O Caledonia

Vera had hoped, when they first came to Auchnasaugh, that Lila might wish to help with the children; she visualised her as a cross between a doting and quaintly dotty aunt and an eccentric family retainer, who would know her place but find fulfilment in a modest share of their family life. She would be grateful to Vera for brightening her drab existence. Lila had countered by dropping cigarette ash in the baby’s cot and providing a steaming bowl of daffodil bulbs cooked in parsley sauce for the children’s lunch, claiming that they were onions. Nanny said she would be obliged to leave if that woman was allowed in the nursery again and so contact with Lila was limited to downstairs. At first the children would shriek with terror as she materialised soundlessly behind them in the corridors or out of the dripping winter afternoon, but soon they grew used to her, and as time passed Janet, who had taken to reading Edwardian books about isolated, misunderstood young girls whose intelligence and courage were noticed only by one adult friend, decided that Lila was fitted for this part. Her only regret was that neither of them was crippled.

Lila, although not effusively welcoming, did not appear to mind Janet’s visits to her room; she continued to do whatever she was doing, and Janet moved about fidgeting with things and asking questions about mushrooms and Russia. Lila would not talk about Russia but was happy to show her her beautiful old botanical volumes. Janet had begun to learn Latin and was intoxicated by the plant names: Clitocybe nebularis, Asterophora, Flammulina, or Rosa gallica, Rosa mundi, Rosa versicolor, Potentilla fruticosa.

She set these names to hymn tunes and wandered about chanting them. Vera forbade her to pick or handle mushrooms. Janet had no intention of obeying. One day, Lila had promised, they would go together on an early morning fungus foray. Janet was aware of the hostility which hung between Vera and Lila and she wished to be on Lila’s side. So, on this rainswept Sunday afternoon, the last weekend of the summer holidays, Janet made her way, by a devious route in case her mother was watching, to Lila’s murky chamber and sat reading Lorna Doone while the wind boomed down the chimney and lashed the chestnuts from their leafy branches and whirled the jackdaws and rooks into a wild confusion beneath the racing clouds.

Chapter Four

It was Hector’s belief that a girl was an inferior form of boy; this regrettable condition could be remedied, or improved upon, by education. For this reason he had started a boys’ school for his daughters to attend. And so in term time Auchnasaugh was transformed, full of boys and benches and clattering boots. Another of his beliefs, and one which he shared with Vera, was that children should study languages from an early age and learn poetry by heart. Miss Christie read them “Hiawatha” and even her bleak Aberdonian tones could not dispel its glories: “Minnehaha, laughing water!” (Potentilla fruticosa!

) Rhythms and rhymes galloped through Janet’s head. For this reason, too, she loved learning Latin, the pleasing oddity of declensions, the greater eccentricity of principal parts—tango, tangere, TETIGI, tactum. She had been learning French since she was four, and when she was ten she started Greek, whose words were even more astounding than Latin. But best of all was the poetry. Smith’s Book of Verse for Boys and Girls began with narrative poems. “It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea.” Janet enjoyed these, as usual visualising herself as the heroine bound to the mast or drifting in elegant death along the shoreline: “O is it weed or floating hair?” But then she discovered the ballads, “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Otterburn,” “True Thomas,” “The Unquiet Grave.” The wind and snow and waters of the world she knew were there, inhabited not by her family or Miss Wales the cook or the chilled and prosaic churchgoers, but by fiercer lonely figures driven by passion and savagery, love forever lost and yet forever held, old feuds, undying jealousies, a moral code of pagan nobility without pity.