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

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      ‘YOU’LL NEVER GET ANY PLEASURE FROM THIS PLACE,’ John’s father had told him repeatedly over the years. And by most accounts other than his own, he made every effort, or lack of effort, possible to ensure that his prediction would prove accurate, and that his eldest son—his principal heir—would fail at the role fate had dealt him.

      The ancient system of primogeniture, which decrees that the eldest son is heir to the entire family estate, is still going strong in Scotland. From birth he is groomed, pressed, and moulded by family and society into his role as landowner—in Scotland, the laird. Primogeniture is based on a feudal system that has changed remarkably little since the Middle Ages. Whilst in England the march of progress and the greater population have blurred the rigid lines of the class system in recent times, Scotland still offers a clear window on the past. Its unspoilt view of the pastoral countryside of the Lowlands, and of the vast shooting estates of the Highlands, owe much to the persistence of primogeniture. Eighty-eight per cent of Scotland is privately owned, and if you buy one of those clan maps they make for the Scottish tourist trade, you will find that it is still largely owned by the families who drew the lines centuries ago.

      The landed classes. Since knowing John I have come to better understand the meaning of this term. In Scotland it means not only that these people have land but, once landed, that they intend to stay. Forever. It is almost as much of a personal failure for a Scottish male heir to leave the ancestral home behind him (read, lack of commitment) as it is for the American to stay (read, lack of enterprise). It is no accident that in colloquial Scots, when they ask someone where they live, they ask them where do they ‘stay’. In Scotland it is not so much that one owns a country house as much as it is the other way around. In America, though we could all trace our family history through various houses and buildings, few amongst us know where they are, or if indeed they are still standing. And we don’t really care. After all, we Americans are largely the descendants of second sons who expected to strike out on their own.

      I was raised with a relatively strong sense of my own family history. On my father’s side the Dutch merchant class of New York City and upstate crossed with Puritan New Englanders. When I was a child my grandmother still lived in the Greek Revival house that her grandfather had built in 1830 on the main street of Greene, New York. Everything in that house, from the pair of stuffed pheasants on the dining room sideboard to the old toys in the attic, was woven into a warm, fragile tapestry of my father’s American childhood. On my mother’s side, worldly and artistic Europeans with intermarriages of French, Italian and English connected in her parents’ marriage with a long line of Quaker Philadelphians. At home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I grew up with antiquities collected by my great-aunt when she lived in Egypt, Victorian furniture from the house of my Philadelphia great-great-grandparents, Irish glassware and French china. There were family portraits in oil, silhouette and daguerreotype. These family treasures came together in our own house from so many different sources, now mixed with my father’s collections of modern European art, English delftware and pre-Columbian pottery, that the pieces of my family history took years for me to unravel. In spite of these tangible artefacts there were so many sources, names, places and stories to remember about them. So few cousins, so far away. There was no tying them in with a single family house or even a single family name.

      It was the critical difference between my background and John’s. John could reach into his family history effort-lessly, with hardly a leap of the imagination, for the stage was still set in his native Scotland. On the shelves of the library he could handle the very books his ancestors had consulted. He was sitting in their chairs, looking into their mirrors, literally walking in their footsteps, shaded by the trees they had planted, sheltered by the house they had built and carrying on the same name. This was continuity to be envied. Yet it comes with a price.

      In Scotland a man of John’s class is himself less important than his name, his ancestral home and his estate. He is merely a link in the long family line stretching before and after him, and his duty is clear: to keep it up. Rural gentry like those of John’s family have stood their ground for so long that they are depended upon to remain in place as part of the stonework of society’s foundations, part of the general effort to keep things just the way they have always been. Whilst in school I was raised on stories of the pilgrims, the early homesteaders, the gold rush and the life ethic conveyed by Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’, of Thoreau’s ‘castles in the air’ and Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’; John was made to memorise a succession of kings and queens. Thus I grew up with one myth of the possible—of wide-open spaces and eternal movement—and John grew up with another, that of the security of a closed gate at the end of the drive.

      THE SUMMER BEFORE we were married I spent two months at the Guynd, from late June to late August. Was it true, I needed to know, what John’s father had said—that he would never get any pleasure from this place—when it showed all the potential for being a paradise? In what way was he meant to defy his father’s fatalistic words?

      Since my first visit to the Guynd, our courtship had carried on in New York and in London, where John still had a flat. We had also travelled together, getting to know each other’s friends and family, daily life and work. No American beau of mine had ever been so open, so curious and so delighted by the people and places I had to show him. He arrived in New York with all the exuberance of a schoolboy let out to play or a sailor home from the sea. In my apartment, the top floor of a brownstone building on East Ninety-second Street, he quickly made himself at home, unpacking his grey duffel bag (hiking boots, a few shirts, a bow tie or two just in case of an occasion, and a quantity of loose tea, not quite trusting that the right thing could be found in New York City), pottering in the kitchen (don’t you have a wok? where do you put the compost?) and sinking into the sofa with the Financial Times(delighted to find he could buy it out of a box on the corner of Fifth Avenue).

      He read anything I put in his hands, ate anything I put on the table (his plate as conscientiously scraped as if a dog had licked it), looked with unequivocal interest at anything and everything in any museum or gallery I took him to in New York, not to mention everything on the way there. It was exhausting. But his dogged attention to detail slowed the rush of the city, and his observant foreign eye and the swift backhand stroke of his wit lightened my step on the pavement. His engineer’s logic combined with a bracing cynicism and a nose for the corrupt. All sorts of badly made things, for instance, were ‘good for business!’ he’d say triumphantly. He’d caught the devil at his game.

      His intimate understanding of materials brought another way of appreciating almost everything, including works of art. ‘Wood,’ he might offer, admiring a work of modern sculpture, ‘is difficult to work with, in that it’s delicate and unpredictable, whereas metal is isotropic. It does what you tell it to.’ Isotropic. A brick wall curved in a continuous wave pattern, which I assumed was purely an aesthetic choice on the part of its maker, was very practical, according to John. ‘A sinuous wall is self-buttressing, and therefore doesn’t need to be as thick as a straight wall.’ The meaning of objects took on a whole new dimension. They had lives—even minds—of their own. A string, John told me in all seriousness, has a memory.

      My friends regarded John as something of an exotic, unable to measure his worthiness on the usual scale. He had a wiry energy; there was something embattled and vulnerable about him, but also a toughness born to a tough breed. He seemed to be on intimate terms with the earth, the way a Scot—not an Englishman—would be. The reputation of his rather large house in the country awarded him a mysterious status. He was an Old World radical, an aristocratic country rustic. He used arcane expressions such as ‘the nether regions’ and ‘in days of yore ’ as if he really meant them. He possessed a depth of practical know-how and a living sense of history they couldn’t quite touch. With my mother he was completely at home; he knew she appreciated that depth, that sense, without having to say so, like a silent pact amongst the Europeanborn. At times I felt they understood each other better than I understood either of them. They shared the toughmindedness of survivors, СКАЧАТЬ