O Caledonia

She looked in the mirror at the assembled faces of her siblings. Francis the freckled and green-eyed was sitting far away from her. He was no longer her closest friend; he had defected to Rhona. Rhona was good at tennis, she loved swimming, her neat little fingers could tie an exquisite trout fly in no time at all. Her bicycle worked because she looked after it. Besides all this, she was pretty and kind and loving. “You’ve done well with that one, Vera,” remarked Constance, leaving unspoken the corollary of how badly Vera had done with Janet. “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,” Grandpa had said, defecting too, on one of his last visits. He had been very ill and when he came in Rhona had run forward to help him sit down by the fire; she set his stick beside him and brought his tea. Janet had clambered onto the arm of his chair, knocking over his stick and joggling his tea into the saucer, so that she could show off about having learnt the Greek alphabet. It was on that same visit that Grandpa had looked at Lulu, four years old, angelically blonde, weaving a little posy of ivy tangled snowdrops and he had said to Janet, “You were like that once, a beautiful wee thing. But now you’re plain, my dear, very plain.” He had not meant to hurt her, she was certain of that; he was not a worldly man. But hurt her it did, like a punch in the solar plexus. Now, looking at her sisters’ faces, blonde and cherubic or dark and flowerlike, and looking at her own pallid frizzy-haired reflection, she was overwhelmed by prickling tears. Her name was dreadful too; all the others had names with some romance about them; even Rhona had a suggestion of inappropriate turbulence, a tawny river in flood rushing and foaming about its boulders. But Janet had nothing; its only possible association was with junket.

Grandpa was dead now and she could never regain her place in his affections. His church was gone too, pulled down to make way for a car park for the gin-drinking patrons of the Golf Hotel and Club House. Francis and Janet had been taken to his funeral. It had been terrible standing in the great Victorian cemetery in Glasgow, while a violent rainstorm beat about them, darkening the grief-stricken faces of the monumental angels, smashing the petals of the funeral flowers, whisking hats into the long wet grass. An umbrella rocking in the wind poked Janet’s eye and allowed her at last to weep. Afterwards she and Francis had been sent to walk through the streets of Pollokshields, while the grown-ups drank tea and ate fruit cake and had things to discuss. She remembered the clanging of trains passing by on the suburban network, and saturated posters peeling off the advertising hoardings. The air reeked of petrol and made her feel sick. All the others had gone to see Grandpa in hospital before he died. Janet had not gone; she had forced two fingers down her throat and made herself vomit because she was afraid of what she would see there. Hector and Vera had left her behind with surprising alacrity. And now that was that, and there she was in the dining-room mirror — plain, treacherous, and guilty. Outside, sombre clouds were massing and a squall of rain splattered the windows. “Never, never, never,” she said to herself. The bright day had gone.

Lila had not been present at lunch. She rarely attended meals, nor did Vera encourage her to do so. Sometimes Hector, flushed with preprandial bonhomie, would urge her to join them, but she would give her vague, sweet smile, shake her head and move off in her strange gliding manner into the dark winding passages, pungent with Jeyes Fluid, which led to the back quarters where she had her demesne.