Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion. Belinda Rathbone
the silent waving of orange flames, warming the room through and through, my stove was more comforting to me than an open fire. During the shortening days of late autumn I escaped into my work, my trap door back to America.
We still observed the ‘tea ritual’, as John drolly referred to it, every afternoon at about five o’clock, but we no longer trekked with the trolley out to the drawing room, which was too cold for comfort, its draughts now isolated behind a heavy curtain in the library. We gave up the silver teapot for the fat white kitchen model, more or less permanently dressed in its crocheted tea cosy that looked like an old ski hat out of the Lost and Found. Forget about the bone china cups and saucers; one of the variety of chipped mugs out of the kitchen cupboard would do. But the tea itself, in spite of its ritual being trimmed down to a kind of stand-up affair, was as good as ever. It seemed there was always something more to learn about making a ‘proper pot of tea’. Like pouring the boiling water into the pot from a height, ‘to help it aerate ’, explained John. Or, one should ‘always mix the Lapsang Suchong with an equal amount of Bengal, to tone down the smoky taste.’ And then, as I poured out the first cup, ‘How long has it been steeping?’ He always checked; and, ‘Did you remember to give it a stir?’
This ample supply of loose tea came from an oldfashioned emporium in Dundee called Braithwaite’s, which stood in the same location on Castle Street where it had opened a hundred years ago. Miraculously, twentiethcentury progress had left Braithwaite’s in its wake. An attendant in a red smock would appear behind the counter at the jingle of the bell on the door as we entered its scented sanctuary. The two-foot-high japanned tin canisters still lined the upper shelves labelled China, Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Lapsang Suchong and Bengal. Lifting down the great tin of Darjeeling from above, the attendant’s experienced hand would tap the nearly exact quantity into the shiny brass scales on the counter, and then with a series of counterweights tap a little more until the scales hovered in perfect balance. ‘Anything else? Two pounds fifty, please!’ was the cost of this performance, and with a quick exchange of coins and the thrrinng!of the old cash register we were out the door and into the twentieth century again.
These were the simple comforts of country life in winter, I thought to myself as we climbed the grey roads out of the depths of not-very-bonnie Dundee, making our way past faceless housing blocks, where people whose lives I would never know carried on day to day, their windows decked out in frilly curtains and lit up now in the yellow glow of electric lights as dusk fell. We sped past supermarkets, industrial estates and around so many roundabouts that I thought we were going in circles until we finally made the turn on to the back road that leads eleven miles to the front gate of the Guynd. Home in time for tea.
Late November closed in on us. At sunset, about three-thirty in the afternoon, we went around the house closing all the interior shutters against the cold. The sun, if it had appeared at all, would have done what it could to warm the rooms. It was still too soon to fire up the boiler. (Never before the first of December, goes the local convention. And off by the first of March, as John explained was the custom of his friends at Dunninald, another large house nearby, suggesting strongly that we too would be following the same sensible, ritual logic. Do you think this is America?) Once the heat was on, the small radiators had only from four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight to do their job.
The kitchen was the coldest room in the house. I pared down my cooking efforts from the stews and salads I had enjoyed concocting in the summer to the bare minimum on a wintry evening. A quick dash into the kitchen to shove a frozen breaded chicken cutlet into the little portable electric oven, then back to the fireside, or stoveside, as fast as I could go. ‘Close the door!’ John reminded me every time I left a room, so as not to let the precious heat escape into the passages.
‘We are huddled up in my study most evenings now,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘around the Vermont Castings woodstove. The house has become a huge empty shell we walk through in search of this or that.’
I switched on the electric blanket about an hour before going to bed. Then, turning it off again (under John’s strict instructions), I sank into the dry pool of warmth. Just as the pool was beginning to ebb, John would arrive in the dark like a great human radiator beside me. Mornings, I was greeted by Foxy’s wet nose breathing near my face, accompanied by a vigorous wagging of a tail as I began to stir. It took all my strength of character to get out of bed and don my three or four layers of insulation. Once dressed, I could hardly wait for an excuse to jump into the car, turn on the heat and drive away! Off to the bright lights of the Safeway in Arbroath, to the heated aisles of packaged food and fresh vegetables from Africa, and perhaps afterwards a cup of coffee with Angus’s ex-wife Alison, who lived alone in her semi-detached bungalow on the outskirts of town.
Alison had grown up in an unheated shooting lodge high in the hills of windswept Aberdeenshire, had subsequently raised her own family in a damp basement flat at the Guynd and was now as happy as she could be in her tidy little suburban stucco, easy to clean and heat. There she would be in her apron and rubber gloves, rolling up her sleeves to wipe a few stray crumbs from her immaculate worktop, or placing a carefully constructed pudding into the right drawer of her enormous freezer chest. I always took my shoes off so as not to tread on her mauve carpet, and I left the dog in the car. Alison was all sympathy and cheerful banter about the practical matters of life, of cooking and shopping. But our favourite subject by far was family. I quickly discovered what valuable insight she could provide into the native Ouchterlony character. And since she revealed not a shred of envy for my taking on the big house, nor lingering resentment that she had not, our relationship was remarkably uncomplicated from the start. ‘I so admire you,’ she said. ‘I never could have taken on a house like that.’
‘Maybe I just don’t know any better,’ I replied.
Alison was charmed by my daring, and I by her modesty and her candour. She would share from her fund of memories and insights into recent family life at the Guynd and the mysterious past of earlier generations of Ouchterlonys. We compared the two brothers—John and Angus—their characters, their histories, who resembled which parent in what way. ‘They’re as different as chalk and cheese,’ said Alison, ‘and I’m afraid they were not very good friends.’ Angus, with his ginger hair, was supposed to be light-hearted; John was dark, and seemed deeper. Angus was the sporty one, John the intellectual. Angus moved fast and impulsively, John cautiously and with deliberation. Angus was a spendthrift, John was frugal. Angus threw things away, and John, furious, rescued them. Instead of finding in the other a useful complement, their differing natures grated on each other and brought out their worst and most competitive behaviour, each vying, as brothers will, for supremacy.
Posing in their kilts for the lady photographer who toured the county once a year with her 8 × 10 view camera, black cloth and tripod, Angus, aged about nine, appears to be looking up at his older brother with great respect. Perhaps this was just for the picture, or perhaps there was a time, barely remembered by anyone, when they were friends. The more I learnt, the more I wondered which of the two was the prodigal son, or whether they simply took turns at it. Angus, who eventually fled to Canada, leaving his wife and children? Or John, who took off at a younger age, leaving job and career to follow the trail of his curiosity and to get as far away as possible from the fate that was already spelt out for him? Both rebelled in their own way from the strictness of their upbringing, and neither was granted the prodigal son’s warm welcome home by their father. ‘I suspect he was terribly jealous of his boys,’ Alison ventured. ‘Mother-in-law didn’t make it any easier, to my mind.’
BY THE TIME John’s father was released by the Germans and returned to Scotland at the end of the war, John hardly remembered him, Angus had never met him, and their mother, Tom’s ‘darling wee girl’, had grown accustomed to being in charge. Tom was a changed man—two world wars had left their indelible scars on his psyche—and the world was a changed place. It was too painful and too daunting a prospect to recapture the Guynd of the past. Restoring it to the image of his childhood was inconceivable. Anyway, he might have figured, it never had his name on it. Survivor’s guilt dogged him. Two brothers had died tragically, heroically, whilst he had spent the war years watering tomato plants for the enemy.
Doreen was anxious to return the house to the family, but for a few years Tom—the