The Winter Ground (2 page)

‘Well, I can’t imagine who this was then,’ I said, feeling rather chastened and thinking there were no end of people it could be, people who were woven deep into the fabric of Gilverton and about whom I would know nothing, since I seemed sometimes to know nothing at all. ‘They were a funny-looking bunch, that’s all.’

‘Oho!’ said Grant, looking up from her work and not even flicking a glance over me to see that my seams were straight. ‘Well, then! It’ll have been the circus.’

‘The circus?’ I echoed. And even though midgets and bears bore no better explanation, when I turned my eyes to my bedroom window and looked out at the grey blanket of sky, the black trees and dead bracken stretching to the brown hills in the distance, sheeted with rain and bare of a single other roof as far as the eye could see, I half suspected she was teasing me. There could no more be a circus here than a nightclub with roulette and dancing.

‘At Benachally, madam,’ said Grant. ‘Have you not heard, then?’

I had not, but to be sure if I had to stretch my imagination around a circus without it snapping, then Castle Benachally was the only place a circus could possibly be.

‘I hope they keep the bear on a thick rope,’ I said. ‘While they’re walking around Gilverton anyway.’

It was Grant’s turn to show saucer eyes to me.

‘A bear?’ she whispered. ‘They never said there was a bear. Dogs and ponies and a black monkey in a coat, they said, but nobody breathed a word about a bear.’ With that, she abandoned a lace cuff half-pinned and flitted from the room to take the dread news to the kitchens and cluck the rest of the morning away.

I did a fair imitation of flitting away myself, straight to my sitting room to the telephone to ring up Benachally and invite myself to tea. I did not try to cloak my attempt in disingenuousness; for one thing I would have been seen through and for another I, almost alone of our neighbours, had accepted all the oddnesses of the new arrivals with polite indifference, neither huffing nor interfering, and so I thought I had worked up a little credit which could perhaps be cashed in now.

‘Oh yes, do come,’ said the slightly husky voice of Ina Wilson, doyenne of Benachally. ‘We can go over to their camp before tea and I’ll introduce you. We could even walk if it ever stops raining.’

‘But what are they doing here?’ I asked her. ‘Why on earth did they come?’

‘I’ll tell you when you arrive,’ said Ina, with something between a laugh and a sigh. ‘And bring Bunty,’ she went on. There was a slight pause. ‘Albert is at the works today.’

Ah, I thought, ringing off again. That explained the possibility of the walk too, for while Grant made life easy for herself by consigning me to my sitting room from time to time with impractical pale garments and fluffy footwear, Albert Wilson kept his wife in solitary confinement in Castle Benachally almost permanently and did it, so far as one could tell, by sheer force of personality and, one hoped, out of love.

It was impossible to say what Ina Wilson might have expected from her marriage – the alliance was a considerable leap into the unknown – but it cannot have been what she had got and I always felt rather sorry for her. Her own background was one of perfect rectitude, although not elevated socially speaking. Her father was a don at the university in Glasgow, terribly learned in one of those branches of science which the Victorians went in for, lots of cases full of samples and pieces of delicate equipment and great excitement at – it always seemed to me – the same discovery over and over again. Her mother was no less a scholar, although
her
passion was for the medieval. I never learned whether it was stained glass windows, epic poems or martyred saints which inflamed her since all I ever got were odd snippets from Ina that Mother had had a terrible crossing to Lindisfarne or had sent a postcard from Norwich where she was looking at an illuminated manuscript before it got sent to its new home in a library in Boston.

It can only have been the war, surely, that put the flower of this studious little household in the way of a self-made businessman, twenty years her senior, with a red villa in the suburbs, whose very name – Albert Wilson – must have made her mother wince. (As to the nature of his business, Wilson was given to muttering vaguely about architecture if anyone tried to pin him down but in plain fact he was a brickmaker, a very successful brickmaker, with a brickworks in Paisley and another in Leith, and lately – thanks to the number of shelters, factories, hangars and warehouses thrown up for the war effort – an extremely wealthy man. Ina to her credit never tried to finesse any of this: witness her telling me that Albert was ‘at the works’ today, when I am sure he would have described himself as ‘in town’.)

But when Ina left the West End flat full of her parents’ textbooks and gave up her daily walks to chamber recitals in the winter gardens she did not settle for long in the red villa entertaining the cream of Glasgow’s Rotarians. She succumbed, in the winter of 1918, to the villainous influenza which swept across what seemed like the whole world, borne home by the returning troops and wiping out great swathes of exhausted humanity as though it were swatting so many flies. Young and strong, well-nourished and comfortably tended, Ina fought it and rallied but her child, a girl of ten months old, was less fortunate and as soon as the funeral was over and Ina was well enough to be moved, her husband had sold the red villa and carried her off to a hillside far from the crowds of Glasgow to clean air, clear water and – as I could attest – endless solitude.

For six years now Ina had been convalescing at Castle Benachally, drawn up in high-backed chairs in front of roaring fires, or tucked under blankets on sunny terraces, and I had watched the fleeting pallor of recent illness deepen and settle. I had watched too as Albert Wilson’s concern for his wife and grief for his daughter had grown and twisted into something darker, something a great deal harder to name. Ina bore it with patience, even sometimes with cheerful patience, but others in the neighbourhood, with much less excuse since they were only visiting and did not have to live under the regime, soon became exasperated and stayed away, so Ina’s isolation grew and grew.

I cannot quite say why I was not among them; I am perfectly able to summon unwarranted exasperation, but for some reason Albert Wilson’s regulations did not trouble me. I accepted sitting far across the room from Ina, shouting over to her, accepted my tea being brought on a separate tray, accepted the inevitable telegram on the morning of my visit asking if anyone in the household was unwell, or had been heard sneezing, or could feel the beginnings of a cough. I even accepted the banishing of Bunty from Benachally, despite the fact that people cannot catch distemper nor dogs carry flu. Besides, today Albert was at the works and Bunty was beside me in the little Morris Cowley with her front paws on the dashboard and her tail whipping smartly back and forth, in anticipation. She has high expectations, when taken out in the motor car just after luncheon, that she will be having saucers of milk and crumbled cake for tea.

It was a fair drive from Gilverton to the Wilsons’ – although the estates abut along our eastern boundary – and three o’clock had struck when I turned in between the gateposts with their sleeping dogs, swept past the lodge, up the avenue and over the little bridge with the gothic folly of a gatehouse built above it, and crunched to a stop on the gravel.

Bits of Castle Benachally have been standing these five hundred years and it has some Maxwells and Douglases to its name, as well as the obligatory legend about Charles Edward Stuart stopping off full of hope on his way down or washing up full of despair on his way back again, although at least there is no scrap of tapestry said to be stitched by his mother and her handmaidens while they waited there. (Really, if Mary Stuart had done even a tenth of what adorns castle walls in her name her life would have been the equal of any Huguenot tailor on piece-work rates – locked up for a week, bent over her needle night and day, then let out and on to the next job.)

Despite all this undisputed history, however, Benachally had had the misfortune to be sold to an architect in the fifties and he had spread himself with no little abandon, running up towers, throwing out turrets and tacking on widows’ walks until the whole place looked like something from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Albert Wilson, I am sure, would have pitched in with fumed oak and heraldic pennants if left to himself, suits of armour at every turn on the stairs, but Ina was a calming influence upon him and the inside of Benachally was a delight. The Wilsons had been handed down no family portraits nor dubious Dutch landscapes and rather than buy them up by the yard, which they might easily have afforded to do, they had left the walls almost bare: just plaster painted in cool, powdery shades like sugared almonds, against which sat oversized vases of modern design, filled with branches, looking quite Japanese in their austerity. (I had often envied Ina Wilson’s vases of branches – willow, orange blossom, beech or holly in season – but when I tried the same thing at home against the wallpaper and etchings they looked very messy and made the housemaids sneer.)

Albert’s one contribution to the interior was to forbid much in the way of carpets, for fear of what fusspots the world over call ‘germs’, and Bunty’s toenails sounded like castanets on the marble floor as we approached the main sitting room, so that Ina was calling her name even before the butler swept open the door and announced me. Bunty bounded in, rushed over and subjected Ina to her usual feverish hello. The butler gave me a knowing smile and drew the door shut behind me.

‘Won’t he—?’ I began, but I stopped myself in time. I was unsure how plainly one could talk about Albert’s peculiarity without causing offence, but I suspected that one could not wonder aloud if the butler would tell tales. ‘What a nice friendly butler you have,’ I said in hasty substitution. ‘I always think so when I come here. Mine is a fiend.’

‘We’re very lucky in our servants, Albert and me,’ said Ina Wilson. She was tickling Bunty and so could say the next bit without quite meeting my eye. ‘That is, Albert chooses them very carefully and pays them very well to follow his instructions and I am lucky that, despite all of that, they don’t.’

This was a typical comment of hers: not quite admitting that she shared the general view of her husband and even saying as much as she did with such sweetness that the barb was lost amongst it.

‘Now,’ I said, once I was settled into my chair, ‘please explain, because my mind is absolutely boggling. I thought I was seeing things this morning between the little man and the giant man and the bear.’

‘It’s not a bear,’ said Ina, giggling again as she had on the telephone. I had not seen her so animated in all the time I had known her. ‘It’s a strongman. His name is William Wolf – Big Bad Bill Wolf, he calls himself – and he has a long beard and wears a shaggy suit. I’m sure that’s who it was you saw. I almost fainted when I met him.’

‘But what are they doing here?’ I said. Now, when Ina smiled at me, there was the usual trace of sadness in it.

‘Albert brought them,’ she said. ‘For me.’ I awaited further explanation; for Albert Wilson, whose sole aim in life was to keep his wife from the world and the world from his wife, to bring a circus camp right into his estate grounds seemed impossible. ‘It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds,’ she said, reading my mind. ‘You see, I love the circus. I used to go every day I could get my nurse to take me when I was a child and, in Glasgow, you’d be surprised how often you could find a circus of some description somewhere. Now, I don’t know if you know that I paint a little sometimes to pass the time? Well, recently I decided to paint some circus scenes – quite a compositional challenge, as you can imagine.’

‘Not to mention the horses’ legs,’ I put in. ‘Although, I suppose one could go in for very active scenes with a lot of sawdust kicked up.’

‘Anyway,’ said Ina, who was not exactly solemn but who nevertheless could sometimes make me feel, in contrast, rather flighty, ‘I happened to mention to Albert how much I wished I could see a circus again and he – silly old thing that he is – he said he would learn to juggle and wear a costume if it would amuse me.’ I raised an eyebrow, thinking of Hugh. ‘And then I joked back that we could train up all the servants – housemaids on the trapeze, boot boys turning somersaults – and that way we could have a circus right here at home without any …’ She stopped and I carried the thought to its conclusion for her. Without any strangers, Albert would have said. Without any danger of incomers bringing death along with them. ‘And then,’ Ina resumed, ‘Albert had a brainwave. Instead of turning our household into a circus, why don’t we turn a circus into our household? I couldn’t imagine at first how he could do it. I knew that all the circuses I ever saw were in the summer, or maybe at Christmas sometimes, and I had never wondered about where they went in winter to wait for spring.’

‘Nor I,’ I said. ‘Don’t they go home?’ Then I flushed. ‘Oh. Of course. The caravans
are
home, aren’t they?’

‘They go – poor things – to what they call a winter ground. Somewhere as sheltered as they can find and as cheap as they can get it, because they won’t make another penny until the spring comes and they start the show again. The Cooke circus was camped out on some horrid bit of waste ground near the brickworks in Leith – that’s what gave Albert the idea – and so he went and spoke to Mr Cooke and said they could have a lovely woodland site, with clean water and plenty of firewood, all free of charge so long as they stuck to – you know – Albert’s rules.’

I did indeed know Albert’s rules, as they applied to the servants. No popping into the village even on days off, no evenings in the pub, no visits to the cinema, no going to see their family if anyone in their family was ill or had been heard to sneeze or thought they could feel a cough coming on. The Benachally servants were handsomely paid but they certainly earned it.

‘And in a week or two – for Christmas or New Year – if everyone is in good health, they’re going to put on a show and I’m going to go to it.’ Ina beamed at me. ‘Isn’t he sweet, really?’