O Caledonia

An appointment was made with a famous hairdresser in Edinburgh, a great distance to travel, but then, as Vera said, this was an important moment in the life of a young girl. It was a dank, misty day and Janet wore her new tweed suit. It prickled incessantly and drove her to such a point of irritation that she did not feel car sick on the journey. Her legs felt strange and suffocated in their wrappings of twenty-denier nylon. She longed for it all to be over. Vera, who had begun the journey in high spirits, feeling that at last they were off on a mother-and-daughter spree together, became fretful and depressed after long hours of lugubrious silence on foggy roads. As they waited for the ferry to bear them across the Forth, each had a vengeful fantasy of the car overshooting the pier and engulfing the other forever.

The salon reminded Janet of the lunatic asylum. People came in, looking normal and cheerful. They were ushered by white-coated, unctuous attendants into a neon-lit inner torture chamber of throbbing machines. There they sat, gowned and scarlet-faced, and in no time at all they had lost their identity, their features had lapsed and swollen in the intense heat, their hair bristled with small metal daggers or their scalps were packed with wiry cylinders. Glassy-eyed, they gazed into the mirrors. Hope ebbed from the day. The place reeked of sulphur and brimstone, like hell. As Janet, swathed in billowing pink nylon, followed Monsieur André down the gleaming corridor, she glimpsed her fearful reflection. “To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies?” Well, she knew the name of that altar, the dim, blood-boultered altar of womanhood.

When she emerged she looked worse than she could ever have anticipated. Vera and Monsieur André had chosen to discuss what was to be done when Janet was helpless, her head forced backwards into a stream of scalding water while a smiling sadist clawed her scalp into ribbons. Far from being shoulder length, her hair now scarcely reached her collar. They had curled it and baked it and lacquered it and now she looked old enough to be Vera’s mother; indeed she looked not unlike the Queen Mother. As a final insult she was handed a shiny green box which contained her severed locks, plaited and coiled like a treacherous reptile. “For a chignon,” said Vera. “Isn’t this fun!”

Zephyr the west wind roared like a mighty ocean through the rhododendrons. In the sheltered sunken garden the azaleas’ scarlet blossoms tossed and curvetted for a moment, then dreamed again in the perfumed haze of early summer. Janet lay on the grass in a little glade among the azaleas, listening to the roar fade to a sigh, recede and retire. She stared at the sky and remembered how she used to watch the fleeting gold chasms between the clouds for glimpses of God or the dead. She could imagine the spirits of the dead disporting themselves on such a wind as this. She thought of George Peele’s astonishing line “God, in a whizzing summer wind, marches upon the tops of mulberry trees.” Such a day this was, such a wind. It filled her with yearning and exhilaration; the shining leaves were charged with poignancy. Tendrils of ivy flickered down the wall, curling into the grass among the starry flowers of wild strawberry.