The horror of this was comparable only to the times when Miss Wales boiled lobsters and they would scream a high thin scream and wave their inky antennae and scrabble at the steep sides of the great black cauldron. None of the grown-ups paid any attention to Janet’s desperate pleas for intervention, for mercy for these creatures; in fact, they became angry; “Don’t interfere, Janet. It’s none of your business, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And don’t answer back.” She could not bear it. The kitchen was the one part of Auchnasaugh which she avoided. Besides Miss Wales’s resentful presence and distressing scalp, besides Jim with his bloodstained trousers and his hands ingrained with soil and blood and death, and his hinged knife with fur and entrail fragments stuck to its blade, there was almost always a wide enamel bowl containing salted water tinging to rose pink. In this water lay two skinned and headless rabbits, pale and foetal, slaughtered innocents for all to see. The next day, when they were being forced to eat their rabbit stew, outside the French windows on the lawn and up the steep bank where a thousand merry daffodils blew in the spring breezes, rabbits would be scampering unaware.
“You will finish it up. You will not leave the table until you have finished.” This was the rule for all meals, for all courses, and many were Janet’s counter-stratagems, some more disgusting than others. While patting her lips daintily with her voluminous table napkin she could systematically disgorge her mouth’s contents and enfold them in the snowy linen. At the end of the meal napkins were rolled, ringed, and placed tidily in a drawer. Janet would return in stealth and shake the grisly wreckage out of the window; the feral cats who lived in the rhododendron thickets would streak out and crouch greedily over it. Near the dining table stood an old harmonium, long disused and silent. Behind its pedals a substantial cavity offered a refuge for food too repulsive even to enter her mouth, chiefly herrings and kippers. It was quite easy to drop her napkin, bend down to retrieve it, and, with a deft flick of the wrist, lob the fish into the dark recess. Vera’s dog, Clover, could be relied upon to clear it out later.
Once, when chewing lettuce leaves (thirty times for every mouthful), she discovered a slug in her mouth. It felt enormous and thrashed about. She was afraid that if she screamed they would tell her to stop making a scene and swallow it. She managed to spit it out unseen. It was vast; ribbed, grey and viscous. She put her plate on top of it. The plate danced. In desperation she seized it by the rim on each side and with all her strength pressed it downwards. There was a squelching sensation; the plate was still. A thin trickle of frothy liquid seeped onto the table’s gleaming chestnut surface. Janet sat rigid, praying so hard that the words seemed to mass visible and solid in the air before her, “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me”; but it was not God’s forgiveness she craved, it was the slug’s; and never could this be given, so she must carry her guilt with her forever. “Come on, Janet, wake up, it’s lunchtime, go and wash your hands,” they were shouting. She shambled gloomily out of the drawing room.
The dining room at Auchnasaugh had once been the ballroom, lofty, corniced and swagged with fruits and flowers; chandeliers still glimmered through layers of dust, swaying in the draughts. Now, at the end of the summer holidays, in late September, one massive table spanned its far end, overlooked by a great mirror. The grown-ups sat with their backs to the mirror and the children faced it, so that they might see what they looked like if they chewed with their mouths open or dropped food down their chins. In the mornings only Nanny joined them and they swallowed down their porridge in silence, desperate to escape to the wild outside world of the rhododendron thickets, stables, and animals. Sometimes tinker children would emerge from the bushes, noiseless and scrawny as the feral cats, and make munching faces at them through the windows; they vanished into shadow the moment Nanny turned her stare.
Pudding today was pink junket, the delicacy so relished by Miss Muffet; it reminded Janet of the blanching rabbits in the kitchen bowl, but she had perfected a way of ingesting it with almost no physical contact by tipping tiny fragments into the very back of her mouth and swallowing quickly. Soon the ordeal was over. She looked at her family. Hector was flushed and jovial from his sherry, looking forward to an afternoon when he and the dogs would disappear in his car for a run in the hills. Vera as usual was dreamy and detached, her eye occasionally lighting lovingly on the newest baby, Caro, harnessed in her high chair and opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish as Nanny’s pinkly laden spoon advanced and retreated. Janet had heard Vera telling her friend Constance that she only really liked babies and found children annoying. In fact, she had said, it was possible for a mother to dislike her own child. Constance, who was childless and a psychologist, had much enjoyed this confidence and embarked on a lengthy interpretation. Janet had tiptoed away from the nursery door where she had been listening in the hope that the newly arrived Constance would be commenting on her intelligence and beauty. Her suspicions about Vera were now confirmed. Anyhow she had no need for a mother. She had the dogs, the cats, her pony, and all the woods and hills and waters and winds of Auchnasaugh. And she had books.
She looked in the mirror at the assembled faces of her siblings. Francis the freckled and green-eyed was sitting far away from her. He was no longer her closest friend; he had defected to Rhona. Rhona was good at tennis, she loved swimming, her neat little fingers could tie an exquisite trout fly in no time at all. Her bicycle worked because she looked after it. Besides all this, she was pretty and kind and loving. “You’ve done well with that one, Vera,” remarked Constance, leaving unspoken the corollary of how badly Vera had done with Janet. “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,” Grandpa had said, defecting too, on one of his last visits. He had been very ill and when he came in Rhona had run forward to help him sit down by the fire; she set his stick beside him and brought his tea. Janet had clambered onto the arm of his chair, knocking over his stick and joggling his tea into the saucer, so that she could show off about having learnt the Greek alphabet. It was on that same visit that Grandpa had looked at Lulu, four years old, angelically blonde, weaving a little posy of ivy tangled snowdrops and he had said to Janet, “You were like that once, a beautiful wee thing. But now you’re plain, my dear, very plain.” He had not meant to hurt her, she was certain of that; he was not a worldly man. But hurt her it did, like a punch in the solar plexus. Now, looking at her sisters’ faces, blonde and cherubic or dark and flowerlike, and looking at her own pallid frizzy-haired reflection, she was overwhelmed by prickling tears. Her name was dreadful too; all the others had names with some romance about them; even Rhona had a suggestion of inappropriate turbulence, a tawny river in flood rushing and foaming about its boulders. But Janet had nothing; its only possible association was with junket.
Grandpa was dead now and she could never regain her place in his affections. His church was gone too, pulled down to make way for a car park for the gin-drinking patrons of the Golf Hotel and Club House. Francis and Janet had been taken to his funeral. It had been terrible standing in the great Victorian cemetery in Glasgow, while a violent rainstorm beat about them, darkening the grief-stricken faces of the monumental angels, smashing the petals of the funeral flowers, whisking hats into the long wet grass. An umbrella rocking in the wind poked Janet’s eye and allowed her at last to weep. Afterwards she and Francis had been sent to walk through the streets of Pollokshields, while the grown-ups drank tea and ate fruit cake and had things to discuss. She remembered the clanging of trains passing by on the suburban network, and saturated posters peeling off the advertising hoardings. The air reeked of petrol and made her feel sick. All the others had gone to see Grandpa in hospital before he died. Janet had not gone; she had forced two fingers down her throat and made herself vomit because she was afraid of what she would see there. Hector and Vera had left her behind with surprising alacrity. And now that was that, and there she was in the dining-room mirror — plain, treacherous, and guilty. Outside, sombre clouds were massing and a squall of rain splattered the windows. “Never, never, never,” she said to herself. The bright day had gone.