A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  ‘Liza.’ My mother had a special clipped voice when something embarrassing was being raised, especially if it was of a sexual nature.

  ‘Yes?’ Immediately on edge, and staring out of the passenger window wondering if we were about to tackle contraception or a similarly irksome topic.

  ‘Has your father … has Pa … ever … made love to … you?’

  Oh God. My gut fell like a crashing elevator as my thoughts flipped guiltily to the night Pa had come into my bedroom three years earlier.

  ‘Please tell me. I won’t be cross with you, darling,’ she added softly, kindly.

  ‘No!’ I said, louder and angrier than I intended. The ‘no’ filled the car in a way that the ‘no’ had so singularly failed to do in my bedroom. It made me stop for a moment. And then, gabbling, ‘How long have you thought that?’

  She paused. ‘I would say … about … three years.’ I continued to look out of the window and told her about the night when Pa had woken me. She said, ‘Oh good, I am relieved,’ and the conversation moved on. I did not understand that she was trying to be gentle enough for me to tell her something terrible. I had nothing terrible to tell, other than a scary, confusing dawn visit, but why, I wondered, hadn’t she asked before? Why hadn’t she come to my rescue if she had misgivings at the time? And the travesty of the phrase ‘made love’ – did she imagine it would be something I might have desired? That it would have been anything else other than an incestuous rape? I was horrified. ‘About three years’ she had said. The accuracy of her suspicion split us apart with laser precision. My faith in Ma as sane, honourable and utterly fair had never faltered, but until then I had not fully grasped to what extent her views had been bent out of whack by life with Pa. It took a decade for our relationship to repair after that short conversation we had while driving east down Eaton Square in a car smelling of mimosa.

  Not for the first time I was cross with the wrong parent. Or rather, with the only one with whom I dared to be cross.

  * * *

  Emma and I had grown closer during our parents’ long break-up. There was an unspoken pact that we would try our damnedest to act as padding for the Smalls, who were no longer so small. Colin’s exams went well and he went up to Oxford; Fred and Laura were still at school and both eventually went to the University of East Anglia.

  Emma and I, along with her Kenyan boyfriend David, moved into an attic flat in a Victorian redbrick house near World’s End in Chelsea. I liked the area; it reminded me of listening to the shipping forecast on those long childhood car journeys from Wales to Scotland. ‘Biscay … Finisterre … Sole … Fastnet … Lundy.’

  ‘Where’s Finisterre, Pa?’

  ‘It’s at the end of the world.’

  Hugh hardly ever came to visit us there – too scruffy – but he showed a vague patrician interest in it. He wrote to me comparing our attempts to decorate it with Edward Lear, whose Croatian servant, when asked for a progress report on his new house, replied, ‘him go on like one old tortoise’.

  At nineteen, I fell in love. Christopher was the most handsome, awkward boy I had ever laid eyes on. He moved into our flat and our first year together was spent in a daze of head-over-heels bliss. The next three were spent reconstructing, wholly unconsciously, a pretty accurate replay of my parents’ relationship. We were young and impatient so we telescoped it all into a fifth of the time. Mostly we reprised the demise.

  Something that is seldom acknowledged is how incredibly common addiction is – maybe as high as one in three. When I was young in London, the role of drink was recast as heroin. Heroin was very edgy, very punk, and scores of my peers got into it. I loathed what it did to people: the nodding out, the scratching, the lies, the cracked voices and the needle-prick pupils. I wasn’t born to be a junkie; I was a drinker; I came from a long line of drinking folk. I drank until I could drink no more and then stopped lest I invite the werepig into my waking dreams. I went off to New York to do a course at NYU, and on my return Christopher had started using heroin. Despite compelling evidence that our affair was in tatters, I did the same thing I had done with my father: I hung on and prayed for a miraculous improvement. I couldn’t conceive of ending my relationship with my own father, and applied the same thinking to Christopher. My efforts to keep him away from heroin were futile, although I did discover that by far the best hiding place for a crash helmet is in the oven. Christopher eventually checked himself into rehab, but my first authorized visit was also my last. The advice of his counsellors was that if Christopher was going to start over it should be without any reminders of his past, and that included me.

  Word reached Hugh that I was heartbroken by the perfunctory ending of our affair so he wrote me a letter that meant well, but it was clear he had not really been paying much attention at all. He tried to make me feel better by pointing out how tedious ‘cocaine’ made people because it caused delusion of ‘genius’, and saying he hoped ‘Richard’ would find the strength to ‘discard his crutch’. Cocaine and heroin aren’t that easily confused; one is a fluffer, the other a cosh. Cocaine is the drug of choice for hyper party-animals who want to get a whole lot happier. Heroin is for depressives who like to hover on a velvety cloud of deathlike torpor. But what really jumped out of the letter was ‘Richard’. Four years with Christopher and now he was Richard? If nothing else, the letter made me laugh out loud for the first time in weeks of post-romantic gloom.

  * * *

  When we were at home Angelika had a slightly better rapport with Emma than with me, and set about unilaterally trying to make a suitable ‘match’ for her. It was all a hopeless failure. She simply did not want someone else’s choice, even if he was a) grand or b) rich. Hugh was still writing me letters fretting about cars and accidents and who I drove with: ‘Your overdraft is certainly not your fortune, so your face may have to be its stand in.’ It was meant well, but the message was rammed home with such metronomic regularity that it maddened me. His one gift to us girls would be to desperately steer us towards a rich husband; he was incapable of thinking in any other way. He had absolutely no way of talking to us about jobs as he had never had one. In fact, a vanishingly small number of people in our circle of family friends seemed ever to have been employed.

  * * *

  After a couple of years, my relationship with Angelika became so tense that one weekend at Cawdor she approached me in private to air our difficulties. I opened my heart and tried to explain to her how I was sad that I could no longer think of our home as a home. She was equally honest. Instead of the stilted politeness that blighted every visit, we had been frank with each other for the first time. It felt like we had reached a watershed. I returned to London feeling uplifted, and for the first time hoped that we would reach some sort of understanding and that Cawdor could be a happy family home.

  A month went by and I heard nothing from Pa. I thought little of it. My father often went silent for long periods. He could be extremely awkward on the telephone. Sometimes when he rang he would kick off the conversation with ‘Well, whadda you want?’ as if it was me who had made the call – and at a most inconvenient time for him. Six weeks went by, and still I thought nothing of it. They often went away without telling us.

  Through the course of each year Hugh arranged his life so that he moved between three houses, the furthest house being about ten miles away from the other two, which were only a couple of miles apart. From late August to early November he and Angelika lived at Drynachan and hosted shooting parties. From November to April they lived at Cawdor. When Cawdor opened up to the public for the summer months they moved to Auchindoune, a handsome house just beyond the Big Wood at the foot of the bonfire hill which belonged, through a series of trusts, to Colin. It was a good size for the son and heir to raise a family in due course, and to be on hand until the time came to take over Cawdor. But while Colin remained unmarried, Hugh made a unilateral decision to enjoy the usufruct of it. Whenever they moved they packed a pantechnicon’s load of luggage that
included pot plants, the silver lid for Angelika’s marmite pot, the dog whip, champagne crates and all the other baronial bric à brac they could think of. This endless shuffling around this small, obtuse triangle caused them both a great deal of self-induced stress. As Hugh put it, ‘Today is flitting to Auchindoune day, on which we lose 2 baskets, one corkscrew, all underwear, the temper (twice) and Faith.’ Or, as Joseph Brodsky said, nobody is as bored as the rich, because money buys time, and time is repetitive. When they weren’t traipsing between Cawdor, Drynachan and Auchindoune, they shuttled to Paris, where they had a smart Left Bank apartment. For their stopovers in London he bought a flat in Belgravia, a much grander place than his old pied-à-terre. I went to the London flat twice. The Paris apartment was off limits.

  September arrived. It was my twenty-first birthday. Among the cards on the doormat lay an envelope written in my father’s elegant italic script. He often forgot our birthdays, so I was thrilled that this time he had not. I even wondered if he had remembered the thousand-pound bet not to ride horses he had wagered me a decade earlier – a naive hope: when I did finally remind him, he denied all knowledge of it. I saved his letter until last as they were always a delight and any funny snippets must be read aloud to Emma. I noticed for the first time that the intertwined Cs that headed his writing paper had now sprouted a crown. The letter read: ‘What I shall give you for your birthday is exactly what you deserve – nothing.’ It turned out he had been fuming about my conversation with Angelika; he said that I should realize ‘honesty is not blatant tactlessness’, and that I had abused his love. We were back to square one. What I had thought had been a helpful conversation turned out to have been a diplomatic disaster.

  After this, it was off to Coventry again until after Christmas, when Pa wrote to patch things up. I went up to stay again, but I realized that I must stick to superficialities. In fact, superficiality had become the order of the day. Cawdor stopped being a place that was a hub of the local social life. Our relations had not been welcome for a long time, and now most old friends and neighbours got frozen out too. A big surprise was the end of Hugh’s friendship with Patrick Lichfield. Even more surprising was the reason: Patrick had been caught straying, and his wife had left him. He was devastated and looked to his old friend for support, but Hugh was not just unsympathetic, he was highly censorious. If Patrick was an unexpected departure, then the severing of his link with William Gordon Cumming was incomprehensible. William had divorced Cath’s sister E so there was no longer any conflict of loyalties. The two men had been like brothers and had used each other’s houses as second homes since their teens, yet for the last two years of his life Hugh refused even to speak to William.

  The few who remained friends from his first marriage were a posy of art dealers who flattered Hugh by slavishly dressing in his jazz critic style. And there was a stream of new European friends spending their time, it seemed, comparing notes over where they went boar hunting. Whenever my father wrote about it, it sounded deadly to me, all that cold and wet, but as usual he turned it into a joke: ‘a curious sport … and mildly dangerous because wounded pigs and excited Frogs are not reliable’. And when the house guests had finished talking about boars, they moved on to the partridge shooting in southern Spain; whose yacht, and whose chalet; who was there, who, who, who, and how rich? The wives, who appeared to me as groomed as show ponies, wore tastefully neutral tones in cashmere and clacked with jewels. I thought they were brittle, dull and self-referential. One lunchtime I heard statements like, ‘One simply must see the Alhambra at dawn in November to understand fully the resonations. Last time we went, our party included [King] Juan Carlos [of Spain]. He was very simpatico and truly erudite.’ To an outsider these were conversational culs-de-sac; but I thought that between themselves, it was an elaborate game of verbal bridge designed to elicit envy and admiration. To play, you had to meet any boast with a parallel boast, but to win it seemed to me you had to trump with a showstopper. Something like, ‘Ah, Juan Carlos! He dropped in on us only last week. He is so spontaneous like that. I said I forbade him to leave without taking a crate of our divine new pressing of olive oil and sleeping with my grandmother.’ The only other way to win was to bring in a note of lofty censure. ‘Isn’t it so humiliating the way that every social climber throws herself at Juan Carlos? One can tell who they are because they all make him pose outside their houses so they can display the photographs in every room.’ You could almost hear the thwack of silver against walnut as the picture frames were banged face down in half a dozen minds. On that occasion the atmosphere around the dining-room table bristled with airs but precious few graces. Once upon a time Hugh would have beaten a rude and hasty retreat from people like this. Not now.

  Chapter 16

  I’m off to the concrete sub-surface bombproof shelter, where I hope to hold out after the general collapse of life, as we know it.

  Philip K. Dick, ‘War with the Fnools’

  Over the next few years all the Campbell offspring, with the exception of Fred, moved abroad. Colin went off to study architecture in New York, where he stayed for seven years, commuting back when duties rose above desire. Laura overlapped with him there for four years. I went to live in Kenya, and some time later Emma moved there too. It was not a premeditated exodus, but a life without the obligation to see our father and his wife so regularly was much easier. Fred, by contrast, soldiered on and visited Hugh frequently. Despite the fact that he was now at university, large areas of their relationship had remained static since the days when he was a barrel-shaped ‘Box’ who only ever said ‘unhunhuh’. Hugh generally regarded him as the congenial family clown. Pa could not see that Fred was never going to be suave in his mould; he was one of life’s innocents. Doctors say that a chronic tickle is more torment than an ache. It was all very well to be laughed at when in high spirits, but Hugh’s refusal to recognize any of Fred’s depths began to look like a kind of open-ended persecution. Fred, out of all of us, was the most serious. He was assiduously green in all aspects of his life, long before it caught on with a wider public. He hand-washed his clothes in his bathwater. He rode a bike and took trains rather than burn up fossil fuels. Letters from him arrived on old household bills. He recycled everything he possibly could.

  After graduating from UEA, Fred enrolled to read architecture at Edinburgh. While there, a girlfriend he adored ended their affair. He was crushed. Student friends urged him to visit a church where a charismatic priest was attracting huge congregations. Fred went along, and when the preacher told the assembled crowd that if there was anyone ready to embrace the Lord they should come up to the altar, he found himself overcome with emotion and going up to receive Christ into his life. Initially I was baffled by his rebirth as a Christian, but as soon as I gave it a second of thought it looked like a perfectly logical solution for the predicament he was in. With a broken heart and a father who was capricious in his affections, he had found in God an unconditionally loving authority who was never drunk or hungover. He wasn’t actually there, but because of that he was always present. His conversion to Christianity gave Fred solace, but it gave Hugh more ammunition to mock. When Fred wrote from India telling him of his intention to be baptized when Ma came out to visit him, his response in a letter to me was ‘You could have knocked me down with an earthmover. I hope the mother doesn’t drop him in the aisle.’

  There was once a tradition in titled families that second sons went into the Church. It was an acceptable way to earn a living outside commerce, which was not. The custom was long defunct, but in Fred it had revived, not as an alternative career, but to keep him sane.

  * * *

  My mother had had family connections with East Africa since her Uncle Doug moved out there after the First World War. He lived in a higgledy-piggledy sprawl of a house crowned with billows of bougainvillea and honeysuckle on a cattle ranch near Mount Kenya. Ma and Aunt E travelled out to visit their uncle and aunt every couple of years, and on the occasion when Emma accomp
anied them she had met David Marrian. When, after a couple of years, they got engaged, they decided to marry in Kenya. There was no way on earth Emma could or would marry at Cawdor. Angelika and Ma still had not ‘met’ since Dalcross and Emma could not bear for it to happen at her wedding. She was pretty confident that Pa, who had never yet shown any signs of an obligation towards time-honoured acts of paternal support, would not come.

  In the weeks before their wedding David took us on safari to the Mara, a landscape that achieves naturally what Capability Brown did through long-term planning and careful planting. The only place that had ever given me that same sense of stately emptiness was Scotland. But this was warm. At home, a post-lunch trudge-about was often damp and sometimes dull. Africa opened its gigantic mouth and sank its teeth deep into my brain, into the ancient lizard part where the phone is off the hook to reason and will power. I fell completely in love with it and was very envious of Colin, who blithely tagged along on David and Emma’s honeymoon before setting off to travel back to Europe overland. The trip took him two months, during which time Hugh pestered him frequently. In a letter Colin wrote:

  My life is not without excitement – I am going to the Sudan tomorrow – in fact, there was a bit of melodrama – the day I got my visa Pa sent a cable saying that I had to be back in the UK by March 31st to sign some document. It was probably one of his ploys because Emma rang to say I’d gone to the back of beyond already, to which he replied he was going to contact the border guards, the embassy & James Bond to get me back.

  When I went back out to Kenya for the second time, it was not with any intention of staying, but to keep Emma company when she went out to see David, who had flown out from England on his own a month earlier. He was working on a commission to paint a large mural in a hotel on Lake Naivasha. Hearing of our plans to join him, a friend, Desmond MacCarthy, asked to tag along on his way to visit a childhood friend. After a week in Naivasha, we flew with Desmond in an old Dakota plane to the Lamu archipelago, a dozen small islands nuzzled into the Indian Ocean coastline under stepping-stone clouds paving a vast blue sky where vultures circled improbably high on invisible thermals. Dhows waited to ferry us all across the deep channel that separated the airstrip from the main island. The jetty had a large section missing about halfway along, making it impossible to reach the dhows by that route. We picked our way down onto the exposed coral, seaweed slicks and mussel-encrusted cement posts while hefting suitcases and trying to keep our balance. The majority of the Dakota’s passengers were bleeding discreetly by the time we reached the boats.