O Caledonia

A tiny bird was there; it watched Janet. Janet watched the bird. Its eye was bright and anxious; it opened and closed its beak, beseeching, soundless. Gently she picked it up. It was a jackdaw nestling, not even fledged, and its beak was crossed. It had been flung to the ground to die. Janet thought that there was little hope for it, but she took it indoors to the warmth of a haybox on the back of the Aga. To her surprise and delight the bird survived. Soon she was able to move the box to her bedroom where she tended the incessant cheepings night and day. She decided that he was a male bird; his name was Claws. Now when she entered the room he came hopping to meet her, wings outstretched in welcome, beak agape. She took her old doll’s house from the nursery. At last it had a purpose. She had never played with it and its only previous use to her had been on the long-ago occasion when a friendly rat had sauntered up to Francis in the woodshed. He had brought it in, and he and Janet had installed it in the doll’s house, where it crept about on its belly, peering balefully out of the latticed windows and gnawing the staircase. They secreted liberal quantities of mince and stew in their table napkins and ferried them up the stairs to the voracious and grateful rodent. Lulu had become suspicious of Janet’s sudden interest in the despised mock Tudor residence; she opened the house when no one was around, saw the rat with delight, and stroked its tremulous snout. It sank its teeth into her plump pink thumb. She was rushed to hospital for injections against Weil’s disease and the rat was banished back to the woodshed. Word spread through the village; rats teeming in the very nursery at Auchnasaugh. Just what they would have expected. When Francis and Janet took their rat its evening meal beneath the fragrant wood pile, they found it murdered, ripped apart by other rats, maddened by the taint of mankind. “Like King Lear,” pronounced Janet. “Someone says, ‘O let me kiss that hand,’ and he says, ‘Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.’ ” “That’s not what he means,” said Francis. “Yes, it is,” said Janet. It was what Lear meant, and it was what she meant too.

When the doll’s house had been scrubbed out and flooded with Jeyes Fluid, it was handed over to Lulu and Caro, who could be trusted to use it sensibly. Now they shrieked with fury as Janet tipped their furniture onto the floor and contemptuously shook out their apple-cheeked happy family. “You’re far too old to play with it. What do you want it for? I’m going to tell on you.” “Shut up, it’s mine,” snapped Janet. It was just the right size for Claws and his personal furbishments, at this stage of his development. She left the windows and doors open so that he could come in and out as he wished. The house needed a name. She loved addresses; she had memorised the St. Uncumba’s list of five hundred, imagining each one, furnishing it, in some cases providing gardens or parkland, in others, lamplit alleyways where assassins prowled. Her favourites were the ones which sounded suburban. She imagined soft, deep wall-to-wall carpets, imitation log fires which gave out real heat and did not burn holes in carpets, divan beds, perfumed bathrooms with pastel accessories en suite (unlike the looming, glacial Elderslie Washdown which clanked and gurgled in the mildewed nursery bathroom at Auchnasaugh); in such places the feminine mystique might flourish like the green bay tree, which would be growing in a neat tub by the diamond-paned porch. As usual she felt guilty and treacherous for these thoughts. Her allegiance was to Auchnasaugh. But there was no reason why Claws’s residence should not be named for that discreet, charming, and muted world. Carefully she painted “8, Belitha Villas” above the front door.

Alas for human aspiration. Claws grew apace and although he could stalk about quite comfortably in his villa he made it clear that Janet’s whole room was to be his territory. He skittered about the floor and clambered, flailing his wings, onto the bed. He was fascinated by the dressing table and spent much of his time grimacing in the mirror and overturning the shiny little pots and bottles which Vera had bought for Janet on their day in Edinburgh. At feeding times he nestled in her lap while she dropped squamous delicacies down his throat from a silver salt spoon. She stroked his stubby, growing feathers. Soon he must learn to fly and to feed himself. She worried about his crossed bill.