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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Just as the pool was beginning to ebb, John would arrive in the dark like a great human radiator beside me. Mornings, I was greeted by Foxy’s wet nose breathing near my face, accompanied by a vigorous wagging of a tail as I began to stir. It took all my strength of character to get out of bed and don my three or four layers of insulation. Once dressed, I could hardly wait for an excuse to jump into the car, turn on the heat and drive away! Off to the bright lights of the Safeway in Arbroath, to the heated aisles of packaged food and fresh vegetables from Africa, and perhaps afterwards a cup of coffee with Angus’s ex-wife Alison, who lived alone in her semi-detached bungalow on the outskirts of town.

      Alison had grown up in an unheated shooting lodge high in the hills of windswept Aberdeenshire, had subsequently raised her own family in a damp basement flat at the Guynd and was now as happy as she could be in her tidy little suburban stucco, easy to clean and heat. There she would be in her apron and rubber gloves, rolling up her sleeves to wipe a few stray crumbs from her immaculate worktop, or placing a carefully constructed pudding into the right drawer of her enormous freezer chest. I always took my shoes off so as not to tread on her mauve carpet, and I left the dog in the car. Alison was all sympathy and cheerful banter about the practical matters of life, of cooking and shopping. But our favourite subject by far was family. I quickly discovered what valuable insight she could provide into the native Ouchterlony character. And since she revealed not a shred of envy for my taking on the big house, nor lingering resentment that she had not, our relationship was remarkably uncomplicated from the start. ‘I so admire you,’ she said. ‘I never could have taken on a house like that.’

      ‘Maybe I just don’t know any better,’ I replied.

      Alison was charmed by my daring, and I by her modesty and her candour. She would share from her fund of memories and insights into recent family life at the Guynd and the mysterious past of earlier generations of Ouchterlonys. We compared the two brothers—John and Angus—their characters, their histories, who resembled which parent in what way. ‘They’re as different as chalk and cheese,’ said Alison, ‘and I’m afraid they were not very good friends.’ Angus, with his ginger hair, was supposed to be light-hearted; John was dark, and seemed deeper. Angus was the sporty one, John the intellectual. Angus moved fast and impulsively, John cautiously and with deliberation. Angus was a spendthrift, John was frugal. Angus threw things away, and John, furious, rescued them. Instead of finding in the other a useful complement, their differing natures grated on each other and brought out their worst and most competitive behaviour, each vying, as brothers will, for supremacy.

      Posing in their kilts for the lady photographer who toured the county once a year with her 8 × 10 view camera, black cloth and tripod, Angus, aged about nine, appears to be looking up at his older brother with great respect. Perhaps this was just for the picture, or perhaps there was a time, barely remembered by anyone, when they were friends. The more I learnt, the more I wondered which of the two was the prodigal son, or whether they simply took turns at it. Angus, who eventually fled to Canada, leaving his wife and children? Or John, who took off at a younger age, leaving job and career to follow the trail of his curiosity and to get as far away as possible from the fate that was already spelt out for him? Both rebelled in their own way from the strictness of their upbringing, and neither was granted the prodigal son’s warm welcome home by their father. ‘I suspect he was terribly jealous of his boys,’ Alison ventured. ‘Mother-in-law didn’t make it any easier, to my mind.’

      BY THE TIME John’s father was released by the Germans and returned to Scotland at the end of the war, John hardly remembered him, Angus had never met him, and their mother, Tom’s ‘darling wee girl’, had grown accustomed to being in charge. Tom was a changed man—two world wars had left their indelible scars on his psyche—and the world was a changed place. It was too painful and too daunting a prospect to recapture the Guynd of the past. Restoring it to the image of his childhood was inconceivable. Anyway, he might have figured, it never had his name on it. Survivor’s guilt dogged him. Two brothers had died tragically, heroically, whilst he had spent the war years watering tomato plants for the enemy.

      Doreen was anxious to return the house to the family, but for a few years Tom—the Commander—was satisfied to establish a flat in the West end of the basement, leaving the Admiral upstairs presiding over the principal rooms. Perhaps this was to drive home the point of wartime pecking order, that military duty took precedence over family life. Perhaps it had something to do with Tom’s having spent three years in command of a submarine during the First World War. Did being underneath give him a feeling of safety, or of subterfuge, which he had developed an affinity for? Whatever the reasons, faced with Tom’s inertia it took many months of Doreen’s persistent prodding to get the Admiral’s family moved out of the house and her own upstairs. From then on, as John recalls, his father spent a good deal of his time sequestered in the library in front of the TV with the shutters closed, surrounded by a barricade of club armchairs.

      As John remembered him, his father didn’t seem to have a past or a family worth talking about. He was moody, irritable and intimidating. Every morning the boys had to stand at attention at the foot of his bed, waiting for their orders. Tom spent the morning in the desultory business of his new raison d’être as Secretary of the Shipwrecked Mariner’s Society. At precisely one o’clock he would begin to stir, demanding of his wife, ‘Where’s lunch?’ Commanding his two or three estate workers towards the planting of trees, the raising of pigs, the mending of fences and gates and, in a more energetic mood, reprimanding the estate managers, he tried to recapture the sense of power he had felt in his finest hours in the navy. But there was no real enemy to be vanquished, no territory to conquer. Often Tom would take to his bed and not be available for days. It was well known that his marriage was unhappy, and that his two boys were afraid of him. Even in later years, when the boys were grown up, Alison recalls that when the Commander appeared ‘everyone else would sort of scatter’.

      As the boys grew up and were packed off to boarding school, Tom and Doreen led increasingly separate lives, each claiming his and her own end of the house. Doreen would retire to her sewing room upstairs to play her accordion to herself. Tom loathed the sound of it. Perhaps he suspected that her love of the instrument had something to do with one of those dashing Polish army refugees that so cheered the lonely wives of Angus County during the war, with their shiny black riding boots and their fast-swinging mazurkas. Tom had no interest in dancing of any kind.

      By the 1960s, I learnt from a letter Tom wrote to his middle-aged Canadian nephew, he had concluded that his wife was ‘a townie ’, and that his two teenage boys evinced no real interest in the country. Occasionally he could persuade Angus to go shooting with him, which gave him a ray of hope, but mostly, he complained, ‘parties, cinema, country dancing, pretty well contain their thoughts, except when the lake is frozen’. If Tom had ever felt the same way in his youth he had long since forgotten it.

      John’s parents also cultivated different sets of friends, Doreen’s amongst the upper-crust county families, whilst Tom was more comfortable with the local farmers and the transient military population, always in good supply from the nearby naval air base. One such witness to this situation, a retired naval officer, came to call on us one day in the summer, interested to see the old Guynd again. John instantly disappeared, leaving me to receive the man’s candid recollections. ‘The Commander liked me,’ he told me, adding jovially, ‘which of course made me rather unpopular with the rest of the family.’

      More than one family acquaintance has told me about having been invited to the Guynd for tea, and then being sent away when the knock at the door was met by the Commander, who knew nothing of their invitation. Likewise, Doreen was known to give a cool reception to anyone looking for Tom. She was not expected to participate in his dinner or lunch parties, nor did she care to, to hear Tom telling the same old war stories and his favourite off-colour jokes. One was either his friend or hers, and whichever one was, it was almost impossible not to take sides in the battle over how the Guynd should best be managed or—God forbid—enjoyed.

      Clearly, I realised, СКАЧАТЬ