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

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      Visiting me in America, John said, was like a dream. How funny. It was the Guynd that was like a dream to me. He departed after a month with a reluctant flurry of lastminute packing to head back to the loneliness of his responsibilities.

      Alone again in New York I listened to the strains of Elgar’s Enigma Variations and the soundtrack of A Room with a View, stared at the ceiling and wondered what was happening to me like some modern-day Henry James character, the innocent American about to be plunged into the murky depths of European aristocracy.

      The responsibilities of the Guynd seemed awesome to me and yet, for some reason, I had been chosen. What was the point of romance anyway, I had always thought, if it wasn’t to take you somewhere you never expected to go, to make you intimate with a place or a culture in a way no other route could take you, to start life all over again from scratch, as a stranger in a strange land. Or, perhaps, in this case, to mend a broken connection, to complete the cycle back to my mother’s British upbringing. It was as if I were answering to some cosmic force. The beauty and the poignancy of the Guynd haunted me; it seemed to have called upon me to awaken it, a doll-house gathering dust in the attic. And John’s ardent pursuit showed no signs of letting up, even over the course of many weeks and an ocean apart. With no warning his excited voice from a phone box in London (breathless, out cycling in the rain, just had to call) would jar the streamlined images I had formed of my safe future as a New Yorker.

      We became engaged on the night train from Paris to Zurich. This was thanks to my English cousin Cecilia, who lived outside of Paris and who was like an older sister to me. She had met us for dinner on our last evening there and presented me with a cameo brooch from amongst her family treasures ‘as an engagement present ’. Though marriage was a prospect we had both been studying seriously in our separate minds, we had not said anything to each other about getting engaged. After dinner in a crowded bistro Cecilia hurried us into a taxi to catch our train, beaming with goodwill and happiness for us, and we chuckled along with her excitement. We had booked ourselves into the most unromantic of sleeping arrangements possible, the third-class couchette.Whilst travellers with rucksacks mumbling other languages staggered through the door and wrestled themselves into their narrow cots below us and the train lurched through the night, we held hands across the two top berths, laughed and agreed that Cecilia’s gift had more or less confirmed what we already knew.

      STILL, THE BIG TEST was ahead of us that summer. Was John really able to share his past with another, and was I equipped to take it on?

      At the time I was at work on a biography of the American photographer Walker Evans. Much of the research was behind me, at least enough to spend two months writing without resorting to my original sources. I had packed some seventy pounds of notes, as it weighed in at Kennedy airport, and John had invited me to take over his mother’s sewing room as my study.

      This was the brightest and prettiest room upstairs, straight across the landing. Designed as an upstairs sitting room, it was more or less square with the intriguing feature of a rounded interior wall. A fireplace anchored the rounded wall on one side, and to the right of it, under a gilt-edged mirror hung high, was a lady’s desk. Its drawers were crammed with bundled letters, unwritten postcards, elastic bands, old photographs and dozens of used Vogue sewing patterns from the 1960s. The desktop, folded down, was just big enough for my laptop computer. A 1930s radio provided a suitable stand for my printer. There was a socket nearby, though of course not the right fit for my American equipment. John would fix that. Through two generous windows I looked out over the tenants’ grazing Angus cattle in the field in front of the house, the dark woods beyond, and, still farther, five miles as the crow flies, the straight horizontal line of the North Sea, reflecting a silvery blue or iron grey sky and some-times disappearing completely in the fog.

      Here, thousands of miles from the America of Walker Evans, I would use the steady tranquillity of this room to delve into his life and his art. His photographs of small-town storefronts, billboards and circus posters, rows of Victorian gingerbread houses or Model T Fords parked along a rainy street seemed all the more quaintly American at this remove, and all the more touching. Evans had wanted, he said, to capture what something would some-day look like as the past. He understood how profoundly the simplest thing—and often the neglected or rejected object—defined its moment. How did he acquire this visionary instinct for the telling detail? This fondness for the would-be forgotten? What aspects of his childhood had conspired to develop this genius? Somewhere in my notes was the stuff of the answer. I set to work.

      Yet as every writer knows there is nothing more tempting than manual labour to arouse one from one’s chair and give up the torturous task of writing. In a house like this one, even the simple movement of going downstairs to the kitchen to make another cup of coffee had the disadvantage of reminding me of the fifteen jobs vying equally for my attention.

      On my way back upstairs I might pick up a rag and a tin of wax to polish the wooden banister, enjoying the gleam of walnut veneer sliding under my flannel, emerging like a photograph in the developing bath. By cleaning and polishing I would become intimate with the house; I would arouse its dormant sparkle to waken and talk back to me. The ironwork supporting the banister needed dusting—no, rubbing, with a damp cloth—to appreciate that it was actually jet black, not grey. Back at the top of the stairs I would contemplate how to cope with the pile of old curtains and cushions that seemed for no reason to be heaped on top of a chaise longue, where clearly no one had ever been expected to lounge. Defeated by this problem for the moment, back at my keyboard, I set my mind to work again over a few precious clues to Evans’s child-hood. Foxy curled up on the floor behind me, waiting for the beep of my computer shutting down, knowing that then it would be time for a walk.

      As much as the urge to clean had never felt more powerful, so also was I increasingly curious about John’s family history, a family that was about to be mine. Whilst I was learning the story from John, bit by bit, there were many gaps in his information. I also knew, as the biographer knows, how differently the story might be told by other voices in other times. Later, after work, after a walk, I was determined to look more closely at a diary I had discovered in the library downstairs. Wedged between Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and a stack of atlases, its black leather cover bulged with promising content, buckled tight with two thin leather straps.

      It was John’s grandfather’s, Colonel Thomas Ouchterlony.

      The name Ouchterlony, pronounced Och-ter-lo-ny, John had explained, dated from at least as long ago as the twelfth century, and is entirely local to the county of Angus. Its meaning derives from a hill called Lony, about six miles north-west of the Guynd, which the family claimed as their own back in the Middle Ages. Ouchter is Gaelic for ‘over’ or ‘on top of ’. So all the Ouchterlonys and the many variations on the name since (Ochterloney, Auchterlonie, Uchterlony, etc.) descend from this ancient clan on the hill.

      By now the Ouchterlonys are spread far and wide. John mentioned in particular a large exodus to Sweden in the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century the last heir to the Guynd had to reach several branches sideways across the family tree to appoint his fourth cousin once removed—John’s grandfather—as the last hope of keeping the family name alive in Angus. From the obituaries pasted in the latter pages of the diary I gathered that although the Colonel was new to the area (he had been called up from Devonshire) he quickly made his presence warmly felt with the local population both humble and grand. Gregarious, civic-minded, the exemplary military man, he understood that protecting the family name was implicit in his stroke of fate and immediately set about preparing the ground for his son and heir.

      In the Colonel’s steady, forward-slanting hand, this faithfully kept diary of events of family and estate revealed a surprising fact, that John’s father, Thomas, was not the firstborn son (the Colonel had six children altogether; first came Nora, then the three boys, John—known as Jack—Thomas, СКАЧАТЬ