Emotionally Weird(42)

My sense of foreboding had grown so strong that I hurried past her without looking in her face, mumbling that I didn’t have a watch. I glanced anxiously behind me but the woman had disappeared. A sudden wink of light behind me made me think of The Boy With No Name until I realized it was a car, headlights extinguished, cruising very slowly along at a distance behind me. I quickened my pace and by the time I reached the top of Paton’s Lane I was running. The car didn’t turn to follow me and I paused for a moment in the doorway and watched it glide past the top of the street. It gave the distinct impression, I noticed, of being Cortina-shaped.

Heart thudding uncomfortably in my chest, I ran up the unlit stone stairs of the tenement. The darkness at each corner of the stair seemed to have a thicker quality, as if the shadow of a ghost was skulking there. There was a smell of fried food and something sweet and cloying. This was probably what it was like to be trapped in The Expanding Prism of J . Or a horror film. It was with an overwhelming sense of relief that I turned my key in the lock and achieved the safety of the inside.

Frozen to the bone, we are in the great cold kitchen where the lichen grows between the stone flags beneath our feet. The old oak barometer in the hall is indicating a curlicued ‘Storm’ and Nora, as salty as an old sea-dog, taps it and says, ‘The glass is falling,’ and I feel a melancholy tug inside me as if my body had its own tides and currents and can feel the pull of the moon. Which it can, I know.

Nora is boiling a copper kettle on the range, a complicated process that involves us first having to collect driftwood on the strand. Why does she live like this? I swear it’s colder inside than out. We would be better off building an igloo. To help us with this idea it has begun to snow. Nora says, it never snows here, as if the snow had made a mistake.

I lay out the old chipped Spode cups and saucers. We drink our tea black for we have no milk cow, nor a good red hen, not even a single honey-bee.

We sit and drink our tea at a kitchen table where resentful servants must once have sat. Living here is like living in a folk-museum, actors in A working kitchen, circa 1890 , except there is no-one to observe us. Or so we hope.

~ Is any of this going anywhere? Nora asks, staring into her teacup like a fortune teller.

‘Well, it’s leading here, eventually. As you know.’

~ It’s a rather roundabout route.

‘There aren’t any maps. You see if you can do better then, tell me about Douglas.’

~ Who?

‘Your brother.’

Nora closes her eyes, takes a breath, begins –

You have to remember this was long before I was born, so I have to imagine it. It started out well. Donald Stuart-Murray had a house in Eaton Square, one in Edinburgh’s New Town and endless ancestral pastures north of the border centred on his own glen – Glenkittrie – and a bloodline intimately entwined with the kings and queens of Scotland, and therefore England. He married the third daughter of an English earl, a plain, rather nervous girl, whose family were relieved to have her off their hands. The bride wore some exquisite family diamonds – a dowry-gift to mitigate her shortage of aristocratic qualities – and when she walked down the aisle the wedding-guests gasped in admiration so that the young bride, who was called Evangeline, blushed with joy, thinking they were silently applauding her efforts at beauty.

Evangeline soon fell pregnant and bravely gave birth every two years from then on until the end of the first decade of her marriage to Donald. Altogether they had five children, three boys (Douglas, Torquil and Murdo) followed by two girls. The first of these, Honoria, was dropped on her head from an upstairs window in the house in Eaton Square by a nursemaid who was later certified insane. Honoria was not exactly dead but neither was she exactly alive and after several months of dedicated nursing by her mother, Honoria finally gave up the struggle and died.

The second girl, Elspeth, followed her shortly afterwards, succumbing to an epidemic of diphtheria when she was one year old.

‘As if,’ Evangeline said, ‘little Honoria just couldn’t bear to play alone up there.’ This was a little sentimental for Donald’s taste. Donald was not, in truth, a very nice man. Bluff and blunt, he disassociated himself from emotion, believing it to be the territory of women, children and weak-brained idiots.

Evangeline, never particularly stable, became morbid. She was convinced that her remaining children were going to be plucked from her arms, one by one (she was right, of course), and eventually Donald gave in to her insistent wish that the remnant of her family be brought up back in Scotland away from metropolitan dangers.

The house – ‘Woodhaven’ at Kirkton of Craigie in the glen – was not the most hospitable of homes. Built from local stone and decorated with Alpine gables, it was little more than a glorified Victorian hunting lodge, erected by Donald’s father, Roderick. It was a cold place and a succession of housekeepers and servants had failed to warm it up. Donald, however, was quite content with this move as he could spend all his time now shooting and fishing and generally destroying everything that ran or flew on his rainy estate.