The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  My mother’s people were deeply displeased − the more so because the marriage proved to have taken place, most unfortunately, on the day of her father’s death. Her eldest surviving brother, Rory (who thus became Roderick Glencorry of that Ilk and twenty-second Laird of Glencorry), regarded his sister as a feather-headed child who had been practised upon by some obscure crofter’s son, and for several years he treated the couple as non-existent. But he was a conscientious man, with an honest if perhaps provincial sense of the consequence of the Glencorrys and the decorum that ought to obtain in the family of the Chief. So eventually he swallowed his resentment, and relations of a sort were established.

  Even so, I can recall only one occasion upon which we visited Corry Hall in force. I had myself made the acquaintance of my Uncle Rory by then, and I was terrified lest he should treat my father with outrageous frigidity or condescension. Of course nothing of the kind happened. The Glencorry was cool, but very much the courteous host. He made a polite show of interest in my father’s profession, inquiring about it with a correct diffidence which he certainly showed himself as having no title to shed. It was about my father that I was then anxious; failing to be met with outrage, he was perfectly capable of turning outrageous himself. But this failed to happen either. The Glencorrys didn’t run to a Raeburn, but there were several Allan Ramsays − the family having been more prosperous in the mid-eighteenth century, I imagine, than later on. My father found it impossible to think ill of anybody who treated heirlooms of that sort with respect. The visit ended in good order.

  But it had taken place perhaps ten years after my mother’s marriage, and that settled a good deal. My mother was volatile and, I suppose, rather silly; she was also of those who were beginning to be called neurotics. But she was very well aware of what was due from the head of her family to the husband of her choice; and so stiff a quarantine could not be atoned for by a few amiabilities in front of canvases depicting deceased Glencorrys. The reconciliation remained formal, and things went on as before. Uncle Rory had already judged it right cto take an interest’, as he expressed it, in Ninian and myself, and we were regularly invited to spend two or three weeks of the summer holidays at Corry. We didn’t, however, go together. Ninian, as elder brother, had first innings; and I, as younger, had second. I never understood why this had to be so. Corry Hall would have held (and subdued) half-a-dozen boys much rowdier than the Pattullos. Possibly my uncle felt that the purpose of these visits was the improvement of our behaviour, and that it was best to concentrate upon us one at a time. As for my parents, I think my mother was always in two minds about our highland holidays. She disliked parting with her sons to a brother who was receiving them on a kind of sufferance, but at the same time she wanted us to be Glencorrys − to be, in fact, a laird’s nephews as well as an artist’s sons. This divided feeling became a factor in forming what was to be my own ambivalent attitude to my grand relations. My father was wiser, thinking not in terms of one side of our family and the other, and still less of painters and landed gentry. He simply judged it a good thing that we should get away from Edinburgh and run wild about the glens without any inconvenient cost to himself. Uncle Rory seemed not much to impress him one way or the other. My father had executed portraits of several men of that sort. They weren’t quite his sort, but they belonged to an order he understood and after a fashion respected. They were certainly an improvement on people like the Dreich. Had he been invited (but he wasn’t) to paint his brother-in-law he would have got on the canvas all the inner man there was. It might not have been a generous portrait, but it would have been alive.

  Uncle Rory had an English wife, and two daughters who struck me as very English also. Indeed, my first fully formed, if not clearly formulated, impression of Corry Hall was that there seemed perplexingly little that could be called Scottish about it. I was grown-up before I realised that this was a superficial view. My expectation had been of kilts and bagpipes and even tartan carpets. (A school-friend with aristocratic pretensions had confided to me that the Duke of Argyll wore tartan bedroom slippers, at least at Inveraray.) I never saw Uncle Rory in a kilt, and he once astonished me by advancing the view that it was a garment which had been more or less invented by the Prince Consort. The only kilt in evidence about the place was worn by an elderly man who was provided with bagpipes as well, and whose duty it was to walk up and down in front of the house before breakfast, producing from the instrument all those disastrously emotive strains of which it is so capable. Ninian − for some years more knowledgeable than myself, although I was to overtake him − declared that this was a practice no longer current except in tourist hotels in the Trossachs. He may have exaggerated.

  I found it unnatural that my uncle, who didn’t hail from England, should talk like my masters at school, who did. At the same time, I found the fact fascinating, since it revealed to me the existence of a caste or class unconfined by what I had accustomed myself to think of as unbreachable national boundaries. We had been taught that something of the sort obtained throughout Europe in the mediaeval period.

  But there was a good deal else that was strange to me at Corry. By the time our visits there were an established routine, both my brother and I had made ourselves confidently free of two distinct worlds at home. We understood what I have called the Bohemian character of our domestic situation: its untidiness and disorder; its indecorous rows and rumpuses; the fashion in which, ignored as irrelevant brats one day, we would on the next be whirled as companions and equals into bewildering and exhilarating jollifications improvised by my father and his cronies − this only to find ourselves, two or three days later still, groping through pervasive gloom or dodging nervous explosion because of some disaster in the studio or, it might be, merely in the kitchen. We were getting the measure of all this, and at the same time we were learning (as by rumour from afar) of the uses of toothbrushes and combs, of the polishing of shoes, and of the comfortableness of clean socks. By means of such initial steps as ‘staying to tea’ in the houses of our schoolfellows we were coming to inspect and in many ways to approve the orderly fives of the professional classes in what was still so unmistakably the capital city of an ancient kingdom. It was a society with strong intellectual traditions; if its assumptions and manners contrasted sharply with those which we knew at home, it yet presented to our fairly concentrated regard one facet, as that home presented another facet, of a more or less integrated urban life. We didn’t of course − Ninian and I − put it to ourselves like this. It was simply a matter of our being intuitively aware that the Pattullos and the McKechnies in a last analysis hung together.

  This conception gave us no yardstick for Corry, and three or four years must have passed before I felt myself in a position to theorise to Ninian about this ancestral or demi-ancestral territory of ours. It just wasn’t, I said, part of civilisation − which meant the culture of cities − at all. It didn’t belong to any Bürgerzeit, as Edinburgh did. It was a feudal set-up fossilised, and that was why it was so comically thin. Our uncle was the archetypal Thin Man. I admitted he was tough. But − intellectually, aesthetically, spiritually (if one presumed to know anything about that), he was as thin as he was also undeniably thick. You could unwind him a little. But the result would be just a short length of string.

  The animus in this suggests a divided mind, or at least reflects bewilderment in a strange situation. What had holiday life at Corry Hall been like when we were too small to defend ourselves? It had certainly been possible to run wild about the glens − if a solitary boy can run wild about glens. But it hadn’t been possible to do so without a cap. Without a cap (and it was a school cap, which was all I had, and a token of subjection which for years I’d have written any number of lines rather than been seen wearing in the street) − without a cap one mustn’t go beyond the front door. This wasn’t because of any archaic persuasion that wandering bare-headed constituted a menace to health; I had to wear a cap in order to be able to doff it to any female, old or yo
ung, I met around the estate. The laird had the habit, and it was proper his young kinsmen should acquire it too. I also had to know these people’s names, saying ‘Good morning, Janet’ to the girls and ‘Good morning, Mrs Glencorry’ (since most of them really were Glencorrys) to those who had attained to the dignity of being married women. Before setting out, moreover, I was under orders to visit the stable yard and consult a young man called Mountjoy, who acted as my uncle’s general factotum. Mountjoy would determine whether there was a dog to be walked, and with the aid of a map would delimit as out of bounds any area in which a shoot was likely to be going on. He was an efficient person, who had attained a position of some responsibility early, but he was also benevolent, or at least he was benevolently disposed towards me. He would often keep me talking for some time, and would then add to the packet of sandwiches I had received from the cook a somewhat burdensome bottle of a fizzy red drink called Kola. He kept a stock of it from year to year simply for the refreshment of Ninian and myself − Ninian being also a favourite of his. Neither of us could drink it, our palates having been vitiated by our father’s insistence that we should be reared from an early age on claret and water. Ninian claimed that he seldom failed to find, paddling in a burn, some contemporary of simpler tastes into whom the stuff could be tipped. I was too shy for this, and also fearful that word might get round to Mountjoy of so illegitimate a largesse, to an effect of wounding his feelings. My own Kola, therefore, was apt to go into the burn itself, where it would fine away in crimson streaks and whorls, like the blood of a wounded grouse.

  It will be seen that life at Corry was much a matter of traditionally determined modes of conduct. It was also pervasively low-keyed. The family’s conversation was like that. At home I was accustomed to bouts of passionate and sometimes hectoring and furious talk; to fierce arguments or absorbed discussions among all four of us on topics we often knew very little about. These exhausted, there would be silence for days on end − mitigated only by the too-noisy eating habits of Ninian and myself or our mother’s bursts of full-lunged bravura singing around the house when her nervous agitations took her that way. At mealtimes at Corry (and they were more prolonged than was necessitated by any abundance in the fare) conversation seldom stopped and never, never hotted up. It was a polite − just as slow mastication was a dietic − duty, and it certainly didn’t much trespass on any realm of general ideas. Much was said about the dogs, their health and training; much about details in the not very complicated economy of the estate; a good deal about the tenantry (although they were few) and the moral hazards to which they were exposed through the encroachments of one or another modernisation. The affairs of the neighbouring gentry were also sometimes discussed, but invariably with an inflexible circumspection, so that nothing scandalous or otherwise interesting ever emerged. (Our father’s policy − if it was a policy − was to examine in our presence absolutely any of the vagaries of human behaviour to have come to the notice of his inquiring mind − although always against a background of stiff presbyterian probity which he had brought with him from his childhood to a much greater extent than he knew.) What worried me about the code of the Glencorrys was that its exactions were not in aid of anything I could distinguish. There didn’t seem to be much around in the way of aims and targets; it all appeared depressingly a matter of the maintenance of a style. I thought I came to understand why my mother, in her readings to Ninian and myself from Scott’s novels, kindled whenever she got away from the stodgy stretches to wild and romantic doings. There had been too much decorum in her childhood, and it looked as if there was going to be too much in that of my girl cousins as well, so that Uncle Rory might have rebels on his hands in the end.

  Yet Uncle Rory remained formidable. On one occasion of Ninian’s returning home and my own setting out I learnt with awe that my brother had actually been caned—and this at a date later than his sixteenth birthday—on the score of some gross and uncharacteristic discourtesy offered to a fishwife. That Ninian should have submitted to so humiliating and (as he assured me) fiendishly painful an experience, thus inflicted by one firmly declaring himself in loco parentis, showed that he at least, thought rather well of our kinsman. Had news of this sensational event reached my father it would certainly have been the end of our Glencorry holidays. That we kept it a deathly secret proves that, on balance, we prized and enjoyed them.

  And it would be a good guess that during that summer at Corry Hall I behaved unnaturally well.

  These pages − which might be called Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands − go a little way to suggesting that when I first went up to Oxford I was re-enacting, at least to some extent, my experience at a yet more vulnerable age of meeting a strange environment and almost a different culture. Later on, the Glencorry connection was to have a more considerable consequence. I have sketched in these people here very lightly − but, as it were, ‘straight’ and without thinking to amuse. On future occasions, however, I was to treat them (and people more or less similarly stationed in life, of whom I was to meet plenty) much as I was to treat, say, the Talberts, expending a great deal of perhaps misdirected energy in the endeavour to elevate them within the sphere of comedy. I do not believe that comedy possesses, as the classical theory of it would maintain, any particularly corrective or regulative function in society. But we do perhaps learn a little about ourselves by laughing at other people.

  Plot might have been laughing at me now, had he owned the slightest inclination to such an impropriety. Having fallen upon the recollections I have here sketched, I was in fact still kneeling on my bed − Nick Junkin’s bed − in a markedly juvenile fashion. Plot was standing patiently in the doorway, a large cup of darkish-looking tea in his hand, and an expression of solemnity rather than of amusement on his face. Perhaps he supposed himself to have disturbed me at my private devotions.

  ‘A very agreeable morning, sir,’ Plot said, handing over the tea. ‘I hope you slept well. And most successful, the Gaudy appeared to me to be. Only one gentleman took bad.’ Plot announced this with a satisfaction which might have been attributable either to the paucity of the casualties or to having something dramatic to intimate. ‘Four of us it took, though, to get him back to his room. Right at the top of Harbage Six, it was, with a very awkward twist to the stair. A heart attack, they say, and Dr Damian with him still. Full-fleshed gentlemen ought always to be put in ground-floor sets, if you ask me. It would be only a reasonable precaution − a Gaudy always having its chancy side for such types. Not that it isn’t the emotion quite as much as the liquor, which is a creditable thing. I’m sorry those sheets look a bit crumpled, sir. How that could happen, I can’t say.’

  This was alarming. The sheets were crumpled for the good reason that they had been knotted together for the purpose of parting with Tin Pin. I hadn’t made up my mind what, if anything, of the night’s concluding adventure to communicate to Plot. Now, imprudently perhaps, I decided it should be nothing at all. ‘I had a very comfortable night, thank you,’ I said firmly. ‘And I thought the Gaudy dinner was splendidly served. It must have been very hard work for you all. By the way, I found myself sitting next to Mr Killiecrankie. Prebendary Killiecrankie, I ought to say. I hadn’t realised he’d become a clergyman.’ I felt rather pleased with myself for thus introducing the name of my formerly scandalous contemporary. It might divert Plot from what could prove an awkward turn in our conversation. In an extremity, and supposing Plot to find (though it seemed improbable) any further inconvenient evidences in Junkin’s rooms, Killiecrankie’s history might even be exploited in a kind of counter-attack, since Plot had been so admittedly his henchman in that past time. ‘He seems a changed man,’ I added.

  ‘It’s only fitting, sir.’ Plot paused on this in a fashion I didn’t altogether like. ‘Would the tea be to your satisfaction?’

  ‘Oh, very much so. But now I suppose I’d better get shaved and dressed.’

  ‘Breakfast is from eight-thirty, sir, so there�
�s no call to hurry yourself. And I’ll just be tidying round.’ To my relief, Plot moved towards the door. There, however, he paused again. ‘Adverting to what we were touching upon,’ he said surprisingly, ‘all in due season would be my motto. Mr Junkin, now, has a book on his shelf − one of the bookstall sort, I’d think, that’s done up in paperback − called The Heyday in the Blood. I haven’t looked into it, of course. It wouldn’t be my place. But the title explains itself, you might say. When I was a lad myself I used to get so that I just couldn’t stop myself. But the vale of years isn’t for such goings on. Change must come. Responsibilities.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ I had a moment’s bemused sense of Plot as being in on the Yeats joke. ‘And we are none of us getting any younger,’ I added with desperate sententiousness. ‘Still, we retain our sympathies with the young.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be proper not to.’ With this judicial observation, Plot withdrew, closing the bedroom door behind him. As I shaved I could hear him moving around, and producing those exaggerated flappings and rattlings with which scouts habitually signal that they are hard at work. The demonstration continued while I dressed. Then there was a knock on the door, and Plot was confronting me again. He was holding an ashtray.

  ‘It looks,’ Plot said, ‘as if somebody has been taking a liberty, sir. While you were dining, it might be. They get very slack on the gate, those porters do, when there’s a Gaudy or the like.’