A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  Chapter 10

  All those moments, like tears in the rain.

  Philip K. Dick

  My parents sent their five children to four different boarding schools in four different counties; only my brothers shared a school career. We all stayed in touch, haphazardly, by letter.

  I was sent off aged eleven to Cobham Hall, an all-girls school at the other end of the country, in Kent. Emma had gone off to school with our Gordon Cumming cousins, so I was on my own at Cobham and did not enjoy it at all. I still cherish a grudge against the entire county. My letters home were full of complaints and wistful hopes.

  Darling Ma,

  I am writing to cheer you up a bit. Thank you so much for my lovely holidays. I saw you getting into the car after you had said goodbye, so I banged on the coach window but you didn’t see me. I still hate Cobham and I always will. I am dreading this term; I suppose you won’t be able to take me out as exeat is on January 30th. Our dorm is so cold (the heater is working for the second time this term) you have to take a deep breath before you come in … I pulled my tooth out last night but no fairies came.

  I love you so dearly,

  Your second, unmarried daughter, Liza

  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  P.S. Please send special love to old Findlay.

  A volatile parent creates children who want a quiet life, and none of us was badly behaved at school. But, having excelled in the vibrant atmosphere of Hanford, I slumped at Cobham, and felt very far away from home. My mother came down to the school once or twice while I was there, but my father not at all. Unbeknown to me down in Kent, he had got into the habit of taking Emma out, accompanied by various women he always introduced as ‘Olga Nethersole’. Emma didn’t care that the face of Olga was ever changing, or what they were doing with him; she was just overjoyed to see Hugh. But it meant she was drawn into a partisan subterfuge of keeping secrets from Cath. Years later, when Emma was reading a James Thurber short story, she came across the joke my father had been making. A character called Elliot Vereker introduces a young woman as ‘my niece, Olga Nethersole, despite being neither his niece, nor called Olga Nethersole’.

  * * *

  To assist with all our different half-term and holiday schedules, and to cope with stopovers on our way up to Cawdor, Pa bought a flat in London. It was in Embassy Court, a 1970s high-rise on a busy main road that connected Baker Street with Finchley Road. Down the road was a graveyard, and opposite it was Lord’s cricket ground. Pa was not a cricket fan and my mother shopped in Chelsea – a three-mile drive across the city. The only reason we were in St John’s Wood was that my father’s current Olga Nethersole lived around the corner.

  Our roadside bunkroom was unbearably noisy and we had to wear wax earplugs to get any sleep at all. In the mornings, the whole chewing-gum-in-the-hair scene from our car trips to Scotland was reprised with pink wax grafted firmly onto our eyebrows. There was little to do in the flat and no television, so we would press our noses against the filthy windows and watch a life-size mannequin dressed in overalls with an electronic arm beckoning cars into the garage opposite. The decor in the flat was self-consciously trendy. The hall walls were covered in brown wrapping paper, the lamps were made of smashed-up bottle ends. The pictures were abstract: top half blue, bottom half yellow – and if we were in any doubt about the desert theme, sand had been mixed into the yellow paint. The armchairs were inflatable, which was unfortunate because Pa’s chain-smoking meant that very soon they were sad puddles of transparent plastic on the floor. This Olga was an interior decorator whom Pa had given a free hand to do the place up. Someone should have handcuffed her.

  * * *

  I could not put my finger on it, but Cawdor in the holidays was no longer the home I had grown to love. The idea of taking friends there was awful. We were on constant shimmering alert, desperately eager to please, trying to keep Hugh’s mood sweet. It was tricky work, like trying to juggle soufflés in front of a hostile audience.

  Days were fine; it was the evenings that were worrying. We were expected to change for dinner every night. Emma and I would hurry up to our rooms to climb into stripy Biba dresses before the gong rang for dinner. My mother would appear wearing floor-length creations trimmed with pink marabou feathers and numberless minuscule buttons that ran from a high neck all the way down to the floor. Colin and Fred’s way of approaching Pa was to immerse themselves in his cinematic obsessions: Bad Day at Black Rock, Harold and Maude, The Italian Job and any of the Marx Brother movies that didn’t feature Zeppo too prominently. Fred watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at least once a week, and Pa enjoyed quizzing him on the film’s more abstruse details. Sometimes it seemed to have become the main point of reference with his son. They communicated in quotes. Fred’s favourite line was, ‘Boy, I’ve got vision and the rest of the world wears bi-focals’; Pa’s was, ‘Never hit your mother with a shovel; it leaves a dull impression on her mind.’ Their favourite song was ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike’, sung by the old mine boss for whom Butch and Sundance work when they are on the run. Pa scoured old American songbooks until he unearthed the whole thing and then sent us all copies of it so we could learn it by heart. It became his hospital-bed swansong.

  Emma and I found we could jolly Pa along playing a homegrown version of Call My Bluff. Unearthing a truly peculiar word from the dictionary was capable of making him happy for the rest of the night. The game reached its apotheosis when we happened across the word ‘carphology’, defined as ‘the delirious fumbling of the bedclothes’. We also tried to keep abreast of his ever-changing reading crazes. Sometimes it would be Dylan Thomas, then Logan Pearsall Smith, then Robert Graves. When he was in the grip of a Raymond Chandler obsession we leafed through the oeuvre like a pair of research librarians trying to memorize quotes that might amuse him: ‘She looked as if she’d been poured into the dress and someone forgot to say when’, and ‘It was blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.’ My father was especially thrilled when he came across a rare Chandler poem, and it became his favourite for a while.

  He left her lying in the nude

  That sultry night in May.

  The neighbors thought it rather rude;

  He liked her best that way.

  He left a rose beside her head,

  A meat axe in her brain.

  A note upon the bureau read:

  ‘I won’t be back again.’

  At Pa’s instigation we also had nightly Scrabble and backgammon tournaments, and then, having researched the rules of cribbage in the encyclopedia, he taught us how to play it purely because he liked the idea of a game that had conventions, which involved us shouting ‘muggins’ and ‘his nibs’. At other times he would get us to dowse for coins hidden under the rug while my mother swayed along to Neil Diamond songs and we relaxed and laughed and tried to avoid glancing at him surreptitiously to anticipate if his mood was about to blacken. Once when he was having a disagreement with Ma, we thought it would blow over when he stalked off. Instead he reappeared with a bucket of water and threw it over his wife’s head, drenching her. I never knew what sparked off such excessive reactions. Sometimes he would just get up and go to the loo, and on his return he’d be freighted with paranoia, as if he had just overheard that there had been a mix-up and he was not the Thane of Cawdor after all but the son of a Slovenian sanitation worker. Moreover, they wanted him back home right now.

  I was also beginning to realize that our family’s values were a cosmic league away from anything the school’s career officer talked about. By all outward appearances we looked contemporary, but scratch the surface and archaic traditions were not only still going strong, they went unquestioned. I appreciated this for the first time when, aged about twelve, I was sitting with Ma in the Land Rover waiting for a sudden downpour to cease before we made a dash for the drawbridge. She had parked under some lime trees that were dripping fat raindrops onto the roof of the car and I was looking at my m
other’s pretty, tanned profile and asking her what I had been like as a baby. It was one of those conversations that reassured and fascinated me, to hear about my tiny self. She laughed about how oddly I had crawled – straight legs, bum in the air – and then, as an afterthought, added that she had despaired at having given birth to a second girl. She laughed at the memory, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My mother was an intelligent woman brought up in a family less tied to its past, but she saw no contradiction in championing the opposite sex over her own to fit the customs of her husband’s family. I had no idea how to digest this information smilingly: not only was the deliverer someone of the same gender, she was my mother. Until that moment I had had no proper inkling that girls were a disappointment. It was as if Emma’s birth had been the equivalent of a toothless couple entering a draw hoping for the first prize of false teeth, but winning only dental floss. On entering it again, they had won a toothbrush.

  At Golden Grove, I had felt we were a family of equal parts. Some of us were big and some of us were permanently small, but there was no difference in importance between the sexes. I had, however, overlooked some clear hints. My father, for instance, always arranged to fly separately from Colin, but not from us. I vaguely understood that Colin was the ‘heir’, but it was a wholly abstract concept. To me, he was just my tissue-sniffling little brother and Emma was clearly the alpha-female queen-bee boss-lady. I regarded Pa as a progressive on the flimsy evidence that he had long sideburns, wore flares and listened to Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra. I understood that any system that kept Cawdor intact would necessarily be unfair, but within that system, age discrimination seemed to have the edge of fairness over sex.

  But it was pretty naive to think that Pa was going to depart from opinions so assiduously reinforced since biblical times. Girls were presumed to acquiesce innately to such bigotry, but it was like being invited to smile while swallowing gravel. There was absolutely no-one with whom I could discuss these tangled feelings. I looked at our family with new eyes and saw that everything had a male tilt. We were so steeped in the surrounding history I had overlooked that it all applied to us too. If Colin and Fred had not been born, or if they had died before they were able to produce sons of their own, the next nearest Cawdor male, however distantly related, would be favoured over Emma. In our case, given the preponderance of girls in the immediate extended family, it would be a far-flung cousin many times removed. The only male first cousin with Campbell blood was Alexander Friesen, but he was out of the running since Aunt Carey’s female blood did not count. Pa’s only brother James had produced five daughters across three different relationships. There were no candidates at one remove because Drunkle Uncle, Jack’s only brother, was childless. The Cawdor heir would be a remote, unknown cousin – a melancholic harbourmaster living in Nova Scotia perhaps, or a reclusive tap dancer from Adelaide. Even if these hypothetical men had no interest in Cawdor whatsoever, as long as they had exterior genitalia, it was all theirs. It seemed to me completely absurd that male blood differed from female. I was told that it was because the title could not be passed down the female line – no medals for guessing who had made all these rules up. All privileges were reserved for men because that was just how it was. The women supported that, and didn’t rate their own kind. The most successful form of repression is when it is invisible, and when the repressed assist in its reinforcement. Ma was not some sort of freak. The vast majority of her generation in the same position had never thought twice about what they were supporting.

  In case this misogyny needed any further underlining, before the seat belt laws became mandatory Pa was forever telling me to strap up, saying, ‘Your face is your fortune, so you’d better not smash it up.’ Eventually the mantra began to drive me crazy. The subtext was that we must not expect a share of the family wealth, although there was never any discussion of careers, only of remaining physically undamaged and nubile. A small nest egg had been set aside for the three girls, which went towards our education and a future roof over our heads, but otherwise we were excluded from his will. This draconian tradition was peculiar to our family. It was not the seat belt advice that irritated, but the tedious harping on about our faces. ‘Success’ would be the auspiciousness of any future marriage; any failure in that regard would be down to our looks. Hugh’s vision for us was to be another nob’s wife, an elegant flower who must never express any anger. That would be terribly vulgar and awfully unfeminine. It smacked of hairy ankles. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I didn’t aspire to being the consort of some red-faced landowner merely because he had status. We had sat through La Fille Mal Gardée enough times to know that.

  Nothing gleaned from the outside world really applied at home. It was very confusing. All around, the sexual revolution seemed to have moved the world on. Even Hugh was a fan of Germaine Greer, though it turned out his admiration extended only as far as her bralessness. I tried, once, to talk with Hugh about primogeniture. Big mistake. As sole beneficiary of an antiquated hierarchy, Pa was the least likely person to enter into a reasoned debate.

  ‘What do you think would happen if we three girls took you to the equal opportunities commission?’ I said.

  ‘What’s it like being a half-wit?’ he retorted, and then attacked this impertinence with such anger I was scared he was going to hit me.

  The zeitgeist of enlightened egalitarianism was something ‘other people’ embraced. By the 1960s, the aristocracy was no longer the ruling class, but it still stuck to medieval rules established during a time when, among other things, women got burned as witches and rapists were treated more leniently if their victim was attractive. I gave up ever trying to discuss with my father what I wanted to do with my life after an argument on a damp autumn day when we had driven over to Rait Castle to look for puffballs.

  Rait was a tiny wreck. No floors or roof remained, but there was an elegant stone fireplace halfway up the interior wall – evidence that the main living area was on the first storey with livestock stabled beneath to provide a natural form of underfloor heating. It was more pied-à-terre than castle, and it was ours, as much as it was anyone’s. It came as part of a medieval compensation package for the 1405 murder of Andrew Cawdor, heir to the 4th Thane, by Sir Gervaise de Rait. Although his name was better suited to a choreographer than an assassin, he had not only put the Cawdor bloodline at risk, but his audaciousness had threatened the family’s local reputation. As deaths go, it was infra dig. If it were a farmyard bust-up it would have been like a stud rooster getting savaged to death by a blue tit, in front of all the hens.

  The Raits already had a reputation for punching above their weight. Some time before, the Rait Castle thane felt he had a bone to pick with another of his neighbours and invited the family over to dine with him, with the express intention of murdering them all between courses. Unbeknown to him, one of his daughters was having an illicit affair with the son of one of his intended victims. The prevailing culture of endless hostilities made enemies so thick on the ground that it was frankly hard for a girl not to get romantically involved with one of the enemy’s sons every now and again. When she overheard her father detailing the plot with his stewards, she rushed off to their trysting spot and warned her lover. The boy alerted his family, but instead of cancelling the dinner date, they kept it. At a prearranged signal, the Raits drew their skean-dhus. Instead of being taken unawares, their guests followed suit. In the midst of the snickersnee, it dawned on the girl’s father exactly who had betrayed his plans. He raced to his daughter’s room and burst in upon her just as she was escaping. She was hanging from the windowsill, about to drop down onto her lover’s horse tethered below. Rait ran straight over and hacked off both her hands.

  Sir Gervaise fled into exile after killing Andrew Cawdor. The confiscation of the castle in his absence was intended to discourage any further challenges to the Cawdor authority. Rait Castle was too small and too close to Cawdor to be of any use so it was left
to fall into disrepair.

  As we gathered our mushrooms among the thistly tussocks, my father and I discussed the hand-severing story.

  ‘What do you think the moral is?’ he asked.

  I thought a bit. ‘That family loyalty trumps romantic loyalty?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, what the father does is seen as a betrayal by the daughter, but what the daughter does to stop it is seen as a worse betrayal by the father.’

  ‘Very succinct,’ he said sarcastically, ‘but wrong. The moral of the tale is that meddling children get their just deserts.’

  ‘Ha di ha, very funny. You mean to say that you would have done that to me if it had been us back then?’ I asked.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Would you kill me for loving the wrong man?’

  ‘God no!’ My father laughed. ‘Unless it was a left-footer. Believe me, I’ll be grateful to any man prepared to take you on, especially after your last school report. All indications are that you will be unemployable. If you’re not careful, you’ll be shacked up with a diddicoy and a brood of dribbling cretins.’

  I stomped off to sulk in the car.

  My mother did at least broach the subject of careers with me once. She saw me as an air hostess, and the conversation came to a shuddering halt.

  * * *

  Of course nobody had told us anything at all about Betty and the hexes, but the atmosphere at Cawdor during the holidays grew steadily more peculiar. After much persuasion, a writer friend, Roger Longrigg, came to stay, but the moment he and his wife arrived, Hugh turned on them. A ghastly weekend ensued as he scorned Roger at every opportunity. On the Longriggs’ last morning, Cath joined them for breakfast before they caught their flight south. Hugh was still in bed, but as they signed the visitors’ book she asked them to wait. ‘Hugh will be down in a minute,’ she said. ‘I know he would want to say goodbye.’