The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  But when Ina left the West End flat full of her parents’ textbooks and gave up her daily walks to chamber recitals in the winter gardens she did not settle for long in the red villa entertaining the cream of Glasgow’s Rotarians. She succumbed, in the winter of 1918, to the villainous influenza which swept across what seemed like the whole world, borne home by the returning troops and wiping out great swathes of exhausted humanity as though it were swatting so many flies. Young and strong, well-nourished and comfortably tended, Ina fought it and rallied but her child, a girl of ten months old, was less fortunate and as soon as the funeral was over and Ina was well enough to be moved, her husband had sold the red villa and carried her off to a hillside far from the crowds of Glasgow to clean air, clear water and – as I could attest – endless solitude.

  For six years now Ina had been convalescing at Castle Benachally, drawn up in high-backed chairs in front of roaring fires, or tucked under blankets on sunny terraces, and I had watched the fleeting pallor of recent illness deepen and settle. I had watched too as Albert Wilson’s concern for his wife and grief for his daughter had grown and twisted into something darker, something a great deal harder to name. Ina bore it with patience, even sometimes with cheerful patience, but others in the neighbourhood, with much less excuse since they were only visiting and did not have to live under the regime, soon became exasperated and stayed away, so Ina’s isolation grew and grew.

  I cannot quite say why I was not among them; I am perfectly able to summon unwarranted exasperation, but for some reason Albert Wilson’s regulations did not trouble me. I accepted sitting far across the room from Ina, shouting over to her, accepted my tea being brought on a separate tray, accepted the inevitable telegram on the morning of my visit asking if anyone in the household was unwell, or had been heard sneezing, or could feel the beginnings of a cough. I even accepted the banishing of Bunty from Benachally, despite the fact that people cannot catch distemper nor dogs carry flu. Besides, today Albert was at the works and Bunty was beside me in the little Morris Cowley with her front paws on the dashboard and her tail whipping smartly back and forth, in anticipation. She has high expectations, when taken out in the motor car just after luncheon, that she will be having saucers of milk and crumbled cake for tea.

  It was a fair drive from Gilverton to the Wilsons’ – although the estates abut along our eastern boundary – and three o’clock had struck when I turned in between the gateposts with their sleeping dogs, swept past the lodge, up the avenue and over the little bridge with the gothic folly of a gatehouse built above it, and crunched to a stop on the gravel.

  Bits of Castle Benachally have been standing these five hundred years and it has some Maxwells and Douglases to its name, as well as the obligatory legend about Charles Edward Stuart stopping off full of hope on his way down or washing up full of despair on his way back again, although at least there is no scrap of tapestry said to be stitched by his mother and her handmaidens while they waited there. (Really, if Mary Stuart had done even a tenth of what adorns castle walls in her name her life would have been the equal of any Huguenot tailor on piece-work rates – locked up for a week, bent over her needle night and day, then let out and on to the next job.)

  Despite all this undisputed history, however, Benachally had had the misfortune to be sold to an architect in the fifties and he had spread himself with no little abandon, running up towers, throwing out turrets and tacking on widows’ walks until the whole place looked like something from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Albert Wilson, I am sure, would have pitched in with fumed oak and heraldic pennants if left to himself, suits of armour at every turn on the stairs, but Ina was a calming influence upon him and the inside of Benachally was a delight. The Wilsons had been handed down no family portraits nor dubious Dutch landscapes and rather than buy them up by the yard, which they might easily have afforded to do, they had left the walls almost bare: just plaster painted in cool, powdery shades like sugared almonds, against which sat oversized vases of modern design, filled with branches, looking quite Japanese in their austerity. (I had often envied Ina Wilson’s vases of branches – willow, orange blossom, beech or holly in season – but when I tried the same thing at home against the wallpaper and etchings they looked very messy and made the housemaids sneer.)

  Albert’s one contribution to the interior was to forbid much in the way of carpets, for fear of what fusspots the world over call ‘germs’, and Bunty’s toenails sounded like castanets on the marble floor as we approached the main sitting room, so that Ina was calling her name even before the butler swept open the door and announced me. Bunty bounded in, rushed over and subjected Ina to her usual feverish hello. The butler gave me a knowing smile and drew the door shut behind me.

  ‘Won’t he—?’ I began, but I stopped myself in time. I was unsure how plainly one could talk about Albert’s peculiarity without causing offence, but I suspected that one could not wonder aloud if the butler would tell tales. ‘What a nice friendly butler you have,’ I said in hasty substitution. ‘I always think so when I come here. Mine is a fiend.’

  ‘We’re very lucky in our servants, Albert and me,’ said Ina Wilson. She was tickling Bunty and so could say the next bit without quite meeting my eye. ‘That is, Albert chooses them very carefully and pays them very well to follow his instructions and I am lucky that, despite all of that, they don’t.’

  This was a typical comment of hers: not quite admitting that she shared the general view of her husband and even saying as much as she did with such sweetness that the barb was lost amongst it.

  ‘Now,’ I said, once I was settled into my chair, ‘please explain, because my mind is absolutely boggling. I thought I was seeing things this morning between the little man and the giant man and the bear.’

  ‘It’s not a bear,’ said Ina, giggling again as she had on the telephone. I had not seen her so animated in all the time I had known her. ‘It’s a strongman. His name is William Wolf – Big Bad Bill Wolf, he calls himself – and he has a long beard and wears a shaggy suit. I’m sure that’s who it was you saw. I almost fainted when I met him.’

  ‘But what are they doing here?’ I said. Now, when Ina smiled at me, there was the usual trace of sadness in it.

  ‘Albert brought them,’ she said. ‘For me.’ I awaited further explanation; for Albert Wilson, whose sole aim in life was to keep his wife from the world and the world from his wife, to bring a circus camp right into his estate grounds seemed impossible. ‘It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds,’ she said, reading my mind. ‘You see, I love the circus. I used to go every day I could get my nurse to take me when I was a child and, in Glasgow, you’d be surprised how often you could find a circus of some description somewhere. Now, I don’t know if you know that I paint a little sometimes to pass the time? Well, recently I decided to paint some circus scenes – quite a compositional challenge, as you can imagine.’

  ‘Not to mention the horses’ legs,’ I put in. ‘Although, I suppose one could go in for very active scenes with a lot of sawdust kicked up.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ina, who was not exactly solemn but who nevertheless could sometimes make me feel, in contrast, rather flighty, ‘I happened to mention to Albert how much I wished I could see a circus again and he – silly old thing that he is – he said he would learn to juggle and wear a costume if it would amuse me.’ I raised an eyebrow, thinking of Hugh. ‘And then I joked back that we could train up all the servants – housemaids on the trapeze, boot boys turning somersaults – and that way we could have a circus right here at home without any …’ She stopped and I carried the thought to its conclusion for her. Without any strangers, Albert would have said. Without any danger of incomers bringing death along with them. ‘And then,’ Ina resumed, ‘Albert had a brainwave. Instead of turning our household into a circus, why don’t we turn a circus into our household? I couldn’t imagine at first how he could do it. I knew that all the circuses I ever saw were in the summer, or maybe at Christmas sometimes, and I had n
ever wondered about where they went in winter to wait for spring.’

  ‘Nor I,’ I said. ‘Don’t they go home?’ Then I flushed. ‘Oh. Of course. The caravans are home, aren’t they?’

  ‘They go – poor things – to what they call a winter ground. Somewhere as sheltered as they can find and as cheap as they can get it, because they won’t make another penny until the spring comes and they start the show again. The Cooke circus was camped out on some horrid bit of waste ground near the brickworks in Leith – that’s what gave Albert the idea – and so he went and spoke to Mr Cooke and said they could have a lovely woodland site, with clean water and plenty of firewood, all free of charge so long as they stuck to – you know – Albert’s rules.’

  I did indeed know Albert’s rules, as they applied to the servants. No popping into the village even on days off, no evenings in the pub, no visits to the cinema, no going to see their family if anyone in their family was ill or had been heard to sneeze or thought they could feel a cough coming on. The Benachally servants were handsomely paid but they certainly earned it.

  ‘And in a week or two – for Christmas or New Year – if everyone is in good health, they’re going to put on a show and I’m going to go to it.’ Ina beamed at me. ‘Isn’t he sweet, really?’

  ‘Except you’re going to the campground this afternoon with me,’ I said. ‘And you’ve already met William Wolf.’

  ‘Well, when Albert goes to the works, things are rather different,’ she said and her smile faded. ‘Don’t look at me that way, Dandy,’ she said. ‘He really is very kind, but it’s only the days when he’s gone that have made me able to be kind back again. So don’t look at me like that. Don’t think ill of me.’

  ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘nothing could be further from my head.’ This was true. I was not sitting in private judgement on Ina or her husband; I was merely marvelling at the rich feast of strangeness in other people’s lives, like looking down a microscope into a scoop of water from a pond. One hardly needed a circus at all.

  Still, nothing would have kept me from going to visit it and, since the rain had almost stopped, we set out on foot with me holding Bunty very firmly on a short lead wound twice around my wrist. I had no concerns about her mixing with rough company (as I always tell Hugh – a Dalmatian might be decorative but it is a real dog, not a toy) but I was sure circus dogs would be beautifully trained and would sit at their masters’ sides and look down their noses while she racketed about, trampling over tents and knocking down small children, if I let her.

  2

  The circus folk had set up camp a ten-minute stroll from the castle, choosing an excellent spot I thought as we neared it. They were sheltered from the worst of the winter winds by a steep hill to the north and by crescent-shaped arms of pine trees spreading from the east and west and almost meeting, surely planted there to force some unnatural movement of birds (although I do not pretend fully to understand the ways of the pheasant or the wiles of their tweedy enemies, any more than I see why the grouse must have their gorse and heather in such gaudy patchwork on the hilltops, ruining the view). As well as this hill and these trees, there was a burn which gurgled down in streams and short waterfalls and ended in a pool. In other words, in summertime this would have been a sunless, boggy, midge-infested hell but in December it was an oasis, since there was no sunlight to speak of anyway and boards had been laid to the pool edge until the rain should stop, the mud dry and the ground harden with frost as it must do.

  I had imagined the circus to be battened down and burrowed in, awaiting the spring, and was surprised to see the big top set up at one side of the pond, rather a small big top, frankly, but valiantly jaunty against the black pine trees, even with its wet flag wrapped around the top of the pole and the bunting on its guy ropes dripping on to the grass. It was red and white like a seaside minstrel’s coat and – like a minstrel’s coat – best seen from afar. Close up, the red stripes were sun-bleached here and there and the whole was rather scuffed and worn, rather muddy round the hem, and made me think of a governess between jobs and getting shabby. From inside it, as we walked by, I could hear a rhythmic thumping and grunting and although Ina had seemed very sure about the bear I quickened my footsteps.

  Around the other side of the pond and quite near its edge there was a plainer but just as large a square white tent inside which, upon passing, I could see upwards of twenty horses standing, deeply strawed, in trim wooden stalls; polished black beauties and shaggy cart ponies alike, each with a stuffed hay bag hung on a nail and a water bucket hooked over the stall gate in front of its nose. There was a puff of warmth from the open entranceway and I was not surprised to glimpse three lads sitting on upturned boxes bent in concentration over a game of cards, for if one could bear the reek of horse – and some find it pleasant enough to call it, straight-faced, a scent – there would be nowhere snugger than here to pass the dregs of such a miserable day.

  Beyond both tents lay the camp itself, a ring of green and gold caravans with curls of wood smoke rising from their bent tin chimneys and lamplight glowing out of their lace-covered windows into the dullness of the sinking afternoon. They were set in pairs, open door facing chummily to open door, and on some of the steps women were busy peeling potatoes or mending, tiny children peeping shyly at us from behind them. In the middle of the circle a large fire was laid, ready to light, with a sheet of tin balanced over it on sticks and a collection of girded water buckets placed to catch the rainwater at the edges.

  ‘Can you imagine living in one of those wagons?’ asked Ina, waving around the campground. It was not an exclamation, but rather a question, and she studied me with some earnestness while waiting for an answer.

  ‘Very … natty,’ I said. ‘Most … snug, I should imagine.’

  Ina nodded, satisfied with my answer it seemed. ‘We’d better call at Mrs Cooke’s first,’ she said. ‘She’s the head of the—’

  ‘Here she is again, the pretty maid!’ came a voice from the caravan nearest the big top. Bunty wagged her tail and all three of us turned towards the sound. ‘What did I tell you, first time I clapped my eyes to you? A circus face. You have a circus face as sure as I ever saw one. And here you are again.’

  In the doorway, stooping slightly under the bowed roof, was a dark woman of around sixty, I should have guessed, dressed in rather shiny and old-fashioned garments, with a smile splitting her brown face into creases and her eyes twinkling as bright as the gold hoops through her ears. How satisfying it is when someone turns out to be exactly what one has expected and looked forward to. What a disappointment it would have been if Mrs Cooke, surely the matriarch of Cooke’s Family Circus, had been an efficient little figure in serge too busy with the business accounts to pass the time of day.

  Mrs Cooke stood back and let Ina and me clamber into her caravan and sit down. Luckily, she seemed very proud of her home and so I did not have to resist having a good look round; at the lace and velvet and painted enamel and brass, at the glass-fronted cupboards full of rose-patterned china and heavy crystal, at the panels which lined the walls – surely doors hiding more cupboards although I could see no handles, at the intricate moulding on every panel which was picked out in gold and blue and which, since each panel was so small that it was mostly moulding, made the whole of the little cave glitter with gold and blue as though we had somehow got inside a Fabergé egg and lit lamps there.

  Although I am sure Mrs Cooke would not have minded, I forbore to look too closely at the box-bed beyond the draped curtains at the end, finding it odd to think that I had climbed into the woman’s bedroom before she had even heard my name, but I thought I noticed a small black dog curled up on one of the many pillows and my heart warmed to her; I always let Bunty take her nap on my bed if she is not muddy.

  All the time I was gazing around, Mrs Cooke was filling a kettle, opening the door of the stove to puff the fire to life, gathering cups and plates on to a tray, all without moving from her little padded stool, just reachi
ng out to this side and that and keeping up a good-natured commentary in her nameless, but very appealing accent.

  ‘Mrs Gilver, you say? Now, I knew some Gilvers over in Donegal, years back. Horsewomen they wurr, bred racehorses and rode them too, and they were dark like yourself there. Have you some Irish? You’ve a grand flat back to you, anyway. Ah well, you’ll be a mixture like the rest of us and best of us. I’m mostly Russian with some Irish and French – pure circus, you might say – and Mr Cooke always says he’s Scotch on account of Cooke’s Original English Circus 1750 started in Scotland, but he’s the same as me, and how could he not be since I’m a Cooke on both sides? Born a Cooke and married a Cooke and … what are you after?’

  A very small child had appeared at the top of the steps and was trembling there, looking out from under a fringe of black hair.

  ‘Come on, little Sal, speak up. They won’t eat you,’ said Mrs Cooke.

  The child did not stop trembling but put her chin in the air.

  ‘Is that a slanging buffer, missus, or a jugal?’ she said nodding in my direction, without meeting my eye.

  Mrs Cooke tutted loudly.

  ‘Don’t mind Sallie, maids,’ she said. ‘She’s not been much around flatties and she’s not five yet there. Folks that’s not circus, I should say. She’s just asking after the dog. Want to know if she’s just a pet or if she does a turn.’ Bunty, sensing that she was the centre of attention, stood up and swept her tail back and forth once or twice, perilously near the crowded mantelshelf above the stove. ‘Why don’t you take her out and see if you can get her to slang, little maid,’ said Mrs Cooke, hastily, with one eye on her brass ornaments. ‘Keep you both out of mischief.’

  I handed Bunty’s lead over to the outstretched hand and, with one brave peek up into my face, the child turned and scampered back down the steps taking Bunty with her.