Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion. Belinda Rathbone
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Название: Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion
Автор: Belinda Rathbone
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007343621
isbn:
The stingy little lamps, the walls in need of paint Tom could abide even if Doreen could not. The feared and isolated patriarch complained to his trustees of his family’s ‘soaring expenditure in electricity, due to staggered meals, and their own private sitting room’. He was known to have cut off the hot water supply when he thought his family was being extravagant with it. Yet a striking double standard was not hard to see in Tom’s definition of luxury. He bought a showy two-seater open-top Lee Francis motor car, which is remembered to this day by certain elderly residents of Arbroath. And there was no surer way to impress the county folk with his youthful vigour and enterprise than a heated outdoor swimming pool, which Tom decided he could afford to build in the early 1960s. Furthermore, there was no more public a rejection of his wife’s desires than to smother her lawn tennis court in the process—the ultimate insult to her Wimbledon childhood.
Tom played his new social asset to the hilt, inviting everybody for a swim. Whilst he basked in his superficial popularity, flirting with the girls in their bathing costumes, exhibiting his own remarkably lean figure afloat in an inner tube, Doreen hurried up and down the stairs for extra towels and fretted as children left their wet footprints all over the front hall on their way to the loo. John, having just earned his engineering degree in Aberdeen, outwardly criticised the pool’s poorly designed drainage system and privately fumed over his father’s disregard for his expertise. Alison worried about the safety of her three small children, as she and Angus then resided in the basement flat. Sure enough, one day little Pete, aged four, was discovered floating head down in the pool; the gardener rescued him just in time.
Some of her friends considered Doreen a saint not to have deserted Tom. Certainly she went to church every Sunday, attended religious retreats in foreign countries and prayed a lot at home. A prie-dieu in the corner of the passage upstairs, upholstered in rough brown stuff, faced a religious icon, which I quietly banished to a drawer. Endurance, one friend told me, was Doreen’s great strength. Her long trial ended in 1971 when Tom died suddenly of a stroke. Wrote the headmaster of Fort Augustus, the Catholic monastery where the boys had gone to school, ‘He has finally gone to that place above the dark cloud that hung over him and made him an unhappy man.’
The dark cloud that had hung over the Guynd began to lift after Tom died. His family was free to make decisions, to go about its business, without the constant fear of his criticism. But Doreen had by then lost her energy to make the house beautiful. It lingered in a state of postwar semi-recovery, as she eventually moved downstairs to Tom’s office, no longer having the strength to climb the stairs. This spacious room with a window to the floor gave Foxy a place to doze in the sun or prick up her sharp ears and announce a visitor approaching the front door. John fitted a stove into the fireplace so that his mother could keep herself warm in winter. With Foxy she took walks in the woods to escape the icy winds of the open road. In April she decamped for Portugal where she shared a house with friends. Back at the Guynd in summer, she spent the last two weeks of every June faithfully watching Wimbledon. John remembers the pop, pop, pop of the tennis balls emanating day after day from behind the closed doors of the darkened library.
That first autumn I spent at the Guynd, Doreen’s freshly dry-cleaned tartan skirts still hung in the cupboard, her feathered hats perched on the shelf swathed in tissue paper. In the drawer of a little Pembroke table I sorted through her powders and pills, creams and lipsticks, and as I tossed them one by one into the waste basket I wondered what it was like to live here all alone. Her diaries, little leather books each no bigger than the palm of my hand, stuffed to the back of a desk drawer, accounted for thirty-six years of marriage, every day of it recorded briefly in pencil, as another test of her endurance passed into night. ‘Rain, walked with Foxy in the woods, T. not speaking to J.’
‘Had she been ailing for a long time before she died?’ I asked John.
‘Not at all. She was out at the theatre one evening with friends. Died of a heart attack. I was in London when I got the call. Got into my car and drove nine hours straight to the Guynd. I was devastated. And then, to get here and find her gone. I guess I always thought she would be here. She always was.’
Even if in Tom’s opinion the Guynd would never give them any pleasure, or perhaps because he was so sure of it, Doreen was determined that it was the one thing they had that was worth her whilst to save. ‘I have to stay for the sake of the boys,’ she would explain to friends. ‘It’s their heritage.’
How were the boys to interpret this heritage, raised in the teeth-gritting cold passion of their parents’ conflicting dreams and desires? How was John to proceed under the heavy memory of a father who did not want him to inherit the family home, and a mother who sacrificed everything so that he could? Now the estate was in the hands of trustees his father had appointed, whose management over the years had been, at best, indifferent. Four hundred acres of farmland had been sold off to give Angus his share of the inheritance, which left John the sole beneficiary of what remained of a crippled and neglected estate—the land, the house and its contents.
Was it the Guynd, I wondered, that engendered conflict, that raised hopes and guaranteed disappointment? Was it the Guynd that ruined Tom and Doreen’s marriage? Angus and Alison’s? No wonder John had held out for so long, observing these casualties with a cautious eye. Yet as outwardly critical as he was of the immediate precedents, did he really have the distance it would require to break the mould? No question about it. We were in a high-risk relationship.
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