A Case of Knives (36 page)

Past the green flocking hills, always between the walls of dry stones which are clapped together at the top like hands, and past big harled houses with too little window and slipping turrets at their shoulder, and with not flowers but green vegetables on the south walls. If any of it were to disappear, I would still see it, for I see, of course, with sentimental eyes. What would another make of it? I am partial.

The car snicked between the Crook Inn and its walled garden on the other side of the road. The gate into the garden, against the freshly colouring sky, was flat as a nursery frieze, two woolly lambs flanked by two shepherds’ crooks, white flat iron, white as milk and wool. There are those words used by tourists to Scotland – ‘beauty spot’, suggesting contrivance and falseness. The Lowlands have nothing of vain beauty though; they are protective, gentle, reliable, nurse to the rakeheaven grande-dame of the Highlands. Those mountains put on black and diamonds at night. Down here in the Lowlands, there is a shawl of mist in the country and a good rabbit fur of fag-ash over the towns. We may omit the Lion of Glasgow and the Unicorn of Edinburgh. Each of those is singular.

Stone lies between the two, and is approached by an irregular drive. To arrive, it is necessary to pass the house, which is entered from the side. It has two fronts and two climates. In the douce summer I live in every room; in winter the wind makes the eastern face of the house too brusque for papers and too cold for sitting. In the winter I have found flowers, matured to their fruit, left from the autumn, in ice, held in the vase like Fabergé’s gemmy berries in crystal. Asleep in one of these rooms, you might put out a hand in sleep and in the morning find it gone quite white. The only way to foil the cold is to be in love, and even that is not sure. The house is plain. It is not squinched or pepperpotty, it recollects no French alliance. It is of grey stone, unfaced, and the stone is black when it is wet. There are hills to the west and hills to the east, but they are small for hills and the house is big for a house. It has twenty-seven windows on each side, three rows of nine, their glass of the type which spins all light that hits it. It tells the sky to itself. In the sills of the windows tortoiseshell butterflies hatch too soon and need daily rescuing. There is an attic room where the flies go to die. It fills your hair with noise. To east and west there are porticos, that to the west with a pointed pediment, to the east with a curved pediment. These are supported by unfluted columns to the east, fluted to the west. The columns are Doric. There is no suggestion of romantic vegetable matter anywhere in the architecture of the house. It looks as it sounds, stone.

When the sun rises, it fills the arc of the eastern pediment and the tubes of the columns with light. The smoothness of the portico looks pale against the grey house, and larger, as though it were another house itself. These steps end in a terrace. The terrace is lapped by a lawn shaped like an almond. The man who built the house had lost his heart to India, and found there rich compensation for this loss. The tip of the almond drops to a ha-ha. Cowslips grow in spring at its ashlar foot. A long field of leaning trees moves out to the heather. What the wind began, the trees’ disease has completed. Scotland seems to favour brushy trees, hazel and rowan and gorse, over the English givers of contemplation and stealthy veiling shade.

A lozenge within the eastern pediment, of earlier date than the house, and lettered in pothooked lower-case, not the Trajan capitals you might expect, says:

It hath and schal ben evermor

That love is maister wher he wile.

To the west, which is the side a newcomer first sees, the sun falls down the chutes of the columns, and sinks; the pale portico holds the colour in its severe frieze, a simple cornice of mortised panels. The confident motto, spaced evenly within the base of the portico’s isosceles, is ‘The brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives’.

The steps down from this portico debouch into a courtyard, almost filled with a lawn, which is elliptical in shape, the broadest part of the ellipse being exactly at the centre of the house. In the centre of the lawn is a tall pedestal. It supports a statue of an old man with a tortoise at his feet. I no longer speculate about the tortoise. The man may be Aeschylus, who was killed by a falling turtle, or he may be the inventor of the lyre, or he may be simply a clue that the sculptor was exhausted by carving staffs, snakes, lions. Ever since I received no reaction when I told a table full of visitors, struggling to amalgamate oatcakes, butter and honey without messing their fingers, that it was Darwin with a young Galapagan turtle, I have ceased to speculate. No one laughed, and I missed Mordred so much I could have run away.

‘Most acceptable honey. Is it your own?’ had asked Miss Erskine. I all but stung her.

I brought my friends home in time for breakfast. The rooms at Stone are large and very numerous. Unusually for a middle-sized Scots house, it is a unit, not an accretion. The bottom two storeys of the house have rooms of great height. The top floor’s rooms are just tall.

None of the rooms has curtains. The windows are shuttered with finely made wooden shutters which fold and lock as snugly as big Bibles. Each of the shutters folds away in two parts, so you can allow into the rooms whatever fraction of the light or weather you wish. On days when the light is too strong for the old chintz and large pale furniture, the shutters are closed. It takes one person an hour to close them all, and the arms ache. Seen from the furthest point of the almond lawn with all its shutters closed, the house looks not deserted but full of pleasant secrets. Each set of shutters has one oval hole, about a third of the way down the left-hand shutter’s outer fin; through it you can watch the sun and moon and stars’ passage. A line of sun comes through the hole on summer days, a beam whose Copernican rulings over two centuries may be traced on carpets, walls and wood, where they have faded or where the veneer is just beginning to bridle. There is a pale diagonal of books in my bedroom, showing how orderly or how unreading have been the ladies of the house, and a beam of bleached books, paler even than their faded neighbours. Taken from the shelf, these books, the sun-paled and the merely old of spine, show bright sides. Some of them contain letters or flat flowers, a surprised embrace.

When I was waiting for Alexander to be born, I lay in my room with the shutters almost closed, and watched new colours appear in the three high portholes, green dawn, orange daybreak, and a lilac afternoon changing later to dark blue. There is never the fear of a face at the window. Through these holes only birds can look.

Under the eaves, in what Scots call the rhones, live martins in spring. Their nests are neighbours to the plain white acorns which look like enormous eggs, hanging from the cornice below the roof. Like nomads camped in the Sphinx’s paw, the swifts seem indifferent to any menace which might hatch from these great white wooden eggs.

Rarely, but then as orderly as a weft in tweed, the geese will mount up and over the house, and an unreeling of their elegant repeated pattern will be seen, up the west face of the house, and slowly down the east side, landing slowly in a slope again like cloth on the loch beyond the field. Herons nest there. The geese make a noise like people, and they have two watchmen which give the alarm when there is danger. When they go, they leave ivy-green droppings, white chalk at one end. At rest in the field, with the leaning trees, and their two look-outs, they have the beaky brown faces of the Bayeux soldiers.

The glasshouse is on the south side. It fulfils the purpose of a lemon house, but at Stone we bring into it not lemons, but almost everything which will not take the winter. It contains within itself an orchid house. It is all very sturdy, not lacy; nevertheless, stones should not be thrown. The door into the stone house from the glasshouse is a good hurl away. The kitchens and my day-room are all at this end of the house. Incorrectly known as the back door, this is the door to which people come with boxes or for boxes.

It is the door to which Mordred dragged himself, and then on through it. That last corridor is hung with dreary photographs. These show men and tigers, men and trains, men and men in turbans, men in pearl ropes to their knees and whiskers out past their ears. There are several photographs of yachts, ablaze with a wardrobe of sail over the brown Bay of Bombay or the brown Solent.

When I am at Stone, I do not know why I ever go away. I do, however; and become more familiar with the house as you do with absence. As I have said, it in some sense accompanies me. It sets no officious standards of scale or beauty, but it gives me the inestimable qualifications of being certain that I have at times been perfectly happy. How many people have that, or know where it has been? It is where the two worst things happened, but, more important, many thousands of good. The fountain in which Alexander immersed his concentrating face has gone. Fountains are things of changing but repetitive beauty which reward long contemplation, and I could not have contemplated that one without seeing the backs of his legs with their green veins, and his wet eyes. I have kept other fountains, since I had no further children to lose. His grave is at Stone. It says:

pauper sum ego

nihil habeo

cor meum dabo.

For Cora and the baby – who was to be born in hospital, and brought home – I had chosen two rooms on the first floor of the house, looking out to the hills and the morning light. Lucas I put in the equivalent rooms at the other end of the house, with windows also towards the glasshouse. From his windows the dovecote was visible, a helmet of pinkish grey bricks in the field beyond the glasshouse. The doos, which is how they are called by the Scots, are the ordinary eating kind, with black eyes and iris necks, not the red-eyed pouters with their pantaloons. Sometimes a cinnamon-fronted turtle dove joins them in their brick roost. In the evening, the sounds from the dovecote make it a hive of lullabies.

Corbies, Aesop’s cheese-eating dominie birds, and the guzzlers of dead men, come rarely. They are to be seen after heavy rain, trying to pick off wet shrews. The main scavengers are foxes. I encourage them more than I discourage them. They dance along with their chrysanthemum-coloured tails out straight behind. From the east face of the house I have seen fox pups play tag over heaps of warm grass clippings, and then flop down, trembling and eager, ticking their tails, biding.

Nabob would lie like that as a puppy. Mordred knew him as a pup, and I am sometimes terrified of the dog’s death. It will bring it all back. We know death is inevitable, but we go on having dogs. George and George, who with their wives run Stone when I am not there and when I am, persuaded me to find another puppy. I imagine this is against the death of Nabob. He is going white, and his legs sometimes fail him, but he is as devious, greedy and wheedling as he ever was. He thoroughly dislikes books. Unlike a cat, which will come and sit on a book its master is reading, Nabob just interrupts. But he listens well, and, like a grumpy old man, he has soft spots. He is disciplined about meal-times. He relishes vandalism for the attention it brings, enquiries into his puppyhood and so on. His ears have tears from wire and from teeth, but they are still silky. He does not smell and his nose is a surprise of black in his hungover old face. Without the braceleted ankles he had as a pup, his feet are still amusing. He will cross his forepaws to hold his chin or to watch television, which he does from a chair. The puppy is still on probation. She is a Sealyham and her feet touch her pink stomach as she walks. When Cora’s baby is born, the puppy will have grown to be about the size of the child. At the moment, she is about the size of a bottle of milk. She spills easily, still. It is up to her to win Nabob over with more than her appealing looks. He has not had his day; he is just not interested in puppies. Her name is George too. Nabob had better develop an interest in appealing small bundles clothed in fluffy white. Nabob has a grand way with the house. He knows it all well, but no longer frequents the rooms which are of no use to him. He looks ducally on at George as she fossicks with enthusiasm in the corners of another new room. He is like an old grandee who has retired to his club in advanced age, and is able happily to deride morning-rooms and gun-rooms and still-rooms, having had them and discovered the amenities of bungalow living.

I like to arrive home in the morning in order to have a day of the ordinary shape and size, which will in its turn initiate others. The appeal of order is the sense it makes of time. No regret, no dropped stitches. It is like my cupboards.

Tony stopped the car. As children are, Lucas and Cora were woken by the silence. As I like, there was no one to greet us. Tony would stay for an hour of talk, some food, and three hours’ sleep. He would then go back to London. He does not like Scotland. ‘Too slow,’ he said once to me. I took them to their rooms, through the hall whose floor is black and white, in sober alternation, and whose ceiling is corniced in plain but gold-leafed beading, uncomplicated and decorative as mimosa.

‘I didn’a ken gold came in books,’ said one George, after the beading had been redone by a sad man from Dumfries. ‘Except mebbe pension books.’

The staircase is of stone; it is not carpeted. It ends in a coved barrel vault as high as the sky, pale blue, and the banister leads the eye like a tree to the top. I put Cora into her white room. The wives of both Georges had made a pile of Alexander’s old baby clothes in her dressing-room, whose walls were stencilled faintly with ribbons. The cot waited, not yet set up, like a toy gate, and a basket full of shawls lay on the dressing table.