Her life was little changed by Fergus’s permanent absence. He had always passed long periods away, in Glasgow or overseas on his mysterious naval business, and when he was at home he spent most of his time fishing for trout in the burn which ran along the floor of the glen, or for salmon in the brawling whisky-coloured river which cascaded from the hills, leaping impatiently past its boulders, raucous and jostling until it reached the long tranquil stretch of water which brought it to Loch Saugh, the sorrowing pine trees and the solitary swan. In the evenings they met with Fergus’s aged father in the drawing room; there they drank whisky, played cards, and listened to John McCormack in plangent lamentation for lost faces, lost loves, the past forever eddying away. The servants had long since gone, pedalling through the dusk to the village, all except Jim, the hunchbacked gardener, who tramped off up the hill to his mother’s lonely croft on the edge of the moor. Night enclosed the glen and roofed it with stars. Wind stirred the great trees; owls hooted. At ten o’clock Fergus went out to the dynamo shed where their erratic electricity supply was produced by a sullen generator and switched it off. Up the stairs they went, their Tilley lamps fitfully reflected in the great stained-glass window; a drift of cats followed them; the dogs ran ahead. At dawn Lila would come down again, escorted by the cats, and repair to her mushroom room, or, in the autumn, to the woods in search of specimens. After Fergus’s death she moved a bed down to the tiny room next to the mushroom chamber and slept there instead, still spending the evenings with her father-in-law, until he, too, died. Now she sat alone in her room and played John McCormack on a more modern gramophone and drank her whisky as she read or painted. And now she drank whisky in the afternoons, staring balefully at the foggy windows.
Vera had hoped, when they first came to Auchnasaugh, that Lila might wish to help with the children; she visualised her as a cross between a doting and quaintly dotty aunt and an eccentric family retainer, who would know her place but find fulfilment in a modest share of their family life. She would be grateful to Vera for brightening her drab existence. Lila had countered by dropping cigarette ash in the baby’s cot and providing a steaming bowl of daffodil bulbs cooked in parsley sauce for the children’s lunch, claiming that they were onions. Nanny said she would be obliged to leave if that woman was allowed in the nursery again and so contact with Lila was limited to downstairs. At first the children would shriek with terror as she materialised soundlessly behind them in the corridors or out of the dripping winter afternoon, but soon they grew used to her, and as time passed Janet, who had taken to reading Edwardian books about isolated, misunderstood young girls whose intelligence and courage were noticed only by one adult friend, decided that Lila was fitted for this part. Her only regret was that neither of them was crippled.
Lila, although not effusively welcoming, did not appear to mind Janet’s visits to her room; she continued to do whatever she was doing, and Janet moved about fidgeting with things and asking questions about mushrooms and Russia. Lila would not talk about Russia but was happy to show her her beautiful old botanical volumes. Janet had begun to learn Latin and was intoxicated by the plant names: Clitocybe nebularis, Asterophora, Flammulina, or Rosa gallica, Rosa mundi, Rosa versicolor, Potentilla fruticosa. She set these names to hymn tunes and wandered about chanting them. Vera forbade her to pick or handle mushrooms. Janet had no intention of obeying. One day, Lila had promised, they would go together on an early morning fungus foray. Janet was aware of the hostility which hung between Vera and Lila and she wished to be on Lila’s side. So, on this rainswept Sunday afternoon, the last weekend of the summer holidays, Janet made her way, by a devious route in case her mother was watching, to Lila’s murky chamber and sat reading Lorna Doone while the wind boomed down the chimney and lashed the chestnuts from their leafy branches and whirled the jackdaws and rooks into a wild confusion beneath the racing clouds.
Chapter Four
It was Hector’s belief that a girl was an inferior form of boy; this regrettable condition could be remedied, or improved upon, by education. For this reason he had started a boys’ school for his daughters to attend. And so in term time Auchnasaugh was transformed, full of boys and benches and clattering boots. Another of his beliefs, and one which he shared with Vera, was that children should study languages from an early age and learn poetry by heart. Miss Christie read them “Hiawatha” and even her bleak Aberdonian tones could not dispel its glories: “Minnehaha, laughing water!” (Potentilla fruticosa!) Rhythms and rhymes galloped through Janet’s head. For this reason, too, she loved learning Latin, the pleasing oddity of declensions, the greater eccentricity of principal parts—tango, tangere, TETIGI, tactum. She had been learning French since she was four, and when she was ten she started Greek, whose words were even more astounding than Latin. But best of all was the poetry. Smith’s Book of Verse for Boys and Girls began with narrative poems. “It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea.” Janet enjoyed these, as usual visualising herself as the heroine bound to the mast or drifting in elegant death along the shoreline: “O is it weed or floating hair?” But then she discovered the ballads, “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Otterburn,” “True Thomas,” “The Unquiet Grave.” The wind and snow and waters of the world she knew were there, inhabited not by her family or Miss Wales the cook or the chilled and prosaic churchgoers, but by fiercer lonely figures driven by passion and savagery, love forever lost and yet forever held, old feuds, undying jealousies, a moral code of pagan nobility without pity.
The sound of the wind, the dawn wind, and the sound of the sea, eternally mournful, cruel, tender, were in those pages, were in Janet’s head and heart and blood.
On summer afternoons, when Hector and Vera thought that she was on the cricket pitch, a place she feared, she slipped away through the rhododendron jungle to the mossy silent path which led to the old hen house. The hens had all escaped long ago. Rab the hero dog had slaughtered most of them. He was condemned to wear a bloody corpse slung around his neck — primitive aversion therapy. Now and then a solitary Rhode Island or a snowy Leghorn would emerge from the bushes, peer about, squawk in horror, and retreat. No one cared. The flock of hens had been another of Vera’s attempts to introduce some element of gentle domesticity to the unyielding landscape of the glen, and like her orchard it had not prospered. However, the dank shadows of the hen house, its rotten lichened timbers and shafts of sunlight, received Janet’s taciturn presence and gave her sanctuary. Here she spent the long afternoons reading, and copying her favourite poems into an exercise book. Sometimes she would go farther up the path and come to the wide grassy clearing where the two gaunt old swings, tall and angular as guillotines or gallows, dominated the slope; there, with minimal effort, it was possible to soar to great heights, the steep bank falling away beneath, the black pine branches against the blue sky rushing outstretched to embrace her. The scent of the pines, the throb of wood pigeons, the shearing glissade of the circular saw at the distant wood mill and the perfect arc of the swing, as it rose and sank and rose again, lulled her into a trance of happiness. One day, as she swung, she watched a pheasant lead her brood of chicks through the long fine grass. Suddenly the mother bird sank low to the ground, the little ones ran straggling and cheeping towards her, and a great shadow fell across them, across Janet too, as she whirled around and around, unwinding from the twisted chains of the swing. A huge eagle was passing slowly above her, impervious and purposeful, its wings scarcely beating. It drifted on up the glen until in the distance it spanned the rift between the hills, a creature greater than its landscape.