‘Another farm.’
‘Not around here. Your husband would see to that.’
‘Miles and miles away, then.’
‘You underestimate the farming grapevine.’
‘We would be together, no matter where.’
‘Ah, yes, I can just see you marching along at my side up hill and down dale, your parasol held high to protect your beautiful skin from the sun.’
‘Please don’t laugh at me, Robert. You surely know that I would do anything, suffer anything and gladly, so long as I could be with you all the time.’
And suddenly he would be serious again. ‘I don’t want you to suffer, flower. That’s the whole point.’
‘We could lose ourselves in the city—in Edinburgh, or better still—Glasgow. No one knows us there.’
The twinkle returned to his eyes. ‘Work in the city? You mean you want me to suffer?’
Thinking of it afterwards, she realised it was a ridiculous suggestion. He was a countryman with not merely a feel for the land and its changing scene, but a love for it etched deep into his soul.
She suspected that when he did not turn up at the farmhouse during some afternoons, he was just walking or riding through the fields and hills on his own, savouring the freedom and independence that seemed as necessary to him as breathing.
Sometimes it hurt her to see him buoyantly happy, apparently revelling in his own company. She would catch a glimpse of him as she passed in the carriage with Gavin or Gilbert or Malcolm. There he would be striding easily along, perhaps cheerfully whistling, his hat on the back of his head, his gun under his arm, the collies Jess and Ben panting along at his side.
‘How can you be happy without me,’ she asked him, ‘when I am so miserable without you?’
And he could give her no answer. Except that once he tossed a poem on her lap and said, ‘I know how he feels.’
It was a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson and began:
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me.
Give the jolly heaven above,
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river—
There’s the life for a man like me,
There’s the life for ever …
She had read the poem over and over again until the last verse brought tears to her eyes.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o’er me.
Give the face of earth around,
And the road before me.
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above,
And the road below me.
The day after he had given her the poetry, she had come across him cursing at some horsemen in the most coarse and shocking way. He had seen her but ignored her and she had been forced to hasten away in acute distress, his deep voice still rasping obscenities in her ears.
Sometimes he seemed a strange mixture of coarseness and tenderness. Once she had been shocked and upset when, after making love, he had smiled down at her and said, ‘There’s only one thing better than a good energetic fuck. That’s a good loving fuck.’ She wept because she loved him, no matter what he said or did not say—or did or did not do—or what he was or was not. She tried to show how much she loved him by being as passionately loving as she could, entwining herself around him, fingers twisting in black hair, legs around legs. She showered him with kisses from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. She wound her long hair around him, binding him to her. Reverently she buried her mouth in the palm of his hand. Reverently she fondled and kissed his manhood.
And he loved her with equal passion in return. He said he knew her so well and yet sometimes, catching a glance from his grey, guarded eyes, she felt she hardly knew him at all. There were depths to him that he would not allow her to reach, no matter how she tried.
As the days, weeks and months passed and autumn changed to winter, winter to spring and summer returned in all its glory, she pleaded with him to allow her to leave Blackwood House for ever and come to him for good. But he just shook his head and said, ‘Flower, flower!’
She went on and on and eventually he said, ‘What can I offer the likes of you?’
‘I don’t want anything except you.’
‘One of us has to be practical.’
‘All I care about,’ she cried out to him, ‘is that I love you!’
‘I care about you,’ he said.
Lorianna began to feel bitter. Not at him. Never at him! She could feel nothing for him except love. But often, sitting in Blackwood House, she would look at Gavin and feel bitter. ‘Madman,’ she would think. ‘Sadist, pervert! How you have made me suffer. And might have gone on making me suffer, had it not been for Robert Kelso.’
She no longer felt she had anything in common with any of their ‘friends’, even Jean Dalgleish with her talk of good wives ‘doing their duty’ and ‘submitting to a husband’s demands’. Was that all love meant to Jean and women like her? Did they not know what love could really be like? But how could they with the solemn-faced excuses for men that they had as husbands? What could these stiff-collared, black-coated creatures have in common with her beautiful man, stripped to the waist, brown body rippling with strength as he wielded the axe in the farmhouse yard to chop wood for the kitchen fire? Or when he washed, dipping his head in the icy water of the rain-barrel and then jerking it heavenwards with a gasp like a hallelujah! Or when he was swimming naked in the river—his powerful arms, shoulders and long thighs smoothly cleaving through the water with the grace and joyous freedom of one of nature’s own creatures.
She would look at Gavin with his short slicked-down red hair with its neat side parting, his neat pointed beard and his fussy little pince-nez and she would detest and despise him.
During the past year since she and Robert had become lovers, Gavin had twice attempted to come to her bed. She had fought him off tooth and nail with all the strength that was in her. The last time when she had feared that neither her strength nor clawing nails would be sufficient to stop him, she had resorted to screaming filthy obscenities. That had stopped him all right. Apart from fearing that she would awake the whole house, he was overwhelmed with horror that she should know such words.
The next day he had tried to make her kneel with him at the praying stool. She had merely given him a sarcastic look, excused herself with a headache and rung for Mrs Musgrove before he could do anything more.
Mrs Musgrove’s big-boned, sharp-eyed domineering presence was a match for any man. Her overpowering devotion could have been an embarrassment as well as an irritation had Lorianna not been so glad of her strength as a buffer against Gavin. More and more she felt in danger of succumbing to the temptation to tell the housekeeper about her love for Robert and to ask for her help. Not to protect her against Robert, of course. On the contrary, somehow to help her to be with him for always. But some intuition still held her back, although there were times when she suspected that Mrs Musgrove must know. There seemed very little she did not know.
One day the housekeeper was sitting silently on the sofa at the foot of Lorianna’s bed, knitting as usual, when she suddenly said, ‘Men cause nothing but trouble and you will find the most handsome and attractive ones are the worst.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Lorianna was startled.
‘It has been my experience, madam.’
‘Was the man you were going to marry handsome and attractive?’
‘Yes. As a matter of fact, he was very like Robert Kelso. Every time I see that man I am reminded of him.’
Another day Mrs Musgrove said unexpectedly, ‘Watch Gemmell, madam.’
Puzzled, Lorianna asked, ‘Why?’
‘Just be careful. She is not to be trusted.’
‘Dishonest, you mean? Surely not?’
‘She would do you harm if she could. She ought to be dismiss
ed now before it’s too late.’
‘After all these years of service? And for no apparent reason? Really, Mrs Musgrove, I thought you knew me better than that.’
The woman’s sallow jowls darkened. ‘There is a reason, madam.’
‘Oh?’
Lorianna felt herself become wary. There was something ominous as well as intimidating about Mrs Musgrove’s expression, and her eyes so black they looked like pupils with no irises. The tone of her voice was resonant and harsh, although she never forgot her place and always said, ‘madam’.
‘It’s rather a delicate matter, madam, and one that might cause you distress. I suggest you leave everything in my hands.’
Broad hands like a man’s folded in front of the black bombasine waist, looked incongruous in their lace mittens.
Lorianna felt uneasy, even a little afraid. Worriedly, absently, she said, ‘I am sure I can trust you to do what is best, Mrs Musgrove.’
‘Yes, madam.’
20
Miss Viners had large dark eyes that filled Clementina with terror. But her eyes were not the only terrifying thing about her, for the governess had a morbid obsession with the dead. On their afternoon walks, which were supposed to be for nature instruction as well as exercise, they went to explore parts of the countryside where there were remains of Roman forts. ‘Roman soldiers have fought and died here,’ Miss Viners would say. ‘One might be lying under our very feet.’
Or they would visit different graveyards. ‘That black gravestone,’ Miss Viners would say, ‘is lying flat like that to protect the grave against body-snatchers.’
As they walked across the damp spongy graves Miss Viners would say, ‘Can you imagine it? All those bodies of real people under our very feet! Dozens and dozens of them—all with spirits longing to speak to us … to make contact with us.’
And then to Clementina’s horror Miss Viners would try to summon them up. Her large eyes would grow larger, her nostrils would quiver and she would stretch out her skinny arms beseechingly.
‘Members of the spirit world, allow me to be your medium.’
When nothing happened except the rustling of a bush or the sad swirl of some leaves in the wind, she would sigh and say, ‘It’s never any use in daylight; it has to be during the hours of darkness.’
Clementina longed for Alice and the close camaraderie they had once enjoyed. Alice had been her protector, friend and fellow-sufferer in a life fraught with vicissitudes, dangers and deficiencies. Then suddenly she had been summoned downstairs and dismissed. She had come puffing up the stairs, her round face scarlet, her eyes swollen with tears.
‘I’ve to pack my box and go without even a bloody character. Where am I going to get another place without a character? Honest to God, I’m done for! I might as well just jump out of that window right now.’
Clementina had not bothered about this threat, because Alice was obviously too fat to squeeze through the tower window, but the fact that she was leaving shocked her into speechlessness. She stared at Alice in disbelief as the girl packed her few belongings into a battered tin box.
‘It’s that bloody Mrs Musgrove who’s behind this,’ Alice sobbed. ‘She’s had it in for me all along. Just been waiting for a chance to pounce, so she has. Rotten, evil old hag! No wonder she never got married. Can you imagine any man taking that big Frankenstein?’
‘What’s Frankenstein?’ Clementina’s curiosity got the better of her.
‘Bloody hell!’ Alice exploded. ‘Fancy asking questions at a time like this!’
Ashamed, Clementina lowered her head.
‘A monster,’ Alice said, relenting. ‘And a lot of use that mother of yours is.’ A fresh gush of tears overflowed from her red and swollen eyes. ‘She’s bloody well ruined me for life, not giving me a character.’
Tearing off her frilly mob cap, all her unruly curls sprang loose. It was then that Clementina began to cry too. It was awful to see Alice capless and apronless, fat wobbling loosely about as she struggled to tie her tin box together with a piece of thick string.
‘Don’t leave me, Alice! Take me with you, please. Oh, please, Alice.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Alice roared broken-heartedly. ‘Would this not put years on you!’
Clutching her box under her arm, she dashed away down the tower stair with Clementina howling at her heels. The noise brought Miss Viners running from her room to grab the child and pull her struggling and kicking all the way back up to the nursery, where she soundly boxed her ears. Then, before she returned downstairs, the nursery door was firmly shut and the key turned in the lock.
Clementina rushed to the window just in time to see Alice disappearing down the drive like a little pink barrel in her striped cotton dress.
Miss Viners, as if in perpetual mourning for the dead, always wore black. A black hat decorated only by black ribbons perched above the side-braids that were tightly pinned over her ears. She wore either a long black dress or a black blouse and skirt, a long coat and black gloves even in summer. In the midst of all this black, her pale sickly face and large eyes acquired a certain ghostly luminosity.
The governess turned Clementina’s childhood into an unrelieved nightmare. Even during the mornings in the schoolroom fear hedged round her, making her shrink permanently into herself in cautious stillness.
Like a young animal which, sensing danger, freezes and is silent … so even her mind froze.
Every lesson was tinged with morbidity and Queen Victoria’s death and funeral were dwelt on with endless detail and relish. The death a few months later of the Queen’s eldest daughter, the Dowager Empress of Germany, was seized on with the same obsessive fascination. How they would be dressed in their coffins, the skills of the undertakers—everything was discussed and even illustrated on the blackboard.
At least one could be certain that they would be dead, Miss Viners said. But there were others—in the old Bathgate cemetery for instance—who, when their coffins were dug up for some reason, had obviously been less fortunate.
‘One woman’s coffin,’ Miss Viners said, her voice dropping in awe, ‘had terrible scratch marks on the inside of the lid. She had been buried alive and trying desperately to get out.’
The days were frightful for many reasons. Clementina’s frozen wits could not cope with the intricacies of arithmetic or indeed with anything that precluded instinct, intuition or imagination and required the sharpness of critical, calculating or reasoning faculties. Her mind was no longer bright and quick and clear; no amount of rapping over the knuckles with Miss Viners’ ruler could make it so. Indeed, the more punishment that was meted out, the more stupid Clementina both felt and appeared.
‘You stupid, stubborn child!’ Miss Viners would say. ‘How many times must I tell you? It’s like trying to teach a moron. Or one of the living dead.’ Sometimes Miss Viners would report her stupidity to her father and she would receive punishment from him.
After four o’clock, when Miss Viners went off duty and either disappeared into her room or away to Bathgate on some mysterious business of her own called a seance, Clementina would sit alone in the tower, her mind mercifully blank.
Effie Summers cleaned the day-and night-nursery and Miss Viners’ room while the governess and Clementina were in the schoolroom—and then cleaned the schoolroom after four o’clock. By that time she was too harassed and exhausted to suffer Clementina hanging about trying to speak to her. And she continued as she had always done to sleep downstairs in the servants’ quarters, after having had such hysterics at the mere suggestion of sleeping in the ‘haunted tower’ as she called it, that even Mrs Musgrove had agreed for the sake of peace and quiet. Clementina had hopefully sought some contact with Alice through Granny in the village, but Granny said Alice had gone to try her luck in Edinburgh and Clementina had better steer clear of the cottage in future because Granny didn’t want to be the next one getting into trouble.
‘This cottage belongs to your father, don’t forget,’ she told Clem
entina.
The days were bad enough, but it was at times of darkness that terror wormed its way into the mind and awakened it. Not so much the darkness outdoors in the garden and fields; that wasn’t nearly so bad as the darkness inside the house. No matter how many lamps were carried up from the servants’ passageway; no matter how many candles were wedged, guttering, into candlesticks, there were always dark corners and shadowy places. Even in the sitting-room or the drawing-room when she went to visit her mother, Clementina’s eyes kept straying fearfully to the black places under tables and chairs, behind screens and sofas.
But it was in the tower that the darkness was worst: around the bends of the stairs, in the quiet empty passageways, in the pitch black of the night-nursery. Stiff with terror, she would feel for the pewter candlestick with its pewter saucer and snuffer. The rasp of the match was like a sharp needle scraping over her exposed nerves, followed by the ominous wavering shadows flung out by the candle-flame in the draught.
Violently trembling in her mad haste Clementina undressed, leapt into bed and burrowed down, hiding her head beneath the blankets. Even then she could still hear the moaning of the wind or the trailing branch of ivy tap-tapping against the window pane, or the soot pattering down into the empty grate.
She was thankful for the return of summer when everything was bright and warm and colourful, when there was the cosy hum of bees and the cheerful sound of the farm-horses clop-clopping along with jingling harness.
Sometimes she walked about the hills with only the curlew, the snipe and the peewit for company, the lark rising and floating far away in front of her. Or she would wander along lanes fragrant with wild rose and honeysuckle, with the perfume of the grassy meadows wafting over the hedges in the breeze. At other times she met some of the village children and went with them all the way down to Bathgate.
That was a busy place, mostly because of the railway and the sounds of its clanking and whistling and chuff-chuffing all day long. But it was also busy with cattle on market day, when perhaps a wave of sheep like silver-grey froth would fill the streets, or cattle the colour of rich red earth. Cattle-men would herd the cows from Whitburn Road, growling coarse unintelligible noises at them while thumping them from behind with a stick, making them moo loudly in protest as their wandering, crushing, bumping bodies filled the Steel Yard before overflowing along the Edinburgh Road.
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