I am convalescing. I have been sick with a virus, a strange influenza that has left me as weak as a kindle of kittens. I have come here to recuperate although, sadly, my atavistic mother’s island does not provide the usual invalid comforts – warm bedrooms, soft blankets, coddled eggs, tinned soup, and so on – but I must make do, for Nora is all I have.
Nora herself washed up here a couple of years ago, in her little boat, the Sea-Adventure . She lives like a castaway in the ‘big house’, which is indeed bigger than all the other ruined crofts and roofless cottages that litter the island, themselves slowly eroding into landscape like the ruins of a Minoan palace. Nora says that her great-grandfather had the house built in the last century, imagining that generations of Stuart-Murrays, stretching out to the crack of doom, would wish to vacation here.
The house gives the impression of having been abandoned suddenly, in anticipation of some great disaster. Set up on the hill overlooking the Sound, and beyond that to the wide Atlantic, the winter winds are so fierce here that they cast up pebbles from the beach to rattle and knock against the windows, as if the ghosts of homesick mariners are asking to be let in.
The house is falling down around our ears. A house that was once grand and orderly is now reduced to little more than a stone shell. The roof leaks dreadfully so you cannot move for falling over old galvanized buckets of rainwater. The sandstone of the sills has been worn away by the sea air, the floorboards are rotten and the main staircase so eaten by worm and fly that you must walk at the edge of the stair for fear of falling right through to the mosaic-tiled floor of the hall below.
The house still has its heavy, moth-eaten drapes and cold, fireless grates, the big Belfast sinks, the monstrous Eagle cast-iron range, the Glass Queen washboards and a full set of bells for summoning servants who have long since ceased to respond. The walls are hung with gloomy oil-paintings, so in need of cleaning that you can barely make out the stags and liver-spotted spaniels and heathery vistas that form their subjects. There is even a plant that has survived, a dry old palm with papery brown leaves, struggling on from another era without benefit of water or warmth.
The house is full of the mouldering relics of a more complex, more opulent life – the huge silk umbrellas like marquees that rot in the outsized yellow dragon Chinese vases in the vestibule, the complicated deckchairs with canopies and footrests whose green canvas is worn so pale and thin that they can barely take the weight of a field mouse. In cupboards and trunks and outhouses there lurk decaying galoshes, sou’westers and rubberized macs, ancient shotguns and fishing-rods and nets. On disintegrating dressing-tables the bristles of enamel-backed brushes have caught the hair of people who are all now dead.
The cellar appears to have been used as a storehouse for the whole island and contains cargoes of mysterious objects – lengths of net and twine, old fish boxes and lobster pots, racing-pigeon hampers, shrivelled seed potatoes and, perhaps strangest of all, the figurehead from the prow of an old sailing-ship – a seafaring sailor’s fantasy of a mermaid, with yellow hair and naked torso, she must have once flown beneath the bowsprit of some brave ship, her breasts jutting into the winds and her mad blue eyes looking on the wonders of the world – the Baltic ice and London fog, the tempests of the Capes, the soft yellow sands of the Pacific and the strange savages of Bermuda.
Everything is turning to dust before our eyes. Nothing escapes the hand of time, neither the cities of the Sumerian plain nor the holiday home of our ancestors.
Nora makes a supper of groats and curly kale. She lives like a peasant. But under the skin I suppose we are all peasants.
~ No, no, no, Nora says, striking her breastbone savagely, we are all kings and queens.
~ And now, she says, yawning – in what I consider to be a rather theatrical way – I’m going to go and get some sleep. Carry on without me, why don’t you.
What Nora Missed
—WATSON GRANT.
‘Ah, Dr Watson, I presume.’ Professor Cousins beamed, as if he had made a great joke.
‘Come in, why don’t you,’ Archie said, ‘everyone else has.’
Watson Grant was one of the no-hope challengers for the departmental crown. His speciality was Scottish Studies, a strangely old-fashioned subject which occupied a country somewhere between Brigadoon and the White Heather Club, a landscape of burns and banks and braes where people danced strathspeys and reels while Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar sang duets in the background. Martha Sewell would have understood this version of Scotland.
Grant Watson always wore a Harris tweed jacket and came from somewhere remote that either began with ‘Inver’ or ended in ‘ness’ and was strangely asexual, like a mole, although he did have a wife and two children tucked away in Fife somewhere. He was a keen hill-walker, sometimes even turning up to teach in his clumpy leather walking-boots, still caked in Monro mud, as if there was something virtuous about climbing a hill when you didn’t need to.