A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  We woke up the next morning to an irascible father and an unstructured day that stretched away before us and left us wondering what we could do to keep out of his way and fill the long hours. Church was out. Our family presence at Cawdor kirk had continued for a couple of years after my grandfather’s death, until one day Pa stomped out mid-sermon. My mother shrugged and signalled for us to stay put until the service was over. At lunch, Pa declared that he would never go again, because the new minister’s sermons were ‘too boring’. I wasn’t sure what had made them more boring than all the others we had listened to, but his days of regular worship were over. Christmas Day turned into a shapeless day of boredom, and then Ma called. Her mother had died. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the emptiness of the day was now filled with guilt.

  The following Christmas we reverted to the old plan of spending the New Year in the north – except this time Pa cancelled abruptly at the last minute. When I asked him why, he replied curtly that he had accepted ‘a better invitation’ in France, so with only days to go before New Year’s Eve we all scrabbled to slot in with friends. Pa rang a week later, saying he was now back, and invited us all out to lunch in Soho. Emma had left for Kenya to stay with her new boyfriend, David Marrian. Only Colin and I were still in London, so we trudged off, still feeling slightly peeved over the way he had ditched us.

  We met in one of those crowded Chinatown restaurants with windows obscured by flattened mahogany-coloured ducks hanging from butcher’s hooks. Steam belched from the kitchen and the Chinese staff shouted what sounded like death threats at one another. When Hugh arrived, he was with Angelika. We made desultory conversation. Neither of us mentioned that his cancelling our New Year had been upsetting; that would have been talking about our feelings, and there was always an unspoken pressure to keep to the surface of things. Halfway through the meal my father heaved a buffalo sigh and said wearily, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  Something about his tone made me guess immediately what it was. It must be about Sandy. After his old dog Wasp died when I was nine, my father had got another Labrador. He was named Sandy after a neighbouring laird. When the human Sandy was invited over to shoot, my father would delight in screaming ‘Sandy! You bloody stupid arse! Fucking come here!’ and observing the man’s disquiet. Sandy the dog had once been able to sail over a five-bar gate, but he had grown deaf and arthritic; the last time I had seen him he had had great difficulty getting up. He must be dead. My father was about to break the news.

  ‘Is it … is Sa…?’ But I couldn’t bring myself to finish off the sentence. I stared at my plate and prepared myself for the blow.

  Hugh cut across my dread. ‘Angelika and I have got married.’

  The information settled into every pore. So that’s where he had been – just getting married. This news came with zero warning, without telling us, without inviting us. Just getting married. To Angelika. My plate engrossed me. I willed Colin to say something, but his plate had got him in its grip as well. Neither of us spoke. I had not had even the slightest inkling that this was coming, and later I learned that he had not even bothered to let Ginny, who was still on the scene, know either. Well, at least Sandy was still alive.

  Eventually I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  My father said in a tight, irritable voice, ‘I didn’t need you lot lowering the tone. Now, who ordered the sizzling pork?’

  And the subject was closed.

  * * *

  Even if both parents escape from a divorce with their hearts intact, children rarely do. Stepfamilies are, by definition, a product of loss. Things in our family got off to a famously bad start. Later, this famously bad start came to be regarded as a highlight. I tried to let Emma know, but she was out of touch for weeks. When she did get the news, her letter from Nairobi sounded far more composed than I had been.

  I got a letter from Ma after the New Year informing me about The Happy Event betwixt Pa & A. Ye Gods it’s Bad News. I was so cross – I sat about for days thinking up nasty telegrams but in the end never sent one – we then went on safari for two weeks to the coast & when we got back Pa had sent a letter telling me all. Sometimes he’s amazingly insensitive, he said that you’d been ‘curiously miffed at not being told in advance’. What a nightmare. Pa’s really so stupid sometimes. Hey ho.

  Angelika did not have children of her own, but their place was filled by a pugnacious pack of squat Jack Russells. When they were puppies you could pick one out of the skirmish and then pull them all off the ground one by one as they gripped onto each other’s legs like a string of fanged sausages. Angelika had a long rawhide whip that she used to separate them. Every time we came to Cawdor we hid it, but whenever we returned it was back in its place behind the door in the flower room. Dogs could be thrashed, but Hugh was the one who really needed a strong hand.

  The urge of any new wife is to stamp her own personality on a home, and things began to change very fast. All the fruit and vegetables were grubbed out of the kitchen garden and replaced with a holly bush maze and a hideous fountain made by one of Angelika’s friends. My mother’s old bathroom was the first to get a makeover. When we arrived home for the Easter holiday, we were surprised to find a gleaming new lock on the outside of the door, like the loo in a boarding house. When I plucked up the courage to ask my father about the new lock, he gave me a tired look and said, ‘You are forbidden to defile that bathroom further.’ It was a wonder there was no doorbell, like the one Jack had by the courtyard door leading to his loo. It was a couple of years before the bathroom door was left unlocked one day and I peeked in. The old ivy tendril wallpaper had been replaced with salmon-pink, crushed suedette, and the cheval glass had gone to make way for a fitted mirror surrounded by panto bulbs.

  Our mother was a banned subject. We never once managed to have a family discussion with Pa, let alone attempt to resolve our recent past. Angelika took up Ma’s old habit of dressing in matching outfits with Hugh. She was a much more conservative dresser, so it was a cashmere jacket and the ubiquitous black polo-neck sweater rather than the floor-length velvet coats my mother used to wear. Issie Delves-Broughton, an observant stylist friend of ours, had noted the recurrence of this low-key uniform and one day came over for tea with twelve friends in tow, having instructed each of them to dress in a black polo-neck as a silent joke. To their delight, Angelika and Hugh did not disappoint. Fifteen people stood sipping champagne in the Tower Room looking like a guild of jazz critics, their hosts appearing to notice nothing strange at all.

  We slowly worked out that we were expected to write thank-you letters for having us to stay; we were put in Coventry by Pa if we forgot. One time when I came home, instead of being put into my own attic bedroom I was told I would be sleeping in a guest bedroom at the far end of the house. Before I left to go south again, I decided to pop into my own bedroom for a moment. The door to my little staircase was locked, but there was another entrance to it on a lower floor so I went up that way. Behind my bed was a walk-in cupboard that stretched the length of the wall. A light came on automatically when the door opened. Someone had left it ajar. I walked across to shut it and could see that the cupboard no longer contained my things but was crammed with clothes, hats, shoes, scarves and costume jewellery – all Angelika’s. My room had become her overspill wardrobe. I had to suppress an irrational urge to pour live yoghurt into every pocket. Cawdor had a dozen attics and eighteen other bedrooms, including two just beyond mine that had been unused since I was a child. I closed the cupboard and left the room.

  It seemed pointless to speak out about my bedroom being annexed, but I wrote down how I felt in my diary. When I got back down to London, the diary was missing from my suitcase. My thank-you letter included a request for its return. It arrived in a small packet with a tiny note from my father that read ‘dew dew…’ (‘well, well…’ in Welsh). So presumably he had taken and read it. There was no further communication for four months. A letter from Colin reassured me I was not missing muc
h. Pa was making his life difficult too.

  Cawdor is really grisly. I have invited Bill J to stay, which could mean Pa disinheriting me for having such awful friends. Pa is a little grumpy and has just this evening called me ‘an arrogant sod’ for changing the TV channel without asking, which seemed rather hypocritical. However, I can never retaliate because I usually burst into tears before I can get the words out in time – so I didn’t bother.

  Whatever feelings Angelika inspired in us as together we explored every cliché of the stepmother myth, it was clear that our father was smitten. She had a neck like a gerenuk, and we all knew he had a terrible weakness for them. He blamed all his former ills on an unhappy marriage, and put all his previous bad behaviour down to Cath’s provocation. But however much the first flush of love with Angelika gave him hope, all he had done was slap a pile of icing on top of a fungus-filled cake. This belief, that with a new bride he was a changed man, meant that he avoided any confrontation with the werepig. So why would it go away? Angelika made an admirable attempt to control his drinking. To start with it was only on rare occasions that Hugh drank until he fell over, but his appetites remained essentially the same as before, only the behaviour became much more covert.

  Meanwhile, the redecoration of Cawdor continued apace. To us who had lived in it for years, the place seemed dangerously close to becoming a museum rather than a home. In the drawing room, the sofas and chairs stood opposite one another in millimetre-perfect lines, like the foyer of a pompous Bavarian hotel. All the upholstery was uniformly navy blue and restuffed to within a feather of exploding. And the bathroom door lock was only the beginning. Hugh now clinked about the castle like a prison warder. Large metal rings the size of neck chokers dangled at his waist. The rings carried umpteen keys for drawers, cupboards, doors, gates – his heart. It was a look that had some comic potential.

  While Angelika set her stamp on the decor, Pa was busy in the Tree Room, having just uncovered an old dungeon. The oldest walls at Cawdor varied in thickness between two and four feet, but the wall at the southern end of the Tree Room was curiously thicker. My grandfather had long suspected that there was a lost chamber, but when he had got a mason to drive a crowbar between the stone joints near the ceiling, they had found it solid. While the walls were being repointed, my father asked the mason to try again; this time they pushed the crowbar in lower down, and it penetrated a large space. A small passage was excavated. Inside was a bottle-shaped dungeon, called an oubliette, twelve feet long and half as wide with a tiny grilled window for light and ventilation. The only access, long since boarded over, had been through a trap door in the Tower Room above, meaning that the prisoner got dropped down the ‘neck’ and could only be released by being hoisted back out.

  My father was in his element. After days spent in the Charter Room where all the family archives were stored, he eventually dug out two possible references to it. One was a letter from James III of Scotland, written in the fifteenth century, instructing the Earl of Huntly to persuade the then Thane of Cawdor to release William Rose of Kilravock from his ‘prison’. (A few years after this, Muriel’s father John was married off to the Rose daughter Isabel to heal this neighbourly rift.) His second find was some papers pertaining to one Callum Beg (Callum is a diminutive of Malcolm, and Beg means ‘little’ in Gaelic), a notorious local poacher who had been caught stealing a sheep – a crime that received the death penalty in the 1680s. He was brought to Sir Hugh Campbell and locked up with the ill-gotten sheep – another sign that there was some sort of prison arrangement within the castle walls. Just as Pa had a soft spot for Hamish Davidson, the mink liberator, Sir Hugh had one for Callum. He made sure his prisoner had a sharp knife and then conducted a long interview with the sheep’s owner. In the meantime, Callum had time to butcher the animal and throw the pieces through the prison bars to the Thane’s pack of hounds, which had been left conveniently in the courtyard outside the dungeon. With no sheep there was no evidence, and Callum walked free. Rapid recidivism led to Callum’s capture by the Roses, and once again the neighbouring family got woven into the story. Sir Hugh galloped off to Kilravock and begged for Callum’s life, but this time in vain. They hanged Callum and buried him in a field.

  My father took me to the Tree Room to show me the box of relics he had found among the dirt and rubble at the bottom of the dungeon. There was a small comb made of bone, a thimble, several mouse skeletons and the leather sole of a tiny shoe. It seemed unlikely that a man like Callum Beg would keep a comb handy; in fact, every object pointed towards a woman’s belongings, except for the tiny leather sole, which looked like it would fit a seven-year-old.

  ‘They can’t have thrown children into the dungeon, can they?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not a child’s shoe,’ my father said. ‘I sent everything down to the V&A to see if they could put dates to anything. They have said it is definitely a lady’s shoe.’

  ‘It’s so small.’

  ‘Well, it shows you how wee people were.’

  ‘But even so, why was a woman in the dungeon?’

  ‘It was probably a wayward daughter, thrown in and forgotten about. They weren’t called “oubliettes” for nothing.’

  The idea of my ancestors imprisoning women was not an encouraging image. ‘Not a lot has changed,’ I joked. ‘In those days they locked daughters in, and these days you lock daughters out.’

  Hugh did not laugh, and making light of the situation did nothing to change it. If he accepted a distant dinner invitation while we were staying at Cawdor, he would order us to leave and check into a local hotel. We were not allowed to sleep the night alone in the house. I imagined it was in case we suddenly felt an urge to set light to the soft furnishings and spray the tapestries with fire accelerant. Hugh always expressed surprise when I opted to catch a train south rather than have dinner for one, and only the Golfview Hotel to burn down.

  * * *

  Our stepmother never talked about her past, but I gradually gleaned that she was born in Czechoslovakia, and her parents had fled to Africa during the war. She had grown up on a farm in Rhodesia.

  At eighteen, Angelika escaped her dusty African backwater and moved to Paris. Once she had mastered the language she went into public relations. One of her best friends was Marie-Christine Reibnitz. I imagined that the two women had much in common, and both burned with an ambition born out of families that had been displaced by war. Marie-Christine was born in Czechoslovakia too. The Reibnitz family moved to Australia after the war, and later to a fruit farm in Mozambique. When we met at Dalcross, Angelika had only recently come across the Channel and had managed to swing a date with Prince Charles. Marie-Christine, meanwhile, tilted her sights further away from the throne and ended up as Princess Michael of Kent.

  Chapter 15

  There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

  Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

  When she left Cawdor, Hugh had given Cath the basics to furnish her new home, but after his remarriage he made demands for their return. My mother obliged, but put her foot down when the list extended to the wedding presents that commemorated a marriage she had not wanted to end. Hugh wanted back linen that had been personalized with their initials entwined in red stitching on the corner of every sheet; she refused. He wanted a pair of diamond clips that Jack had given to his new daughter-in-law, but unless Hugh was planning to wear the clips himself, Cath did not see why she should hand them over. She did agree to return the clips, but only to Colin’s fiancée – whenever he got engaged – not to Angelika. Sometimes my mother would refuse to take the phone calls, in which case we got it in the neck instead. After Pa had yelled at me during yet another round of Chinese whispers, a letter came in which he apologized for trying to use me as a conduit for his conversations with Ma rather than doing it directly, saying he had been ‘h
orrid and boring’, occasionally going off ‘Moh’s Scale – the scale of hardness’.

  Despite his fabled generosity, every now and again Hugh could be spectacularly cheap. Ma was shattered after these bullying sessions. She was in a terrible state generally for a long time, and it took her years to pick up the pieces of her confidence. It was very hard to live with her. We couldn’t help. We just wanted to escape.

  * * *

  One rainy summer’s day, Ma and I were heading down Eaton Square towards Waterloo station where I was to catch a train to stay the weekend with Mosh Gordon Cumming. I was holding a bunch of mimosa Ma had bought to give to a friend she planned to visit after dropping me off. We were driving along in a comfortable silence, listening to Villa-Lobos playing on her car stereo. I was watching a money spider lowering itself in little spurts down a gossamer strand hanging off her rearview mirror. We were not allowed to touch the cobwebs in her car, or pick at the moss that had formed on the rubber around the window frames; she was fiercely protective of the wildlife that was gaining a tiny foothold in the corners of her car.