Frozen to the bone, we are in the great cold kitchen where the lichen grows between the stone flags beneath our feet. The old oak barometer in the hall is indicating a curlicued ‘Storm’ and Nora, as salty as an old sea-dog, taps it and says, ‘The glass is falling,’ and I feel a melancholy tug inside me as if my body had its own tides and currents and can feel the pull of the moon. Which it can, I know.
Nora is boiling a copper kettle on the range, a complicated process that involves us first having to collect driftwood on the strand. Why does she live like this? I swear it’s colder inside than out. We would be better off building an igloo. To help us with this idea it has begun to snow. Nora says, it never snows here, as if the snow had made a mistake.
I lay out the old chipped Spode cups and saucers. We drink our tea black for we have no milk cow, nor a good red hen, not even a single honey-bee.
We sit and drink our tea at a kitchen table where resentful servants must once have sat. Living here is like living in a folk-museum, actors in A working kitchen, circa 1890, except there is no-one to observe us. Or so we hope.
— Is any of this going anywhere? Nora asks, staring into her teacup like a fortune teller.
‘Well, it’s leading here, eventually. As you know.’
— It’s a rather roundabout route.
‘There aren’t any maps. You see if you can do better then, tell me about Douglas.’
— Who?
‘Your brother.’
Nora closes her eyes, takes a breath, begins —
You have to remember this was long before I was born, so I have to imagine it. It started out well. Donald Stuart-Murray had a house in Eaton Square, one in Edinburgh’s New Town and endless ancestral pastures north of the border centred on his own glen — Glenkittrie — and a bloodline intimately entwined with the kings and queens of Scotland, and therefore England. He married the third daughter of an English earl, a plain, rather nervous girl, whose family were relieved to have her off their hands. The bride wore some exquisite family diamonds — a dowry-gift to mitigate her shortage of aristocratic qualities — and when she walked down the aisle the wedding-guests gasped in admiration so that the young bride, who was called Evangeline, blushed with joy, thinking they were silently applauding her efforts at beauty.
Evangeline soon fell pregnant and bravely gave birth every two years from then on until the end of the first decade of her marriage to Donald. Altogether they had five children, three boys (Douglas, Torquil and Murdo) followed by two girls. The first of these, Honoria, was dropped on her head from an upstairs window in the house in Eaton Square by a nursemaid who was later certified insane. Honoria was not exactly dead but neither was she exactly alive and after several months of dedicated nursing by her mother, Honoria finally gave up the struggle and died.
The second girl, Elspeth, followed her shortly afterwards, succumbing to an epidemic of diphtheria when she was one year old.
‘As if,’ Evangeline said, ‘little Honoria just couldn’t bear to play alone up there.’ This was a little sentimental for Donald’s taste. Donald was not, in truth, a very nice man. Bluff and blunt, he disassociated himself from emotion, believing it to be the territory of women, children and weak-brained idiots.
Evangeline, never particularly stable, became morbid. She was convinced that her remaining children were going to be plucked from her arms, one by one (she was right, of course), and eventually Donald gave in to her insistent wish that the remnant of her family be brought up back in Scotland away from metropolitan dangers.
The house — ‘Woodhaven’ at Kirkton of Craigie in the glen — was not the most hospitable of homes. Built from local stone and decorated with Alpine gables, it was little more than a glorified Victorian hunting lodge, erected by Donald’s father, Roderick. It was a cold place and a succession of housekeepers and servants had failed to warm it up. Donald, however, was quite content with this move as he could spend all his time now shooting and fishing and generally destroying everything that ran or flew on his rainy estate.
Evangeline concentrated on keeping her sons alive, feeding them on oatmeal and potatoes and boiled chickens and keeping them well away from disease, immorality and nursemaids. She had to be particularly vigilant when it came to the large amounts of water threatening them at every turn. The river Kittrie flowed not a hundred yards from the house and had been partially diverted on the instruction of Roderick to feed a small, artificial loch he had created. This had been stocked with a great many young trout and, accidentally, a rogue baby pike which fed at leisure on its companions and grew to be legendary. Roderick devoted the rest of his life to trying to catch it.
The boys were all taught to swim in case of accident as well as being made to undertake regular walks and suffering annual bracing holidays at the island holiday home—
‘You mean here?’
— Yes, don’t interrupt — and were forced to sleep for ten hours every night with their bedroom windows wide open, even in winter, so that they were sometimes woken by snow falling on their faces. By the time they were in their teens they were all in astonishingly good health with strong teeth, straight bones, good manners and clean habits and were, as everyone remarked, a great credit to their mother and their country.
When they went off to school, to Glenalmond, Evangeline wrote each of them a letter every week begging them to eat well, refrain from unhealthy thoughts and be vigilant around water, sharp objects and occupants of the sick bay.
When war was declared and the Hun were begging for a good thrashing Douglas was amongst the first to volunteer to give it to them. Feudalism still being a concept that was understood properly in that part of Scotland at the time, his example was followed by a swathe of his father’s tenants from the glen. Torquil crossed to France three months later and Murdo decided he wasn’t going to be left out of their adventures. Although he had been brought up not to lie, he swore to a recruiting officer that he was eighteen years old — he was fifteen — and eager to fight the foe. The recruiting officer signed him up with a conspirator’s wink.
They died in reverse order to that in which they’d been born. Murdo fell at Mons, neatly decapitated by a shell and six months later Torquil was lost for ever, drowning in the mud of no man’s land. Donald and Evangeline were not told at first because Torquil’s commanding officer thought he might eventually turn up but after a few weeks it became clear that those calcium-rich bones of his were going to secretly fertilize foreign soil for years to come.
A year later, Douglas was accidentally shot by his own side. He lived for several minutes after the bullet entered his brain and the snow that started falling on his face made him think that he was lying in his bed at home with the snow blowing off the hills through the window and that his brothers were safely asleep in their adjacent bedrooms (which in some ways they were), dreaming of their lives to come. Little Honoria had clearly been determined on her full complement of playmates.
Evangeline and Donald called their lost sons ‘the boys’, as if they were a single entity, rather than the individuals they had never really had the time to become. Donald comforted himself by imagining himself an unwilling Abraham, called upon to sacrifice his sons on the altar of patriotism. For a long time, Evangeline hung onto a secret hope that instead of drowning in mud, Torquil had deserted (she’d never been much of a patriot) and one day soon was going to walk up the long rhododendron-lined driveway, as jaunty as when he was alive. Time dulled this possibility and when the armistice was announced and there was still no sign of him, Evangeline decided that it was unlikely he would be coming home now and went down to the laundry room and hanged herself with a length of washing-rope from a large hook in the wall the purpose of which had always puzzled the laundrymaids but which now seemed only too clear. The end.