‘I’m afraid so.’ (Wipe out the previous deduction.)
‘What happened next?’
‘He fell over. I’d come in to help and he took a swing at me – please don’t worry, Mr Elder, I’m very good at dodging – and lost his balance. He didn’t hurt himself but it took the wind out of his sails for a minute and that enabled us to get him into a wheelchair and along to his room. But he was still quite distressed so we did give him a sedative. I just wanted you to be aware. He’s been dozing since then.’
‘By my calculation that’s a nine-point incident.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Don’t apologise. I’d say you handled it pretty well.’
‘Oh. Thank you,’ she says, turning Gratified Pink.
The kind of scenario she is describing is not unfamiliar to me. I remember that occasion when Dad decided he was going to lift all the carpets in the house to check that the floorboards were properly nailed down. When I said he didn’t need to do that he thought I was saying he wasn’t needed. I probably spoke more sharply than I should have because he had a claw hammer in one hand and a long-bladed screwdriver in the other, and had already made a start in one of the bedrooms. It was a tense moment. In the end, after the hammer had missed my head and gone through the window, we had a kind of wrestling match on the bit of carpet he’d managed to prise up.
‘Mr Elder?’ Beverley Brown’s voice brings me back to the present.
‘I’m sorry. I was reminiscing about a twelve-point incident we had, not long before he came here.’
‘We don’t operate a points system,’ Beverley says sternly.
‘Perhaps you should introduce one. A bit of competition among the inmates. Sorry, residents.’
The thing is, once I had him in a bear hug, or he had me in one, we just clung on to each other, grunting and gasping, and then we both started laughing. All we could do was lie there, clutching each other’s sides. Apart from the broken window not too much damage was done.
‘I don’t think so.’ Beverley Brown rises. ‘Thank you for your understanding, Mr Elder. I appreciate it.’
‘Please call me Douglas, Beverley,’ I say.
‘Douglas Beverley?’ she says. No she doesn’t, but she does regard me with curiosity, as if sizing me up as a future client. If I were in her shoes, that’s what I’d be doing. She opens the door and lets me out and I begin the long walk to Dad.
The other thing about the carpet-lifting episode is that after the laughter came the tears: floods of them, first from him and then from me, because we knew that our lives were changing and there was nothing either of us could do about it.
And yes, Beverley is right, he is very sleepy. He is the least violent, obstreperous, stubborn old man you could ever hope to meet, snoozing away his autumn days in a clean jumper and a Moderation Beige armchair. When I kiss him he opens his eyes and stares at me with knowing unknowingness, or possibly unknowing knowingness or some other variation on a theme by Donald Rumsfeld. I am not at all convinced that he recognises me.
‘What’s up, Dad? Did you get angry at something, earlier?’
He raises a hand and tries to point – at me, I think – but the finger wavers and the hand drops again.
‘What was it? You didn’t fancy what they were giving you for lunch?’
He mutters something. His eyelids flutter. I lean in closer.
‘What’s that?’
Another mumble.
‘Sorry, Dad. Could you say that again?’ I put my ear right up to his lips, and he speaks, and what I can just make out is:
‘Drink your coffee.’
‘Ah.’ I move back. ‘You don’t like being told what to do, is that it?’
No response. Maybe he doesn’t like being told he doesn’t like being told what to do. Then his eyes close again, and I wonder if he has even heard me. I doubt he takes in what I say next, either: that I have to go away and that he won’t see me for a few days. Sonya sends her best wishes and might put in an appearance. (Some chance! Even though she can come by car and park in one of the visitor spaces.) Zero response to that, too. So I tell him to be good and kiss him goodbye, and leave him be.
Before I head off I seek out Beverley Brown and inform her of my planned absence. I have previously informed the Home of my mobile number in case of emergency. They already have my landline number and, because I haven’t updated the information, still have Sonya’s as well. They have all the information they need, and – once I have spoken to Rosalind Munlochy and consulted the online bus and train timetables – I should have all the information I need. How lucky we are, compared with Dad! How cursed is his life without information and the capacity to act upon it in a rational manner!
Notice the irony. For all I know, there is a whole world spinning within the confines of that skull, a multiplex, surround-sound experience compared with which the wildest possibilities of the outside world are mere pale flickerings. And in the middle, seated in an armchair marked Director of Operations, is my father, Thomas Ythan Elder.
FURTHER EXTRACT FROM NOTES FOR AN AS YET UNWRITTEN BIOGRAPHY OF MRS ROSALIND MUNLOCHY, NéE STRIVEN, BY MR DOUGLAS FINDHORN ELDER, AUTHOR; COMPOSED FROM SUNDRY PAPERS, INFORMATION GATHERED IN CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE PRESENT WORK, ETC. COPYRIGHT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THE MORAL RIGHT OF THE AUTHOR WILL BE ASSERTED IN DUE COURSE
London in 1932 was, as it ever has been, a heaving mass of human activity, a city of endeavour, opportunity, inequality, wealth and squalor. Greater London at that time had a population of more than eight million – including numerous strivers, idlers, grafters, plodders and visionaries, with the vast majority simply trying to make a living and have some cash left over at the end of every week. While unemployment levels soared in Scotland, Wales and the North of England, London and the South fared better. Light, modern industries less adversely affected by the global slump were located there, and new factories and businesses catering for a growing consumer society continued to be established throughout the 1930s. But London, too, had its slums and desperate poverty, and radically different political groups clashed often on its streets. A few weeks after Rosalind alighted from the sleeper and went to stay with a cousin in Bloomsbury, contingents of National Hunger Marchers arrived from all over the country and were greeted by a crowd of a hundred thousand in Hyde Park. Thousands of police were mobilised against them by Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, and violence ensued. Rosalind and her cousin – a music teacher who lived a mildly bohemian life among other musicians and teachers – had gone to support the marchers, and were caught up in the trouble, which continued across central London for several days. The cousin took fright and retreated to her flat, but Rosalind was exhilarated by the experience and stayed out on the streets. She fell in with a thoroughly disreputable, therefore thoroughly attractive, set of socialists, anarchists, writers and artists, joined the Communist Party and began to write poetry and fiction herself.
Over the next two years she immersed herself in political campaigning at both local and national levels, devoting much of her energy to opposing the rise of the British Union of Fascists. Her first novel, The Hindered, was published by Victor Gollancz in 1935 when she was just twenty. It failed dismally, but despite this Gollancz published her controversial polemic, What Must We Not Do?, the following year. In this short work she attacked moral authoritarianism and advocated free love, contraception and the right of women to control their own reproductive systems. She also had a volume of poetry published by the Buff Coat Press of Putney.
Rosalind moved between the world of her family connections and that of her intellectual and political engagement in London. Thus during her childhood and young adult years she knew or rubbed shoulders with a wide range of people from many walks of life. Among them were Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (after whose late wife she would name her first daughter), Sydney and Beatrice Webb, C. M. Grieve (‘Hugh MacDiarmid’), Neil M. Gunn, Rebecca West, George Bernard Shaw, Beatrix Potter, Duncan
Grant, Aldous Huxley and Vita Sackville-West.
Although she left the Communist Party in 1936 and joined the Labour Party (believing that only the election of a genuine Labour Government offered a realistic chance of establishing socialism in Britain), she had married the communist poet Guy Merriman (b. 1905) the previous year. This intense, sometimes tempestuous relationship produced a daughter, Gabriella, in 1936. In 1937 Guy went to Spain to fight for the Republic: he was killed in the failed offensive on Zaragoza that September. His body was brought home by a fellow member of the International Brigades, Ralph Elphinstone Munlochy (b. 1903), and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Ralph already knew Rosalind slightly. He was the eldest son of Lord Munlochy, one of Scotland’s senior judges, who despite his established position approved of his son’s political stance against the rise of European fascism. Rosalind and Ralph, consoling each other over the loss of her husband and his friend, became lovers. In 1939 they married, and left London to run a farm on land owned by Ralph’s father in Easter Ross.
Until this time, Rosalind had continued to use her own name of Striven for all purposes except legal ones, but she now adopted the surname Munlochy – ‘as an act of appreciation, not as an act of surrender’, she wrote to a friend. They managed the farm together until 1942, when Ralph returned to London to work as a liaison officer with the Free French Forces. That same year Rosalind’s mother was incapacitated by a stroke, and Rosalind left Easter Ross for Glentaragar House to care for her and to help her sister, Jemima, run what remained of the estate.
Of her three brothers, the eldest was a Professor of Physics at Oxford, the second a cartographer in South America and the third a civil servant in the War Office. None of them had any interest in Glentaragar, and after Jemima married an Australian cattleman in 1946 and emigrated to Queensland, neither did she. Rosalind thus became the de facto inheritor of the house and land when her mother died in 1947.
Before this happened, however, she had succeeded in having herself adopted as Labour candidate for the local constituency in the General Election held in July 1945. The Labour Party had never come close to winning the seat in the past, but her opponents’ votes were split between a Unionist, an Independent and a National Liberal, and Rosalind slipped through the middle and was elected with a majority of 147, much to the horror of local religious leaders who abhorred many of her opinions. By this time she and Ralph had two children, Gregory (b. 1940) and Georgina (b. 1942), half-brother and half-sister to Gabriella. Ralph wholeheartedly supported his wife’s new political life and remained at Glentaragar for the next five years, running the estate and looking after the children and Rosalind’s mother while she divided her time between Westminster and the constituency.
Despite all this activity Rosalind had found time to write two more novels, Wild Hyacinth (1941) and Unto These Be Given (1944), which had received mixed reviews. Printed in small runs owing to wartime paper shortages, they have never been reissued.
Her parliamentary career was brief. Despite being part of Labour’s landslide majority, and despite the energy and ambition of Attlee’s first government, she found the House of Commons a stultifying environment, dominated by men, and preferred to concentrate on local issues, such as crofting and grazing rights and the improvement of rural housing. She also championed access to further and higher education for women, and worked closely with Tom Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland, on the hydro-electrification of the Highlands, although she did not accept that all modernisation was necessarily beneficial. ‘So much supposed economic improvement,’ she said in a House of Commons speech, ‘turns out to be neither economic nor an improvement.’ She was also a vociferous advocate of Scottish Home Rule even though that longstanding policy had been dropped from Labour’s election manifesto.
At the 1950 General Election Rosalind lost her seat to the Liberal candidate, and indeed was narrowly beaten into third place by the Unionist. She described her defeat as a ‘Liberal liberation’, and remained on excellent terms with that party’s local representatives for many years. In 1952 she resigned from the Labour Party and was briefly a member of the Scottish National Party. In the 1960s she was an Independent Councillor on the County Council. Criticised for being a political butterfly by Baron Ross of Marnock (William Ross, Secretary of State for Scotland under Harold Wilson), she responded, ‘It is better to have wings and fly than to remain forever in a cocoon.’
[To be continued]
EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH
‘Hello? Is that Glentaragar House?’
A brief interlude follows. Not exactly a silence. It is as if my question has to travel through a disused railway tunnel or along a narrow lane overhung with trees before arriving in a gloomy hallway.
‘It is.’ The voice sounds surprised by its own confirmation. It is very faint and could belong to either a man or a woman.
‘Would it be possible to speak to Mrs Rosalind Munlochy?’
After a slightly longer interlude, the voice replies, ‘It would.’ There is a definite West Highland intonation and a measured slowness to this short phrase.
‘Thank you. My name is Douglas Elder. I’m a journalist. I work for the Spear.’
Silence. I listen for the sound of the receiver being laid down, or of retreating footsteps, or of a door banging, or of a few words explaining to a third party that a Mr Elder of the Spear is on the telephone, but nothing happens. And after a minute I begin to doubt that the person at the other end of the phone has gone away at all. I am pretty sure I can hear breathing.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello.’
‘You’re still there?’
‘I am. And you, too?’
‘Yes. I am waiting to speak to Mrs Munlochy.’
‘Oh, you want to speak to her?’
‘Yes, I thought you were away to tell her.’
‘No, no.’
‘Well, how was she going to know I was waiting?’
‘She wouldn’t know that. You should have said.’
‘I did say.’
‘You only asked if it would be possible to speak to Mrs Munlochy.’
‘To which you replied that it was.’
‘No. I said that it would be. That is a different matter.’
‘Well, may I speak to her now, please?’
‘No, I am sorry, she is not available.’
‘And to whom am I now speaking?’
‘You are speaking to me.’
At this point I lose patience, which is something a journalist seeking an appointment for an interview should not do.
‘And who the hell are you, for God’s sake?’
‘That is a big question, especially the way you have phrased it. A very big metaphysical, not to say ontological, question.’
I take a deep breath. ‘Look. No, scratch that. Listen. My name is Douglas Elder, I am a journalist working for the Spear newspaper, and I wish to arrange to come to Glentaragar House some time next week in order to interview Mrs Rosalind Munlochy. Would you please convey that message to her?’
Again, silence.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘Douglas. Elder. Journalist. Not Douglas Fir, then?’
‘No! What are you doing?’
‘I am writing down your request. What about?’
‘What do you mean, “What about?” ’
‘What is it you wish to interview Mrs Munlochy about?’
‘Well, everything. Her life. Her views on politics, culture, and so on. Just a general interview.’
‘A wee chat?’
‘No, not a wee chat! An interview, a formal interview.’
‘I was just checking. I was using shorthand, you see. Very well, “formal interview” it shall be. I will pass the information to Miss Munlochy, who looks after Mrs Munlochy’s diary.’
‘Miss Munlochy?’
‘Miss Coppélia Munlochy, yes.’
‘Is she there?’
‘Who?’
> ‘Miss Munlochy.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Well, could I please – no, please ask her to come to the phone so that I can make the arrangements directly with her.’
‘That will not be necessary, as I have written it all down now. You are coming for an interview. Life, politics, culture, and so on. No chat. Yes, I am sure it will be fine. We will see you next week, then.’
The voice now sounds more masculine, though still soft and slightly high-pitched, and it seems to be floating away down that long tunnel. I am suddenly anxious that the call is not terminated.
‘Yes, but what day will I come?’
‘What day suits you?’
‘I don’t know. You see, I don’t know how long it will take to get to Glentaragar. I am in Edinburgh.’
‘Edinburgh? My goodness. Well, that will take you a while, yes indeed it will. If you were coming from Fort William, or Oban even, that would be far enough, but Edinburgh – well, well! What day is it?’
I feel like I could be having this conversation with my father. ‘Today? Today is Friday.’
‘Och, but you should manage fine to get here by next week in that case. Shall we say Tuesday?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Three days should be ample, even from Edinburgh.’
‘Yes, but I thought Miss Munlochy would need to consult the diary.’
‘In theory, yes, but there is never anything much in it. Tuesday will be fine, I am sure.’
‘I’d better give you my number, in case it isn’t.’
‘Och, that will not be necessary.’
I utter my next words with great deliberation. ‘I would rather that you add my number to what you have already written down, and pass it to Miss Munlochy. Just. In. Case.’
‘If you insist.’ The speaker – I am now convinced that it is a man – sounds put out, as if his intelligence or his probity has been questioned, a suspicion not without foundation. Slowly and distinctly I read out the eleven digits of my mobile phone number, and slowly and indistinctly he repeats them. I picture a white-haired, crook-backed retainer – a gardener or butler perhaps, the last remaining servant – laboriously copying the figures out in thick, soft-leaded pencil.
To Be Continued Page 13