Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion. Belinda Rathbone

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      What would the architect and his draughtsman think of us now, of their various descendants meeting by sheer coincidence, caught by surprise in a transatlantic alliance of country house maintenance in the late twentieth century? And had we met in London, say, or New York, would the meeting have anything like the same resonance, the same tangibility for that historic connection, that it had in the architect’s library in the kingdom of Fife?

      BACK AT THE GUYND the autumn sunlight slanted across the rooms, raising the spectre of dust on every surface, illuminating the chipped cornice or cracks in the wall paint. The ironwork of the banister cast a sharp-focus shadow on the wall, crisp as the echo of a voice across a frozen field. Then the sun disappeared suddenly behind a cloud, the light was too dim to remember where to dust, and it didn’t matter anyway.

      The long days of a northern summer were now traded in for the short days of a northern winter, and I wondered if we had invested heavily enough in the daylight hours that were once abundant and now so scarce. Some mornings we would wake to see a coat of hoarfrost over the green fields. Matted brown leaves, their veins painted silver, sparkled and crunched under my wellington boots as Foxy led me along the open roads. The ‘beasts’ were still in the fields, but soon would be moved to their farmers’ sheds for the winter. From across the field the house stood starkly; the windows like sheets of silver winked back at me as the sun hit them sideways. The strange thing was that the frost would still be there just the same in the afternoon; the sun never rose high enough to burn it off. It just hung there, at half-mast, and then went down. This was a twilight world.

      There were various residential tenants in place, which helped to tone down the effect of gathering winter isolation. Stephen, the artist, lived downstairs in the West flat. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Stephen painted dark, foreboding landscapes in a style that John facetiously called the Scottish School of Gloom, and which clearly drew much of their inspiration from the Guynd. He lived with his German girlfriend, Ilka, and their one-year-old daughter, Gwen. Stephen was frankly delighted to find in me someone with whom he could talk seriously about Max Beckmann. As for me, the idea of making a studio visit under our very own roof was well beyond my expectations.

      ‘Stephen prices his paintings by the yard,’ explained John, rather derisively, I thought, even if it was true. Paintings weren’t the same as cornices, please.

      ‘A large painting is a more ambitious undertaking than a small one,’ I told him, a mite stiffly.

      In the East flat lived another young couple. David had a second-hand furniture business in Dundee, and his wife, Jill, was a vet. The entrance lodge at the front gate was occupied by a young bachelor named Robert, who worked for the telephone company. Living alone at the edge of the estate, he hardly ever crossed our path. There was a complex of farm buildings half a mile down the East drive at the back gate, which included an L-shaped steading, a U-shaped piggery and a row of three attached cottages, at the time empty but one, which housed an old widower named Fayerweather. A passionate gardener, Fayerweather single-handedly managed a large vegetable patch behind the old piggery. We’d encounter him, a stooped white-haired man, harvesting the last of the summer crop, and he would invite us to help ourselves to the Brussels sprouts, whenever. And he told me where to look for the ‘wee wild orchid’ that grew near the dam. Finally there was a mysterious old couple, the Fishers, living in a grim little house near the farm, which used to be the residence of the overseer. We could tell that the Fishers were home from the coal smoke curling out of their chimney, but we hardly ever saw a figure emerge from that house to find his or her way through the thicket of weeds and past the graveyard of half a dozen or so dead automobiles that surrounded it.

      Upstairs in my study John inserted a stainless steel coil of chimney liner through the opening in the fireplace to the roof and hooked up our brand-new woodstove. Matt black with sturdy old-fashioned lines and a window through which you could see the silent waving of orange flames, warming the room through and through, my stove was more comforting to me than an open fire. During the shortening days of late autumn I escaped into my work, my trap door back to America.

      We still observed the ‘tea ritual’, as John drolly referred to it, every afternoon at about five o’clock, but we no longer trekked with the trolley out to the drawing room, which was too cold for comfort, its draughts now isolated behind a heavy curtain in the library. We gave up the silver teapot for the fat white kitchen model, more or less permanently dressed in its crocheted tea cosy that looked like an old ski hat out of the Lost and Found. Forget about the bone china cups and saucers; one of the variety of chipped mugs out of the kitchen cupboard would do. But the tea itself, in spite of its ritual being trimmed down to a kind of stand-up affair, was as good as ever. It seemed there was always something more to learn about making a ‘proper pot of tea’. Like pouring the boiling water into the pot from a height, ‘to help it aerate ’, explained John. Or, one should ‘always mix the Lapsang Suchong with an equal amount of Bengal, to tone down the smoky taste.’ And then, as I poured out the first cup, ‘How long has it been steeping?’ He always checked; and, ‘Did you remember to give it a stir?’

      This ample supply of loose tea came from an oldfashioned emporium in Dundee called Braithwaite’s, which stood in the same location on Castle Street where it had opened a hundred years ago. Miraculously, twentiethcentury progress had left Braithwaite’s in its wake. An attendant in a red smock would appear behind the counter at the jingle of the bell on the door as we entered its scented sanctuary. The two-foot-high japanned tin canisters still lined the upper shelves labelled China, Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Lapsang Suchong and Bengal. Lifting down the great tin of Darjeeling from above, the attendant’s experienced hand would tap the nearly exact quantity into the shiny brass scales on the counter, and then with a series of counterweights tap a little more until the scales hovered in perfect balance. ‘Anything else? Two pounds fifty, please!’ was the cost of this performance, and with a quick exchange of coins and the thrrinng!of the old cash register we were out the door and into the twentieth century again.

      These were the simple comforts of country life in winter, I thought to myself as we climbed the grey roads out of the depths of not-very-bonnie Dundee, making our way past faceless housing blocks, where people whose lives I would never know carried on day to day, their windows decked out in frilly curtains and lit up now in the yellow glow of electric lights as dusk fell. We sped past supermarkets, industrial estates and around so many roundabouts that I thought we were going in circles until we finally made the turn on to the back road that leads eleven miles to the front gate of the Guynd. Home in time for tea.

      Late November closed in on us. At sunset, about three-thirty in the afternoon, we went around the house closing all the interior shutters against the cold. The sun, if it had appeared at all, would have done what it could to warm the rooms. It was still too soon to fire up the boiler. (Never before the first of December, goes the local convention. And off by the first of March, as John explained was the custom of his friends at Dunninald, another large house nearby, suggesting strongly that we too would be following the same sensible, ritual logic. Do you think this is America?) Once the heat was on, the small radiators had only from four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight to do their job.

      The kitchen was the coldest room in the house. I pared down my cooking efforts from the stews and salads I had enjoyed concocting in the summer to the bare minimum on a wintry evening. A quick dash into the kitchen to shove a frozen breaded chicken cutlet into the little portable electric oven, then back to the fireside, or stoveside, as fast as I could go. ‘Close the door!’ John reminded me every time I left a room, so as not to let the precious heat escape into the passages.

      ‘We are huddled up in my study most evenings now,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘around the Vermont Castings woodstove. The house has become a huge empty shell we walk through in search of this or that.’

      I switched on the electric blanket about an СКАЧАТЬ