O Caledonia

Vera met her off the bus. As they drove up the glen road she questioned Janet about her day. Janet talked with animation, for, as part of her strategy, she had researched intensively in Vogue and

Woman’s Journal. She described the cup of coffee she had taken in Watt and Grants, and the haughty mannequin who had glided up and down between the tables, expressionlessly flinging a fur wrap over one shoulder, revolving like a mechanical doll so that the pleats of her Gor-Ray skirt fanned out above the ruler-straight seams of her stockings. She spoke of A-line dresses and pencil skirts, of shot taffeta ball gowns and fashion’s hideous new colour, shocking pink. She claimed that she had tried on a pair of shoes with Louis heels, “just for fun, of course. I know I’m not old enough to wear heels.”

Vera was astonished and delighted. Perhaps at last Janet was growing up, becoming more feminine. How she yearned for a companionable daughter. Rhona was always a pleasure, but she was still rather young. What fun it would be if she and Janet could exchange girlish confidences, complicit glances, enter into the powerful freemasonry of the female against all that was uncouth, barbaric, and disruptive (well, masculine) at Auchnasaugh. “Shoe kicking time,” she thought, in happy anticipation, imagining the two of them, lounging and lolling on Janet’s bed, chattering and giggling late into the evening, perhaps over mugs of drinking chocolate. Of course she would have to provide Janet with a different bedside lamp, some floral affair in china, with a rosy silken shade. This scene could not be enacted in the harsh light of her Anglepoise. Janet, aware of her mother’s new warmth of spirit, ventured to ask whether she might just possibly, as an end-of-holidays present, have a copy of the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.

Vera frowned, remembering the books stacked slithering and topsy-turvy all over Janet’s bedroom floor. Why add to them? “All right,” she said, “I’ll ask them to send it straight to you at school.” Janet eyed her distrustfully and saw that it was best to drop the subject. “Where, incidentally,” demanded Vera, still ruffled, “are the things you changed for whatever it was?” “Oh,” said glib Janet, “it was the Celanese knickers and they wouldn’t swap them. Oh goodness, oh dear, I must have left them on the bus.” Vera sighed. “Your poor great-aunt. What a waste,” she said.

“Typical,” she said.

That winter lasted even longer than usual. In late March, Janet walked slowly up the drive; her feet were beginning to ache with cold, but she could go no faster for fear of falling on the dense sheet ice. The air was hushed and clouded as though it, too, were about to freeze. The rhododendron leaves hung stiff and shrivelled, the trees loomed black and still. Nothing stirred. It seemed a dead landscape, imprisoned beneath a colourless sky. Great icicles hung below the bridge over the burn. The water moved wearily, obstructed by tangles of frozen branches and random chunks of ice; the glen was drained, exhausted. Janet thought of Tennyson, “I dreamed there would be spring no more.” As the words formed in her mind, a kingfisher shot from under the bridge and sped in brilliant zigzags down the dreary burn, glorifying the winter world. Janet was exultant. She had been accorded a vision. “What, though the field be lost, all is not lost!” she cried aloud to the silent hills and the echo returned, giving her the lie, “Lost, lost, lost.” Unheeding, she hobbled on to Auchnasaugh; a spring of crystalline joy was leaping in her heart. “Wherefore let thy voice Rise like a fountain in me, night and day.” She thanked God, she thanked the moon, still visible in the midday sky. The pale sun and the pale moon hung opposite each other in that white sky. It was like the book of Revelation.

Over lunch she related the miracle to her family. Hector and Vera became bored as she described with unnecessary detail her progress up a drive whose every tree, bush, ditch, or frozen puddle they knew just as well as she. “Do get to the point Janet, you’re just blethering.” She got to the point. There was a moment’s silence, then everyone spoke at once; Francis’s voice was loudest. He and Rhona were exchanging a meaningful look. “I won’t say it’s camp,” said he, “but it’s tantamount. And of course, purest Disney.” “Drip, drip, drip, little April showers,” sang Rhona gleefully. Francis joined in, so did Lulu. Caro squealed with delight. Hector and Vera subsided into mirth. Janet wanted to cry, but she would not give them that satisfaction. She had been trying to read Proust recently and she had pounced with relish on his phrase “l’étouffoir familial,” the family suffocation chamber. Vengefully and silently she repeated it.