‘Well, the SWRI has landed on the shores of Fife,’ said Mr Tait, ‘and caused a bit of a stir there. The local men are terribly old-fashioned in some respects – I daresay it’s just the same here – and to listen to some of them you’d think their wives were off out to supper and a show.’
‘When in fact?’ I prompted.
‘A perfectly wholesome gathering of respectable married ladies and girls, to discuss matters of domestic interest and learn handicrafts,’ he said, sounding like a pamphlet. Hugh said nothing. ‘And some of the womenfolk themselves are just as bad,’ Mr Tait went on. ‘One of my older parishioners, a wonderful old lady, came begging me to stop “thon sufferer-jets” from pestering her. She said she had not been off her farm except to church and market for forty-three years and she was not about to start.’
‘Remarkable,’ I murmured, although my decades at Gilverton had taught me that it was nothing of the kind.
‘So while I daresay there would have been a fair bit of interest in a great many topics, even suffrage itself, the whole thing is having to creep along on tiptoe. Talks on infant nutrition, don’t you know, and home-made lampshades. For next month, my daughter tells me they are trying to find a speaker to address “The Household Budget”.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I suppose it’s better than nothing. Men are suspicious, right enough. And prone to discontent.’
‘Dandy,’ said Hugh, and I turned to him. He looked at me out of innocent eyes. ‘You could do that.’
‘Do what?’ I asked, frowning. For a moment I thought it was a clumsy attempt at a joke, implying that I could make a man suspicious and discontented. I soon realised, of course, that it was much worse. He bared his teeth at me and turned back to Mr Tait.
‘Dandy here could do a wonderful talk on managing a household budget,’ he said. ‘She’s a whizz at it. Aren’t you, my dear?’
‘Hugh, I hardly think my languid remarks to cook, butler and maid are quite what Mr Tait’s good ladies are looking for.’ I laughed a tinkling little laugh, but it turned rather dry towards the end.
‘You could scale it down,’ persisted Hugh. ‘You could extrapolate from a large household to a small, surely. The principle is the same.’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Mr Tait. ‘If you have a flair for it.’
‘Oh, she does,’ said Hugh. ‘She certainly does. You won’t be surprised to hear, sir, that things have been tighter and tighter every year since the war, the same as everywhere,’ – Mr Tait inclined his head in gentle sympathy – ‘and yet what Dandy manages to squeeze out of her dwindling housekeeping . . . oh, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you: new clothes, a little motor car, extra staff. I don’t know,’ he finished sternly, ‘how she does it.’
I was blushing now to the roots of my hair. So he did suspect something. Luckily, Mr Tait took my blushes to be modesty, and he went as far as to lean over the table and pat my hand.
‘It’s nothing to fear, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘Just a village gathering, and your name on the list of speakers would help no end in quashing some of the suspicions for good. Can I tell Lorna that you’ll come?’
I was trapped, unless luck was on my side with the calendar, so I asked the date.
‘Now then, let me see,’ said Mr Tait, reaching into an inside pocket and drawing out a slim diary. ‘November, November . . . It will be Tuesday the eleventh.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Hugh. ‘There won’t be any problem with that. Mid-week, absolutely nothing to hold you back, Dandy.’
He was right. I knew he was.
‘I shall have to check my own diary,’ I said. ‘The eleventh is ringing a distant bell.’
‘Very well,’ said Hugh. ‘Take Mr Tait to your sitting room after luncheon and make quite sure.’ I was astonished. Where was Hugh finding these depths of cunning? Of course, I had had no intention of taking the good Reverend with me. I had thought to go to my sitting room, count to ten, and come back with an expression of deep regret and news of an engagement in town, but if Mr Tait were standing right there beside me I could not possibly look at a blank diary page and pretend to find an appointment there.
‘I’ve no idea about this,’ I told him again. ‘I’m bound to make a fearful mess of things.’
‘Come to the October meeting first then,’ said Mr Tait. ‘It’s a hospital sister. You’ll pick up some good hints from her.’
Hugh was practically stroking his moustache and saying heh-heh-heh like a pantomime villain by this time.
‘When is the October meeting?’ I asked, sensing defeat.
Mr Tait once again flicked through the pages of his diary.
‘Sunday the – oh, but it won’t be Sunday, of course. And I would doubt it would be Saturday. So probably Monday the thirteenth. A week on Monday. I can telephone to you this evening and make sure, of course. But I would imagine it would be on the Monday. They always have it at the full moon.’
Hugh looked rather startled and I am sure I blinked.
‘That has some unfortunate associations, does it not?’ I said. ‘I don’t wonder that the men are suspicious of that.’
Mr Tait looked confused for a moment and then his face split into a grin, his crescent-shaped eyes dancing.
‘For the light, my dear Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘To light their way there and home again. These are simple countrywomen, remember. They have no little motor cars, no matter how prudent they are.’
After luncheon, after the caramelised orange pudding which was quite a success with Mr Tait, being hot and sweet and stodgy as many men require their puddings to be, he followed me along the passage and through the breakfast-room to my little sitting room in the south-east corner of the house. By habit, I walked over the thick breakfast-room carpet rather than around it and stepped very gently on the four feet of polished boards between its edge and my door. This is usually a sensible plan, since otherwise Bunty can have whipped herself up into a frenzy of excited whining at my approach and is likely to hurl herself upon me as I enter. On this occasion, looking back, I might have been as well to make a little more noise. Her answering din would have reminded me of her presence and would have prompted me to warn Mr Tait. As it was, I made no sound at all and I can only imagine either that he was unusually light on his feet for such a comfortably proportioned gentleman or that for some reason he was wearing India-rubber-soled shoes. Anyway, I opened the door, telling him over my shoulder that it would not take a minute before we could rejoin Hugh in the library for coffee, and at the sound of my voice Bunty, who had been curled on the blue velvet chair, snapped to attention to stand with her forefeet on its back and her head, as a result, towering above ours and let out a tremendous, welcoming Howwf!
Mr Tait took the name of our Lord squarely in vain and then blushed, rubbed his jaw with a forefinger and apologised, laughing. I had already decided that I liked him, but from that moment I determined that I wanted him as a friend, even if a talk on household budgeting was the price of securing his friendship.
I was disappointed, then, a moment later to see in my engagement diary against Tuesday the eleventh of November two entries, short but unmistakable. Wreath 11 a.m., said one; Fitting, 2 p.m., Perth, the other.
Here was the excuse I had been ready to invent, waiting actually in existence for me. Unless . . .
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Tait,’ I said. ‘It seems I’m busy on the eleventh of next month.’ He was teasing Bunty, running the toe of his shoe up and down her tummy as she lay wriggling and whining with pleasure on her back on the hearthrug. I have always felt that Bunty is an excellent judge of character and although she is never exactly stand-offish with anyone – Dalmatians never are – this level of instant and total submission only strengthened my own view of Mr Tait as a good egg. ‘But I’m wondering,’ I went on, ‘will they really have the meeting on Armistice Day? Wouldn’t it be rather . . . ?’
‘Rather what?’ said Mr Tait.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to make it sound light. ‘Rather disrespectful
, I suppose. Rather ungrateful. Would these villager women really want to abandon their husbands and homes on that day of all days and go to a public meeting?’
He stopped teasing Bunty at that and she rolled over onto her side with a sigh and lay looking out of the window at the bird-table on the lawn, her tail thumping the carpet.
‘I’m surprised at you, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘Truly I am. A young woman like you with such old-fashioned notions. I cannot understand where everyone is getting the idea’ – he spread his arms wide and looked around the room as though for inspiration – ‘that the SWRI is a hotbed of socialists and suffragettes. I really cannot.’
‘No more can I,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest that it was. But I’m afraid if you’re sure the eleventh is the day then I shall have to decline your invitation. I’m laying a wreath at the service in the morning.’
‘But you’ll have plenty time to get down to Fife after that,’ said Mr Tait.
I was debating with myself whether to agree, cancel my fitting and face Grant’s wrath or make up a more serious appointment to account for my afternoon when his demeanour suddenly changed. He sat down heavily on the blue velvet chair and put one hand on each tweedy knee, leaning slightly forward with the manner of one about to explain something terribly important to a rather backward child.
‘I want you to come to the meeting most particularly, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘I meant to ask you even before Hugh . . . dropped you in it, shall we say?’ My eyebrows rose at that and I smiled.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I assure you that no matter what Hugh would have you believe, I am no housekeeper.’
‘But you have other talents,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I’ve been hearing about them from an old friend of mine who recommends you very highly. Very highly indeed.’
I closed my diary firmly. Dresses (and Grant) be damned. I had a case.
2
If one considers this kingdom of His Majesty’s, stretching from rosy, lazy Somerset and the like all the way to the stark, scoured rocks of Orkney, it is tempting to conclude that harshness and despair rise like the mercury in the glass the further north one goes (with a sharp jump over Hadrian’s Wall, of course) and to imagine that a trip to Fife, lying south of Perthshire, would be a little step towards the soft shire of girlhood and home. To think this is to make, however, a fundamental error about the nature of Scotland and of Fife, and to miss the part that the east plays in the scheme of things. Perthshire is snugly in the middle and is on the way to the Highlands, where people drink whisky, wear tartan and kick up their heels. Fife, by contrast, is at the edge, almost all coast, and east coast at that, chilled to its stony heart by the haar and, I have always thought, by its own conviction that chilly is best. I was once at a christening in Fife, and I overheard an old woman, of the type who will haunt christenings if there are no funerals to be had, suck her teeth and say: ‘Aye, first breath – beginning of death.’ Ever since, that has summed up Fife for me. So, I did not foresee much jollity as I motored down there that Monday afternoon. October afternoons are never very cheerful no matter where one passes them but I fully expected the little village of Luckenlaw, which was my destination, to make Gilverton in October seem like midsummer in Zanzibar.
I had just passed through the Burgh of Falkland, tucked under the north slopes of Falkland Hill, and because of that quite the most gloomy place one could imagine at this time of the year, and I now set my sights on the distant laws. There were three of these laws running west to east, smack in the middle of Fife near its southern shore. (It should perhaps be explained that a law, in these parts, is the name for a cone-shaped hill, isolated and therefore conspicuous like a hill in a child’s painting, but I resent having to explain it, or rather I resent being able to explain it. That is, I fiercely resent the many times in my married life when I have been subjected to such outpourings on the topography and nomenclature of Scotland’s landscape that I now have the explanation all to hand.)
I thought, as I approached, that Kellie and Largo Laws were not classics of the type, being rather asymmetrical and littered around with little ridges and outcroppings like leftovers that the law-maker had neglected to tidy away. Between them, however, was the Lucken Law, in every way the most splendid of the three. It was the highest, almost perfectly conical – looking like a molehill on a putting green the way it rose up from the uncluttered fields around – and then there was its title. All three laws had furnished much of their surroundings with names, of course. Largo Law to the west had three villages, Upper (or Kirkton of) Largo, Lower Largo and Largoward, and a sandy shore named Largo Bay. Kellie Law to the east had no village but, in compensation, boasted the rather grand Kellie Castle. The Lucken Law, however, had not only that impressive definite article – it was always the Lucken Law – but also Luckenlaw village due south of the hill, and a quite breathtaking array of farms, which spoke to the absence of imagination in the Fifish spirit as could nothing else. Over Luckenlaw, Hinter Luckenlaw, Wester Luckenlaw, Easter Luckenlaw and Luckenlaw Mains were nestled in about the law itself like chicks around a mother hen. The big house – and there is always a big house whenever there is an otherwise inexplicable village and a farm called the Mains – lay to the north and was called, inevitably, Luckenlaw House.
The house and park, just like Falkland village, were quite cut off from what daylight was left by the great brute of the hill which rose up before them, and I mused as I drove past that it would be well into spring before the sun shone upon its gardens or into its windows again. I could only hope that the inhabitants were the type to take pleasure from irony, for had I inherited or married into that house – and surely no one would ever have bought the place – I should have called it anything but luck. On these points, as on so many others, I was soon to find out that my assumptions were mistaken and my conclusions quite wrong.
I skirted the hill, passing solid farmhouses squarely built from blocks of pinkish grey stone and attendant cottages made of the same stone in rather rubblier and more heavily mortared pieces, and eventually turned off to take the lane into the village. There were not, here, the crow-stepped gables and red pantiles of the pretty villages on the coast, but it was a pleasant little place; a school and schoolhouse to the left, a row of cottages with a post office on one end to the right, and a handful of houses built in pairs, set around a green with a cenotaph at the far end, last year’s faded poppy wreaths still at its base with another month to go.
A gaggle of small girls were busy with a skipping game but they let their rope fall limp and gazed at me as I approached, one or two women as well coming to look out of doors or windows at the sound of the engine. I waved, slowing as the lane narrowed to skirt the green before it led up to the kirk and manse a little way on. One or two further cottages could just be glimpsed straggling upwards, but beyond them the lane ended at a gate into a field. This, then, was Luckenlaw. I swung my motor car into the open gates of the manse just as Mr Tait and a young woman of the same comfortable build and smiling countenance, who must be the daughter Lorna, came out onto the step to greet me.
‘No Bunty?’ said Mr Tait, as I stepped down. ‘I’ve been telling Lorna here all about her.’ I was sure he had, but I have learned from bitter experience that Bunty’s absence is the only thing that makes any hearts grow fonder of her and so, while someone who has not seen her for a week can think it a pity that I have left her behind, I am sure that that same someone, faced with Bunty exploding out of the motor car after the constraint of a two-hour journey, would roll his eyes and think: Oh Lord, not that dog again.
I shook hands with Lorna and she made that odd little sideways gesture which is almost a bob, the very last vestige of the curtsey which began to decline in the reign of the last King George but has not quite finished its death throes yet. I do it myself from time to time when faced with someone terribly old or monstrously grand and I hoped that it was some spurious air of grandeur hanging about me which had stirred the impulse in Lorna for, lookin
g at her close up, I could see that she must be around thirty and so was almost certainly less than ten years younger than me. From a distance, one might have said she was older for as well as the comfortable figure she had a mild, wide face which seemed formed for maturity rather than girlhood and which was framed by a lot of dark hair gathered gently into a soft bun at the nape of her neck. Her nose and mouth, sharper than Mr Tait’s, must have been inherited from the mother but her eyes and appley cheeks were his and I felt a surge of friendliness mixed with a little relief as I followed her into the house.
The relief does me no credit; it is shallow and self-regarding and absolutely typical, although surely some respect is due me for its admission. The truth is that I had been working myself up into something between a huff and a temper at the prospect of this trip, and not only because a visit to the SWRI meeting and a chance to hear a hospital sister lecture on infant nutrition were so completely without allure. I was disgruntled, too, at the thought of being the guest of a young Miss Tait, with all her life before her, dreading the evidence of my own creeping middle age and the unscalable walls of my chosen path when I compared my lot with hers. One might suppose it foolish fancy for a Miss Leston as was, now Mrs Hugh Gilver, with all that I had and all that I commanded, to feel anything at all much less this churlish envy about a girl of Miss Tait’s station in life and until very recently one would have been right. My mother would have felt no stab from Lorna’s mother, I am sure, but in those days all there was were husbands and all there was to choose between one husband and another were the kinds of things which would see a Mr Gilver of Gilverton trumping a Reverend Tait every time.
Now however, these days, there was the chance that a Miss Tait, beloved child of a reasonable man, would have been to school and perhaps to college too and might be just about to plunge into a life of fun in a flat in the city or about to marry an even more reasonable man and spend her life writing books about Egypt and making frequent trips there with her adoring husband in tow. Such a Miss Tait could easily have made the Mrs Gilver whom I had imperceptibly but now undeniably become feel hopelessly ancient and humdrum by comparison, but such a Miss Tait would have had short hair and smart little pleats to her skirt or at least – Egyptologists not being known for their chic – short hair and corduroy breeches with a penknife at the belt. This Miss Tait, on the other hand, the real Miss Tait, Lorna, wore clothes which were the woven equivalents of her loose-tied bun: pale woollen garments in grey and pink, looped softly around her plump shoulders and hips and decorated only by a heart-shaped brooch pinning to her collar a silk rosebud and black velvet bow which spoke of love and loss.
Bury Her Deep Page 2
