There were no roads within fifty miles. Kiwaiyu was not under any flight path, so the only things to see in the sky were bee-eaters, fish eagles, clouds and a billion sequin stars. On clear nights, not only did the moon cast its reflection across the creek waters, but Venus too. It was heaven, aside for the hankering for news of the wider world. The Spectator magazine arrived by dhow, months after being sent, and I would fall upon it hoovering up every column, even the television reviews. Our post was sporadic, but I had a family of keen letter writers and I loved sitting in the hammock reading all the correspondence from my family at their different points across the globe. Hugh’s letters shrank to a trickle and were all the more precious for their scarcity. He sounded happier, but with Pa it was totally impossible to tell if his words bore a true reflection of his life. In one letter he reported that they had been plagued by high winds, which had brought down power cables, leading to ‘a small but excellent firework display, and silencing the telly to Lady C’s discomposure’.
* * *
I got pregnant, and a few months before our daughter was born we built a thatched shack where she and I could shelter from the sun. Storm’s birth changed everything. She was a breech, both her hips were dislocated and she had to be strapped into a Pavlik harness that ran over her shoulders, round her chest and down her legs to little stirrups for her feet. Storm had to be in it twenty-four hours a day, and the good Doctor Pavlik had not designed it with equatorial humidity in mind. From living a totally outdoor life, suddenly I was confined indoors from sun-up until dusk with a tiny white baby. After three years of island life, we gradually reached the conclusion that maybe this was the time to leave and go somewhere else. We headed back to Willie’s home in Norfolk.
Willie’s parents wanted, understandably, to meet their fellow in-laws. My mother came and met them, but my father remained elusive. It was hard explaining to them that it wasn’t that Hugh didn’t want to meet them, he just did not adhere to normal social niceties – they were for ‘other people’.
‘I’m sure he’d come if we lived in a stately home too,’ Willie’s father said grumpily.
‘No, no! God, no, it’s nothing like that.’
But he had a point. I wondered whether Hugh would have come if they had.
I thought I might be able to solve the impasse at Storm’s christening, although yet again we were faced with mother–stepmother awkwardness. I thought, ‘What the hell, christenings are happy and brief and no-one has to stay. If we can all cope with the initial awkwardness, it will never be as bad again.’ My father sent a note in reply to my invitation. ‘It is not very likely that we will attend a christening in Norfolk next month,’ it began. And then he changed the subject to Alexander the Great. For a moment I thought about explaining that I wasn’t just inviting them off the cuff to a random christening of any old baby, but to that of his first granddaughter. Then I dismissed the thought. My parents-in-law were hurt and puzzled. They never did meet him.
I got pregnant again, but the work Willie had hoped for in Norfolk never materialized and our marriage suffered under the stress of having two babies and no breadwinner. It was becoming obvious that Willie functioned far better in the wilds than in his home country, so six months after our son was born we were packed and ready to leave for Sumba. Willie was in his element again, although I found the going tough. In Kenya, even though our friends were scattered over hundreds of miles we knew they were there. On Sumba, we did not have a single friend, and while Willie was out at sea my days were slightly lonely, chasing butterflies with two toddlers as my assistants.
Chapter 17
The trouble with closets is that they make skeletons terribly restless.
Hugh’s death in the summer of 1993 brought us back from Indonesia. Cath met us at the airport. She brimmed with quiet sadness about missing Hugh’s funeral. I ordered a wreath, left Willie with our babies and flew up to Scotland. The flight path took us over Cawdor, and the thought of the plane dipping its wings as it brought our father home made my eyes leak tears. We also flew over Kilravock, half hidden by tall beech trees, and lastly Dalcross, each castle with its specific significance in the course of our family history. I was cross-eyed with jet lag, but Colin looked after me and drove me to the graveside.
Since I had heard the news of Pa’s death, the sadness had been interspersed with adrenalin-fuelled highs, sensations that were almost as physical as they were emotional. Aside from Ma, there was no-one left above me on the family tree and it felt as if I had been shoved into the topmost branches. In my mind’s eye, this family tree was not a stout oak such as you might see on the page of a genealogy book, it was a spindly poplar that bent and shivered. Hugh’s death brought with it the sensation that we were all now, inescapably, adult, and yet, with the loss of a parent, I had never felt more child-like.
A few days later in London, White’s Club in St James’s celebrated its three hundredth anniversary. It was the party for which Pa had used up all his dying energies trying to ascertain if the Percys of Alnwick had answered their invitation, and it had now become his wake. The original guest list had not been compiled for such an event, so it was an odd bunch marking his death. The family seemed to be existing in a rarefied state of loss, and I remember little about the dinner other than seeing Margaret Thatcher looking like a Roman candle in a gold dress, holding court on an upstairs balcony and sitting next to an old Lovat Fraser friend who had been my only punk friend north of the Grampians. White’s is normally men only, but they had bent over backwards to accommodate that alien creature, woman, and had set aside several of the gents’ toilets where they had piled every shelf with enough boxes of Tampax to stock a chain of pharmacies.
The service was on 6 September, the day he would have turned sixty-one.
The shock of missing his funeral had left me craving a solemn, ceremonial goodbye. I wanted to hear his old friends telling stories about him, summing up his life and charting the highs without the lows. As the day of the memorial drew closer, however, it was becoming disconcertingly clear that the service was not going to follow the normal order. People started dropping out and Colin could find no-one who would give an address. None of us felt able to do it. William Gordon Cumming or Patrick Lichfield would have been perfect candidates, but as Hugh had rendered them erstwhile, it did not seem appropriate. The more we looked, the more Hugh’s life seemed full of people he had either cut off a long time before, or had only been friends with for a short time, and on the most superficial level. Colin made call after call, but could find no-one. When I suggested that maybe he should do it, Colin said he just could not face it. The service went ahead without any homilies.
I had clean forgotten that, because Hugh had converted to Catholicism, the whole ceremony was going to be, well, Catholic. The fact that it took place in a gothic horror off Manchester Square wouldn’t have mattered, but it was full of priests who had never even met Hugh. They spoke of him loitering with angels at the Pearly Gates awaiting the nod from St Michael. It sounded highly unlikely. These were the sorts of sentiments that would have had Hugh rolling his eyes and stifling his irreverence with a handkerchief rammed into his mouth. If Hugh was indeed at the Pearly Gates, I could only imagine him bumming a fag off St Michael. Towards the end of the service, the head priest invited the congregation up to the altar for communion, then gave a dry little cough and added, ‘For those of you who are not Catholic, it is preferable that you please stay seated during this act of worship.’ The whole service had been a series of pious, everyman brushstrokes, and the only chance to share in the ritual was subject to segregation. Angelika stood up to take her place at the head of the queue. I didn’t have the nerve to gatecrash. By now I was thinking, ‘Did I wax my legs for this?’
As the Catholics shuffled up for their transubstantiated snack, I was surprised to see Louis Grieg, a friend from Scotland, waiting in line. I knew he was a devout Christian, but had never realized he had converted to Catholicism.
When
the service was over I saw him in the porch and said, ‘When did you convert?’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t know you had become a Catholic.’
‘Oh! I haven’t, but I wasn’t going to pay any attention to that bollocks about not joining in.’
That one remark was far more in the spirit of Hugh than anything else that had gone on, and it made me laugh. I wished I had done the same, instead of leaving with a sense of complete alienation and the feeling that the memorial had failed on every level. The fact that this mood was universal made it even more depressing. The congregation spilled out onto the church steps and the general talk was what a rum, incongruous affair it had been; how little, if anything, of Hugh had been conveyed. In life he had had such a dominant character; in death he was reduced to a chimera.
Angelika had booked a private dining room in a hotel next door to the church for a memorial lunch. I stopped to talk to Uncle James who was with his two eldest daughters, Cara and a tearful Slaine.
‘Shall we go ahead and get a drink?’ I said.
‘We’re not coming,’ James replied. ‘I think we’re going to try out a little Chinese place off Marylebone High Street that Peebles told us about.’ He squeezed my hand, gave me a kiss and wandered off, sandwiched between his daughters, their arms about him.
I stared after them, until they had vanished round a corner. I was aghast. Instead of being a lynchpin at the lunch, I had to conclude that this gentle, loving man, our uncle, Hugh’s only brother, was not on the guest list. Lunch was a trial. I did not know half the people and had no energy for any get-to-know-you conversations.
The memorial had been the antithesis of what I had hoped for, and now, more than ever, all I really wanted to do was spend a few days with my brothers and sisters in a place that meant something to Pa, a place we all loved. The more I thought about it, the more a visit to Drynachan seemed to be the answer. I asked Colin if we could arrange a weekend up there. ‘I don’t know…’ He sounded vague. A couple of days later we all met up for supper at Laura’s flat and I tried again, hoping I would be able to persuade the others that it was a good idea.
‘Please, it would mean so much…’
‘It’s not that simple,’ Colin said suddenly.
‘What difficulty could there be?’
‘I don’t think Angelika will agree to it.’
‘But what could upset her about us going there?’ Colin looked uncertain, so I took a deep breath. ‘Pa is dead. Drynachan belongs to you now. Angelika doesn’t live there. Surely you can go whenever you like?’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, “no”?’
‘I mean it’s complicated.’
‘What do you mean, “complicated”?’
‘Pa has left virtually everything to Angelika. I’ve all but been cut out of the will.’
* * *
The will reading had been a couple of weeks after Hugh’s death. None of us, other than Colin and Angelika, had gone, or had even known it was taking place. Since then, Colin had kept the revelations to himself, too shocked and ashamed to tell anyone. Heirs in the primogeniture system get disinherited only in extremis; if they are so wholly irresponsible, so dissolute or so mad that the consensus is that they will put the future of the whole family in jeopardy. Colin did not have the first idea what he had done, so the contents of the will came out of the blue. Not only had Hugh leaned down and pulled a gigantic rug from beneath his son, he had stigmatized him too.
As they left the solicitor’s office, Colin had said to Angelika, ‘Why didn’t Pa tell me?’
‘You never asked,’ she had replied.
We sat around the table stunned. Colin was extremely uncomfortable. If he had been able to, he would probably have remained silent on the subject for ever, just like our great-grandmother Joan had done over the shame of her syphilitic husband. What weighed most heavily upon Colin was that when he became the 26th Thane, Cawdor was lost to the family. No wonder he had felt unable to read a homily about Hugh in church. My mourning came to a shuddering halt. ‘Oh Pa,’ I mumbled. ‘You total cunt.’
Hugh had neither earned nor bought Cawdor. It had taken no talent to receive all this extraordinary privilege other than being born the correct sex. These possessions were entrusted to his care, but Cawdor was not his. Not only had he shafted his own son in the will rewrite, he had shafted the previous twenty-four generations. This stony treasure had survived six hundred years of wild Scottish history, including a crucial battle fought on its doorstep, yet it took only one drunken rake to piss it away. Hugh’s life achievements amounted to a list of perfidies: demolishing Stackpole; selling Golden Grove and all the Welsh land; brutalizing his first wife; rebuffing his extended family; discarding friendships like used tissues; indulging in fabulously injudicious sexual adventures; destroying his health; and then revealing his most wretched act only after his final exit. We would never know what he had so urgently wanted to tell Colin as he lay dying in hospital.
There was a further chilling discovery. Hugh had not changed his will in a fit of steroid-fuelled rage during his final decline, he had done it seven years into his second marriage and then spun a web of lies, constantly interrupting Colin’s attempts to get his architectural career started by demanding his presence ‘to learn how to run the place’ when he had already secretly signed over Cawdor to his wife.
Like a lot of sons, Colin had rebelled against many of his father’s ways. He didn’t drink much and he had never smoked; he had the beginnings of a career; he had one girlfriend at a time; he was a pretty steady guy. He loved his father. To be fair, Colin did have one really irritating fault: he was a useless timekeeper and missed a lot of planes. Maybe that was his crime. But throughout our childhoods Hugh never missed a chance to stress that, twentieth century or not, we were all subordinate to the institute of primogeniture. Emma, Laura and I had been laboriously groomed to expect nothing. As girls we were outside the grand scheme of keeping everything intact for the heir, blah de blah de blah. We had heard it ad nauseam, so the indigestible irony for us girls was that while Pa had insisted that his daughters remain disenfranchised, he had broken the archaic tradition he had championed by handing everything over to a woman.
I had never realized before that there is clearly an art to writing a will. For a man who had so much, Hugh’s will was an amazingly curtailed document, only one page long. Its effect was to tie Angelika and Colin together in a way that seemed almost consciously designed for maximum friction. Cawdor belonged to Angelika along with any ‘Welsh’ furniture from Stackpole, which included most of the portraits of our forebears, yet the ‘Scottish’ furniture belonged to Colin, thanks to a trust that had thwarted any desire of Pa’s to hand that over to her too. At Drynachan, it was the reverse: the house belonged to Colin, but the furniture was left to Angelika. In a stroke, Hugh had effectively torn the estate apart. Not surprisingly Colin felt that his behaviour was under scrutiny and feared that failure to comply with her wishes would ensure that Cawdor never, ever returned to the family.
Two good things happened to Colin. Firstly, he married Isabella, an Irish beauty and his long-term girlfriend whose loyalty and level-headedness was unwavering. She was a good businesswoman, and despite the distraction of having three babies in hectic succession she was instrumental in helping him return to viability those parts of the estate entrusted to him and therefore outside the reach of the will. The second good thing was Uncle William. Horrified by what his former best friend had done, William stepped in and gave Colin emotional and practical support that lasted until his death.
Though the punishment had fallen on Colin, the rejection hit us all. Why had Hugh done it? What were his motives? During the first year, we were confused and out of kilter with one another.
I went up to Drynachan filled with questions that were almost too painful to ask. After lunch on my first day there, Angelika met me in the sitting room and said, ‘I have been giving certain matters my serious cons
ideration.’ She paused. ‘It must be a little bit sad for you girls, in the sense that you have not been given anything of your father’s, yes?’ This empathy made me ever so slightly unsure. I said nothing. ‘I am prepared to give you something of your father’s,’ she continued. ‘I have already done the same for your sisters. You can take one of his fountain pens.’
‘Thank you.’ I was not sure if I should voice my immediate reaction – but what the hell. ‘I have a problem with Pa’s pens. He was right-handed and I am left, so we wear our nibs down at different angles. I won’t be able to use it. Would it be OK to have something else instead?’
She walked out of the room. I took that to mean no.
The desire to understand Hugh’s motives for disinheriting Colin haunted me. Questions circled tediously, the mental equivalent of grinding my teeth. The big picture was out of focus and the small things irritated – like why, on my last visit to Cawdor before his death, had Pa bothered to rant about Ma coming back to live in the north when he had made Angelika the chatelaine? The curiosity was two-way, and while we were frustrated in all our attempts to determine the underlying cause of Hugh’s decision, it seemed that our stepmother was equally keen to know about us. Any mail sent to me at Cawdor would be forwarded, having been opened first and sellotaped back down. It took some time, but eventually all my mail avoided Cawdor and the only letters that ever arrived for me there were those of a postal stalker called Gary, a man who lived in a secure mental hospital somewhere in the Wirral. Gary was a complete stranger to me, but three or four times a year he wrote me rambling letters that recalled the wonderful times we had had together in Holland Park along with a couple of Siamese cats. I was grateful that his letters went to Cawdor rather than his knowing where I lived in London, but nevertheless I was irritated by the thought that his letters might be scrutinized before they reached me. I preferred to keep my lunatic private. Eventually, in a flash of inspiration, I wrote a letter berating Angelika for opening my mail, then I sealed it in an envelope, addressed it to myself and sent it to Cawdor. Having opened it, she forwarded it to Colin saying, ‘As you know I open everything that comes in my mailbag without looking at who it is addressed to,’ and that she thought I ‘needed psychiatric help’. Perhaps that was why Gary was drawn to me.
A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle Page 25