“Hamish spent most of his first year sitting on it.”
“Wicked boy. Oh dear, it doesn’t bear thinking about. And Lottie doesn’t bear thinking about either. Now I’ve got Edie to worry over, saddling herself with that dreadful lunatic cousin. We’ve all depended on Edie for so long, we forget that she’s no longer young. I just hope it’s not all going to be too much for her.”
“Well, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it’ll never happen.”
“We can scarcely wish poor Lottie Carstairs dead, which seems the only alternative.”
She looked at Archie and saw, somewhat to her surprise, that he was near to laughter. “You know something, Vi? You’re depressing me.”
“Oh, I am sorry.” She struck him a companionable blow on the knee. “What a miserable old gasbag I am. Take no notice. Tell me, what news of Lucilla?”
“Last heard of, roosting in some Paris garret.”
“They always say that children are a joy. But at times they can be the most appalling headaches. Now, I must let you get home and not keep you chattering. Isobel will be waiting for you.”
“You wouldn’t like to come back to Croy and have more tea?” He sounded wistful. “Help amuse the Americans?”
Violet’s heart sank at the prospect. “Archie, I don’t think I feel quite up to doing that. Am I being selfish?”
“Not a bit. Just a thought. Sometimes I find all this barking and wagging tails daunting. But it’s nothing compared with what poor Isobel has to do.”
“It must be the most dreadfully hard work. All that fetching and carrying and cooking and table-laying and bed-making. And then having to make conversation. I know it’s only for two nights each week, but couldn’t you chuck your hands in and think of some other way to make money?”
“Can you?”
“Not immediately. But I wish things could be different for you both. I know one can’t put the clock back, but sometimes I think how nice it would be if nothing had changed at Croy. If your precious parents could still be alive, and all of you young again. Coming and going, and cars buzzing up and down the drive, and voices. And laughter.”
She turned to Archie, but his face was averted. He gazed out over her washing-green, as though Violet’s tea-towels and pillowcases and her sturdy brassiere and silk knickers were the most absorbing sight in the world.
She thought, And you and Edmund the closest of friends, but she did not say this.
“And Pandora there. That naughty, darling child. I always felt that when she left she took so much of the laughter with her.”
Archie stayed silent. And then he said “Yes,” and nothing more.
A small constraint lay between them. To fill it, Violet busied herself, gathering up her belongings. “I mustn’t keep you any longer.” She opened the door and clambered down from the bulky old vehicle.
“Thank you for the ride, Archie.”
“A pleasure, Vi.”
“Love to Isobel.”
“Of course. See you soon.”
She waited while he turned the Land-Rover, and watched him drive away, along the lane, and on up the hill. She felt guilty, because she should have gone with him, and drunk tea with Isobel, and made polite chat to the unknown Americans. But too late now, because he was gone. She searched in her handbag for her key and let herself into her house.
Alone, Archie continued on his way. The road grew steeper. Now there were trees ahead, Scots pine and tall beeches. Beyond and above these, the face of the hillside thrust skywards, cliffs of rock and scree, sprouting tufts of whin and bracken and determined saplings of silver birch. He reached the trees; and the road, having climbed as high as it could, swept around to the left and levelled out. Ahead, the beech avenue led the way to the house. A burn tumbled down from the hilltops in a series of pools and waterfalls and flowed on down the hill under an arched stone bridge. This stream was Pennyburn, and lower down the slope it made its way through the garden of Violet Aird’s house.
Beneath the beeches all was shaded, the light diffused, limpid and greenish. The leafy branches arched thickly overhead, and it felt a little like driving down the centre aisle of some enormous cathedral. And then, abruptly, the avenue fell behind him and the house came into view, set four-square on the brow of the hill, with the whole panoramic vista of the glen spread out at its feet. The evening breeze had done its work, tearing the clouds to tatters, lifting the mist. The distant hills, the peaceful acres of farmland, were washed in golden sunlight.
All at once, it became essential to have a moment or two to himself. This was selfish. He was already late, and Isobel was waiting for him, in need of his moral support. But he pushed guilt out of his mind, drew up out of earshot of the house, and switched off the engine.
It was very quiet, just the sough of the wind in the trees, the cry of curlews. He listened to the silence, from some distant field heard the bleat of sheep. And Violet’s voice: All of you young again. Coming and going…And Pandora there…
She shouldn’t have said that. He did not want his memories stirred. He did not wish to be consumed by this yearning nostalgia.
All of you young again.
He thought about Croy the way it had once been. He thought about coming home as a schoolboy, as a young soldier on leave. Roaring up the hill in his supercharged sports car with the roof down and the wind burning his cheeks. Knowing, with all the confidence of youth, that all would be just as he had left it. Drawing up with a screech of brakes at the front of the house; the family dogs spilling out of the open door, barking, coming to greet him, and their clamour alerting the household, so that by the time he was indoors, they were all converging. His mother and father, Harris the butler, and Mrs Harris the cook, and any other housemaid or daily lady who happened to be helping out at the time.
“Archie. Oh, darling, welcome home.”
And then, Pandora. I always felt that when she left she took so much of the laughter with her. His young sister. In memory, she was about thirteen and already beautiful. He saw her flying, long-legged, down the stairs, to leap into his waiting embrace. He saw her, with her full, curving mouth and her woman’s provocative, slanting eyes. He felt the lightness of her body as he swung her around, off her feet. He heard her voice.
“You’re back, you brute, and you’ve got a new car. I saw it out of the nursery window. Take me for a ride, Archie. Let’s go a hundred miles an hour.”
Pandora. He found himself smiling. Always, even as a child, she had been a life-enhancer, an injector of vitality and laughter to the most stuffy of occasions. Where she had sprung from he had never quite worked out. She was a Blair born and bred, yet so different in every way from the rest of them that she might have been a changeling.
He remembered her as a baby, as a little girl, as that delicious leggy teenager, for she had never suffered from puppy fat, spots, or lack of confidence. At sixteen, she looked twenty. Every friend he brought to the house had been, if not in love with her, then certainly mesmerised.
Life had hummed with activity for the young Blairs. House parties, shooting parties, tennis in the summer, August picnics on the sunlit, purple-heathered hills. He recalled one picnic when Pandora, complaining of the heat, had stripped off all her clothes and plunged naked, with no thought for astonished spectators, into the loch. He remembered dances, and Pandora in a white chiffon dress, with her brown shoulders bare, whirling from man to man through Strip the Willow and the Duke of Perth.
She was gone. Had been gone for over twenty years. At eighteen, a few months after Archie’s wedding, she had eloped with an American, some other woman’s husband, whom she had met in Scotland during the summer. With this man she flew to California, and in the fullness of time, became his wife. Waves of shock and horror reverberated around the county, but the Balmerinos were so loved and respected that they were treated with much sympathy and understanding. Perhaps, people said hopefully, she will come back. But Pandora did not come back. She did not return even for her parents’ fun
erals. Instead, as though engaged in an endless Strip the Willow, she flung herself, wayward as always, from one disastrous love affair to another. Divorced from her American husband, she moved to New York, and later to France, where she lived for some years in Paris. She kept in touch with Archie by means of rare and sporadic postcards, sending a scrawled address, a scrap of information, and a huge straggling cross for a kiss. Now she seemed to have ended up in a villa in Majorca. God knew who was her current companion.
Long since, Archie and Isobel had despaired of her, and yet, from time to time, he found himself missing her more than anybody else. For youth was over, and his father’s household dispersed. Harris and Mrs Harris had long retired, and domestic help was reduced to Agnes Cooper who, two days a week, climbed the hill from the village to give Isobel a hand in the kitchen.
As for the estate, matters were hardly better. Gordon Gillock, the keeper, was still in situ in his small stone house with the kennels at the back, but the grouse moor was let to a syndicate, and Edmund Aird paid the keeper’s salary. The farm, as well, had gone, and the parkland was ploughed for crops. The old gardener — a weathered stick of a man and an important part of Archie’s childhood — had finally died, and not been replaced. His precious walled garden was put down to grass; unpruned, the rhododendrons grew massive, and the hard tennis court was green with moss. Archie now was officially the gardener, with the sporadic assistance of Willy Snoddy, who lived in a grubby cottage at the end of the village, trapped rabbits and poached salmon, and was pleased from time to time to earn a little drinking money.
And he himself? Archie took stock. An ex-Lieutenant Colonel in the Queen’s Loyal Highlanders, invalided out with a tin leg, a sixty-per-cent disability pension, and too many nightmares. But still, thanks to Isobel, in possession of his inheritance. Croy was still his and would, God willing, belong to Hamish. Crippled, struggling to make ends meet, he was still Balmerino of Croy.
Suddenly, it was funny. Balmerino of Croy. Such a fine-sounding title, and such a ludicrous situation. It was no good trying to work out why everything had gone so wrong because there was nothing much he could do about it anyway. No more harking back. Duty called and the Lady Balmerino waited.
For some obscure reason he felt more cheerful. He started up the engine and drove the short distance across the gravel to the front of the house.
8
It had drizzled most of the day but now it was fine, so after his tea Henry went out into Edie’s garden with her. This ran down to the river, and her washing-line was strung between two apple trees. He helped her to unpeg the washing and put it into the wicker basket, and they folded the sheets together with a snap and a crack to get all the creases out of them. With this accomplished, they went back into the house and Edie set up the ironing board and began ironing her pillowcases and the tablecloth and a blouse. Henry watched, liking the smell and the way the hot iron made the crunchy damp linen all smooth and shiny and crisp.
He said, “You’re very good at ironing.”
“I’d need to be after all these years at it.”
“How many years, Edie?”
“Well…” She dumped the iron down on its end and folded the pillowcase with her dimpled red hands. “I’m sixty-eight now, and I was eighteen when I first went to work for Mrs Aird. Work that one out.”
Even Henry could do that sum. “Fifty years.”
“Fifty years is a long way to look ahead, but looking back it doesn’t seem any time at all. Makes you wonder what life’s all about.”
“Tell me about Alexa and London.” Henry had never been to London, but Edie had lived there once.
“Oh, Henry, I’ve told you these stories a thousand times.”
“I like to hear them again.”
“Well…” She pressed a crease, sharp as a knife edge. “When your daddy was much younger, he was married to a lady called Caroline. They were married in London, at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and we all went down for the occasion, and stayed at a hotel called the Berkeley. And what a wedding that was! Ten lovely bridesmaids, all in white dresses, like a flock of swans. And after the wedding we all went to another very grand hotel called the Ritz, and there were waiters in tailcoats and so grand you’d have thought they were wedding guests themselves. And there was champagne and such a spread of food you didn’t know where to start.”
“Were there jellies?”
“Jellies in every colour. Yellow and red and green. And there was cold salmon and wee sandwiches you could eat with your fingers, and frosted grapes all sparkling with sugar. And Caroline wore a dress of wild silk and a great long train, and on her head was a diamond tiara that her father had given her for a wedding present, and she looked like a queen.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Oh, Henry, all brides are beautiful.”
“Was she as pretty as my mother?”
But Edie was not to be drawn. “She was good-looking in a different sort of way. Very tall, she was, with lovely black hair.”
“Did you like her?”
“Of course I liked her. I wouldn’t have gone to London to look after Alexa if I hadn’t liked her.”
“Tell me about that bit.”
Edie set aside her pillowcases and started in on the blue-and-white-checked tablecloth.
“Well, it was just after your Grandfather Geordie died. I was still living at Balnaid, and working for your Granny Vi. It was just the two of us in the house, keeping each other company. We knew that Alexa was on the way, because Edmund had come up for his father’s funeral and he told us then. ‘Caroline is having a baby,’ he told us, and it was a wonderful comfort to your Granny Vi to know that even if Geordie was with her no longer, there was a new wee life on the way. And then we heard that Caroline was looking for a nanny to take care of the bairn. Your Granny Vi was up to high doh. The truth of the matter was that she couldn’t bide the thought of some uninformed bisom having the care of her grandchild, filling her wee head with all the wrong ideas, and not taking the time to talk to the child, nor read to her. I never thought about going until your Granny Vi asked me to. I didn’t want to leave Balnaid and Strathcroy. But…we talked it over and in the end decided that there was nothing else to be done. So I went to London…”
“I bet Daddy was pleased to see you.”
“Och, yes, he was pleased enough. And at the end of the day, it was a mercy I went. Alexa was born safe and sound, but after the baby arrived, Caroline became very, very ill.”
“Did she have measles?”
“No, it wasn’t measles.”
“Whooping cough?”
“No. It wasn’t that sort of illness. It was more nervous. Post-natal depression they call it, and it’s a horrible thing to see. She had to go to hospital for treatment, and when she was allowed home she was really not able for anything, let alone taking care of a baby. But eventually she recovered a wee bit and her mother Lady Cheriton took her off on a cruise to a lovely island called Madeira. And after a month or two there, she was better again.”
“Were you left all alone in London?”
“Not all alone. There was a nice lady who came in every day to clean the house, and then your father was in and out.”
“Why didn’t you come back to Scotland and stay with Vi?”
“There was a time when we thought we might. Just for a visit. It was the week of Lord and Lady Balmerino’s wedding…only then of course he was Archie Blair, and such a handsome young officer. Caroline was still in Madeira and Edmund said we’d all come north together for the occasion and stay at Balnaid. Your Granny Vi was so excited when she heard the news that we were coming to visit. She got the cot down from the attic and washed the baby blankets and dusted up the old pram. And then Alexa started teething…she was only a wee thing and what a time she had of it. Crying all night and not a mortal thing I could do to quieten her. I think I went two weeks without a proper night’s sleep, and in the end Edmund said he thought the long journey north would be too much f
or the pair of us. He was right, of course, but I could have cried from disappointment.”
“And Vi must have been disappointed too.”
“Yes, I think she was.”
“Did Daddy come to the wedding?”
“Oh, yes, he came. He and Archie were old, old friends. He had to be there. But he came on his own.”
She had finished the tablecloth. Now she was on to her best blouse, easing the point of the iron into the gathered bit on the shoulder. That looked even more difficult than ironing pillowcases.
“Tell me about the house in London.”
“Oh, Henry, do you not weary of all these old tales?”
“I like hearing about the house.”
“All right. It was in Kensington, in a row. Very tall and thin, and what a work. The kitchens in the basement and the nurseries right up at the top of the house. It seemed to me that I never stopped climbing stairs. But it was a beautiful house, filled with precious things. And there was always something going on — people calling, or dinner parties, and guests arriving through the front door in their fine clothes. Alexa and I used to sit on the turn of the stairs and watch it all through the banisters.”
“But nobody saw you.”
“No. Nobody saw us. It was like playing hide-and-seek.”
“And you used to go to Buckingham Palace…”
“Yes, to watch the Changing of the Guard. And sometimes we took a taxi to Regent’s Park Zoo and looked at the lions. And when Alexa was old enough, I walked her to school and dancing class. Some of the other children were little Lords and Ladies, and what a toffee-nosed lot their nannies were!”
Little Lords and Ladies and a house filled with precious things. Edie, Henry decided, had had some marvellous experiences. “Were you sad to leave London?”
“Oh, Henry, I was sad because it was a sad time, and the reason for leaving was so sad. A terrible tragedy. Just think, one man driving his car far too fast and without thinking of any other body on the road, and in a single instant Edmund had lost his wife and Alexa her mother. And poor Lady Cheriton her only child, her only daughter. Dead.”