O Caledonia

One day as she trudged up the drive at Auchnasaugh she came upon a squirrel, hit by a car. It lay in a semblance of repose, its head bowed in the meekness of violent death, its paws curving inwards. Its fur was sodden and dishonoured by rain and mud. Mechanically she picked it up and carried it off for burial. She could only find the big old gardening fork. As she dug, the wet red clods of earth clung to it so that she kept having to stop and wipe them off; her hands were sticky and sharp grit pressed into her palms. Suddenly on the prong was a frog, transfixed and splayed, kicking wildly. Janet’s heart lurched. “O son of man,” she gasped. She heard the words so loud they filled the rainy sky, louder than the wind which rocked the treetops. Gently she drew the frog off the spike; it struggled into the nettles. Janet knelt on the ground. She buried the squirrel and then she sat by the small grave and was overwhelmed by grief. Pity, she thought, pity like a naked newborn babe, pity like the frog threshing on the fork, the desolate manatee, the melted eyeballs of the people of Hiroshima, the burning martyrs clapping their hands, pity was needed and was not in the world; if it existed, none of this could be. Divine pity. Human pity was not enough. A bleeding heart could only bleed and bleed. It seemed to her then that the nature of Caledonia was a pitiless nature and her own was no better. What use was it to be racked by pain for animals and the general woes of the world when she was unmoved by the sorrows of the people she knew? She thought again of the students drowning in the cold summer sea; they would have heard the church bells ringing out from the far invisible cliffs beyond the dawn mist, ringing and calling people to the love and knowledge of God; but not one of those people had heard their cries for help, and God had chosen to ignore them. Anger rose in her and merged with her grief, confusing her utterly. She had had enough, she could not cope. She placed a token frond of bracken on the grave, picked up the fork, and plodded onwards up the drive. She passed the frog, spread-eagled and lifeless on the grey winter grass. Another burial; she could not bear it. She thrust the corpse into a heap of dead leaves. “ ‘Nine peacocks in the air, I wonder how they all came there. I don’t know and I don’t care’,” she remarked to the rustling, watchful Heracleum

grove.

The empire of the winds is shared between the offspring of Eos the dawn and Astraeus the starry sky. Chill Boreas of the north and wild sorrowing Zephyr from the west were lords of the air at Auchnasaugh. Occasionally a mean blast blew from eastern Eurus, straight off the heaving sea from the forlorn polderlands and farther barbarian territories, homes of the Goths and Vandals. The south wind, Notus, was a stranger to Caledonia, “Ignotus,” as Janet said, making one of her boring, pedantic jokes. But most beautiful, most haunting and haunted, was the wind of dawn, which brought the next day, and whirled the past off into the breaking clouds: a wind thrilling and melancholy, tender and cruel, a wind of beginning and ending.

Janet lay in the darkness, listening to it sweep and wail about the battlements. She felt weightless and abstract, almost the spirit she hoped one day to become. Then she heard her parents’ warring voices down the corridor. She tried to switch on her lamp, simultaneously stubbing her toe on her cold stone hot-water bottle. As she had expected, the lamp was not working. Hector and Vera had fused all the lights yet again. This had been happening all winter, since their acquisition of a Goblin Teasmade. Vera had wanted one of these machines for many years, ever since she had visited Constance in her sterile apartment in Edinburgh and enjoyed the benison of solitary and effortless early morning tea, provided by a friendly automaton which required no gratitude. However, Hector’s desire to wring six cups out of a system which believed that four were enough for anyone had dampened her enthusiasm and was now making her dislike the Goblin. The start of each day was nerve-racking. As Janet listened to the dawn wind, so Vera, tense with anxiety, listened to the Goblin swing into action. It sighed, puffed, panted, convulsed, hissed, and then, if all were well and the day was to be a day of modest success, there was a hideous blast like a road drill and a lurid neon light flooded the room. Tea was ready. However, if Hector had overfilled the squat kettle, couched in homely conjunction with its squat teapot spouse, the Goblin would fall eerily silent in the midst of its heavy breathing, water would seep into the intricacies of the hydroelectric, and as late as possible in the wrecked day a gloomy workman would arrive and restore light to the castle. What a good thing that they had kept the old Tilley lamps.