A View to a Kilt

by Wendy Holden

Mimi was a close friend of la patronne, Ginette, a woman never without a tea towel on her shoulder, a pair of clacking white mules and a plain blue dress accessorised by glasses which swung on a chain of orange plastic links. Also ever-present was Ernest, an elderly working transvestite with dyed blond hair, a moth-eaten fur coat, bright pink blusher and outsize high heels. His legs, in fishnet tights, were planted wide apart on the ground, huge hands clamped on his pastis, as he urged her, on the subject of wine: ‘Faut pas boire l’etiquette!’

  ‘Never drink the label!’

  Under Ernest’s careful tuition (by dint of nipping drops from the bottles that stood in circular retainers in a stainless-steel counter behind the bar) Laura had learnt how to taste wine for what it was, and to cut through the snobbery that surrounds it.

  It was thus, in this humble Paris bar, rather than any fancy sommelier course, that she had learnt to recognise grape varieties, grow familiar with the regions of France, understand how a modest Vin de Pays or VDQS could – sometimes – match an AOC or a Grand Cru.

  Ernest would have fallen right off his outsize high heels to see all this, Laura was thinking as she watched Sandy gather up an armful of bottles. ‘Now – supper!’ she announced, and led the two of them back upstairs.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lulu and Vlad sat in the steam room of the Sheep Dip. It was all hot, misty and swirling.

  Low, mystical, Enya-esque wailing filled the air, along with a pleasant scent of pine. Three huge stone bowls of steaming water stood on pedestals down the centre of the room, which was ancient and vaulted; the original foundations of the demolished Castle McBang, in fact.

  Not that the former medieval denizens would have recognised it now, had they been able to make it out through the vapour. Pine benches ran down either side, and braziers of hot coals stood in each corner, with a wooden bucket and ladle on hand for raising further steam. The walls were indented with a series of niches, each with saloon-style wooden doors.

  Staring at the damp stone floor, Lulu wondered what the sticky reddish stain was. She’d have that blast-cleaned when she took possession. And even allowing for her sunglasses, it was murky down here. Some good downward spots would sort that out, though.

  But above and below her plans for improvement, her mind ran constantly on the splendours of Flora MacDonald’s corsets upstairs. They were perfect. She had to have them. Vintage was so in, and if South’n could see her sporting the majestic underwear of his fabled ancestress…

  Lulu’s eyes suddenly misted over. Their marriage had being going through tough times of late. But here was something to bring them back together. As tightly as possible, until the last breath was squeezed out, in fact. She wondered if the cabinet Torquil had shown her was locked.

  Meanwhile Vlad, impeccable as ever in a snowy white towel, was going through the finer points of the sale. She had a tablet to hand and, in between wiping the steam off it, was insisting on listing every last thing Lulu thought she was buying. In Vlad’s view, Torquil McBang was far too slippery to leave anything to chance.

  ‘As I understand it, madam wishes to purchase the estate, comprising the land, the fishing rights.’

  ‘On spot,’ nodded Lulu.

  ‘The restaurant lavatories, including paper and soap. All the lightbulbs. The website address McBang.com. The @Banger Twitter handle. The postbox. The phone box. The bothies. The Wee Cripple pub.’

  Lulu tried to concentrate. This would all have to be gone through when she met Torquil over dinner, but her mind kept slipping off to reconsider the perfect stitching, the precise placement of the hooks and eyes. Flora’s corset was exactly her size. It wouldn’t hurt to try it on. See what it looked like. Feel what it felt like. For one teeny-tiny, weeny-winy minute…

  Vlad cleared her throat gently but firmly. ‘The mountains.’

  With a reluctant sigh, Lulu brought herself back from Flora MacDonald’s underwear. ‘Oh yes. The mountains.’

  ‘The famous McBang’s Tables,’ Vlad went on. ‘So-called because of their flat tops. They will, if I may say so, make a magnificent backdrop to the estate. Another consideration is that, as few other rock stars appearing at the Land of the Purple Haze actually own their own mountains, they give you the edge, as it were. In more ways than one.’ Vlad permitted herself a modest smile at the joke.

  She was hurt when Lulu did not respond – she usually roared with laughter at her factotum’s rare witticisms. Vlad was alarmed to look up and see that her mistress was gone. In the gloomy distance, the exit to the hotel’s reception was swinging open.

  Vlad remained where she was. It had been a long time since she had enjoyed a proper steam and it was good to relax. This Scottish trip had been hectic. She shifted herself slightly on the stone seat and stared, as Lulu had, at the stain on the floor. It looked exactly like fresh blood to her, but of course it couldn’t be. Neither she nor Lulu had injured themselves.

  Vlad was a phlegmatic, pragmatic character and not given to flights of fancy. Even so, as she stared at the crimson puddle, the memory came back to her of what Torquil McBang had said about his ancestress Scary Mary. Bangers might be crazy and modern in appearance but it had been built on the site of an ancient fortress which, like all ancient fortresses, had its secrets.

  And hadn’t he mentioned that the room in which she sat was the very oldest part of the castle? As the rest of the place had been demolished, it followed that all the memories the vanished rooms had once held had come down here. The Sheep Dip, in other words, was a distillation of the castle’s history. No wonder it had such a powerful atmosphere. Vlad could sense it, despite the equally powerful smell of pine. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could almost hear it.

  The butler breathed in deeply: atmosphere, pine essence and history all at once. And sound, yes. She was almost certain she could hear something. Voices coming to her down the centuries. Transmitting themselves through the ether of the years. Calling from the distant past.

  Vlad opened her eyes and frowned. She could definitely hear voices echoing and faraway.

  But were they from the distant past? They sounded as if they might actually be from the present; from the here and now.

  Perhaps it was Torquil and Lulu, but Vlad didn’t think so. It was coming from the wrong direction for a start. They were upstairs, in the hotel, whereas the voices seemed to be coming from somewhere beneath her.

  Vlad hurried to the bench where she had placed her butler’s uniform, the black tie neatly positioned on top, and quickly put it back on. Then she walked carefully around the room, trying to detect where in the ancient stone chamber the voices were the strongest. There were four niches fitted with louvred corral doors and she paused at each one. Three of them were silent; obviously just changing rooms fitted with a bench and a wall of lockers. But in the fourth, echoes could certainly be heard. Desperate echoes, as if lost souls were imprisoned in some long-forgotten dungeon.

  Vlad narrowed her eyes. Thanks – if that was the word – to her East European military career, she had had a certain amount of experience of lost souls and long-forgotten dungeons. If she could find these and get them out, she would. She stood to attention briefly in memory of departed comrades, then pushed open the louvred doors.

  Seconds later she had placed experienced hands on the lockers, felt about a bit and pressed. There was a click, then the entire wall of lockers swung away to expose the entrance to a passage. A cold, old smell, full of darkness, dust and age came rushing up at her.

  The wailings were much louder now. In the impenetrable black they sounded ethereal and ghastly. Whoever – or whatever – it was, was down there. Vlad squared her shoulders, raised her chin, felt in her pocket for her Estonian Army knife-cum-torch, then set off into the dark.

  Meanwhile, in the hotel lobby, Lulu too sensed a click beneath her fingers. She had definitely felt the lock give. A deft jiggle of an unbent hairpin was all she now needed to do to release it completely.

  There. She o
pened the cabinet’s glass door and reverently picked up the pink satin-covered whalebone from where it lay amid a jumble of ivory chess pieces and brooches with people’s hair in.

  Lulu shrugged off the Jacob Marley and stood briefly naked in the moonlight streaming through the modernist front windows. She stood for a moment with her eyes closed, relishing the pulsing warmth of the heating playing about her bare skin. Then she took the corset and set to work. A few tweaks later, she was trussed up in Flora McDonald’s finest. It fitted her like a glove, encasing her curves in a satin caress.

  Lulu reverently stroked its silken sides. Truly, like the decor of the hotel surrounding it, it was the work of a master. Flora MacDonald might be a historical heroine, risking her life for Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that, blah blah blah, but what Lulu really admired about her was her eye for a top piece of underwiring.

  She twirled into the lounge bar, where earlier she had spotted a full-length mirror near the thrones. Lulu admired herself full-frontal and side-on, tossing her hair and admiring the way the ensemble projected her assets to the fullest possible extent. She wished South’n Fried could see her now. He’d be crazy with lust. He loved her in complex underwear.

  In a minute she would take it back. But not yet. The fit was marvellous, the details superb. It seemed to be cut especially low so a tiny smidgeon of nipple could be seen. What a minx Flora MacDonald was, to be sure…

  A footstep. Someone was coming in. Torquil, presumably. He would not be happy to see her wearing the family treasure, Lulu thought.

  On the other hand, she was buying this place and the corsets would certainly be part of the deal. If asked to explain herself by an indignant laird she would simply cite the ‘try before you buy’ maxim.

  Whoever had come in did not sound like Torquil, however. His patent crested pumps had clicked on the concrete floors, whereas what she could hear now was a slithering sound. A sinister slithering sound.

  Was it, Lulu wondered, the ghost of Scary Mary McBang, Torquil’s tortured and imprisoned ancestor? Her heart leapt in terror beneath the satin, but then, quite suddenly it calmed down again. Lulu realised, rather to her amazement, that she was not afraid in the least.

  Perhaps Flora’s corsets yet contained some of the Jacobite heroine’s legendary courage. She glanced down at them; they seemed to be gleaming with a strange power. Magic underwear? Lulu had several pairs of knickers of this name, which claimed to pull you in where needed. But none of them seemed as truly magic as these corsets. She had the sense that, while she was wearing them, nothing could harm her, rather like King Arthur when he was holding Excalibur.

  The slithering sound got closer. She could hear breathing now, as well. Any moment whatever it was would show itself. Lulu raised her chin. She was ready.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Sisters… Are Doin’ It For Themselves!’

  Deafening and distorted, one of Sandy McRavish’s Memorex C90 mixtapes burst into proto-feminist life through the medium of a vast vintage ghetto blaster, the sort which would fetch a tidy sum at a hipster upcycling shop in Hoxton.

  Laura stared at it. With its silvered plastic and go-louder design, it struck an odd note in a dining room straight out of a Hammer Horror film.

  A long wooden table, made of a single vast plank from what must have been a tree of prehistoric hugeness, stretched away like the M1. An M1 spattered in wax from two vast candelabras, each fashioned from a mighty pair of stag’s antlers. Their points were tipped with silver holders for the tapers which provided the only light in the room. In the gloaming, Sandy’s heart-attack lipstick glowed ethereally, along with the faint gleam of her archetypally Sloaney single string of pearls.

  A series of dimly visible portraits of McRavish chiefs of yore adorned the stone walls, their eyes seemingly fixed on the diner. It was easy to see why Sandy shouted so much. You needed to, to make yourself heard across the vast wastes. Sandy was at the table’s head and Laura at its foot. Between them rolled miles of wood and for a certain distance, miles of cutlery. At least six different forks, and a matching number of knives, made up Laura’s place setting, along with a crowd of glassware.

  As the ever-smiling Mrs MacRae materialised suddenly out of the darkness, Laura jumped. The housekeeper gave her a reassuring look as she lowered a Meissen tureen and said something Laura didn’t understand. ‘Venison stew with what?’

  ‘Och, mashed neeps and champit tatties,’ replied the housekeeper cheerfully.

  Oh, turnips and potatoes. Just what she needed to soak up all the booze.

  After Mrs MacRae discreetly made herself scarce, Laura discovered that sustained conversation with Sandy had challenges other than physical distance. There was a time-delay factor too. It seemed that the lady laird had not been following the news from ‘down south’ (i.e. the rest of the world) since the era reflected in her clothes choices. Sandy, in other words, was completely ignorant of any event since the mid-eighties. It was like talking to a Sloane Ranger version of Rip Van Winkle.

  ‘What do you mean, the fall of the Wall?’ Sandy said at one point. ‘What wall?’

  She was shocked to hear that Checkpoint Charlie was no more. Home deliveries by Waitrose were an additional revelation, and Sandy had no idea who Meghan Markle was.

  ‘What does Diana think of her?’ she wanted to know.

  Laura paused. In the opening rounds of their conversation she had taken great care not to mention either that Duran Duran had split up nor Princess Diana was deceased. She had feared that the dread news regarding both eighties icons might be too much for Sandy to handle. Especially given she was three-quarters of a fine Gewurztraminer to the good.

  ‘Everyone says she’s a breath of fresh air,’ Laura said eventually, hoping that Sandy would assume the former Princess of Wales was one of the ‘everyone’. Fortunately Sandy had now moved on and was reminiscing about rag-rolling courses at the Inchbald. Laura had no idea what she was talking about. Hairdressing? Dancing? But there were other more important issues to discuss.

  ‘Why is the phone line so bad?’ she asked. ‘And why don’t you have any radio reception?’ If cables could be laid under the oceans and satellites revolve in space, surely it wasn’t beyond the wit of man to stick a mast up in Glenravish?

  ‘Yes, but the masts always fall down,’ Sandy explained earnestly as a smiling Mrs MacRae placed the pudding before them. ‘It’s the ground, you see. It’s either too boggy or too hard, I can’t remember.’

  ‘Och, it’s both,’ said the housekeeper comfortably. She had returned without Laura noticing; admittedly, given the crepuscular conditions, this was not difficult. She was smilingly shaking her head as if this separation from modern communication was a mild inconvenience and not a life-changing disaster that had left Sandy marooned in the age of Wham!

  Not that Sandy seemed to mind especially. She was now bopping in front of the ancestral fireplace to ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’.

  Finally, as their silver forks lay beside the remains of Mrs MacRae’s summer pudding, a dish Laura had never seen the point of and regarded as more punishment than dessert, Sandy got on to her own story.

  Her tale was punctuated by bursts of music from the cassette player, her favourites of which would cause her to crease up her eyes, throw her arms out, click her fingers to the beat and jiggle her shoulders from side to side.

  ‘Girls on film,’ Sandy was singing.

  They were well into the first bottle of Saint Bris, which, having been stored in the cellar’s cool, was the perfect temperature for immediate, rapid quaffing.

  ‘So, Daddy popped his clogs bless him – he’s buried in the cellar, in fact.’

  Laura now remembered, in the gloom of one of the vaults, the outline of a sarcophagus straight out of the final scene of Romeo and Juliet. So that was who it was.

  ‘It was in 1984, height of that ghastly miners’ strike,’ Sandy sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Laura said politely.

  San
dy looked at her, a rueful flash of clogged blue Dior mascara. ‘So was I. I had to up sticks PDQ. Get out of Chelsea and hit the Highlands.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Laura, beginning to see where this was going. After the wild times Sandy had referred to, this must have been a culture shock.

  Right on cue, Culture Club came wailing out of the ghetto blaster. ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ sang Boy George. Sandy blinked back a tear, then continued.

  ‘Didn’t have a bean to my name. Plenty of assets, yah – but no cash to speak of. No job, either. I’d been training as a pot-banger; learning how to make my own mayonnaise and beurre blanc at Prue Leith’s cookery school.’

  Laura thought about her own cookery school, where she had learnt to make those two same staples of French cuisine. Her grandmother’s tiny Paris kitchen. ‘And I was teeing myself up to marry some rich and dreary banker or dismal but loaded captain of industry,’ Sandy continued.

  ‘How awful,’ said Laura, thinking how objectionably mercenary and surrendered-woman this was. Then she remembered, guiltily, that she had been teeing herself up to do the same thing when she thought Sandy was a man.

  ‘Yah. Rather glad I didn’t, really. They were all sexist pigs. It really was the effing stone age. Massive mobile phones, massive egos and small penises. Sex was like having a wardrobe with a small key sticking out fall on you. Hated that.’

  Laura was working out quite how to reply to this when The Human League came on and saved her the effort. ‘Don’t You Want Me…’

  By the time the song had finished, and Sandy had stopped dancing around, Laura had worked out how long ago the wardrobe with the key had last fallen. ‘But that was…’

  ‘Yah, nearly forty years ago. Tell me about it. Things haven’t exactly gone to plan.’

  Gary Numan was now singing about cars. From her position at the head of the table, Sandy shot the ghetto blaster a look.

  ‘Yah, and thanks for the reminder, Gary. About cars. Because that’s another thing. You see, I don’t drive, so I’m stuck here and I never get out. That, and the rubbish radio reception, is why I live in a time warp.’