O Caledonia

Lila’s two rooms overlooked a small and ancient lawn whose turf was underwater green even in winter. Beyond was the washing line and the blighted apple tree, and then the giant hogweed grove, forbidden in the summer months when its great heads of flowers swayed in menace against the windy sky and its serpentine stems reared triumphant and rutilant. “An army terrible with banners,” Janet thought, and those banners bore their dread device. Noli me tangere

and Nemo me impune lacessit,

they hissed as their huge leaves scarcely lifted in breezes which scattered the petals from the roses and made the rhododendrons roar like the sea. Now in early autumn they stood withdrawn and spectral, parched skeletons drained of their venom, and occasionally, without warning, one would crack, rend, and plunge in airy slow motion to the ground, there to lie in majesty like the great Lord of Luna. It had pained and angered Janet that they should be called hogweed, uncouth in sound, doubly insulting in intention, and she was overjoyed to find that their real name was indeed heroic: Heracleum giganteum.

In her thoughts they were still Lords of Luna, but she now referred to them as Heraclea and tried to persuade others to do so too. No one would, not even Lila, who at this time of year would bring these broken ghosts into her room and sit in the afternoon dusk gazing at the shadows they cast on the white walls as her fire smouldered and her seven-branched candelabrum flickered and glowed.

About the room were many other desiccated trophies: bracket fungi like Neanderthal livers, long-dead roses in jam-jars green with algae, bracken and rowan berries hung in shrivelled swags around the mirror frames, straw hats pinned to the walls, dust lying heavy on the brims, turning their wreathed flowers a uniform grey. The crumpled rugs bore a patina of cigarette ash, the ashtrays brimmed, books lay open on the floor and tables, stained with coffee, dog-eared and annotated. These books were in Russian, for Lila, like the Heraclea, originated there. In one corner of the room a low archway led into a turret and here Lila’s cat, Mouflon, slept on a pile of old fur coats draped ineffectually over a mighty stack of empty whisky bottles. The aromas of ancient tom and evaporating spirits combined with Schiaparelli’s Shocking and Craven A tobacco to create an aura of risque clubland. On the mantelpiece, just visible behind a watercolour of the cat and a spilling powder compact, was the curled corner of a photograph of Lila’s deceased husband, cousin to Hector. Lila had met him long ago in Russia, where he had been employed as a naval adviser to the tsar’s fleet, and when he had asked her to marry him she had been unable to think of any polite way of saying no. So he had brought his silent black-eyed bride to Scotland, and the Revolution had happened and she had never gone back; all her past was gone.

At Auchnasaugh she had been neither happy nor unhappy, passing her days in reading, dreaming, painting watercolours of animals, landscape, mushrooms, and politely refusing all contact with the world beyond the glen. She collected wild flowers and pressed them in albums, she brought in baskets of fungi and identified them from their spore prints, covering any empty floor space in great sheets of paper dotted and oozy with deliquescent fruit bodies. For thirty-five years she had kept a record of mysterious botanical presences and absences. Sometimes people saw her sitting on a moorland boulder, staring into space, or scrabbling with a trowel at its mosses and lichens, or gliding through the woods with the curious veering gait, the bowed head and solitary absorption of the mushroom seeker. It was generally supposed that she was mad and a sorceress as well. Her rare visits to the village did nothing to help her reputation; she would sit bolt upright in the back of Vera’s car, shawls wound about her head and across her face, looking neither to right nor left, a widowed queen. Vera would take her list into the shop, the shopkeeper would bring her box out and pack it into the boot, she would hand the money through the car window, and not one word would she say. As the car drove off the village children would appear, pointing and jeering, but they were also afraid of her.