O Caledonia

Lila’s husband, Fergus, had been dead for many years now, gone into the silent past with Lila’s Russia. Janet asked her if she wished she were back in Russia, if she missed her life there. “It’s over,” she said. “It’s the past. It doesn’t matter now.” And as to Fergus: “It’s a long time since I last saw him. I don’t remember him very well. There’s nothing much to be said.” Much, however, was said in various places about the manner of Fergus’s death. Hector and Vera said that he had collapsed and died from a stroke, precipitated by an old war wound. Nanny said that Lila had poisoned him with her nasty toadstools and he had died in convulsions of agony, his screams echoing down the glen, unheard by his deaf old father, and unheard or unheeded by Lila, who had retired with a nightcap. This story was popular in the village. In fact, said Lila, it had been the doing of her cat, Mouflon, whom Fergus had hated. Mouflon had been young and playful then, and during dinner he had skittishly made off with Fergus’s trout. Fergus had leapt up and hurled his plate at him. He missed the cat but broke the plate. Mouflon fled with the trout to a high shelf and crouched there, snarling and devouring. Fergus was puce with rage; he began to rant about Lila’s devotion to her cat and her mushrooms, her failure to make friends of his friends, her refusal even to acknowledge acquaintances. “You may pass through life without friends, but you can’t manage without acquaintances.” Lila could, and did, but this she did not say. Instead she diverted him, spoke admiringly of his prowess at the wheel of his Lagonda, his joy, his ink-blue close-couple coupé, swan-curved of running board. She pretended that she would like to go for a drive with him the next day. Fergus was mollified. He told Lila about his dentist’s admiration for his teeth and how the dentist had said that as teeth went these were Rolls-Royces, and he had riposted that they should be Lagondas. To prove his point he would now bisect a Fox’s Glacier Mint with one snap of his front teeth. He set the small gleaming iceberg in position; Lila watched, dreamy in the candlelight; down came his teeth like the blade of a guillotine, down hurtled Mouflon, a ginger streak from the high shelf, embedding his claws in Fergus’s neck. Fergus gasped, jerked backwards, inhaled the half Glacier Mint, and choked to death. Lila thumped him and shook him to no avail. It was over very quickly. Beneath the table the cat, Mouflon, licked the other half of the mint, twitched his whiskers in distaste, and sauntered off to Lila’s mushroom chamber. Presently she joined him there. After all, nothing could be done until the morning.

Her life was little changed by Fergus’s permanent absence. He had always passed long periods away, in Glasgow or overseas on his mysterious naval business, and when he was at home he spent most of his time fishing for trout in the burn which ran along the floor of the glen, or for salmon in the brawling whisky-coloured river which cascaded from the hills, leaping impatiently past its boulders, raucous and jostling until it reached the long tranquil stretch of water which brought it to Loch Saugh, the sorrowing pine trees and the solitary swan. In the evenings they met with Fergus’s aged father in the drawing room; there they drank whisky, played cards, and listened to John McCormack in plangent lamentation for lost faces, lost loves, the past forever eddying away. The servants had long since gone, pedalling through the dusk to the village, all except Jim, the hunchbacked gardener, who tramped off up the hill to his mother’s lonely croft on the edge of the moor. Night enclosed the glen and roofed it with stars. Wind stirred the great trees; owls hooted. At ten o’clock Fergus went out to the dynamo shed where their erratic electricity supply was produced by a sullen generator and switched it off. Up the stairs they went, their Tilley lamps fitfully reflected in the great stained-glass window; a drift of cats followed them; the dogs ran ahead. At dawn Lila would come down again, escorted by the cats, and repair to her mushroom room, or, in the autumn, to the woods in search of specimens. After Fergus’s death she moved a bed down to the tiny room next to the mushroom chamber and slept there instead, still spending the evenings with her father-in-law, until he, too, died. Now she sat alone in her room and played John McCormack on a more modern gramophone and drank her whisky as she read or painted. And now she drank whisky in the afternoons, staring balefully at the foggy windows.