“This house is seriously idiosyncratic,” Cole says.
“Yeah, yeah,” the four women call out together. The three men look a bit startled, then laugh. Ed and John open the white wine in the fridge and pour. We drift outside to look at the climbing roses. Robin and Susan identify them all.
“Oh, there’s the walled garden.” I point down a path.
“How huge. Let’s go look.”
“It’s at least half the size of a football field. How would you like to have built those stone walls? They’re—what—eight feet tall?” Ed always notices stonework. Our life in Italy consists of moving stone, looking for stone, hauling stone in trucks, and building with stone.
“Too high for a deer to leap over,” John observes.
We pass a rustic cottage orné with broken panes, full of rakes and wheelbarrows.
The wooden door to the garden should be opened with a big iron key, but Kate turns the handle and we walk in. We have been told we can pick our vegetables and salads on the land. We did not expect this glorious garden. Inside, grass paths intersect large raised beds. Roses scramble up all the walls. The strawberry, gooseberry, and raspberry patches look mysterious under their net draperies over poles tall enough that you can walk as you gather. They are all banked with straw so the leaves do not touch the ground. I realized in England that the name strawberry came from this method. Our beds at Bramasole yielded twice their usual amount when we tried the thick straw this year. We also mowed our plants in March, and that also seemed to spur them to new production.
John has brought along the wine bottle, and we sit down on benches along the wall and try to reconstruct the plot of The Secret Garden.
The men head back to shower first—or maybe they’re not riveted by The Secret Garden. The women drift back to the terrace. We’re slightly sloshed from two glasses of wine. Along the low stone wall a group of cows has gathered, and we walk down to see them. “These are Highland cows,” Kate says. They have shaggy russet coats and long bangs. They regard us with interest.
We begin to sing “Don’t Fence Me In” quite loudly, followed by “Home on the Range.” They move closer to us and seem to long for something. We set our wineglasses down and pull up handfuls of the grass they already are eating. They decline. But they do seem to like “Amazing Grace.” Robin decides that they have the hungry look of her freshman composition students and begins to lecture them on recognizing comma splices and the correct use of lie and lay. “Only hens lay,” she explains. “Just write this down: lay takes a direct object. Eggs would be the object.” Suddenly the cows toss their bangs, look alarmed, turn into a herd, and stampede away. We think this is very funny. “It’s the lie-lay dilemma. Does it every time,” Robin says.
John becomes our guide. He brought the books with restaurant listings, all the maps, and has noted the sites and gardens he knows we will want to see. This first night we drive to Falkland, a storybook Scottish town, clean and peaceful, with tea shops and a fountain and a thousand hanging flower baskets. They have won best village awards, flowering Britain awards, and they deserve them. We’ve reserved at the Greenhouse Restaurant, a place of Quaker simplicity and fresh organic food. Carrot soup, salad, grilled trout. To avoid check scrambles, we’ve made a “kitty.” John, formerly business manager of the San Francisco Symphony and hence quick with figuring everything, including tips, pays for us.
Back at the house, we settle into the downy sofas. The owners have left us a good bottle of Scotch as a welcome gift. Cole pours little shots, but no one drinks more than a few sips. Too much hit for this California Zen-and-chardonnay crowd. Even at ten, light lingers in the trees and out along the horizon, where the cows must be puzzling out the strange behavior of humans. One by one we slip upstairs. Our feather bed envelops us. I can’t see any of Ed except for a shoulder. We roll into a heap in the middle and sleep like the newly dead. And then I wake up at three. Streaks of dawn are beginning to touch the east.
I have been out of touch with these friends. I have missed mothers’ deaths, operations, dissolving and reforming marriages, children’s weddings. The trice-weekly phone calls to exchange small news have not included me. So powerful a force in friendship is propinquity, and I have not been around to take yoga and walk the dog in the Stanford hills. Since they have given up their jobs, they study piano with Cole and participate in book groups and gourmet groups. Susan teaches gardening to children, Kate has laid a labyrinth in her garden and started a new relationship with someone I barely know, and Robin has become a passionate whitewater rafter. I have been travelling and living over half the year in Italy. When I am in the United States, I’m travelling for my speaking engagements and various business commitments. Our friendship was forged when I lived in Palo Alto. When I divorced my first husband, I moved to San Francisco, only thirty minutes north. But when I started spending longer times in Italy, I saw less of them. They’ve visited Bramasole, but often when we’re not around. Susan and Cole married there. I’ll never forget the wedding cake we baked in the small oven I had then. The shape came out lopsided, but smothered in cream and cherries, the basic 1-2-3-4 cake tasted worthy of the occasion.
Four years ago we moved to Marin County, an hour, often longer, away from the Palo Alto area. Italy’s siren call lures us more and more. Although we exchange e-mails frequently, I found that when I came home and called, I began to feel an uncomfortable distance. I’d summarize what I’d been doing, they’d summarize, and we’d try to stake out a date for lunch, a walk, or dinner.
So I located this house in Fife and proposed a reunion.
“Sounds like a sneeze.”
“Sounds like you’re lifting your boot out of muck.” They’re talking about the nearest village, Auchtermuchty. In Gaelic this means “height of the swineherds.” The grocery store where we go to stock the kitchen seems strangely bare. “Is this a time warp from postwar rationing?” I wonder. Sparsely filled shelves hold scattered cans of this and that. The produce is sad, woody carrots and brown-around-the-edges cabbage.
“Probably some gross shopping mall has driven them out of business,” Robin says. We buy what we can and decide to go back to Falkland, where we were last night. The supplies are only marginally better, but the town is enchanting. Last night we didn’t explore the brownish-gray stone town of turrets, steeples, towers, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century upright houses.
The Stuart royalty kept a hunting retreat here, rebuilding an earlier castle that we are delighted to see was once owned by the Macduffs. A remnant of the older structure’s tower stands within the walls. We’re attuned to the area as a setting for Macbeth. Robin has brought paperbacks of the play for each of us and is planning to cast us for a performance one night. We roam through the castle gardens, imagining young Mary, Queen of Scots, playing in the park in the few years before events and her own nature brought her calamity. How marvelous for the town to have these grounds right near the center.
Falkland is downright obsessed with flowers. Wooden tubs and farm carts overflow with blooms, window boxes adorn even the humblest house, tumbling baskets hang along iron fences and from iron poles, all prolifically spilling with splendid yellow and orange begonias, trailing ivy, lobelia, and petunias. The baskets are started and nurtured in polytunnels, then in spring everyone rushes to a town plant sale.
Roughly cobbled wynds, streets barely wider than sidewalks, are lined with old weavers’ cottages. One has the wonderful name Sharp’s Close. A plain house named the Reading Room gives a sudden flavor of nineteenth-century winter evenings, when a literate stonemason used to read aloud to the weavers. Here they gathered for stories and news. Around town we spot “marriage lintels” over the doors. These insets, some dating to the early 1600s, are carved with the initials of the couple who lived there and their date of marriage. A violin shop adds a musical note of charm to the center, as does a fountain, called Bruce Fountain, with four eroding lions. In Falkland we find two statues of Bruces, one Professor John Bruce and
another with the fabulous name Onesiphorus Tyndall-Bruce. I did not learn how he got the name but did find out that he was married to Margaret, niece of the other Bruce. Margaret’s father died out in India, leaving an illegitimate daughter that he fathered with “a native lady.” The uncle had Margaret brought back to the family mansion, Nuthill, on the castle grounds. She was called Margaret Stuart Hamilton Bruce. Her uncle raised her from age eight. Later he opposed her desire to marry Onesiphorus, who had a pile of debts and was associated with a bank that traded in slavery. “I wish you would marry a man of business,” he told her.
Her reply—“He will become a man of business when he marries me”—reveals a gritty determination. In 1828, when she was thirty-eight and her uncle safely dead, she married the risky Onesiphorus and paid off his debts. She must have quickly whipped him into shape because he became a community pillar and an ardent restorer of the royal palace, which the Bruce family owned. He took her surname onto his own. There’s no statue of Margaret, but reading about her, I suspect there should be. I wonder what happened to her mother.
We manage to load the trunks of the two cars with supplies. Kate spots a tearoom that looks properly dowdy. We pause for tea and crumpets doused in thick cream. Susan is in heaven; we’re not far behind.
After siestas, in the late afternoon, Kate, Robin, Susan, and I take baskets down to the garden. Lettuces, tiny radishes, zucchini, beets, and new onions shine in their beds. I want to come back alone later. The walled garden seems like the perfect metaphor for the solitude of the mind. I pick out the fruit tree I will sit under. All of us have vegetable gardens (though Kate only grows Cabernet grapes on her land), but none has a poetic garden like this, and we are enchanted. The air is sweet and cool, not hot or cold, just deeply fresh. Underfoot the loamy earth sinks. Robin finds dill, and I pick a handful of parsley and thyme. Last we gather ripe, ripe strawberries.
For dinner Cole grills salmon—Scottish, of course—on the terrace. Susan concocts a prawn sauce with fresh dill, and rice with diced peppers. I roast beets in the slower Aga oven and slice them right into the most heavenly salad imaginable. The crisp greens right out of the garden—incomparable. Susan, by now totally into her English mode, creates her mother’s summer pudding. Candlelight, a pitcher full of blue hydrangeas and white roses, the table laid—we’re living here.
“This seems like something you read about—house parties where people are tipping down the halls to other rooms in the middle of the night,” Ed says.
“Or Upstairs, Downstairs—only there’s no downstairs.” Kate pushes back the draperies for more of the late light.
“There is Violet. She was here this morning. Didn’t you notice all the wineglasses got washed? She’s the housekeeper and will come later in the week. John and I were the only ones up.”
We retire after dinner into what we’re calling the drawing room. Cole and Robin play a Brahms waltz for four hands. Then they launch into Methodist hymns and Scottish ballads from a book Cole brought over, Seventy Scottish Songs for Low Voices, printed in 1905. I’m hoping no one takes it upon themselves to read Robert Burns’s “best-laid schemes o’ mice’ an’ men gang aft agley,” or, God forbid, sing “Auld Lang Syne.” Robin, I realize, loves to work with her hands. She gardens, does needlepoint, plays the piano, hand-marbles paper, and sets type from dozens of boxes of minuscule lead letters. She started her own letterpress publishing house when I first met her. I marveled at her patience in setting every little comma and putting all those space bars just so. Her first effort was to publish my first book of poetry, and she since has published several collections of Ed’s poems and a fine edition of another book of mine, as well as Marbling at the Heyeck Press and many other books cherished by readers of poetry and collectors. Her books are in many rare book rooms in the great libraries. Right now she’s banging out “I Come to the Garden Alone,” and since I know all the words, I can’t resist singing along.
Cole teaches piano at home and gives private concerts. In the past he used to play in jazz clubs in Paris and Southern California. “How many times have I been asked to play ‘Misty,’ ” he muses, launching into it only for a moment.
“Can you play our song?” Ed asks. “‘A Whiter Shade of Pale.’ ”
“That’s your song? Procol Harum? I don’t know—how does it go?”
“You don’t pick your song, you all. It picks you. This was playing in all the romantic moments when we first met,” I say.
Susan and I try to sing the melody. The words are hard to remember. What makes the song memorable is the quirky voice of Gary Brooker. I’m astounded as Cole gradually pieces it together from our wavery rendition. He tries chord after chord and then is playing as if he’d always known all the notes. “It’s Bach,” he says, “‘Air on a G-string’ and a bit of one of the cantatas, ‘Sleepers Awake.’ ”
“Well, that redeems us,” Ed, my bonny laddie, laughs.
Before we go to bed, I get out my notebook and copy Susan’s recipe.
SUSAN’S MOTHER’S SUMMER PUDDING
1 pound raspberries, strawberries
1⁄4 pound red or black currants
(or any mixture of above fruits)
1⁄2 cup sugar
day-old white bread, sliced as for sandwiches, crusts removed
2 teaspoons cherry brandy or blackberry ratafia (optional)
Wash fruit and place about one cup of it in a saucepan with the sugar and liqueur, and cook lightly for three minutes. Cool.
Line a pudding basin with the bread, leaving no gaps. Gently spoon in the uncooked fruit interlaced with spoonfuls of the cooked fruit, pressing the fruit down gently with the back of a spoon. Place a “hat” of bread on top when the basin is full, cutting bread to fit inside the surrounding bread.
Puddle remaining juice in center of the hat. Cover entire basin top with a piece of waxed paper or plastic wrap, and place a small plate on top so it fits inside the basin. Place a weight (such as a can of tomatoes) on top to hold it down. Refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours.
To serve: Remove saucer and waxed paper. Place serving platter over basin and invert. Your summer pudding should be quite pink. Use extra berry syrup to cover any white spots. Serve with ice cream.
Note: Ours rested only a few hours and was fine. We served it with good Scottish cream, rather divine.
The green countryside and quick little burns with lush grassy banks invite us to walk in the early morning and evening. The house is surrounded by pastures with paths that lead to oak copses and vistas of lochs. The shaggy cows amble to the fence to greet us. Ed and I are out early. Over a rise we see a wooden cross, about thirty feet tall, with dangling leather straps hanging from the crux. This is not a piece of sculpture.
At breakfast Ed tells everyone about the cross on the hill. Then he discovers that he does not have his cell phone. When Kate comes downstairs, she’s holding a pad. “I counted eighty-six Jesuses and Marys. Also, just so you know, there are a hundred and twenty-nine paintings and prints on the walls. The downstairs bathroom is separate—ninety items on the walls. Not to mention that fake fish that sings ‘Take me to the river, drop me in the water’ when you sit down on the toilet.”
“I wish we could invite the owners for dinner,” I say. “They must be fun.” We feel half acquainted with them and their four children through the distinct personality of the house.
Everyone searches each room for the cell phone. It’s command central for our restoration-in-progress in Italy. The number of all the technicians and workers involved, and they are legion, are on that phone. We are in daily contact with the work going on. Ed has called so many times that the numbers have worn off the buttons. He goes out and retraces our walk. We call the phone; no response. He searches the car. “I’m sure I had it this morning because I meant to call Fulvio.” Lost.
Today we’re driving over to Kinross. We’re finding gardens we want to see, fine walks, and plenty to do nearby but nothing compelling, so we linger over coffee, catc
hing up. Cole’s music drifts through the rooms. We don’t care if we get a late start. We brake for bakeries. We circle towns to look at mossy churches and prim houses enlivened by masses of hollyhocks.
Kinross, a stately, austere Georgian house dating from 1693, stands inside a ten-acre walled garden that slopes down to Loch Leven. The present owners descend from the proprietor who took it over in 1902, after eighty years of neglect, and restored the original garden. They can look out their windows every morning and see that the ruined castle on a tiny island in Loch Leven is not at all the fairy-tale illusion it seems to be. Kinross’s main garden axis lies from the front door of the house, down the gradually lowering garden, out the gate, and across the water straight to the castle. Famous for imprisoning Mary, star-crossed queen, the castle always was the focal point and orientation of Kinross and provides a thrilling prospect.
Mary tried several escapes during her ten months of confinement. One plan was to jump from the tower into a boat below. This made no sense until I learned that the water used to lap the castle before the loch was lowered in the nineteenth century. Mary endured, with the help of her cook, doctor, and two ladies-in-waiting. She loved falconry; I wonder if she was allowed out at all. Just before she was taken to Loch Leven Castle, she had given birth to stillborn twins and felt extremely weak from loss of blood. Her life rivals Job’s, beginning with the death of her father when she was one week old. She finally did escape, when a servant grabbed the keys during a banquet and let her out. The daring episode did little good; she fled south to seek help from Queen Elizabeth, but the two had old issues, and her cousin promptly put her under lock and key again.
The gate, which frames the castle from Kinross, has an arched door. Over it there’s a carved stone basket full of the seven types of fish of the lake: salmon, blackhead, pike, perch, speckled trout, char, gray trout. When the loch was lowered, the char died out, and the salmon could no longer reach the loch.
A Year in the World Page 33