Neither Jim nor Lila went. For a while nothing much happened, as was so often the case at Auchnasaugh. Hector, staring at a point three feet above Jim’s stooped head, told him that he believed he had been working late into the night and although of course he appreciated his selfless efforts, his duty after five in the evening was to be with his old mother. Jim, staring at Hector’s conker-brown brogues, nodded wordlessly. Thereafter he ignored Lila, even when he was working on the lawn outside her window and she was standing there, framed by her torn curtains, glowering at him.
Hector told Vera, untruthfully, that he had spoken to Lila. Vera, hissing with rage, made forays to Lila’s room and, without mentioning anything so crude as factual evidence, informed her that she was a slut, an outcast, an unwelcome parasite who would be moved out at the first opportunity. And she was to keep away from the children: “We both know what I mean.” Her fury fragmented her sentences. Phrases, “abuse of trust,” “disgusting urges,” “flouting of protocol,” winged off her lips and bombed like hornets about the room. Lila refused to speak. She turned her back and drank more whisky. But as the days passed her small reserve of appetite for life began to drain away. She no longer searched for mushrooms, no longer cared to paint her minute, intricate watercolours of mosses and lichens. Her face lost its contours and sagged, her eyeballs were veined in pink and yellow, fluff and dust gathered, unheeded, in her shorn locks. Sometimes at dusk she slipped out among the trees and howled like a wolf. Alone in her room she uttered strange cries and clawed her face into raw furrows so that she seemed to be weeping tears of blood. She played her John McCormack records at full volume to drown her own noise. All this Vera witnessed with grim satisfaction. She flung Lila’s door open, without knocking. “I’ll thank you to turn that noise down. You might show just a little consideration for others.” Lila lay like a basilisk on the sofa; she stared at Vera without expression. Firelight flickered and gleamed on her whisky bottle, glittered across her black eyes.
intoned the gramophone. Vera stalked across to it: “And that record belongs to me.” She switched off the control, wrenched off the record, and slammed from the room.
Early one September morning Vera ascended the stone staircase with her tea tray. She was in good spirits. Her campaign against Lila was going well. Her campaign against the Goblin was proving even more successful. Hector did not enjoy pouring his own tea (albeit four cups) and drinking it in silence while his spouse lay comatose beside him. His enthusiasm for the machine was flagging. Sometimes now he did not even switch it on at night. Her tiresome older children were both far off at their boarding schools; the boys’ term had not yet begun. Life felt almost normal with Rhona, Lulu and Caro, Nanny and the pleasures of the nursery. With persistence one may achieve one’s ends, she thought. She hummed an invigorating hymn tune:
Lila erupted from the shadows by the great stained-glass window. She was swinging a wet towel, twisted into a rope. She walloped Vera across the face. The tray crashed down the stairs. Vera toppled, Lila swung the towel again and knocked her backwards. She rolled down the stairs, pursued by Lila in her flapping black garments. Lila kicked her as she went, lost her footing and fell over too. Horribly entwined they landed on the hall floor. Each sank her nails into the other’s face. Lila suddenly let go. Vera pulled herself free and stood up, shaking. She grabbed the banister and heaved herself painfully up the stairs. Lila lay on the floor staring up at the dying cockatoo. She was laughing; her eyes were alive with merriment.
When Janet came home for the Christmas holidays she was horrified to find that Lila had been committed to a lunatic asylum, an appropriately Gothic establishment near the coast with the inappropriate name Sunny Days. Vera made it clear that Lila was to play no further part in their lives. Janet knew better than to argue, or even to speak of her. After Christmas she caught the bus from the village to Aberdeen, to exchange her Christmas presents. This had become an accepted part of Christmas ritual as they all grew older. Francis and Rhona did not care to travel with Janet; her frequent requests to the driver for halts and fresh air were a great embarrassment. Janet was inured to it; she did not feel quite so ill on the bus as she did in cars; there was no smell of leather upholstery to convulse her stomach. Now, jolting down the long winding road out of the hills, she felt wonderfully confident. Over her new tartan skirt she wore her new white duffel jacket. Beneath the tartan skirt lurked her romantic new paper nylon petticoat, tiered and flounced. It crackled loudly as she moved and swelled the brusque pleating of her skirt outwards into strange sagging contours like those of a homemade lampshade. Her ensemble was completed by ankle socks and the perennial Start-Rite walking shoes, laced very tight. On her knee she clasped a brown paper parcel containing six pairs of Celanese knickers, eau de nil, turquoise and sticking-plaster pink, cut like twin pillowcases. These hideous gifts arrived each year from one of Vera’s many aunts, and Janet was well aware that she would not be able to exchange them as, apart from anything else, they had been bought in Glasgow. But herein lay her alibi. No one would be surprised that she had done something so silly as to travel a total of eighty miles to change the unchangeable and had returned still burdened with it. “Typical Janet,” they would say, and that would be that.
Her plan was to leave the bus at the second coastal village and walk the short distance to the lunatic asylum. For the first time, Lila would have a visitor. Later she would catch the same bus back to the village where Hector or Vera would meet her as arranged. A foolproof plan, conceived and executed with daring efficiency, such efficiency that she had escaped without cleaning her shoes and without Vera noticing the presence of the paper nylon petticoat. (“For parties,” she had purred, as Janet opened the parcel. What parties, Janet asked herself. Rhona and the little ones went to parties but she did not. She remembered them from earlier days, without pleasure. She was always first to be out in games and she either became hectically overexcited so that she behaved appallingly and had to be spanked later, or was so consumed with shyness and nerves that she was sick. She had enjoyed the afternoon time before a party, however, with the electric fire glowing in Vera’s bedroom at an unaccustomed hour, and the scent of starch as Nanny ironed their organdie dresses, and the lovely sight of Shetland shawls pinned out by their points across the carpet like a sequence of giant cobwebs.)
Sunny Days had been built as a seaside hotel in Edwardian times. A glassed verandah ran the length of the building, offering an uninterrupted view of the bitter sea and bitter sky beyond the cliff edge. Little wooden balconies, their paintwork weathered and blistered, trembled outside shuttered windows. There was a lofty conservatory, starkly empty. The grounds were extensive, open and windswept. A few stunted trees pointed inland, signalling escape. There had been little demand for it as a hotel. The boulders and sharp outcrops of the shore made bathing impossible and the constant wind made people uneasy and fretful. There was agreement that its only possible use could be as a place of confinement for people who had already been disordered — by war, weather, humanity, or what you will. As they were mad they would not notice its disadvantages. So it became a full house, and in constant demand.