, maybe. And I’m in a super-inflationary wages war with Mrs Murdoch. She’s up to three hundred at the last count.’

‘Well, she’s worth it,’ said Daisy. ‘These scones are divine. So I’d shut up about the larder if I were you.’

Buttercup chuckled, then cocked an ear.

‘Oh goody,’ she said. ‘Here’s Cad. Now drink him in and tell me what you think later.’

Cadwallader de Cassilis appeared in the doorway and strolled towards us. At once I had the fanciful notion that here was why Buttercup seemed not to notice the Stygian gloom of the castle, for he exuded light. From the top of his head, where his hair was polished and golden – real gold too, I rather thought, not April Sunrise – to the tips of his toes, in appalling patent co-respondent brogues, he shone. Part of it was the spanking new cricket jersey and cream bags – billowing acres of these – but some of it was the bursting, pulsing good health of his eyes and cheeks and teeth, the sheer Americanness of him altogether. Although one knew he was Scottish by ancestry, at least two generations’ worth of buffalo steaks, corncobs and milk must have gone to produce what stood before us now.