Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion

Living With the Laird

A LOVE AFFAIR WITH A MAN AND HIS MANSION

Belinda Rathbone

For John and Elliot

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Part One

One It’s All Yours If You Want It

Two Heir and Spare

Three Winter Light

Four The Blessing

Part Two

Five The Garden

Six These Woods, These Cultur’d Plains

Seven Home Economics

Eight The County

Part Three

Nine Play Piece

Ten Tenants and Factors

Eleven Guests and Ghosts

Twelve The Birthday

Epilogue

Sources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

THE FOLLOWING IS A TRUE STORY BASED ON

my own notes taken and letters written in Scotland between 1990 and 2000. Most of the names of the people and places mentioned are factual; a few names have been changed and characters blended in consideration of their privacy. Also, in a few places, I have slightly altered the sequence of events for the sake of a more fluent narrative.

…

B. R.

PART ONE

ONE It’s All Yours If You Want It

I KNEW WHEN I MARRIED THE MAN THAT I married the mansion. Though which would pose the greater challenge—my husband John, or his crumbling Georgian country house in north-east Scotland—there was no telling. There was no separating them, in mind or in fact. There was no dealing with one that did not involve the other, lurking somewhere in the background. For this was not just a house but the scene of my husband’s childhood, of his father’s childhood, of the labours and loves of his ancestors. It was the material proof of an ancient and once prominent Scottish family that is now close to extinction, and scarcely a day went by when we didn’t feel the weight of its history upon us and the mandate to hang on.

Was anybody watching? Did the family ghosts smile with approval as we wheeled out the George III silver teapot and the Old Willow pattern teacups into the drawing room every afternoon at five o’clock? Did they sigh as we dropped into armchairs with sagging springs and faded upholstery in our stocking feet and blue jeans? Did they dismay at the sight of the peeling paint in the upper corners of our stately rooms, or the cobwebs clinging to the capitals, as we made a dive for the Safeway’s shortbread in the crumb-ridden depths of a rusty biscuit tin?

We lived on the stage set of another era, or the kind of layering of several eras that happens when a family stays in one place for many generations—in this case a stylistic evolution from Regency through the post-war era. All the country house equipment was in place. The dining room cupboard stored regiments of cut glass bowls, decanters, wine glasses, demitasses, picnic boxes, saltcellars, fruit knives, dinner plates stamped with the family crest. Upstairs, the cedar-lined linen cupboard overflowed with a history of bed linen, damask table cloths, napkins and embroidered hand towels. Downstairs the old wine cellar housed an archive of old prints and family portraits, miscellaneous frayed curtains, faded furniture covers, swords, broken lamps, empty preserve jars, and prewar pots and pans. The desk drawers were stuffed with diaries, bank statements, bills, schoolboys’ letters home, assorted calling cards and dance cards dating back fifty years and more, and reams of pale blue stationery engraved on the upper right, ‘The Guynd, by Arbroath, Angus’, and on the left, ‘Telephone, Carmyllie 250’, boxed, waiting for the lady of the house, with her fountain pen.

The tool shed was a catalogue of mowers, rollers, rakes, trimmers and strimmers, loppers and scythes. What were once the laundry, the stable, the hen house and the coal store were now a jumble of cast-off furniture, farm vehicles in need of repair and building scrap. The old vaulted kitchen was the living room of the East flat. The nursery was an artist’s studio.

We had everything such a house required except for the nine servants who once took care of it. For some years Will Crighton, the retired gardener, came every morning to count the animals in the fields and every few days to mow the three and a half acres of lawn around the house. But I gave up trying to get anyone to help me clean. For I was the housekeeper and the chambermaid, the cook and the nanny. John was the gardener, the plumber, the launderer, and the odd-job man. Still, at the end of the day, as we sat fireside in the library amidst volumes such as The Gardener’s Chronicle, Burke’s Peerage and Byron’s leatherbound Complete Poetical Works and discussed what to do about a broken stone wall or an untidy tenant, he was the laird (the twenty-sixth), and I was the chatelaine.

WE MET IN VANCOUVER, at a cousin’s wedding, in July 1990. The bride, my cousin Pippa, was equally John’s cousin, as she was the daughter of my uncle and his aunt. Both of us had been especially urged to make the trek west for the wedding, I from New York and John from London, as the last of Pippa’s assorted cousins to remain unmarried. We had met once before, as children; our families had converged in Italy back in 1954. But the age difference between us—thirteen and a half years—was then enough to make us almost unaware of each other. I was a toddler when he was a teenager.

At fifty-three John was still a bachelor. At thirty-nine so was I. Strategically, the family had arranged for us both to be put up for the weekend with the neighbours, an elderly Mr and Mrs Hamilton. When my taxi pulled in from the airport at dusk, a lanky dark-haired figure lurched out of the house to help me with my bags.

This must be John.

Inside, over a drink with our hosts, I watched his long, lean figure unfold awkwardly into a chair, like a youth still searching for the right fit, as we attempted to ground ourselves in relation to our Canadian cousins and catch up on the last thirty-something years.

His talk was witty, ironic and charged with nervous energy. As he darted nimbly from one subject to the next, he revealed an upper-class British background, but without the superficial polish. If he was the product of a system at all he was an errant one. He used words like salubrious with ease and relish, but he also peppered his speech with colloquial British expressions such as ‘naff’ and ‘bloke’ that gave it a tougher edge. Though his accent was English his features were somehow of a rarer breed or more ancient genesis. His long face, though lined, showed the youthful softness of a moist climate. His high, bony cheeks were shot through with the ruddy rose that comes from the chill of stone buildings in winter, and his greyblue eyes beamed steadily out of their sheltered hollows. When he laughed you could see the gold in his back teeth.

We sat together at the Catholic wedding service the next day, whispering expressions of impatience with the Latin. During the reception at the Capilano Golf Club John hovered, bringing me canapés and topping up my champagne. After the wedding some of us went out for supper at a noisy pub in downtown Vancouver, where we ate hamburgers and shouted and laughed over the din of the loud music. John pulled me on to the dance floor and we rocked and rolled, losing track of our party in the reeling crowd.

On Monday we took off for Denman Island to stay with Pippa’s older sister Anne on her organic apple farm. Our knees knocked together in the crowded back seat of Anne’s station wagon. We bundled up against the wind and strolled the rolling deck of the ferryboat. The next morning John and I were promptly dispatched on an outing with bicycles and directed towards the ferry to nearby Hornby Island. John, leading the way, wagged his tail at me like a happy dog and cast the occasional backwards glance as I strove to keep up. We found a sandy beach, went swimming in the cool blue bay, shared sandwiches and swapped travel stories.

‘I don’t like being a tourist,’ I told him. ‘Nowadays I tend go where I’m invited, either on business or as a guest in somebody’s house. It’s the only way to really get into the heart of a place.’

‘I just like exploring, without a fixed program,’ John rejoined -^ much as we were doing that day, cycling down unknown roads without a map, without a guide. We had both spent time in Spain on business. We discussed the Spanish character, and that famous cliché, mañana. Did their use of the word really mean that they could put something off indefinitely, I queried, or, on the contrary, that it was urgent? John thought it meant they could put it off. In my experience it meant that it was urgent. Perhaps our sense of the Spanish character simply served as a mirror of ourselves. John’s instinct to put things off and my sense of urgency meant that in this case we almost, but not quite, missed the last ferry back to Denman.

That evening after supper, sitting around the picnic table on the porch of Anne’s self-built island farmhouse, Anne asked John about ‘the Guynd’, his family home in Scotland, which she remembered visiting as a child.

The Guynd, I learnt, was an agricultural estate that John’s family had owned for the past four hundred years. ‘Guynd’ in Gaelic means ‘a high, marshy place’. The Guynd rhymes with ‘the wind’, and as it blew into our conversation the residual gaiety of the wedding weekend was swept away like a summer shower on a picnic. No longer the convivial traveller, John’s expression darkened; a flood of concerns and irritations surrounded and enveloped him. He had resumed the role he’d left behind in Scotland, that of the reluctant incumbent to a sadly run-down estate.

Since his mother’s death three years earlier the mansion house had stood empty, except for a single tenant, a young artist from Glasgow, in a basement flat. John’s father had been dead some twenty years. John’s younger brother, Angus, had left his wife and three children and fled to Canada back in the 1970s. John himself had been residing at a safe distance, in London, for the past several years. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he had been caught up in the ferment of the 1960s, gave up a career in the oil business and never looked back. From then on, between roaming South America with a girlfriend, boat building in Majorca for a rich American and flat renovating all over London, he discovered sex, marijuana, garlic and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man and decided he was a new man. Meanwhile he continued to make regular forays to Scotland, knowing that the house would someday be his, as the elder son, to carry on. For no matter what experience he had acquired elsewhere, and what attractions they held, his identity was still shaped mainly by that role and that place.

‘When are you going to move back?’ asked Anne.

‘I get up there quite a lot,’ John answered defensivly. “Anyway, Stephen’s in the West flat. He’s always there.’ The question bothered him, I could tell. It was clear that his inheritance was a mixed blessing, that as much as he was devoted to the memory—or myth—of its glorious past, the reality of its present condition was discouraging at best. The appearance of the light traveller with his rucksack, the breezy cyclist who just liked to explore, concealed an unusually heavy load of baggage that weighed him down wherever he went. Although we shared first cousins, and my mother was born as English as his was, we were of very different cultures.

From an early age I had travelled widely in Europe with my family, and we never failed to schedule a stay in England. I have fond childhood memories of visiting my cousin Judith in her long, low-ceilinged cottage in the Kent countryside, of climbing the cherry trees and walking the fields with her dogs. I remember staying at the Norfolk Hotel in South Kensington, riding the double-decker bus to Covent Garden and feeding the ducks in Hyde Park. In school, for some reason, my eyes watered and my voice choked when we sang ‘Jerusalem’. But what did building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land have to do with me? Now I knew, as I listened to John, that I had only skimmed the surface. He had a depth, a kind of worldweariness that is the privilege of Europeans—especially Europeans with baggage—that I could hardly touch.

The scene he described in Scotland was like something out of Country Life. I recalled the magazine arriving for my mother once a month in a brown, tightly rolled overseas bundle, and I would peruse the front pages with its aerial views of vast manorial estates hidden deep in the English countryside, or thatched roof cottages that might have been the setting of a Thomas Hardy novel. To John the scene was not that of a book or a magazine; it was real, it was today, the characters were living and he was one of them.

Anne had assigned me to a bedroom upstairs, and John to a mattress on the living room floor. But that night I crept downstairs. My plane was leaving mañana, in a matter of hours we would be separated by thousands of miles, and there was no time to worry about propriety. Besides, as I slid under the covers beside John, I could tell he was expecting me.

The next afternoon John saw me off from the little island airfield, promising to write and to call, and to plan our next meeting. But where? John was eager to come to New York but I was hesitant to see him there just yet. He seemed to be a man trying to escape his past, and I was not sure I was prepared to play host to his flight. Better, I thought, to see him first on his own turf, to know what he was running from. We agreed to meet at the Edinburgh Festival in late August. That way, if our precipitous, longdistance romance proved a fizzle, we could always lose ourselves in the darkness of the theatre.

‘BRING PLENTY OF WARM CLOTHES,’ warned my mother, ‘it’s not like summer there.’

In August? My mother had a tendency to exaggerate, especially about the cold. I travelled in a thin cotton dress and regretted it the minute I stepped outside the terminal building at the Edinburgh airport. A brisk wind whipped at my skirts as I buttoned up my cardigan and searched for a sign of John. There he was, the native, in a heavy shirt and pullover, corduroys and sandals with socks. (Sandals with socks!) Everything that had seemed exotic or eccentric about John in Vancouver was about to seem perfectly normal. He was a cut of the old cloth.

In Edinburgh at festival time the one-act plays, comedy revues and concerts of the Fringe played in every available public space, and clowns and mimes performed their antics on the hilly, cobbled streets of the Old Town. Walking the streets with names like Cowgate and Grassmarket, overlooked by the stony fortress of Edinburgh Castle at one end of the town and the bare hillside of the Crags at the other, John was in his element, and I was entranced. We laughed through parodies of Shakespeare’s tragedies, dozed through a theatrical rendition of Finnegans Wakeand danced Scottish reels in an old town hall. John shouted instructions and madly waved his arms at me as I was whirled from one partner to the next in the rollicking ‘Strip the Willow’. When we came out sweating it was well past midnight but the streets were still hot with activity. Finally we returned to our little blue room at Mrs Reekie’s B and B and made love in one of the twin beds before collapsing in utter exhaustion.

Between the distractions of the festival, as we relaxed over tea or a beer, conversation inevitably turned again and again to the Guynd. John rambled. His answers to my questions were not always easy to follow. He had a way of hurrying through some subjects, then taking long circuitous routes around the point of another, as if the idea was to keep his listener in the dark. I had a feeling that the place was on his mind all the time, even when he was asleep. Sometimes, awake, lost in thought, his face would twitch and contort, engaged in some angry exchange with one of his many demons. He was not in the habit of sharing his thoughts as much as battling them out alone. The only thing that seemed clear, from where we now sat just fifty-odd miles south of the Guynd in an Edinburgh café, was that I could not carry on the conversation much further without meeting his albatross face to face. All right, he eventually, reluctantly, agreed, we could dash up to the Guynd for a night or two, maybe visit friends in Fife or Perthshire on the way to or from, to take the edge off the point of our main destination.

In his mother’s dusty gold VW Scirocco we left Edinburgh, crossed the Firth of Forth into Fife and drove through a hilly, pastoral landscape for another thirty miles or so. Crossing the Tay Bridge we entered the big, grey town of Dundee and the county of Angus. We stopped for groceries at a supermarket at the far end of town, agreeing on chicken for dinner, eggs for breakfast. From there onwards the route was along narrow, winding country roads. John grew silent. As he shifted gears I could tell he knew every bend. Finally he slowed at a junction where a small weather-beaten wooden sign pointing to the right read, ‘Guynd—½mile’. His profile tightened as we approached a low, ivy-covered wall and the stone lodge at the head of the front drive.

Passing through the iron gates, John unstrapped his seat belt as if to relieve some of his tension at the prospect of coming home. He suddenly turned hawk-like in his attention to a rut in the road here, an untidy edge of lawn there. He muttered to himself things that were too obscure for me to understand. He was talking to himself anyway. We had left the world of the present and had entered the long tunnel of his past.

To my American eyes the landscape appeared lush and orderly, mature rather than overgrown. As we drove the half mile from the main road to the house, an acre of lawn suddenly opened up on the left, edged with abundant rhododendrons, followed by shadowy woods of towering beech trees. Then the landscape opened wide with a pasture on the right, huge oaks and sycamores dotting it here and there, shading the grazing cattle and, on the left, a freshly ploughed field. Straight ahead in the distance on a slight rise, surrounded with tall trees and shrubs, I could see the house.

Late Georgian, its neoclassical lines somewhat weather-worn at the edges, the house reminded me of a picture I had grown up with that hung in our dining room of a Regency house designed by my great-great-great grandfather in England. It had always puzzled me as a child. They called this a house? It looked to me more like a bank or a post office than a family home. Now here it was, as if the watercolour had come alive. That this style could have been considered, in its heyday, ‘informal’, that its strict symmetry was designed to relate to a romantic landscape, takes some time and study on the American’s part to fully understand. For the time being it was enough to take in its sheer bulk of stone. It was enough to wonder, as we approached the front portico, what a house like this one was doing with a pair of ordinary storm doors painted institutional green, inset with wired glass windows.

John fumbled with a collection of keys on a string and opened the heavy double doors, then the big front door. We entered a vast front hall. It smelled damp, the damp of stone walls and old carpets and I didn’t know what else. Its far corners were rounded by fourteen-foot classical columns and matching pilasters, all of them painted black. The walls had faded from whatever they once were to a nondescript beige. An old Turkish carpet of pale green and orange covered the stone floor. A single bare light bulb hung from the ceiling. A mass of tools and bric-à-brac littered a table in one of the far corners. A wicker dog basket, padded with a shredded blanket, presided over another. A large armchair shouldered the overflow from the cloakroom. There were two alcoves containing bronze boy figures of unknown origin on pedestals, one of them adorned with a paper party hat, and two grandfather clocks, one to the right, the other straight ahead under the stairs, neither ticking.

Beyond the pillars the stone staircase was piled with things on their way somewhere, up or down. A begonia plant with large pointed waxy leaves, which at first glance I thought was plastic, had been trained to wind its way up the banister. Looking up, I discovered the source of light the begonia was heading for—a huge round glass cupola with wrought-iron filigree, edged with the grime of condensation.

Instantly John abandoned the role of host that he had played with such flair in Edinburgh. I looked on in some confusion as he followed his distracted thoughts from one source of anxiety to another, dodging about and disappearing into dark cluttered passages and behind doors, then appearing again out of another, clutching the odd tool, suddenly remembering that I was there, not quite sure what to do about it. ‘Are you all right? Do you need anything?’

I couldn’t think what I needed. ‘No, no I’m fine.’ Anyway, I was apparently being left on my own to explore.

Opening a pair of large veneered double doors off the front hall, I discovered the dining room. More Ionic columns, this time white, formed a screen at the far end of the room. The windows were tall and generous and the walls were faded Wedgwood blue. A baroque painting of the Madonna and Child, punctured and patched with what appeared to be a wad of tar, occupied the wall between the columns. Ancestor to my left—a pleasant-faced late Georgian gentleman with a bemused smile. Ancestor to my right—a rather more determined-looking Victorian. On the dining room table dust had gathered around the place mats, left from a dinner party some months ago. More chairs than I could count. A small table on the side draped in cloth as thick as a blanket held a white metal plate warmer, such as you might see in a rooming house. A variety of vintage electric space heaters stationed in the far corners assured me that this was a cold room in winter, perhaps even in spring. The floor was covered, inexplicably, with stained puddle-brown linoleum.

On the other side of the front hall, directly opposite the dining room, a matching pair of doors opened into the library. Bookshelves built into deep architraves, stocked with leather-bound volumes and edged with a bedraggled leather dust fringe, gave off the faint glint of faded gold leaf. A clutter of souvenirs and children’s toys littered the shelves in front of the books. Colour picture postcards curled with damp lined the white marble mantelpiece. Half empty tonic and gin bottles sprouted from the drinks tray behind an enormous armchair covered in brown stretch fabric. But how to get across this room, past the barricade of oversized armchairs, huge standard lamps with their cockeyed shades, a giant television, an old hi-fi system built into a table, three-and-a-half-foot speakers covered with pink psychedelic fabric, and through the curtained archway straight ahead?

Picking my way across the room I drew the curtain and passed through the arch into a spacious drawing room, bright even with the shades drawn. Three windows at the far end, facing south-west, flanked the bowed end of the house. Dodging a collection of dead flies on the windowsill, I gave the shades a tug and revealed with a snap a living triptych of fields and trees. Another large window on the left framed an ancient copper beech and shed a shaft of light on the keyboard of the grand piano. It was a hall of mirrors and glass: gold-leafed mirror brackets over marquetry game tables in the niches of either side of the fireplace, a huge mirror over the mantel and overhead a Bohemian glass chandelier, dripping with prisms. A hard-edged art deco drawing room suite, covered in wrinkled pink damask loose covers, dominated the middle of the room. This was clearly the lady’s end of the house, her showpiece. I imagined John’s mother serving tea.