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

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СКАЧАТЬ to my left—a pleasant-faced late Georgian gentleman with a bemused smile. Ancestor to my right—a rather more determined-looking Victorian. On the dining room table dust had gathered around the place mats, left from a dinner party some months ago. More chairs than I could count. A small table on the side draped in cloth as thick as a blanket held a white metal plate warmer, such as you might see in a rooming house. A variety of vintage electric space heaters stationed in the far corners assured me that this was a cold room in winter, perhaps even in spring. The floor was covered, inexplicably, with stained puddle-brown linoleum.

      On the other side of the front hall, directly opposite the dining room, a matching pair of doors opened into the library. Bookshelves built into deep architraves, stocked with leather-bound volumes and edged with a bedraggled leather dust fringe, gave off the faint glint of faded gold leaf. A clutter of souvenirs and children’s toys littered the shelves in front of the books. Colour picture postcards curled with damp lined the white marble mantelpiece. Half empty tonic and gin bottles sprouted from the drinks tray behind an enormous armchair covered in brown stretch fabric. But how to get across this room, past the barricade of oversized armchairs, huge standard lamps with their cockeyed shades, a giant television, an old hi-fi system built into a table, three-and-a-half-foot speakers covered with pink psychedelic fabric, and through the curtained archway straight ahead?

      Picking my way across the room I drew the curtain and passed through the arch into a spacious drawing room, bright even with the shades drawn. Three windows at the far end, facing south-west, flanked the bowed end of the house. Dodging a collection of dead flies on the windowsill, I gave the shades a tug and revealed with a snap a living triptych of fields and trees. Another large window on the left framed an ancient copper beech and shed a shaft of light on the keyboard of the grand piano. It was a hall of mirrors and glass: gold-leafed mirror brackets over marquetry game tables in the niches of either side of the fireplace, a huge mirror over the mantel and overhead a Bohemian glass chandelier, dripping with prisms. A hard-edged art deco drawing room suite, covered in wrinkled pink damask loose covers, dominated the middle of the room. This was clearly the lady’s end of the house, her showpiece. I imagined John’s mother serving tea.

      In spite of its glorious light, its air of gentility and its fine antiques, the drawing room depressed me as much as any other. Perhaps even more so, because of the effort implied in making it cheerful and elegant and, above all, correct. There was nowhere in the house where I felt I could sit down and relax without feeling the massiveness of the gloom that surrounded me.

      As I climbed the stairs my heart sank even lower. The landing was heaped high with old curtains and cushions, a glass-fronted bookcase stood half empty, books all askew, as if it had been hastily scoured and relieved of its choicest treasures. Wherever I looked I felt the stillness of John’s mother’s death three years before, and the disarray following the task of sorting her belongings. Various relatives had made their passes through, taken what they wanted and vanished. What they left behind was drained of life and tainted with rejection.

      I had always thought of myself, having grown up in New England, as someone well prepared to confront the baggage and the bumps of an old family place. I had known enough old Boston families, old money, deeply imbued with the ethic of inconspicuous consumption, to appreciate the beauty of an unrenovated country kitchen, the charm of faded upholstery and the clutter of dusty heirlooms. But this was not the warm, drab grandeur of an old summer house in Manchester-by-the-Sea. This was not the cherished family retreat in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the lakeside log cabin camp in the Adirondacks. Love must once have been felt for this place, but it was not the kind that passes like a gift from one generation to the next in the name of summertime pleasures and memories. This was the centrepiece of a system gone to seed, deeply suggestive of the forbidden desire to give up and get out. Some hidden force kept them there, but it wasn’t exactly love.

      I felt a strong urge to start moving things around, but I didn’t know where to begin. I decided to take a walk.

      I found John around the back of the house, immersed in a sea of tools and spare parts in a vast skylit garage. He was working on the brake system of his mother’s Scirocco. Now that we were here I wondered if I would ever be able to tear him away, as he was already in the grip of so many problems. A young man with wavy brown hair was trying to get John’s attention. Turning to me he introduced himself as Stephen, the artist who lived in the basement flat at the West end of the house, the one who was always there. And that was Foxy, the yellow Labrador Stephen had been looking after whilst John was away. It was clear that no one could be bade to accompany me on anything so unnecessary as a walk, not even the dog.

      ‘She won’t go with you,’ said John, ‘doesn’t know you well enough.’ But he assured me that I couldn’t get lost if I simply followed ‘the circuit’.

      On my own I followed the invitation of a road just in front of the house, which led between two fields. My heart lifted at the sight of a gigantic sycamore before me, its massive trunk holding a perfectly shaped crown of deep green leaves. There was a fair breeze. The sky was big and near and clouds moved rapidly across the blue; the sun winked in and out, angling across a field of wheat. A pheasant squawked and fluttered out of the tall grass in front of me. Handsome old specimen trees dotted here and there in the fields made the scene look not so much like a farm as resembling a pleasure park. Now rounding a corner and looking back across a field of grazing beasts I caught sight of the house in the distance, perhaps a quarter mile from where I stood. I suddenly imagined myself a character in a Jane Austen novel. There was nothing in my view that declared the arrival of the twentieth century. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a horse and buggy wheeling by. For the most essential thing—the house and its command of the landscape—had as much authority as it would have had two hundred years ago.

      I FOUND JOHN in the kitchen, a narrow room on the north side of the house with strangely high ceilings. It was chilly. There was no need to refrigerate the chicken we had bought for supper, which sat next to the sink in its plastic wrapping. The wooden counter around the sink looked damp and had a lip along its edge, like a ship’s galley, as if to keep things from sliding off in case of a storm. The narrow workspace was cluttered with a collection of toasters and weighing scales and big crockery jars stuffed with wooden implements. An overworked roll of flypaper hung in a twirl from a fluorescent light fixture. A long terry-cloth hand towel hung from a wooden roller in a loop and looked overdue for a thorough laundering.

      ‘Used to be the butler’s pantry,’ said John. ‘The original kitchen was downstairs on the basement level, just below us. Now it’s the main room of the East flat.’

      ‘Isn’t it awfully far from the dining room?’ I asked naively.

      ‘That was the whole point. You weren’t supposed to smell cooking until it was on a plate in front of you. It was a bit of a trek for the maids, though, with their platters of hot food, scurrying up and down the stone stairs. Though of course there was also the dumb waiter.’ He opened a sliding, square door to a wobbly shelf at counter level, where a large aluminium pot was parked. ‘I sometimes keep a head of lettuce in there. Better than the fridge, really. Anyway, why not save a watt?’

      ‘Why not,’ I agreed, somewhat mystified.

      ‘How about a drink?’

      I couldn’t think of anything I needed more. Ice cubes could be wrested from a frost-ridden, doorless freezer compartment in a bar-sized fridge.

      ‘I never use ice,’ said John, which was plain to see. ‘Unnecessary in this climate.’

      We would not be eating dinner in the dining room that night, I was relieved to hear. It was too cold, and too big for the two of us. Instead, as John used to do with his mother, we wheeled our trolley of food out of the kitchen and into the library. John unfolded a little Pembroke table in front of the sofa, drew up a chair on the other СКАЧАТЬ