O Caledonia

Once, when chewing lettuce leaves (thirty times for every mouthful), she discovered a slug in her mouth. It felt enormous and thrashed about. She was afraid that if she screamed they would tell her to stop making a scene and swallow it. She managed to spit it out unseen. It was vast; ribbed, grey and viscous. She put her plate on top of it. The plate danced. In desperation she seized it by the rim on each side and with all her strength pressed it downwards. There was a squelching sensation; the plate was still. A thin trickle of frothy liquid seeped onto the table’s gleaming chestnut surface. Janet sat rigid, praying so hard that the words seemed to mass visible and solid in the air before her, “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me”; but it was not God’s forgiveness she craved, it was the slug’s; and never could this be given, so she must carry her guilt with her forever. “Come on, Janet, wake up, it’s lunchtime, go and wash your hands,” they were shouting. She shambled gloomily out of the drawing room.

The dining room at Auchnasaugh had once been the ballroom, lofty, corniced and swagged with fruits and flowers; chandeliers still glimmered through layers of dust, swaying in the draughts. Now, at the end of the summer holidays, in late September, one massive table spanned its far end, overlooked by a great mirror. The grown-ups sat with their backs to the mirror and the children faced it, so that they might see what they looked like if they chewed with their mouths open or dropped food down their chins. In the mornings only Nanny joined them and they swallowed down their porridge in silence, desperate to escape to the wild outside world of the rhododendron thickets, stables, and animals. Sometimes tinker children would emerge from the bushes, noiseless and scrawny as the feral cats, and make munching faces at them through the windows; they vanished into shadow the moment Nanny turned her stare.

Pudding today was pink junket, the delicacy so relished by Miss Muffet; it reminded Janet of the blanching rabbits in the kitchen bowl, but she had perfected a way of ingesting it with almost no physical contact by tipping tiny fragments into the very back of her mouth and swallowing quickly. Soon the ordeal was over. She looked at her family. Hector was flushed and jovial from his sherry, looking forward to an afternoon when he and the dogs would disappear in his car for a run in the hills. Vera as usual was dreamy and detached, her eye occasionally lighting lovingly on the newest baby, Caro, harnessed in her high chair and opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish as Nanny’s pinkly laden spoon advanced and retreated. Janet had heard Vera telling her friend Constance that she only really liked babies and found children annoying. In fact, she had said, it was possible for a mother to dislike her own child. Constance, who was childless and a psychologist, had much enjoyed this confidence and embarked on a lengthy interpretation. Janet had tiptoed away from the nursery door where she had been listening in the hope that the newly arrived Constance would be commenting on her intelligence and beauty. Her suspicions about Vera were now confirmed. Anyhow she had no need for a mother. She had the dogs, the cats, her pony, and all the woods and hills and waters and winds of Auchnasaugh. And she had books.