A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  Writing such nonsense had an advantage when it came to the opposite end of the problem: you couldn’t easily rebuff people you didn’t like unless your card clearly looked full. I began to grade the reels on how much you touched your partner. The Reel of the 51st was the most flirtatious – best kept for someone who made your heart beat faster. Hamilton House gave you the least physical contact with your partner – good for dealing with mossy-handed boys. Speed the Plough was so impenetrably complex that it was seldom on the dance lists, but it would be included from time to time so that it did not slip entirely from our cultural canon. When it featured it was not just a clinically efficient passion douser, it could cause a novice not only to lose the will to flirt, but the will to live.

  It all seemed so unutterably, endlessly innocent, but what did I know? Peep under the social lino of any county life and beneath you will find swarming sexual intrigue. The twin counties of Nairn and Morayshire were no different. As we moved away from childhood, it slowly dawned on us that gracious lifelong couplings were far fewer than we had presumed. Everyone gossiped about the landowner and the wife of his neighbour who went off together on extended diving trips every summer. This was a passion that ran along seasonal lines with rather admirable self-discipline. Another woman who tangled with almost every married man north of the Grampians, including Hugh, had Emma and me echoing ‘Uncle’ George’s familiar refrain, mouthing ‘From Genesis to Deuteronomy!’ at each other whenever her name was mentioned. When she embarked on yet another affair, her new lover went to Asprey’s and ordered a brooch that spelled out the splendid announcement ‘I love fucking you’ in diamonds. This became known only when the stricken lover came to my father in hysterics because the enormously expensive gift had got lost in the post. The man swore Hugh to secrecy, but he told us about it (without mentioning names) over lunch, laughing so hard that his claret came gushing out of his nose. I loved the idea of the dignified shop assistant charged with taking his order. ‘Would sir like the phrase in a straight line, or in a circle? I could ask Mr Ledbetter if we could add an exclamation mark at a reduced price. You may like to look at an example we have made for another gentleman, which was inspired, I believe, by some art on a tree. Here it is, sir: “Sex is Fun”, in emeralds.’ I liked to imagine that the brooch had slipped silently from the postman’s sack and lay unnoticed in the penumbra of a sub-post office until Mrs Harris started shutting up shop. I could hear her saying, ‘Crikey Moses, what’s that glinting down by ’yur? Dew! Must have come out of one of them foreign caramel creams.’

  Tales like this were hilarious to me as a teenager, mostly because it was happening to ‘other people’. When it came to my own father it was a different matter. I hated the arguments between my parents, which I could hear through the floorboards of my bedroom. I would lie in bed in a conflicted tangle of trying to ignore and straining to hear the names of the women mentioned. Our own burgeoning sexuality was, in turn, a source of quiet horror to my mother. When Emma lost her virginity, Ma took her aside and said sadly and solemnly, ‘You’ve played your ace card.’ From her viewpoint, chastity was a priceless coin to be sewn into a velvet pouch and locked inside an ironwood chest set on a high shelf, in a distant belfry, on a remote island, with no anchorage. Of course, she had reasons we knew nothing about. She had no control over her husband’s sexual behaviour; maybe she felt a need to keep ours in check.

  Thanks to Highland reeling, the job wasn’t hard. For years, it was all one big chaste blank. I envied all my school friends, whose parties offered contemporary music, drinking cider and groping in the dark. Such debauchery was out of the question in Scotland when, far from being exclusively teenage, our parties were nearly all ‘for the nine-to-nineties!’ Rather than sloping off into the bushes between dances, everyone just sat about trying to catch their breath before the start of the next reel. While all my school friends appeared to have snogged several boys, I was having an agonizingly vestal time spinning to the sound of an up-tempo accordion. I fretted that not only would I die a virgin, I would never even experience what it was to be kissed. How the hell did you kiss? I had no idea. Did you move your tongue around like a gear stick? Did you just rest it there like a salmon in a pool? How did you breathe? Were there any rules? No-one would say.

  Growing up was full of mortifications. I finally got kissed at the age of fourteen. The son of one of my mother’s cousins came to stay and we exchanged smouldering looks for a couple of days before he found me alone in the drawing room and invited me ‘to go for a walk’. I knew what that meant. I was more nervous than excited, not least because moments before I had rammed a fistful of peanuts into my mouth. I could only nod and follow him out across the drawbridge, chewing as fast as I could. We crossed over the burn and into the woods. As soon as we were out of sight of the house, a damp hand clamped onto mine. He went into a droning monologue about how he wanted to follow his father’s example and sell ‘top of the range’ sports cars when he grew up. It never crossed my mind that he might be nervous too; all I noticed was that he was being astonishingly boring. The hand, the peanuts and the car talk had annihilated any lust, and in a wan attempt to abort the mission I took him on a path that cut back in a short circuit through the rhododendron bushes. If I could get him back within sight of the house, nothing would happen. But then suddenly he said ‘Hey!’ loudly and urgently, as if stung by a hornet. I turned in surprise and his mouth fixed on mine. How come I could see his teeth? Lips, teeth, tongue, saliva, teeth, nut particles, tongue, more teeth. It was not a success. I ignored him for the rest of his stay.

  A week later, we were all sitting around the breakfast table watching a pair of red squirrels dancing across the larches on the far side of the burn. We could always tell if the squirrels were there, even if we couldn’t see them, because of the sudden shudders as they bounced across the branches. My mother, who read through her mail at breakfast, finished her grapefruit and began reading out loud a thank-you letter. It was from her cousin, and it went something very like this:

  Burble, burble … you must tell me how you grow those marvellous miniature yellow tomatoes … burble … can’t believe how much stronger Laura looks now … burble, burble … & I’m so very sorry about the incident between Rupert and Liza in the woods. He is still very puzzled and upset because he feels she encouraged him, but he has given me his word that it will never happen again.

  He told his mother? He’d treated my face like an ice cream and then he’d snitched? And now she who must be kept in the dark about these things was reading it out to the whole family? I silently thanked God that Pa was still upstairs nursing a hangover. Meanwhile my mother seemed oblivious to my embarrassment; she even seemed to be rather enjoying herself, as if this exposure might work as a powerful tool against my trying anything so beastly again, until well after my silver wedding anniversary. Not only was this going to mean years of therapy, she had neatly handed my head on a marmalade-smeared plate to Emma. To her great credit, instead of mocking me Emma rolled her eyes in a conspiratorial way, as if to say, ‘Parents, eh?’ The only lasting fallout was that the name Rupert still gives me the chills.

  As a teenager, I longed for my mother to ease up a little and for my father to do the opposite, but instead a new secretary arrived. This Olga Nethersole had soon helped Pa out of his trousers. My mother guessed what was happening when she noticed the girl wearing an identical necklace to one Hugh had recently given her. Emma had seen them grappling with each other in a Range Rover, and I had overheard private laughter coming from behind the locked office door. None of us said anything, each of us thinking we were alone in carrying the secret.

  * * *

  When Cawdor opened to the public, my father installed huge floodlights. Before they were installed I could see Cassiopeia and the Pleiades in the night sky from my attic window, but no longer. Now when I went to bed my room was bathed in a sickly shade of municipal orange, against which my curtains were no match. It was strange: we were deep in the cou
ntry, but it was like sleeping on a motorway slip road.

  My bedroom was above my parents’ suite of rooms and I would lie awake in the eerie tangerine twilight listening to my father shouting and slamming doors and praying that he would not hurt Ma. Like a terrified flyer, I stayed awake to check that the wings of their marriage were still on. But if they fell off, what was I going to do? I could never think of a plan. The racket would continue into the small hours, and then I would hear the glass rattle in its frame as the front door slammed shut behind Pa, the scrape of his footfall and the faintest chink of his shoe buckle as he crossed the courtyard below, then the clump of heavy feet on the timbers of the drawbridge as he made his way out to his vile lime-green Ferrari parked in the drive. When he screeched off, a new worry would start: what if he had another crash? The compressed carcass of his last E-type lay rusting in the garages, a neglected talisman. Once Pa had gone and I could no longer hear the engine dip as he shifted gears on the corners, the fretting faded into the bliss of silence and sleep would finally come. Peace.

  There were nights when Pa had reached the falling-down stage and lacked the co-ordination to drive. When this happened, he would just sit at the wheel and rev the engine until it screamed. Other times he could not even make it out to the car and appeared at breakfast covered in grazes. He would explain that ‘the drive came up and hit me’. He would look over at Ma and say sarcastically, ‘What’s eating you today? You look like a whited bloody sepulchre. Why are you looking at me like that? Did I do something?’ In truth, he really had no idea. One morning he came down in his Tibetan dressing gown, bleary-eyed and unshaven, saying he had had the worst nightmare of his life, so terrible it still terrified him, even when he had woken up and realized it was a dream. He said a huge werepig with a russet pelt had chased him all over the house until he was cornered. In the end, he said, he knew he had to get out of bed and go down to his study to draw it. It was hard to imagine an animal more frightening than the ones in ‘The Google Book’, but I took his word for it. He said he couldn’t show the drawing to anyone because it was so monstrous we would be haunted too. As he talked, Emma and I glanced at each other. In a tiny exchange we knew we were both thinking the same thing: the werepig had been with us for some time and had no plans to leave; it was the nocturnal part of him.

  Soon after this, my father developed a virulent strain of eczema. He had deep, tickly fissures between his fingers and on his throat that got inflamed every time he shaved, and the itching drove him mad. Or the madness made him itch. Either way, his flesh was in torment. For a while, the subject of his affliction took over in his letters as he searched for a cure. His skin doctor, a tiny, twinkling hunchback, tried to guide him through the maze of irritants. Comments like ‘Your observation about deterioration of the skin condition when you gave up cigarettes may be quite valid’ endeared him greatly to my father. The ‘cure’ turned out to be only a short respite and the eczema soon returned – on his testicles as well as a stigmata rash across the palms of his hands.

  * * *

  Now when Pa turned on Ma it was physical. One afternoon he thumped her so hard she got whiplash. Acting without any provocation, he hid behind her bathroom door and waited there until she had finished freshening all the flower vases around the house and had gone in to wash her hands. As she leaned over the basin, he clouted her on the side of the head.

  Another day he hid again and then cornered her with one of his samurai swords drawn. ‘I’m going to chop you in half,’ he hissed. Thatch had helped him learn how to handle knives, but an unarmed wife was clearly not quite the target the aikido master had intended. Cath fled the room and searched the house until she found another adult. Her saviour came in the unlikely shape of Martin Newell, an artist friend who had come to Cawdor to paint a mural on Emma’s bedroom walls. Pa had commissioned Martin as much for his painting style as for the fact that he was almost permanently pissed. As things grew increasingly confused during the course of any given day, Martin would woozily dip his paintbrushes in his whisky glass rather than the glass of turpentine. The entire mural reeked. Martin rose unsteadily to the occasion, calmed Cath and, when he strolled in ten minutes later, rounded on Hugh. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re playing at, man?’ Pa looked at him in surprise and then stared blankly at my mother. He asked her why she was crying. Such amnesia was commonplace. When people talked about blackouts, I thought it meant someone falling unconscious, not someone so drunk that they went on functioning while the cognitive, mindful part of their brain had shut down.

  The craziness started to seep out of Cawdor. The first sign of a leak was when Cath went off to a local drinks party on her own one evening after Pa had refused to go with her, predicting it would be tedious. Half an hour later, however, he strode into the party as Cath was chatting to a group of friends in the middle of the room. He got straight down on his knees and started yanking at the rug she was standing on, trying literally to pull the rug out from under her feet. After a moment of simple maths – the great expanse of rug, the large number of people anchoring it – it became obvious that his plan had fundamental flaws, and he stormed off. He did not utter a single word throughout. When he came home, he found his three oldest children watching television in the Blue Room. Still nursing a frustrated desire to intimidate, he gave the television such a kick that he broke his toe. The Blue Room fireplace had a carved stone cipher that read ‘Feare the Lord’. As he landed the screen a pointless thwack, the message suddenly seemed less biblical incitement than a warning to Hugh’s nearest and dearest.

  I prayed that my mother would find the strength to leave him and these increasingly demented attacks, but she did not. Nor did she see it that way. To her, leaving would be a defeat, though it took all her courage to stay. I tried to tell her how frightened I was for her, but Ma always tried to rationalize the situation with a cock-eyed perspective born out of extended exposure to Pa’s irrational excesses. She drew comfort from the fact that she didn’t draw his fire exclusively. ‘He often lashes out at other people; it isn’t always at me,’ she would say. She didn’t know how nutty she had begun to sound when she said she really did not think things were that bad and Pa’s behaviour was only a little blip. Her optimism came from the sudden, unexpected lulls in the storm when he would sit close to tease her as she sat in front of the fire, knitting us long winter scarves. As her needles clicked, he would playfully wrap the finished end around his face until only his eyes showed. This was a glimpse of the old Hugh. There would be no edge to his humour. He would walk around humming, hold my mother’s bird-like hand, call her Puddock and dance with her. My friends were appalled when their parents danced, but I adored it when mine did. And by the time they reached their eighteenth wedding anniversary they were happy enough to have a party in celebration.

  Chapter 13

  When the lamb they is lost on the mountain, they is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Towards the end of the 1970s a series of upheavals changed the family landscape for ever. Four key figures went and four new ones were thrust into our midst, all of them women. I cannot now remember in what order they happened; I can only recall them in terms of rising impact.

  The first to leave was Edith. Even though she was a quiet, introspective loner, Edith was the only person who had made the transition from Golden Grove to Cawdor with us. She connected us back to happy times in Wales. While all the other staff had upped and left, she had been our one constant. Edith had never really assimilated into local life, however, and had pined for her home on the banks of the Towy all the years she was in Scotland. For someone whose nervous disposition was so profoundly ill suited to the goings-on at Cawdor, Edith had shown remarkable tenacity. She had survived by tucking herself away and carving a separate existence within the house, her presence hardly ever being anything more tangible than a disembodied voice behind the green baize door of the dining-room hatch. There was no goodbye party – her
nerves weren’t up to it – so my parents had a quiet sherry in the sitting room with her while she sat slumped in a chair clutching her handbag, on the brink of a turn. The last I saw of her was a sodden handkerchief waving out of the train window as the sleeper pulled out of Inverness station, taking her away from us for ever. As the train climbed the hill towards Culloden Moor and vanished into the trees, I wondered how many of her salty tears had flavoured our food over the years.

  Next was Granny Wilma. She got ill and died quickly. My father did not go off to be with her. A stroke killed her, brought on by an incident a few days earlier when the poor woman had lashed out at one of her nurses in an exasperated fury. She had cracked under the unendurable strain of having to listen to pleasantries peppered with persistent grammatical blunders. We were in the Tower Room when Pa took the telephone call.

  ‘Is she dead?’ I asked as he replaced the receiver.

  ‘As a ruddy doornail,’ he replied. As if she was a parrot in a comedy sketch.

  I didn’t know what to feel. I looked to my father to give me an emotional lead, but there was nothing. She was my grandmother, but I had never had a normal grandchild relationship with her, had not seen her for a couple of years, and in that time my father had never made reference to her; she was a closely related stranger. Nevertheless, she represented a large chunk of the family tree closest to us.

  We are all equal in front of the Lord, but not in his graveyards. As an ex-wife, Wilma was not allowed to be buried at the Cawdor kirk. She had requested to be buried at Daviot, a tiny church near Inverness. Uncle James brought her home on the overnight sleeper. I said to my father that I was worried about what an ordeal it would be for James, on his own, knowing his mother’s body was lying in a coffin in the guard’s van as the train rattled its way north. Pa gave me a look like I was an idiot and replied briskly, ‘Oh no, it’s only a small casket – they grilled her first.’ We buried her ashes in Daviot graveyard with Pa glancing impatiently at the minister, as if the man was a trainee bank clerk being frustratingly slow in completing a very basic transaction. There were six of us at her funeral. On the way home I said, ‘Are you very sad?’ He did not reply. ‘Didn’t you love her?’ He gave a tight little smile. It was hardly encouraging; it followed that if he failed to feel love for the woman from whom he had come, what was to stop him doing the same to us, who came from him?