Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion. Belinda Rathbone
upstairs presiding over the principal rooms. Perhaps this was to drive home the point of wartime pecking order, that military duty took precedence over family life. Perhaps it had something to do with Tom’s having spent three years in command of a submarine during the First World War. Did being underneath give him a feeling of safety, or of subterfuge, which he had developed an affinity for? Whatever the reasons, faced with Tom’s inertia it took many months of Doreen’s persistent prodding to get the Admiral’s family moved out of the house and her own upstairs. From then on, as John recalls, his father spent a good deal of his time sequestered in the library in front of the TV with the shutters closed, surrounded by a barricade of club armchairs.
As John remembered him, his father didn’t seem to have a past or a family worth talking about. He was moody, irritable and intimidating. Every morning the boys had to stand at attention at the foot of his bed, waiting for their orders. Tom spent the morning in the desultory business of his new raison d’être as Secretary of the Shipwrecked Mariner’s Society. At precisely one o’clock he would begin to stir, demanding of his wife, ‘Where’s lunch?’ Commanding his two or three estate workers towards the planting of trees, the raising of pigs, the mending of fences and gates and, in a more energetic mood, reprimanding the estate managers, he tried to recapture the sense of power he had felt in his finest hours in the navy. But there was no real enemy to be vanquished, no territory to conquer. Often Tom would take to his bed and not be available for days. It was well known that his marriage was unhappy, and that his two boys were afraid of him. Even in later years, when the boys were grown up, Alison recalls that when the Commander appeared ‘everyone else would sort of scatter’.
As the boys grew up and were packed off to boarding school, Tom and Doreen led increasingly separate lives, each claiming his and her own end of the house. Doreen would retire to her sewing room upstairs to play her accordion to herself. Tom loathed the sound of it. Perhaps he suspected that her love of the instrument had something to do with one of those dashing Polish army refugees that so cheered the lonely wives of Angus County during the war, with their shiny black riding boots and their fast-swinging mazurkas. Tom had no interest in dancing of any kind.
By the 1960s, I learnt from a letter Tom wrote to his middle-aged Canadian nephew, he had concluded that his wife was ‘a townie ’, and that his two teenage boys evinced no real interest in the country. Occasionally he could persuade Angus to go shooting with him, which gave him a ray of hope, but mostly, he complained, ‘parties, cinema, country dancing, pretty well contain their thoughts, except when the lake is frozen’. If Tom had ever felt the same way in his youth he had long since forgotten it.
John’s parents also cultivated different sets of friends, Doreen’s amongst the upper-crust county families, whilst Tom was more comfortable with the local farmers and the transient military population, always in good supply from the nearby naval air base. One such witness to this situation, a retired naval officer, came to call on us one day in the summer, interested to see the old Guynd again. John instantly disappeared, leaving me to receive the man’s candid recollections. ‘The Commander liked me,’ he told me, adding jovially, ‘which of course made me rather unpopular with the rest of the family.’
More than one family acquaintance has told me about having been invited to the Guynd for tea, and then being sent away when the knock at the door was met by the Commander, who knew nothing of their invitation. Likewise, Doreen was known to give a cool reception to anyone looking for Tom. She was not expected to participate in his dinner or lunch parties, nor did she care to, to hear Tom telling the same old war stories and his favourite off-colour jokes. One was either his friend or hers, and whichever one was, it was almost impossible not to take sides in the battle over how the Guynd should best be managed or—God forbid—enjoyed.
Clearly, I realised, it was impossible for Doreen to make the house as beautiful as she would have liked it to be, as beautiful as it deserved to be, without Tom’s support. Nothing like the upheaval I had already caused by raising the linoleum would ever have been allowed, even though it wouldn’t have cost them anything. A fresh coat of paint would have been welcome everywhere but that was obviously out of the question. Soft furnishings, it seems, were Doreen’s only outlet. Even so, the curtains she had made were nervously cut to the narrowest margin, not quite meeting in the middle when they were drawn, and the pelmets were too shallow for those high, generous windows.
The stingy little lamps, the walls in need of paint Tom could abide even if Doreen could not. The feared and isolated patriarch complained to his trustees of his family’s ‘soaring expenditure in electricity, due to staggered meals, and their own private sitting room’. He was known to have cut off the hot water supply when he thought his family was being extravagant with it. Yet a striking double standard was not hard to see in Tom’s definition of luxury. He bought a showy two-seater open-top Lee Francis motor car, which is remembered to this day by certain elderly residents of Arbroath. And there was no surer way to impress the county folk with his youthful vigour and enterprise than a heated outdoor swimming pool, which Tom decided he could afford to build in the early 1960s. Furthermore, there was no more public a rejection of his wife’s desires than to smother her lawn tennis court in the process—the ultimate insult to her Wimbledon childhood.
Tom played his new social asset to the hilt, inviting everybody for a swim. Whilst he basked in his superficial popularity, flirting with the girls in their bathing costumes, exhibiting his own remarkably lean figure afloat in an inner tube, Doreen hurried up and down the stairs for extra towels and fretted as children left their wet footprints all over the front hall on their way to the loo. John, having just earned his engineering degree in Aberdeen, outwardly criticised the pool’s poorly designed drainage system and privately fumed over his father’s disregard for his expertise. Alison worried about the safety of her three small children, as she and Angus then resided in the basement flat. Sure enough, one day little Pete, aged four, was discovered floating head down in the pool; the gardener rescued him just in time.
Some of her friends considered Doreen a saint not to have deserted Tom. Certainly she went to church every Sunday, attended religious retreats in foreign countries and prayed a lot at home. A prie-dieu in the corner of the passage upstairs, upholstered in rough brown stuff, faced a religious icon, which I quietly banished to a drawer. Endurance, one friend told me, was Doreen’s great strength. Her long trial ended in 1971 when Tom died suddenly of a stroke. Wrote the headmaster of Fort Augustus, the Catholic monastery where the boys had gone to school, ‘He has finally gone to that place above the dark cloud that hung over him and made him an unhappy man.’
The dark cloud that had hung over the Guynd began to lift after Tom died. His family was free to make decisions, to go about its business, without the constant fear of his criticism. But Doreen had by then lost her energy to make the house beautiful. It lingered in a state of postwar semi-recovery, as she eventually moved downstairs to Tom’s office, no longer having the strength to climb the stairs. This spacious room with a window to the floor gave Foxy a place to doze in the sun or prick up her sharp ears and announce a visitor approaching the front door. John fitted a stove into the fireplace so that his mother could keep herself warm in winter. With Foxy she took walks in the woods to escape the icy winds of the open road. In April she decamped for Portugal where she shared a house with friends. Back at the Guynd in summer, she spent the last two weeks of every June faithfully watching Wimbledon. John remembers the pop, pop, pop of the tennis balls emanating day after day from behind the closed doors of the darkened library.
That first autumn I spent at the Guynd, Doreen’s freshly dry-cleaned tartan skirts still hung in the cupboard, her feathered hats perched on the shelf swathed in tissue paper. In the drawer of a little Pembroke table I sorted through her powders and pills, creams and lipsticks, and as I tossed them one by one into the waste basket I wondered what it was like to live here all alone. Her diaries, little leather books each no bigger than the palm of my hand, stuffed to the back of a desk drawer, accounted for thirty-six years of marriage, every day of it recorded briefly in pencil, as another test of her endurance passed into night. ‘Rain, walked with Foxy in the woods, T. not speaking to J.’
‘Had she been ailing for a long time before she died?’ I asked John.
‘Not at all. She was out at the theatre one evening with friends.