Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion. Belinda Rathbone

       ONE It’s All Yours If You Want It

      I KNEW WHEN I MARRIED THE MAN THAT I married the mansion. Though which would pose the greater challenge—my husband John, or his crumbling Georgian country house in north-east Scotland—there was no telling. There was no separating them, in mind or in fact. There was no dealing with one that did not involve the other, lurking somewhere in the background. For this was not just a house but the scene of my husband’s childhood, of his father’s childhood, of the labours and loves of his ancestors. It was the material proof of an ancient and once prominent Scottish family that is now close to extinction, and scarcely a day went by when we didn’t feel the weight of its history upon us and the mandate to hang on.

      Was anybody watching? Did the family ghosts smile with approval as we wheeled out the George III silver teapot and the Old Willow pattern teacups into the drawing room every afternoon at five o’clock? Did they sigh as we dropped into armchairs with sagging springs and faded upholstery in our stocking feet and blue jeans? Did they dismay at the sight of the peeling paint in the upper corners of our stately rooms, or the cobwebs clinging to the capitals, as we made a dive for the Safeway’s shortbread in the crumb-ridden depths of a rusty biscuit tin?

      We lived on the stage set of another era, or the kind of layering of several eras that happens when a family stays in one place for many generations—in this case a stylistic evolution from Regency through the post-war era. All the country house equipment was in place. The dining room cupboard stored regiments of cut glass bowls, decanters, wine glasses, demitasses, picnic boxes, saltcellars, fruit knives, dinner plates stamped with the family crest. Upstairs, the cedar-lined linen cupboard overflowed with a history of bed linen, damask table cloths, napkins and embroidered hand towels. Downstairs the old wine cellar housed an archive of old prints and family portraits, miscellaneous frayed curtains, faded furniture covers, swords, broken lamps, empty preserve jars, and prewar pots and pans. The desk drawers were stuffed with diaries, bank statements, bills, schoolboys’ letters home, assorted calling cards and dance cards dating back fifty years and more, and reams of pale blue stationery engraved on the upper right, ‘The Guynd, by Arbroath, Angus’, and on the left, ‘Telephone, Carmyllie 250’, boxed, waiting for the lady of the house, with her fountain pen.

      The tool shed was a catalogue of mowers, rollers, rakes, trimmers and strimmers, loppers and scythes. What were once the laundry, the stable, the hen house and the coal store were now a jumble of cast-off furniture, farm vehicles in need of repair and building scrap. The old vaulted kitchen was the living room of the East flat. The nursery was an artist’s studio.

      We had everything such a house required except for the nine servants who once took care of it. For some years Will Crighton, the retired gardener, came every morning to count the animals in the fields and every few days to mow the three and a half acres of lawn around the house. But I gave up trying to get anyone to help me clean. For I was the housekeeper and the chambermaid, the cook and the nanny. John was the gardener, the plumber, the launderer, and the odd-job man. Still, at the end of the day, as we sat fireside in the library amidst volumes such as The Gardener’s Chronicle, Burke’s Peerage and Byron’s leatherbound Complete Poetical Works and discussed what to do about a broken stone wall or an untidy tenant, he was the laird (the twenty-sixth), and