A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  Of all the losses, the next one was the most unexpected. One sultry day in summer, we were drinking coffee in the Tower Room after lunch when the telephone rang. As soon as my father picked up the receiver, an instinctive hush came over the room. It was obvious from the way Pa was listening that this was not a routine call. It was Uncle Peebles ringing from Spain; something had happened to Aunt Carey. We could hear only one end of the conversation, but Uncle Peebles was plainly worried. He and Pa talked for a long time and we slowly picked up the details of an accident. They were on the way back from seeing his parents in Majorca … they had stopped off with friends in Cadaques … Carey had tripped and fallen over a garden terrace … she was in a hospital … her ankles were broken … she might have chipped her coccyx … there was something wrong with her blood … her kidneys … the cottage hospital was run by nuns … it was ill-equipped … he needed help getting her back … she needed English doctors … it was an emergency.

  Pa placed the receiver back on its cradle with a heavy sigh and stood looking at it for a few moments. At first, he thought Peebles was panicking unduly – broken ankles did not sound too bad – but several calls later it was clear that the situation was grave and getting worse. For the next couple of days my father tried to organize a flight to bring his sister home, while France was paralysed by an air traffic controllers’ strike. An air ambulance was chartered, but getting permission to cross the disputed airspace was an unbearably slow process. An increasingly desperate Uncle Peebles kept Pa informed as Carey’s condition deteriorated. At last the plane got the go-ahead. Peebles took their daughter Boojum and set off ahead by car. Alexander, who had just turned fourteen, stayed behind to accompany his mother. Carey died as the plane arrived at the Spanish airport. She was forty-two. The plane crew flew her back to Scotland, but instead of taking her to a hospital they brought her to Cawdor to be buried.

  Throughout her life Carey had been Hugh’s intellectual sparring partner; his older sister and boss lady; his strongest stabilizing influence. He turned his mourning inward. I knew that he had no love for Wilma and that he had adored Carey, yet there was no discernible difference in his reactions to the two deaths. I never saw him cry. I never heard him reminisce. With both his parents dead, Thatch gone and now Carey dead, fate had left Hugh answerable to absolutely no-one. Carey’s death was not only incredibly sad for all of us, it triggered a chain of events that was to shatter the family.

  Within a year, Uncle Peebles had met and married a beautiful young widow. My father did not react well to Carey being replaced and took it out on Peebles’s new wife. They were no longer invited to stay at Cawdor and consequently neither were Boojum and Alexander. Emboldened by the exclusion of the Friesen family, Hugh did the same to his brother’s family. James had divorced his wife Bridget and remarried, but Hugh had taken a dislike to his new wife as well. ‘Why the hell do they remarry?’ he would growl, and now James was welcome to stay only if he came alone. Slaine and Cara, the daughters from James’s first marriage, were cut adrift too, and we saw them very sporadically. None of us even met Sarah and Lucy, the two daughters of his second marriage, until they were teenagers. Suddenly, from acting as the stage for our extended family gatherings, Cawdor was fenced off. No-one else had a house big enough to have everyone to stay, so our family connections began to unravel.

  Cath protected us as best she could, but who was there to protect her? Who were the men of the family who would stand up for her? There were none. Her father was so deaf that conversation was almost impossible. He did not have the smallest idea of what his son-in-law was up to. Her only brother, Bill, had the mind of a child. No-one took Drunkle Uncle seriously; ‘Uncle’ George, he of the sponging from Genesis to Deuteronomy, was far too toadying to consider challenging Hugh; Pa’s younger brother James was hardly ever around; and, although he loved Cath, Uncle William at Altyre was too much of an ally and spree partner to fight her corner. Uncle Peebles was older and possessed of an innate authority, but he came north even less often than James did since the froideur over his remarriage. The uncomfortable truth was that there really was something different about how otherwise level-headed people viewed my father. His status gave him leeway, a droit de merde. What I once admired as a cool, laid-back approach to life among the adult men in our family looked more and more like a moral vacuum.

  * * *

  Business boomed, and as Cawdor got busier and more crowded it became harder to use it as a normal home during the months it was open. Whenever we took short cuts against the flow of the people, we found ourselves being touched gently on the arm by motherly tourists and asked if we were lost, or told off by those with traffic-flow issues: ‘You’re going the wrong way, pet.’ Everything had to be kept meticulously tidy in the house, as if we weren’t there, which was ironic, because the signs of our presence were a large part of what people said they enjoyed about visiting. So many houses open to the public have room after room of anodyne orderliness and a dreary deadness. The visitors liked the fact that Cawdor was a real family home strewn with our books and photographs.

  One summer holiday the numbers at Cawdor picked up to such an extent that we moved across the moor to stay at Drynachan. While there, Pa began expanding his collection of stuffed animals in glass cabinets that lined the walls of the sitting room. There was a snarling wildcat, a pair of ptarmigan in their white winter plumage and two oriental pheasants with long wedding-dress trains of scimitar-shaped feathers. Pa had just taken delivery of a golden eagle when I wandered into the room. He asked me what I thought of this latest acquisition. I went and had a closer look and, for want of anything better to say, asked him if he’d bought it at auction.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I had it shot.’

  I was appalled. Eagles were an incredibly rare sight.

  ‘That’s illegal!’ I spluttered.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody bourgeois,’ he snapped.

  ‘What? But you wouldn’t kill an osprey, would you?’

  ‘They’re endangered.’

  ‘Which makes eagles vermin?’

  ‘Oh, go boil your head,’ he said.

  I left the room in a rage and reported the incident to Emma. ‘At least he’s not making us eat it,’ she replied with a shrug.

  Towards the end of that summer Emma’s first serious boyfriend came up from London to stay at Drynachan, but given the crepuscular direction in which Pa’s mood was heading the day after Charlie’s arrival, we decided it would be best to retreat to the Gordon Cummings’ for supper. It was a lovely evening and we arrived back at Drynachan in the early hours. The keeper’s dog gave a couple of warning barks as we drove past its kennel at the top of the drive. A few rabbits skittered away across the lawn as we approached the house and pulled up.

  The first thing that struck an odd note was that the front door was ajar. It was possible that Pa was out walking his dog Sandy, but our headlights would have picked them out, and besides, my father hated us leaving the door open because the wind was apt to fling it shut with a mighty slam, or sheep would wander in, or a hundred thousand bugs and moths would arrive to conduct their fatal worship of the light bulbs. He was always shouting, ‘Shut. The bloody. Door!’ However pissed he might be, it was not like him to leave it open.

  As we crossed the little yard in front of the house, we could see that the glass in the door was smashed. Our conversation came to an abrupt halt. We looked at each other and wavered, before Charlie quietly pushed the door wide and we stepped into the hall. It looked like there had been a burglary. Lamps, vases and chairs were tipped over, belongings lay everywhere and clothes were flung down the length of the staircase. When we got to the foot of the stairs, I realized that the mess was not indiscriminate: everything belonged to Ma. The chaos suggested noise, and lots of it, but the house was utterly silent. We followed a thin trail of blood along the carpet towards the sitting room. I could barely breathe; it had finally happened. I expected to find my mother lying dead on the floor in front of the fi
re, or slumped half on, half off the sofa, her hair covering her beautiful, battered face. None of us said anything. All I could hear was the banging of my pulse and the sound of air rushing in and out of my body.

  We got to the sitting room and Charlie gingerly pushed the door open. My father was nursing what looked like a pint of whisky. He had his back to us and was staring out of a broken window pane at the star-spattered night. He did not turn his head when we came in. Charlie cleared his throat nervously. ‘Are you all right, sir?’ No reply. I saw that the back of Pa’s trousers were ripped to the knee and was swept with relief: maybe the trail of blood was his and not hers.

  We left him where he was and went looking for Ma. We took it in turns to peer round the doors into each room along the length of the long passage leading back to the stairs. In the hush, I suddenly realized that just because it was not her blood, it didn’t mean that she had not been killed. Maybe he had throttled her. None of us dared call out in case we woke the Smalls.

  We came across my mother upstairs. She had heard us coming and was making a frantic effort to tidy their bedroom before we found her. It was completely trashed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Charlie asked.

  She gave a quick nod, face turned to the wall.

  ‘There’s blood downstairs,’ I said.

  ‘It’s Pa’s, I think,’ she said, trying to steady her voice amid heavy, stifled sobs, and answering as if we might be discussing a lost shoe. My father had been kicking in all the windows; he had gashed his leg on the glass. Ma moved around the room with difficulty, her neck and an arm held stiffly, as if in pain. We tried to help, but she ushered us out. ‘No. Go to bed. Please.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing, really. Really. Nothing. Go to bed.’

  She could not bear to be seen so wretched. Pa had wrenched her neck, dislocated her shoulder and given her an aikido chop under her nose that had cracked the roots of her front teeth. I was just so relieved that she was alive I felt almost happy.

  * * *

  Just when we thought our holiday could not get any more gruesome, it did, after a visit to a house on Loch Ness. Our host lived almost halfway along it, a fifty-mile drive for lunch. I always found the loch a horribly oppressive place, a long, deep slit in the land where the dark water is as deep as the steep hills soaring up on either shore are high. Because there were seven of us, we normally travelled separately. Pa boy-racered off in his Ferrari on his own; Ma hauled the rest of us. At the end of an afternoon of gut-straightening cocktails, Pa offered a lift to a girl who was one of our fellow guests. He set off before us, but arrived home two hours after us, tousled and smudged with lipstick. His attempt at some high-speed grooming as he approached the front door was ineffectual. It was obvious what had gone on.

  Cheating on one’s spouse is not the mark of a magnificent human being, but this girl was way, way off limits. She was our age; she’d been messing around with us at lunch, not him. She was at Emma’s school and we knew her family really well. It had never felt as if the family had been more ruthlessly subjugated to his libido than when I saw him in his School Olga disarray. I felt ashamed, and not merely of Pa. It felt like there was enough shame to spill over all of us.

  * * *

  Emma had a far more robust attitude to Pa. In the small hours of one night, he buzzed her telephone and summoned her to his study. Cretinized by drink, he gave her a long, maudlin lecture about how all he wanted to do, all he really wanted to do with his life, was ‘take the clothes off beautiful women’. She got up mid-polemic and left the room. ‘Take a cold shower!’ she called over her shoulder as she padded back upstairs, shrugging off the whole incident as a passing nuisance.

  The next spring holidays Pa pitched up in my bedroom in the middle of the night. He shook me awake and told me to come to his bed. He was dressed in the heavy Tibetan robe that had belonged to Jack. For a groggy moment I could not pull away from the mittened fist of sleep to grasp what he was saying. When he repeated the order, I was panic-stricken; the werepig was in my room. All I wanted to do was say ‘No!’, but at sixteen I simply did not have the emotional vocabulary. The technicalities of a blunt rejection were quite beyond me. I had always done what he told me, and so I did this time. I trudged after him down the stairs, unhappier and lonelier than I had ever felt before.

  My parents’ bedroom had never been a place we went to when we were ill or had nightmares. It was too long a trek in the pitch dark from any of our bedrooms. Our Christmas morning ritual was the solitary incursion into their privacy here. The room had last been decorated at a time when they fitted tapestries rather than carpets. The bedroom door was concealed behind a tapestry, so when it was shut there was an unbroken panorama of woven murals.

  We reached my parents’ four-poster. I could see that only one side of it was disturbed. I kept wondering where the hell my mother was. Had Bluebeard killed her this time? I perched on the furthest edge of the bed – my mother’s side. Last time I had sat there it was to open my stocking; now Pa told me to lie under the covers. I got under the damask bedspread, but he told me to get between the sheets. ‘I said, get in.’ I did as I was told. He lurched round to his side of the bed, but as he reached forward to pull back the blankets he gave out a little slack-jawed groan; his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed across the bed, spark out. I wriggled away faster than an eel, sped over to the tapestry and fumbled clumsily for the hidden door latch. I raced up the spiral steps to the attic floor. Logic told me that he wasn’t chasing me, but panic wouldn’t believe it. Back in my room, I pulled jumpers off shelves and dresses off hangers to make a nest, pulled the door shut and slept in my cupboard for the remainder of the night.

  It is not what happens to you but how you react that matters. I went over and over the scene in my head. I knew Emma would have handled herself better. She would have been able to see him off and be sleeping soundly five minutes later. For weeks afterwards I was terrified he would return, or go for Emma, without my having warned her because I was too freaked out to say anything to anybody. To this day, the incident remains enigmatic. I don’t know what he intended. Maybe it was just a pre-dawn cuddle, but even that would have fallen far short of being welcome. Pa never mentioned it again and nor did I. Until my mother brought it up three years later.

  * * *

  Into this train-wreck of a home life came ploughing a new character. It turned out to be our future stepmother.

  Summer at Drynachan had become a fixture for us, so Sheila de Rochambeau had rented the neighbouring castle of Dalcross. She invited my parents, Colin – who had just graduated from being a Small – Emma and me over to dinner. It was always a relief to go out because even though Pa got drunk, he could be charming and urbane in company. People invariably enjoyed Pa’s witty anecdotes, but having listened to them on dozens of occasions it felt like we were quietly pedalling on a hamster wheel of his humour.

  Unusually, on this night we were all together in one car. We barrelled the few miles across undulating farmland, past Kilravock Castle and through a bare-earthed beech wood where so many Highlanders had spent their last night alive before Culloden. Dalcross Castle is small and beautiful and the closest stronghold to the battlefield. It is reputed to be haunted by a boy soldier from that time. After the rout, dozens of the defeated Highlanders fled to Dalcross, but in the chaos of retreat the heavy front door was left unbarred. They only realized this when royalist soldiers raced into the courtyard after them, and the young boy rushed back to secure the bolts. They shot him as he ran down the stone staircase, leaving his spirit to try to complete the task in perpetuity. People who are sensitive to such things say that they can feel the ghost shoving past. With the boy dead and the door open, the Highlanders were rounded up, marched to a nearby barn and barricaded in, along with other wounded men who had crawled in there for sanctuary. Cumberland’s men set the thatch alight, and thirty-two were burned alive. Whenever I visited Dalcross as a child, I would stand on the
staircase nervously hoping to feel an ethereal draught as the boy passed clean through me.

  We arrived in time for drinks before dinner and joined a party of about fifteen in the first-floor drawing room. Among them were faces we knew, like Sheila’s twins Eric and Marc, with their matching scars now faded to white, but mostly the guests were strangers. There were a diminutive Greek and his girlfriend, and a tall woman with hennaed hair and formica-white skin. Her name was Angelika Lazansky.

  When dinner was announced the party went into the dining room, where a buffet was being served. My father and Angelika took their food into another room and I did not see him again until we were having coffee. Pa had long blithely ignored my mother’s feelings, but had always made some attempt at behaving properly in front of his children. But not this time. Ma did her best to relax everyone with a show of dignified composure, but a stilted air of embarrassment hung over all the guests for the entire evening. Her attitude was that the only possible response to bad manners was a display of good ones; I wanted her to stand up, make a scene. But that was never my mother’s style. I was furious with her for doing nothing, saying nothing. Of course, I was furious with the wrong person.