O Caledonia

When Janet came home for the Christmas holidays she was horrified to find that Lila had been committed to a lunatic asylum, an appropriately Gothic establishment near the coast with the inappropriate name Sunny Days. Vera made it clear that Lila was to play no further part in their lives. Janet knew better than to argue, or even to speak of her. After Christmas she caught the bus from the village to Aberdeen, to exchange her Christmas presents. This had become an accepted part of Christmas ritual as they all grew older. Francis and Rhona did not care to travel with Janet; her frequent requests to the driver for halts and fresh air were a great embarrassment. Janet was inured to it; she did not feel quite so ill on the bus as she did in cars; there was no smell of leather upholstery to convulse her stomach. Now, jolting down the long winding road out of the hills, she felt wonderfully confident. Over her new tartan skirt she wore her new white duffel jacket. Beneath the tartan skirt lurked her romantic new paper nylon petticoat, tiered and flounced. It crackled loudly as she moved and swelled the brusque pleating of her skirt outwards into strange sagging contours like those of a homemade lampshade. Her ensemble was completed by ankle socks and the perennial Start-Rite walking shoes, laced very tight. On her knee she clasped a brown paper parcel containing six pairs of Celanese knickers, eau de nil, turquoise and sticking-plaster pink, cut like twin pillowcases. These hideous gifts arrived each year from one of Vera’s many aunts, and Janet was well aware that she would not be able to exchange them as, apart from anything else, they had been bought in Glasgow. But herein lay her alibi. No one would be surprised that she had done something so silly as to travel a total of eighty miles to change the unchangeable and had returned still burdened with it. “Typical Janet,” they would say, and that would be that.

Her plan was to leave the bus at the second coastal village and walk the short distance to the lunatic asylum. For the first time, Lila would have a visitor. Later she would catch the same bus back to the village where Hector or Vera would meet her as arranged. A foolproof plan, conceived and executed with daring efficiency, such efficiency that she had escaped without cleaning her shoes and without Vera noticing the presence of the paper nylon petticoat. (“For parties,” she had purred, as Janet opened the parcel. What parties, Janet asked herself. Rhona and the little ones went to parties but she did not. She remembered them from earlier days, without pleasure. She was always first to be out in games and she either became hectically overexcited so that she behaved appallingly and had to be spanked later, or was so consumed with shyness and nerves that she was sick. She had enjoyed the afternoon time before a party, however, with the electric fire glowing in Vera’s bedroom at an unaccustomed hour, and the scent of starch as Nanny ironed their organdie dresses, and the lovely sight of Shetland shawls pinned out by their points across the carpet like a sequence of giant cobwebs.)

Sunny Days had been built as a seaside hotel in Edwardian times. A glassed verandah ran the length of the building, offering an uninterrupted view of the bitter sea and bitter sky beyond the cliff edge. Little wooden balconies, their paintwork weathered and blistered, trembled outside shuttered windows. There was a lofty conservatory, starkly empty. The grounds were extensive, open and windswept. A few stunted trees pointed inland, signalling escape. There had been little demand for it as a hotel. The boulders and sharp outcrops of the shore made bathing impossible and the constant wind made people uneasy and fretful. There was agreement that its only possible use could be as a place of confinement for people who had already been disordered — by war, weather, humanity, or what you will. As they were mad they would not notice its disadvantages. So it became a full house, and in constant demand.