A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  When we left, we left together, but it was obvious that Pa was annoyed that he had not come in a separate car. As we made our way down the haunted staircase, I prayed that the boy would be there to pitch him onto his face.

  Chapter 14

  By the time you swear you’re his,

  Shivering and sighing,

  & he vows his passion is

  Infinite, undying –

  Lady, make a note of this:

  One of you is lying.

  Dorothy Parker

  As their marriage imploded in Slo-Mo, my parents had far too much to cope with on the domestic front to keep up with the details of five different school careers. I suddenly realized that not only had they taken their eyes off the ball, they hadn’t even bought tickets to the game. Seizing the moment, I told them I planned to leave Cobham and would do my A levels in one year, at a crammer. It was great. They did not notice I was bunking off a year early without a single plan for the future.

  I had no idea what I was good at or how to get a job; all I knew was that I sure as hell wasn’t going to be showing people how to tie a life-jacket correctly as they flew above the world’s landmasses or murmuring, ‘Chicken or fish?’ while dressed in a red tabard. It was holidays for ever – wasn’t it? All I needed was to pass my driving test and gain full physical independence. When I passed, Pa’s congratulations came in a letter with the usual advice for if and when I got a car, that I should look for one with good brakes: ‘as your face is your fortune, it is important to keep it (and your neck) intact’. He went on to wonder if I could afford to run such a car, and concluded I should look for a ‘rich lover’.

  Before I fully achieved independence, the end came for Hugh and Cath. The combined loss of Edith, Wilma and Carey paled into insignificance compared to the moment when our mother finally left. In the midst of all her misery, a man came along and paid court to Cath, someone who saw her as a dreamy beauty who should be treated like a queen. The affair was over almost as soon as it had started, but Pa went wild. He was the philanderer, she was the long-suffering faithful one; it was an outrage. His anger towards her was brutal and sustained until at last she could take no more and moved out.

  I do not remember how I learned of the coup de grâce; it was certainly not something that was announced by them as a united front. I think they both just hoped it would all segue smoothly from marriage to divorce without the need for query or comment. Because Hugh and Cath were so reluctant to speak to us about the upheaval, I felt tongue-tied and frightened that I would upset them by raising the subject. There were other girls at school whose parents had divorced, but we were all too young to articulate our shared distress in ways that were helpful. Mostly we just got into trouble with our course work and cried a lot. A typical conversation would go as follows:

  ‘How were your holidays?’

  ‘Bit rubbish really.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My parents split up.’

  ‘Oh. Mine did that last year.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Really awful. You?’

  ‘Same.’

  ‘I’ve got Science in a minute. See you.’

  ‘See you.’

  Ever since we had walked through the silent and smashed-up rooms at Drynachan, I had lived in dread that Pa would one day kill Ma. At least now I knew that would not happen; but neither would the fierce fantasy of a return to the happy family I remembered from Wales be fulfilled. We were emotionally adrift. I came to dread Ma’s friends ringing to console her. I tried not to listen as she talked to her friends on the telephone, especially the litany of women who had been sharing our family life, but it seemed all the details I wanted to forget immediately were the things that stuck like cat prints in concrete. As far as my father was concerned, any serious discussion of our parents’ separation was absolutely unwelcome. The only time he even mentioned it was two lines in a letter: ‘Don’t be glum or sad, nor waste your time brooding about Ma & me, etc.; it’s a dull patch, and no fun, but it will pass into oblivion.’ Emma seemed to shrug it all off in a world-weary way, and my three younger siblings seemed too young to have a conversation about it. We all carried on as five separate satellites, uncertain how to orbit separate moons. Communications with parental command had gone from the deafening static of the last few years to a cavernous silence. While my mouth stayed shut, my subconscious worked overtime with the arcane manifestations it was prone to. For a whole term I awoke, gasping in panic, as the same Cold War dream visited night after night. I was about to die. A nuclear bomb was about to fall on the school, but because nobody had told me I had not evacuated with the other girls.

  Now that Cath no longer had to withstand the marital attrition, the reality of what she had been putting up with crashed down on her. She was wrenched away from her busy life as the hostess of Cawdor, and from all her friends in Scotland. Worst of all, she still loved Hugh. She hoped that one day they would be able to sit down and put the past behind them. I prayed that they would not; there was too much blood under the bridge already. Second worst of all was that despite her obvious hurt, Pa immediately bought himself a pied-à-terre a block away from her new home in London. His flat was, moreover, on the ground floor facing the street, so unless she wanted to make a fifteen-minute detour she had to face the possibility of bumping into him every time she left the house.

  Even though we now had this strangely cluttered London set-up, it was hard to know how Hugh’s playboy lifestyle, unfettered by the encumbrance of a wife, was going to fit us in, or even if he had the desire to do so – and if he did, whether I would feel safe with him knowing that Cath was no longer in the wings. To my surprise and relief, he did not cut us adrift. Although he still never came to school, we flew up to Scotland regularly and saw him whenever he came to London. Hugh was always in a better mood when out on the prowl and far away from the mechanics of estate management. Now that he was single he was apt to draw us into his view of women.

  As we walked down the street he would say, ‘Great tits! Did you see them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She looked French. Terrible bra though.’

  ‘Oh.’ His enthusiasms made me squirm.

  Instead of any heartfelt talks, we would go to exhibitions and movies, but never to the theatre, which he loathed and despised. Granted, the frisson that comes from witnessing genuine dramatic art is far rarer than reviews suggest, but Pa’s rejection was total. I don’t believe he ever saw a single production of Macbeth. It was an odd hole in his cultural life. He preferred to take us out to eat in one of his clubs, and was tickled when waiters ushered us to a discreet corner of the restaurant having mistaken Emma and me for Olga Nethersoles. I hated the idea of waiters thinking I was his underage lover and expressly called him ‘Pa’ as loudly and as often as possible. After an aeon spent over dinner he would shunt back his chair, prise himself upright and stand there, swaying like a palm tree. By this time several fags would be alight, one in his mouth, one in his hand and another smouldering in the ashtray. Arm in arm, we would stagger into the street where he would hail a cab with a deafening lost-dog-on-the-moor whistle using two fingers from each hand, like panpipes made flesh.

  He could be wonderful, mischievous company, but as a parent he would only very occasionally proffer verbal advice. It rarely went further than seat belts and complaining that I didn’t wear enough lipstick. Now that he no longer had Cath to whom to delegate the duller parental duties, he did his best to pass them on to his daughters. And we were to tell Colin to get on with his driving lessons or doctor’s appointment, and to remind him he couldn’t just come ‘goofing up here on the spur of the vagueness & expecting the right petals to fall off the tree’.

  To begin with, I was extremely nervous about spending time at Cawdor without Ma there. I was not more frightened of Pa coming to my bedroom now she was gone, because she was nowhere to be found on the previous occasion. What did frighten me was the idea of Pa losing his temper without her there as
a buffer. But it was soon clear that Cawdor was a relaxed place to be for the first time in as long as I could remember. Pa had always been able to reinvent himself in his letters, and now that Ma had gone he had another stab at reinvention beyond the pen. His extramarital life, always hectic, now came out into the open. His temper was once more under control, and four girlfriends – Catherine Schell, Ginny Fass, Gay Close and Angelika – came to stay in the swift rotation of a boil wash. What amazed me, having been witness to his excesses for so long, was that any of these women should want to go anywhere near him. As their visits became regularized, it became apparent that Hugh did not know any of them well enough to pull up the boulder of his personality and show them the underside. We all benefited from that.

  * * *

  Catherine Schell was not only our mother’s namesake, she looked uncannily similar. She was like an echo of Ma – as if Pa couldn’t quite shake off what had fascinated him in her and had found comfort in a replica. She had a gentle, rather impenetrable character and her interest in tarot and telepathy fascinated him; the Betty episode had convinced him of his own occult sensibilities. He told us that she came from a German aristocratic family who lived in Hungary. Her father had been a successful diplomat, but the Nazis confiscated their estates and they escaped to America. After the war, her family moved to Munich, but by then Catherine had forgotten her native tongue and she wound up in England.

  Catherine had played a love bunny called Tracy Draco in the Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but she never mentioned to us she was an actress. We had no idea what she did until we turned on the television one evening and she appeared wearing a spangly blue catsuit with reptilian bumps across her forehead, playing a seductive alien life force called Maya in Space 1999. She said that, given her upbringing, it had been apt casting. ‘I am an alien. Wherever I go I can’t feel that I really belong.’ Long after she had left our lives, we heard that she had retired from acting and had gone off to run a guesthouse in France. It seemed fitting that as someone who felt she was a foreigner in every country she had settled in a new one with the role of making fellow travellers welcome.

  Gay Close was by far the youngest of the four. I was into making anagrams of everyone’s names at the time so she became known as Easy Clog. She was in her early twenties, an open-faced, textbook beach blonde with a sunny, optimistic nature who was flattered to be spoiled by a rich older man. He described her in a letter as ‘a dear person, totally devoid of bullshit’. Pa would whisper that she was an ‘illy’ – adopted – and he decided that her biological father was most probably an aristocrat. After Ma left, his interest in people’s social standing grew more pronounced, and if they didn’t have a title but he liked them, he tended to make one up for them.

  Ginny Fass was a small, jolly woman – not an immediately obvious choice for Pa, but intelligent, maternal and a fine sommelier, something which impressed him immeasurably. Unusually for Pa, a friendship had developed before the affair began. Although Pa normally liked obviously glamorous women, in Ginny he had stumbled across something else. Her character bore comparisons to Aunt Carey. She would not put up with a jot of nonsense from him. She was happy to stand her ground when they disagreed, and she was the only one of the four who seemed to be sensitive to the fact that the family baggage trolley was piled high and that the children of his marriage might be feeling frail. When Fred and Laura came up to stay for their half-term, she was shocked when Hugh ordered them off to bed at the far end of the house and refused to accompany them. They were still young enough to dread the idea of a long corridor to a dark wing. When she pointed out that they were not dawdling because they were naughty, but because they were frightened, he ignored her, so she took them under her wing, tucked them into bed and told them that if they had any problems in the night they were welcome to come to her room. She slept in her own room rather than share Hugh’s bed that night, in case they did. This kindness instantly won us all round. Her intelligence and innate goodness meant we all liked her tremendously, and for a long time it was a great relief to us that she seemed the most serious of all Hugh’s girlfriends. He would occasionally say to us, ‘I’m never going to get married again, but I can see Ginny as my long-term companion.’ We never had the slightest inkling that he would marry Angelika.

  Of all his girlfriends, Angelika was the only one with whom I felt thoroughly ill at ease. She would laugh, but her eyes never seemed to follow suit. My father appeared enchanted. But I felt that Angelika had no time for us girls at all, and what I took to be her disdain surfaced in odd places. When I came home sunburned after a hot weekend, she looked me over and then looked away saying, ‘One should never, ever go in the sun without a hat, in the sense that it is simply – how should one put it? – so plouc [hick] to have a tan.’

  We were never entirely sure whether Hugh’s girlfriends knew about one another, but we were used to keeping our mouths shut and not asking questions. As it turned out, they didn’t. Pa liked to cut things very fine, and thus Gay finally learned about Ginny when she arrived one day on a morning flight and found that Ginny was ill in bed at Cawdor and had not left, as intended, the night before. Pa sped to the airport, met Gay, gave her a brief explanation with promises of lavish apologies, and hustled her into a local hotel. ‘You owe me big time,’ she warned, and settled in to a day of room service.

  The four women in my father’s life neatly represented the corners of a playboy’s dream. In its own eccentric way, it was a stable and cosy time. My father’s ego was clearly stroked to the right degree. Even his relationship with Laura was improved. When she was ten, a friend of Ma’s with a deaf child of her own had watched the way Laura failed to respond and suggested they get her hearing properly checked out. The hunch was right. She had no hearing in her right ear whatsoever. This was a huge breakthrough, because although nothing could be done, we all now knew which side to direct our voices to and, more importantly, Laura could warn strangers not to talk to her deaf side. In the way children do, she put aside all Pa’s past taunts and was so doggedly affectionate that he quite forgot his old habits; besides, Cath, the real target of his attacks, had departed. In our new template of dysfunction, we were all shambling along rather happily.

  The harem arrangement carried on for several years. We never asked Pa what was going on, we just accepted this new situation where we knew all the Olgas’ real names. I don’t know how it ended with Catherine, but Gay eventually went off with a younger man, and to our dismay, Ginny cooled and effected a partial withdrawal after Hugh flung a book at her head saying, ‘The problem with you, Ginny, is that I can’t destroy you.’

  * * *

  In London, punk had just rudely exploded into the national consciousness. For a nanosecond, it felt like an iconoclastic, shin-kicking movement with real political clout. But, no. Punk had swagger, but its manifesto was boringly nihilistic. Looking back, it is hard to recall the amount of naivety it had required to believe that society was going to be irrevocably shaken up on the strength of a sardonic reading of the national anthem by a bunch of cheeky boys looking like crowned cranes. The call of the herd was strong in my teenage bones, though, and for a moment I loved punk. It was thrilling and frightening, especially as its whole ethos was based on hating people like me.

  I wasn’t a proper punk. I never basted my hair with diluted sugar to produce stalagmites, or wore black lipstick, nor did I have any safety-pin piercings. Up until then my wardrobe was filled with all my mother’s old fifties sunray skirts and satin stilettos; now I had PVC trousers and mohair jumpers that looked like a web spun by a spider the size of a guinea pig. Yet I was a ridiculous creature who knew all about Jacobite battles and a fifteenth-century woman called Muriel but nothing about The Ruts’ tour dates. It would have been churlish not to be proud of Cawdor, yet our upbringing had made an anachronism of me. Of all the things drummed into us, the only ones with any application to the modern world were the importance of being polite to strangers, and a sketchy kn
owledge of trees. Even now, whenever I cross Hyde Park a list forms in my head as I pass each tree: hornbeam, plane, catalpa, ash, plane, ilex, false acacia, plane, walnut. I still get a twinge of anxiety if I pass one I cannot identify, and I can hear Hugh’s voice: ‘Come on, vole brain. Look at the seeds. See the bark. Think!’ I go up to the trunk and stare at it, hoping that the solemnity of my approach will somehow impart its identity. It never works; all I can ever think of is ‘TRRRREEESKIN!’ There was nothing in punk that required my narrow historical expertise or my second-rate dendrology. After all the money spent on my education, it didn’t feel as if I had any credentials at all.

  After such a slow start, suddenly I was dating. My head was filled with boys, boys, boys. I trampled on other girls’ toes and had mine trampled on and realized that sex was rarely pure and never simple. And if I should ever lack sufficient remorse for any bad behaviour, my older sister was always there to remind me of the precise quantities I should be experiencing. I could not translate my own stumbling experiences with the opposite sex into a more sympathetic understanding of my father’s philandering. I never stopped longing for him to be impossibly noble and effortlessly wise. But what I wanted was unattainable. It was like hoping that Yassir Arafat would go to bed and wake up as Nelson Mandela.

  * * *

  Anyone who comes from a divorced family knows that it ruins Christmas: frosty wind makes moan. There was never any question of our parents showing a united front, although Ma would have done it for our sake; Pa preferred to keep her at arm’s distance and not be reminded of his abuse. Normally, we spent Christmas with Ma, and New Year with Pa. We knew Pa had a choice of companions, whereas Ma was still a million miles away from getting involved with anyone else again. But after four Christmases in a row like this, we lost our heads and elected to swap the visits round. It turned into a bizarre disaster worthy of a novella.

  Pa got drunk and wayward on Christmas Eve. Unbeknown to us, our mother’s Christmas neatness with saved ribbon and folded paper had made the whole thing bearable for him. Seeing Cawdor so tidy when it was open to the public made him intolerant of any sort of untidiness, unless it was his. The shiny packages spreading out from the foot of the tree just looked like mess to him. After dinner, he gave the parcels a good kick, and then became adamant that we must open them forthwith. He wanted it all cleared away as soon as possible, or he would keep on kicking. We could tell he was in a dangerous mood so we opened everything. It was a hurried, tense affair, with Pa checking the labels and then throwing the parcels at us with more force than was strictly necessary. One present from my godmother was just shards of pink glass when I opened it, posing problems as to the gist of my thank-you letter.