They spent the rest of the eighteenth century draining fields, clearing stones, building dykes, planting trees, rotating crops, breeding cattle and sheep and generally improving their estates. They did not shirk from hard physical labour but in time they came to sweat and toil less and to supervise and delegate more, and this gave them additional time in which to improve their minds by hard mental study. A great library was accumulated, and generations of Strivens read their way along its shelves, which contained very many works of practical utility, political economy and natural history, and very few of fiction, poetry or theology.
Although Strivens, male and female alike, did fish, shoot and stalk, some becoming experts, they treated these activities as useful endeavour, not as recreation, and killed only for the pot. Other sports, such as football, swimming, boxing, shinty, athletics and mountaineering, were encouraged for their promotion of fit, healthy bodies and alert, agile minds. No Striven, however, has ever taken up the game of golf.
If they did not mistreat their tenants neither were they sentimental about them: when, for reasons of efficiency and cost, they found it necessary to relocate families, they moved them as short a distance as possible, built better accommodation for them and supported them while they acquired new skills or new trades. An almost radical streak – or a strong commitment to fair play, at least – ran through the Strivens, and they despised those neighbours who ruthlessly cleared their lands of people to make room for sheep. A Striven in the House of Commons was fiery in calling for Land Law Reform in the 1880s, and his wife was active in the cause of Women’s Suffrage in the 1890s. These were the grandparents of Rosalind Isabella, and no doubt their strong and active characters – they both lived until the 1920s – were an early influence on her own.
Other relatives – cousins, uncles and siblings – were geographers, scientists, judges, physicians, and campaigners in the fields of public health and housing. Rosalind’s father was that rare exception among the modern Strivens, a soldier: this was somewhat frowned upon because, though he strove as hard as any other Striven, the military life was not thought to be a very constructive occupation. He redeemed himself, however, by taking a special interest in military engineering, including the building of earthworks, tunnels and trenches, which was very practical between 1914 and 1918. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, exhibited enough independence of thought to express dismay, in a guardedly loyal way, at how the war was being conducted, and pleased everyone by surviving the entire four years, only to drown in 1924 while swimming in the sea near Oban.
The death duties resulting from his premature demise led to a further reduction in the acreage in Glentaragar, and the selling of a townhouse in Belgravia. His widow, although not a Striven by blood, had so thoroughly become one by nature that she declined to exchange, as she could have, the uncertain difficulties of a Highland life for a more comfortable one in London, and strove – with some success – to run what was left of the Glentaragar estate for the good of her children and the local community. Her children – Rosalind, her three older brothers and one younger sister – thoroughly approved of her resolve. They even loved her for it, although Love was not much mentioned among Strivens in those days, as it smacked of being a distraction from Industry and Achievement.
Rosalind learned to read (newspapers and the Bible) when she was four, to ride (horses and bicycles) when she was six, to swim (lochs and the ocean) when she was eight, to shoot (guns and arrows) when she was ten and to smoke (cigarettes and a pipe) when she was twelve. All of these skills she acquired at Glentaragar. She learned other things at her boarding school in Edinburgh: French, Latin, Mathematics, Botany, History, Geography, Music, Drawing, Literature and how to be a lady, the last of which accomplishments she discarded as soon as she walked through the gates of that institution for the last time, aged seventeen. It was the summer of 1932, the Great Depression was deepening, unemployment and poverty were everywhere, and the fragile economy of the Highlands was near collapse. Rosalind came home to Glentaragar, looked around and did not at all like what she saw. After three days she packed a suitcase, said farewell to her mother and took the sleeper to London.
[To be continued]
DOGS OR CATS?
Friday morning. I consult the online telephone directory. No residential number in the West Highlands is listed under Munlochy, Striven or Glentaragar. I have an address from John Liffield, but it is so vague as to be almost useless: Glentaragar House, Glentaragar, Argyllshire. I bring a map up on-screen and hunt around the countryside until I find the glen, and when I home in on it I see a small black square identified as ‘Glentgr Ho.’. I print off the right section of map and match it to the equivalent page of a road atlas. It is hard to see how any inhabited mainland location could be more difficult to reach than Rosalind Munlochy’s place of residence. Main roads shrink to B roads, B roads to unclassifieds (presumably with passing-places), and one of these, eventually, turns into what appears to be little more than a track ending at the house. Just running my finger along the twists and turns that lead round lochs and hills and across rivers and burns makes me travel-sick. Sonya had better be in a receptive and generous mood. I am really going to need a car for this journey.
We are due to meet at one o’clock in a café near her office, which is in the university area of the city and handily close to the Central Library. En route to our appointment, I visit the library’s reference room, where I hope to find an old edition of the paper telephone directory for the Argyll area. I am in luck: a librarian retrieves the relevant 1980s phone book from a backroom and this trusty old volume contains an entry under ‘Munlochy, R., Glentaragar’, with a four-digit number which, to be functional in the twenty-first century, only requires to be prefixed by another two digits and a new area code. I write down the details and am just about to leave when I think it may be worth checking if the library has any of Munlochy’s books in its lending stock. To my deep joy it does – a short memoir published in 1966 called Some Life. I borrow it and, feeling rather pleased with myself, make my way to the café and my assignation with Sonya.
Sonya is employed in an educational consultancy firm. The last time I checked she was its Administration Officer, but this could easily have changed in the interim. Periodically the firm attaches a new title to her job, although her duties have never changed in all the time I’ve known her. Broadly speaking, the pattern of her working life is as follows: her employers – two men and a woman, all partners in the business – spend their days in a continual stream of meetings in which they consult with or are consulted by other people who, like them, inhabit the field of further and/or higher education. Whenever the partners emerge, singly or en masse, from one set of meetings, they swing by Sonya’s desk and dump a load of paperwork on it, and she sorts it out for them. By the time she’s typed up notes, filed reports, made new appointments, cancelled old ones, scheduled meetings and drawn up agendas for same, the consultants are swinging by again with another load of paperwork. This has been going on since before the start of the present millennium. I am not sure that the process didn’t begin when the trio, all of whom used to be academics, heard the Prime Minister of the day utter the mantra ‘Education, education, education’ and took it as a clarion call to stop actually teaching and start talking about it instead. I have an image of them taking one ‘education’ each with a view to seeing how long they could keep passing them round without dropping them. Fortunately, Sonya is a very methodical and tidy person, so the cycle of activity I have described is meat and drink to her. She seldom complains that she is put upon, overworked or underpaid, whereas if her job were my job I would long ago have fed the three consultants, head first, through the enormous paper-shredder beside her desk. It is odd that she is so uncomplaining: my experience of her in a domestic setting is quite different.
Furthermore, the Sonya of admin and desk-tidying has a past. Don’t we all? (Well, I don’t, not really: I have a kind of lump of time that suddenly congealed in
to fifty years.) As a student, Sonya (so she has told me) was a keen member of the Drama Society. She acted a little, danced a little, even sang a bit. In the summer holidays she worked in bars and cafés and took parts in Edinburgh Fringe shows of one kind or another. There have been hints – never really elaborated upon, at least not to me – of a wild, even bohemian lifestyle. It was, so I understand, during the last of her student summers that she met the man who would become the father of her children. He was a member of a troupe of artistes appearing at the Festival Fringe. I suppose that is quite bohemian, but it ended, as my mother would have predicted had she known about it at the time, in tears.
When I arrive at the café Sonya is already seated, reading her tablet. (In olden days Scottish witches used to do this, tracing people’s fortunes in the sugary lines of the hardened fudge-like substance they made in their cauldrons. I jest. Sonya is engrossed, I assume, in a newspaper or book.) She seems relaxed. I approach quietly, like a television naturalist, and am able to observe what a fine-looking woman she is, especially when unconscious of being under observation. As I watch, she lifts a hand to tuck a strand of her long, dark hair behind one ear, and I am reminded both of the delicacy of that ear and the slenderness of her fingers. If I were in my shoes I would have to question the sanity of having so disappointed such a woman as to cause her to ask me to move out of the home we shared for ten years. But I am already in my shoes and already questioning my sanity, so there isn’t much point.
‘Hello, Sonya.’ These words leave my lips right at the moment when a nasty suspicion enters my head: that she is not engrossed in her reading material and not unconscious of my approach, and that she deliberately did that thing with her hair, ear and fingers in order to trigger the very pang of self-doubt upon which I have just decided not to dwell.
‘Oh, Douglas, it’s you,’ she says, bookmarking (not, obviously, with a real bookmark) whatever she was reading, and closing the device.
‘You weren’t expecting me?’
‘Yes, but not on time.’
Deciding not to rise to this, I do the opposite and sit down. It is true that my timekeeping has not always been up to Sonya’s standard, but factors beyond my control – roadworks on Lothian Road, for instance – have usually been to blame.
‘Reading anything interesting?’
‘A very bad novel,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why some people bother.’
Again, I resist the urge to respond. It is entirely possible that Sonya is simply saying what she feels at this moment, and not being antagonistic. Then again, she could be referring to my own literary aspirations, for although I have told only Ollie of my current engagement in the craft of novel-writing, it would be less than honest of me not to admit that there have been previous attempts. These, regrettably, have never progressed very far and, while Sonya’s critical terminology is less explicit than Ollie’s, it has always been clear to me that she has as little time for my fictional dabbling as he does. Sonya, an admirable woman in many respects, and capable of fair-mindedness and generosity (I sincerely hope, when it comes to vehicular matters), is however not hugely tolerant of failure. Even honest but insufficient application sometimes does not cut the mustard with Sonya, and her face has a particular way of showing disapproval which, while hard to describe, is impossible to mistake.
(In olden days English witches used to cut the mustard, which they made in their cauldrons, with herbs, spices and other ingredients – the usual stuff: eye of newt, toe of frog, et cetera – producing a hot, evil-smelling concoction with supposed magical properties. I jest again.)
I lift the menu from its position between the salt and pepper shakers. ‘What do you fancy? My treat.’
‘I’ve already ordered,’ Sonya says. ‘I must be back at the office by a quarter to.’ She flashes me a toned-down version of the full disapproval display. ‘You have to go up to the counter.’
This is not an encouraging start. She is not bringing to the occasion the positive spirit that I require of her. The text-message exchange seemed friendly enough so I am not sure what new thing I might have done (or not done) to displease her. No doubt I will find out soon enough.
The café offers a variety of soups, pasta dishes, sandwiches, toasties, panini, and so forth. It really doesn’t matter to me what I choose, except that I want to eat at the same pace as Sonya. That is, I don’t want to order a sandwich if she is having three courses, nor do I want to have the seafood linguine with a mixed salad and crusty bread on the side if she is going to gulp down a bowl of soup and make her exit. However, asking her what she is having and then copying her is not likely to shift her opinion that I am weak-willed and indecisive.
I decide to be decisive.
‘Sonya, I’m going to level with you. I’m not prepared to sit here nibbling at a cheese-and-ham toastie while you work your way through a full lunch. I came here to talk, and I need your complete attention. The consumption of unequal quantities of food is hardly going to establish a favourable context for an open discussion of the state and status of our relationship, and what’s more –’
She interrupts me. ‘Douglas, I’m not having a full lunch. I’m having a sandwich.’
‘Good. I’ll have something similar.’
I do not jest: I lie. Not one word of the above exchange takes place. Sonya never eats much. I go to the counter and order a cheese-and-ham toastie and an apple juice. The man serving wants payment up front. From this I deduce that Sonya has already paid for whatever she’s having, thereby eliminating any leverage my buying it might have given me when we come to negotiations about the car. Things are not going well.
‘And I’m not discussing our relationship in a public place,’ she says when I return to the table, as if she has been having a conversation with me in my absence. Perhaps she has. It’s something I do, after all. Alternatively, she might simply be reading my mind. Maybe that’s what she has downloaded onto her tablet.
‘So what are we here for?’ This comes out rather more bluntly than I intended.
‘I don’t know what you’re here for, but I’m here to be friendly,’ she says, squeezing the last word out between her teeth. ‘And just for the record, wasn’t it you who texted me?’
‘You’re right. I apologise. I wanted to see you. It’s been a while.’ I count two beats. ‘I miss you.’
‘Do you?’ She gives me a flattered – or at least less acidic – but rather pitying look. ‘I wonder if you do. I think, on balance, the present arrangements are better for both of us. I wanted to see you too, Douglas, or I wouldn’t have said yes. In time, if we both continue to want to, we’ll be able to do this more often. It’s about respect, really, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve always respected you.’
At this moment a waitress arrives with Sonya’s meal. I was right: she’s ordered a sandwich, a brown-bread item crammed with so much lettuce, shredded beetroot, tomatoes and other healthy produce that most of the contents are already spilling vigorously out onto the plate. And a smoothie of sunset tones, mainly deep reds, pinks and purples.
Not until the waitress has departed does Sonya reply: ‘Well, I’m glad.’ I wait for a reciprocal expression of respect, but it isn’t forthcoming. ‘Anyway,’ she says, sweeping some imaginary crumbs from the table, ‘enough of that. What have you been getting up to?’
‘I’ve been getting up to fifty.’
She pauses in the act of lifting one sandwich quarter to her lips. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘It was my birthday on Tuesday.’
‘Oh, of course. I hadn’t a clue what you were talking about. Did you get my card?’
‘I did, thanks.’
‘Did you do anything, in the end?’
‘Not a thing. I ate a pie and drank some wine.’
‘Oh, Douglas!’
‘It’s all right. I said I didn’t want a fuss.’
‘Yes, you insisted. I took you at your word.’
‘That was the right thing to do, Sonya. Honestly
.’
‘It just sounds a bit … dismal.’
‘Not at all. I had a very jolly time. The pie was poor but produced no ill effects. The wine was good. It came later.’
‘That was it?’
‘No, no, far from it. These were only two of the day’s highlights. I also got stuck on a bus and took in a funeral. Oh, and Ollie Buckthorn bought me a mystery dram.’
‘Hmm.’ The disapproval mask slips on again, and she concentrates on eating her sandwich. Sonya has met Ollie only two or three times. He did not make as good an impression on her as she did on him.
‘I heard about the funeral, actually,’ she says. ‘From Paula.’
To Be Continued Page 11
