Lila had not been present at lunch. She rarely attended meals, nor did Vera encourage her to do so. Sometimes Hector, flushed with preprandial bonhomie, would urge her to join them, but she would give her vague, sweet smile, shake her head and move off in her strange gliding manner into the dark winding passages, pungent with Jeyes Fluid, which led to the back quarters where she had her demesne.
Lila’s two rooms overlooked a small and ancient lawn whose turf was underwater green even in winter. Beyond was the washing line and the blighted apple tree, and then the giant hogweed grove, forbidden in the summer months when its great heads of flowers swayed in menace against the windy sky and its serpentine stems reared triumphant and rutilant. “An army terrible with banners,” Janet thought, and those banners bore their dread device. Noli me tangere and Nemo me impune lacessit, they hissed as their huge leaves scarcely lifted in breezes which scattered the petals from the roses and made the rhododendrons roar like the sea. Now in early autumn they stood withdrawn and spectral, parched skeletons drained of their venom, and occasionally, without warning, one would crack, rend, and plunge in airy slow motion to the ground, there to lie in majesty like the great Lord of Luna. It had pained and angered Janet that they should be called hogweed, uncouth in sound, doubly insulting in intention, and she was overjoyed to find that their real name was indeed heroic: Heracleum giganteum. In her thoughts they were still Lords of Luna, but she now referred to them as Heraclea and tried to persuade others to do so too. No one would, not even Lila, who at this time of year would bring these broken ghosts into her room and sit in the afternoon dusk gazing at the shadows they cast on the white walls as her fire smouldered and her seven-branched candelabrum flickered and glowed.
About the room were many other desiccated trophies: bracket fungi like Neanderthal livers, long-dead roses in jam-jars green with algae, bracken and rowan berries hung in shrivelled swags around the mirror frames, straw hats pinned to the walls, dust lying heavy on the brims, turning their wreathed flowers a uniform grey. The crumpled rugs bore a patina of cigarette ash, the ashtrays brimmed, books lay open on the floor and tables, stained with coffee, dog-eared and annotated. These books were in Russian, for Lila, like the Heraclea, originated there. In one corner of the room a low archway led into a turret and here Lila’s cat, Mouflon, slept on a pile of old fur coats draped ineffectually over a mighty stack of empty whisky bottles. The aromas of ancient tom and evaporating spirits combined with Schiaparelli’s Shocking and Craven A tobacco to create an aura of risque clubland. On the mantelpiece, just visible behind a watercolour of the cat and a spilling powder compact, was the curled corner of a photograph of Lila’s deceased husband, cousin to Hector. Lila had met him long ago in Russia, where he had been employed as a naval adviser to the tsar’s fleet, and when he had asked her to marry him she had been unable to think of any polite way of saying no. So he had brought his silent black-eyed bride to Scotland, and the Revolution had happened and she had never gone back; all her past was gone.
At Auchnasaugh she had been neither happy nor unhappy, passing her days in reading, dreaming, painting watercolours of animals, landscape, mushrooms, and politely refusing all contact with the world beyond the glen. She collected wild flowers and pressed them in albums, she brought in baskets of fungi and identified them from their spore prints, covering any empty floor space in great sheets of paper dotted and oozy with deliquescent fruit bodies. For thirty-five years she had kept a record of mysterious botanical presences and absences. Sometimes people saw her sitting on a moorland boulder, staring into space, or scrabbling with a trowel at its mosses and lichens, or gliding through the woods with the curious veering gait, the bowed head and solitary absorption of the mushroom seeker. It was generally supposed that she was mad and a sorceress as well. Her rare visits to the village did nothing to help her reputation; she would sit bolt upright in the back of Vera’s car, shawls wound about her head and across her face, looking neither to right nor left, a widowed queen. Vera would take her list into the shop, the shopkeeper would bring her box out and pack it into the boot, she would hand the money through the car window, and not one word would she say. As the car drove off the village children would appear, pointing and jeering, but they were also afraid of her.
Lila’s husband, Fergus, had been dead for many years now, gone into the silent past with Lila’s Russia. Janet asked her if she wished she were back in Russia, if she missed her life there. “It’s over,” she said. “It’s the past. It doesn’t matter now.” And as to Fergus: “It’s a long time since I last saw him. I don’t remember him very well. There’s nothing much to be said.” Much, however, was said in various places about the manner of Fergus’s death. Hector and Vera said that he had collapsed and died from a stroke, precipitated by an old war wound. Nanny said that Lila had poisoned him with her nasty toadstools and he had died in convulsions of agony, his screams echoing down the glen, unheard by his deaf old father, and unheard or unheeded by Lila, who had retired with a nightcap. This story was popular in the village. In fact, said Lila, it had been the doing of her cat, Mouflon, whom Fergus had hated. Mouflon had been young and playful then, and during dinner he had skittishly made off with Fergus’s trout. Fergus had leapt up and hurled his plate at him. He missed the cat but broke the plate. Mouflon fled with the trout to a high shelf and crouched there, snarling and devouring. Fergus was puce with rage; he began to rant about Lila’s devotion to her cat and her mushrooms, her failure to make friends of his friends, her refusal even to acknowledge acquaintances. “You may pass through life without friends, but you can’t manage without acquaintances.” Lila could, and did, but this she did not say. Instead she diverted him, spoke admiringly of his prowess at the wheel of his Lagonda, his joy, his ink-blue close-couple coupé, swan-curved of running board. She pretended that she would like to go for a drive with him the next day. Fergus was mollified. He told Lila about his dentist’s admiration for his teeth and how the dentist had said that as teeth went these were Rolls-Royces, and he had riposted that they should be Lagondas. To prove his point he would now bisect a Fox’s Glacier Mint with one snap of his front teeth. He set the small gleaming iceberg in position; Lila watched, dreamy in the candlelight; down came his teeth like the blade of a guillotine, down hurtled Mouflon, a ginger streak from the high shelf, embedding his claws in Fergus’s neck. Fergus gasped, jerked backwards, inhaled the half Glacier Mint, and choked to death. Lila thumped him and shook him to no avail. It was over very quickly. Beneath the table the cat, Mouflon, licked the other half of the mint, twitched his whiskers in distaste, and sauntered off to Lila’s mushroom chamber. Presently she joined him there. After all, nothing could be done until the morning.