Inevitably, Georgina’s family could no longer deal with her and a series of institutions for the mentally infirm became her home. If they took away her typewriter, she’d fall into a catatonic state. If they gave it back to her, she’d immediately revert to her suicidal typing. There seemed to be no middle ground. Drugs and extended counselling were ineffective.
“IN THE END, she was committed to Eildon House,” said Sarah Mackay. “When she first came here, her file contained some of the many hundreds of pages of the novel she’d been writing. I read them carefully. It wasn’t really a surprise to discover that her main character was a woman who sat in her room all day, writing a novel. In the course of writing, this woman came to understand that all the other inhabitants of the world outside her room were conspiring against her. What was worse, they weren’t actually people at all but huge rodents disguised as human beings. She could hear them hissing and scratching at her door trying to get in. She herself was the last real human being on this earth, and she knew that as long as she kept up her desperate typing the rodents couldn’t get at her. Hence, her compulsion — and, by extension, Georgina’s.”
After hearing this I felt curious: what was wrong with Georgina to make her believe such frightening nonsense?
“You’ve put your finger on a dangerous aspect of the writing profession — the inability of writers to separate reality from fiction,” said Sarah. “In an invented story, it’s quite all right for a heroine to believe that all the human beings in the world have turned into rodents. In fact, it contains interesting possibilities. And Georgina must have been sane enough at first, for she wrote about her heroine in the third person. But as she herself began to lose her grip on reality, she began to write in the first person— she’d come to identify completely with her character.
“As I mentioned, we’ve tried all the latest psychotropic drugs on her and at times they seem to help. She can wander about Eildon House doing little jobs — such as delivering coffee and so on, as you’ve just seen. If I let her have her typewriter back, she’s fine at first and writes about her character in the third person. But after a while she gradually reverts to the first-person narrator — a sure sign she’s returned to the manic state. So we have to take the typewriter away from her. That deprivation makes her catatonic again and we give her more of the drug till her behaviour’s quite balanced once more. It’s been a vicious circle so far, but we haven’t given up on her. If we can’t get her to stop reverting to the first person, we may try another mix of drugs that’ll make her give up writing altogether and become a normal human being on a permanent basis. But that’ll only be as a last resort.”
4
The story of Georgina being out of the way, Sarah Mackay now began interrogating me closely about my own life history. She applied herself to the task in the way, no doubt, she would question a new inmate. Only detailed and considered responses satisfied her. I had to tell her at some length where I’d gone after I fled from Duncairn, how I’d ended up in Canada, about my marriage, and about my work. She listened with great concentration, drawing me out with shrewd questions about Alicia and Frank. She seemed especially interested in the complexities and recent development of my father — son relationship with him.
Finally, she turned to the purpose of this present trip to Scotland. I was required to tell her all about my meeting with the curator, my finding of The Obsidian Cloud in Mexico, and the mystery of its author, Macbane.
Sarah listened to all of this with rapt attention.
“How fascinating,” she said. “His story sounds just like some of those old Upland legends Mother used to tell me.”
WE THEN CAME to the matter of how I’d discovered she worked at Eildon House. I explained that I’d driven to Duncairn after meeting the curator, partly just to see what the place looked like now. I’d also hoped I might even come across her mother, still living there. I’d found out she was dead, visited her grave, and seen the fresh flowers. Through that I’d learned about her own existence from the owner of the Bracken Inn and decided to track her down.
She sat back, apparently satisfied with my account of myself. “I’m so glad you did track me down,” she said. “Miriam would have been thrilled to know what had become of you.” She sometimes called her mother by her first name, as though they’d been more like friends or sisters than parent and daughter.
I understood — my own parents liked me to use their first names, though for other reasons.
“She might have been surprised at the kind of work you do,” Sarah said. “She seemed to think you had more of an idealistic streak.”
That hurt a little, but I said nothing.
“Did you know she herself was an only child?” she said.
I’d always assumed that was the case. As in other matters, I’d known so little about her.
“Yes, her mother — my grandmother — was a fragile woman with a weak heart who died at home just a few days after Miriam was born, and Grandfather never married again,” said Sarah. “When I was a child, Mother took me on a trip to see her birthplace. The people who owned the house didn’t mind us coming in to have a look round.” She recollected the scene for me. “It was on the east coast, north of Edinburgh — one of the big houses you find on the cliffs with a bow window in the parlour looking out over the sea. There was a huge rock a mile or two off shore, completely covered in bird droppings. When we were there, it was glimmering in the sun like the dome of a cathedral. But apparently the day Grandmother was dying the sky was overcast and the rock grew less and less visible till you couldn’t see it anymore. That was always the sign of a storm approaching the coast.
“After Grandmother died, Grandfather sold the house and rented a rowhouse in Edinburgh. He wasn’t really cut out to be a parent, so he hired nannies to look after Miriam. When she was ten, she was enrolled in a girls’ boarding school in Edinburgh. He wasn’t around much during her childhood, for he was a partner in an export — import business and had to make a lot of voyages back and forth to the Far East. That was where he developed a liking for opium. You knew about that?”
Indeed, I did. How could I forget Miriam’s distaste as she tended the opium pipe for that wreck of a man?
“Eventually,” Sarah went on, “he sold his share of the firm, too, and moved everything to the house in Duncairn, lock, stock, and barrel — yes, there really was a barrel with a lifetime’s supply of opium in it. Who knows why he chose Duncairn? We used to wonder if it was because the sight of the ocean stirred up bad memories for him and Duncairn was about as landlocked as it was possible to be in the Uplands.
“When Miriam was sixteen she left school and went to stay with him. Even though he wasn’t very old, he already needed looking after. The townspeople of Duncairn barely knew him, but they did get to know Mother and they liked her. After she married Sam Mackay, they lived together in the manor with Grandfather. Sam had the kind of temperament that was able to put up with him.
“In the course of time, I was born. I didn’t have much to do with Grandfather. He always seemed only vaguely a member of the human species, inhabiting his corner of the manor, with his strange smells and habits. I was only seven when he died of complications resulting from the opium. After his death I missed him — I suppose it had become normal to have such a weird creature at home.