‘Rather what?’ said Mr Tait.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to make it sound light. ‘Rather disrespectful, I suppose. Rather ungrateful. Would these villager women really want to abandon their husbands and homes on that day of all days and go to a public meeting?’
He stopped teasing Bunty at that and she rolled over onto her side with a sigh and lay looking out of the window at the bird-table on the lawn, her tail thumping the carpet.
‘I’m surprised at you, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘Truly I am. A young woman like you with such old-fashioned notions. I cannot understand where everyone is getting the idea’ – he spread his arms wide and looked around the room as though for inspiration – ‘that the SWRI is a hotbed of socialists and suffragettes. I really cannot.’
‘No more can I,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest that it was. But I’m afraid if you’re sure the eleventh is the day then I shall have to decline your invitation. I’m laying a wreath at the service in the morning.’
‘But you’ll have plenty time to get down to Fife after that,’ said Mr Tait.
I was debating with myself whether to agree, cancel my fitting and face Grant’s wrath or make up a more serious appointment to account for my afternoon when his demeanour suddenly changed. He sat down heavily on the blue velvet chair and put one hand on each tweedy knee, leaning slightly forward with the manner of one about to explain something terribly important to a rather backward child.
‘I want you to come to the meeting most particularly, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘I meant to ask you even before Hugh… dropped you in it, shall we say?’ My eyebrows rose at that and I smiled.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I assure you that no matter what Hugh would have you believe, I am no housekeeper.’
‘But you have other talents,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I’ve been hearing about them from an old friend of mine who recommends you very highly. Very highly indeed.’
I closed my diary firmly. Dresses (and Grant) be damned. I had a case.
2
If one considers this kingdom of His Majesty’s, stretching from rosy, lazy Somerset and the like all the way to the stark, scoured rocks of Orkney, it is tempting to conclude that harshness and despair rise like the mercury in the glass the further north one goes (with a sharp jump over Hadrian’s Wall, of course) and to imagine that a trip to Fife, lying south of Perthshire, would be a little step towards the soft shire of girlhood and home. To think this is to make, however, a fundamental error about the nature of Scotland and of Fife, and to miss the part that the east plays in the scheme of things. Perthshire is snugly in the middle and is on the way to the Highlands, where people drink whisky, wear tartan and kick up their heels. Fife, by contrast, is at the edge, almost all coast, and east coast at that, chilled to its stony heart by the haar and, I have always thought, by its own conviction that chilly is best. I was once at a christening in Fife, and I overheard an old woman, of the type who will haunt christenings if there are no funerals to be had, suck her teeth and say: ‘Aye, first breath – beginning of death.’ Ever since, that has summed up Fife for me. So, I did not foresee much jollity as I motored down there that Monday afternoon. October afternoons are never very cheerful no matter where one passes them but I fully expected the little village of Luckenlaw, which was my destination, to make Gilverton in October seem like midsummer in Zanzibar.
I had just passed through the Burgh of Falkland, tucked under the north slopes of Falkland Hill, and because of that quite the most gloomy place one could imagine at this time of the year, and I now set my sights on the distant laws. There were three of these laws running west to east, smack in the middle of Fife near its southern shore. (It should perhaps be explained that a law, in these parts, is the name for a cone-shaped hill, isolated and therefore conspicuous like a hill in a child’s painting, but I resent having to explain it, or rather I resent being able to explain it. That is, I fiercely resent the many times in my married life when I have been subjected to such outpourings on the topography and nomenclature of Scotland’s landscape that I now have the explanation all to hand.)
I thought, as I approached, that Kellie and Largo Laws were not classics of the type, being rather asymmetrical and littered around with little ridges and outcroppings like leftovers that the law-maker had neglected to tidy away. Between them, however, was the Lucken Law, in every way the most splendid of the three. It was the highest, almost perfectly conical – looking like a molehill on a putting green the way it rose up from the uncluttered fields around – and then there was its title. All three laws had furnished much of their surroundings with names, of course. Largo Law to the west had three villages, Upper (or Kirkton of) Largo, Lower Largo and Largoward, and a sandy shore named Largo Bay. Kellie Law to the east had no village but, in compensation, boasted the rather grand Kellie Castle. The Lucken Law, however, had not only that impressive definite article – it was always the Lucken Law – but also Luckenlaw village due south of the hill, and a quite breathtaking array of farms, which spoke to the absence of imagination in the Fifish spirit as could nothing else. Over Luckenlaw, Hinter Luckenlaw, Wester Luckenlaw, Easter Luckenlaw and Luckenlaw Mains were nestled in about the law itself like chicks around a mother hen. The big house – and there is always a big house whenever there is an otherwise inexplicable village and a farm called the Mains – lay to the north and was called, inevitably, Luckenlaw House.
The house and park, just like Falkland village, were quite cut off from what daylight was left by the great brute of the hill which rose up before them, and I mused as I drove past that it would be well into spring before the sun shone upon its gardens or into its windows again. I could only hope that the inhabitants were the type to take pleasure from irony, for had I inherited or married into that house – and surely no one would ever have bought the place – I should have called it anything but luck. On these points, as on so many others, I was soon to find out that my assumptions were mistaken and my conclusions quite wrong.
I skirted the hill, passing solid farmhouses squarely built from blocks of pinkish grey stone and attendant cottages made of the same stone in rather rubblier and more heavily mortared pieces, and eventually turned off to take the lane into the village. There were not, here, the crow-stepped gables and red pantiles of the pretty villages on the coast, but it was a pleasant little place; a school and schoolhouse to the left, a row of cottages with a post office on one end to the right, and a handful of houses built in pairs, set around a green with a cenotaph at the far end, last year’s faded poppy wreaths still at its base with another month to go.
A gaggle of small girls were busy with a skipping game but they let their rope fall limp and gazed at me as I approached, one or two women as well coming to look out of doors or windows at the sound of the engine. I waved, slowing as the lane narrowed to skirt the green before it led up to the kirk and manse a little way on. One or two further cottages could just be glimpsed straggling upwards, but beyond them the lane ended at a gate into a field. This, then, was Luckenlaw. I swung my motor car into the open gates of the manse just as Mr Tait and a young woman of the same comfortable build and smiling countenance, who must be the daughter Lorna, came out onto the step to greet me.