Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion. Belinda Rathbone
enjoyed exposing the hard practical reality behind things that were held as mysterious or sacred. At the same time his attention to detail, his care for breakable objects and delicate surfaces, and his respect for old things and genteel rituals reminded me of my father. An art connoisseur, museum director and auction house adviser, my father had brought me up to respect antiques and objects of beauty. John’s sense of how things worked, of the logic and economics behind their construction, gave the quality of his care a different emphasis that was new to me. For my father, appearance and presentation were inextricable from the object itself. Never far from the front of his mind was the art of seducing his public with his careful display, of creating a dialogue between the object and its surroundings. All of this went along naturally with his courtly manners and his well-tailored clothes. Whilst my father knew how to dress the outside, John understood how to fix the inside. If my father was a master of form, John was a master of function. John approached things from underneath, deeply involved in their mechanisms. He was too accustomed to the wealth of his possessions, too engaged with the process of their repair and maintenance to notice the superficial disarray he might be causing on the surface.
Or was it just that John—even at fifty-three—was not yet ready to play the host to his heritage? Pride of place seemed to be hidden under several layers of humility. About its grandeur, which he was not sure he could live up to, on the one hand. About its present state of disorder, which he was not sure he could live down, on the other. Which was the greater burden to bear?
‘How long has your family owned the Guynd?’ I asked him.
‘Nearly four hundred years. They moved over from a castle called Kelly, just a couple miles from here. The original Guynd house is over there,’ he said, gesturing out the window. ‘This one is of course relatively modern, designed in 1799.’
‘It all depends on your perspective, I guess.’
I wasn’t sure he heard me. ‘How does the farm work? Do you have tenants in all these fields?’ I asked.
‘A fellow called Webster up the road has a long-term lease on the arable, you know, barley, wheat—cereal crops. Then the grass is auctioned off by the season for the beef.’
‘The grass?’
‘Grass, as in pasture. Grazing. Don’t you call it grass in America?’
‘No, I don’t think we do. And we don’t call it the beef, either.’
‘Well, the beasts then.’
Though these farm tenants provided an income, John explained, it was no longer enough to sustain a large house, the farm buildings and the grounds, as it used to be in the old days. As history neared the present we approached John’s nerve centre. His comments became intense and emotional, his characters more clearly defined in black and white. There was his unhappy mother, who tried so hard, and his stern, distant father. There were the greedy accountants and the useless estate managers who were out for themselves, and there was the galloping over-draft. The Guynd was not yet John’s, though he was its sole beneficiary. It was still in the hands of trustees his father had appointed many years ago. There seemed to be a few legalities of the so-called trust deed to unravel before the estate could be turned over to him. Something about his brother Angus’s share of the inheritance. Something else about a farmer with a long-term lease, which under the new law was to have expired three years ago but who refused to leave. Something about a timber merchant who had harvested three acres of woods but hadn’t reinstated the roads he’d messed up in the process. I couldn’t follow it all. I had left Mansfield Park and entered Bleak House.
We took the master bedroom at the East end of the house, which had been badly painted aqua blue. A gloomy grey print of a river scene hung over the fireplace, which was blocked by a large suitcase. Twin beds had been shoved together and a double mattress slung over the top of them to create the only double bed in the house. We went to sleep between a flannel sheet and a winter-weight duvet, with the heavy curtains pulled tight against the early summer dawn.
How strange this all was to me, fresh from New York, where what matters is not where you come from but what you are doing there, not what happened years ago but what is happening now. I had been steeped in the art world, living in a distillation of many cultures, sampling its riches, its variety, its ethnic pockets, floating above it all in a society of commentary and intellect. New York, I had been led to believe, was the centre of the world. The very air you breathed would bring you up to date with the latest in everything. But about what? And who cared? It made no difference to anything here in Scotland. The oblivion I felt was pleasantly disconcerting. The materiality of those ancient trees put everything else in its proper perspective. The sense of primal attachment to the land—the land of one’s forefathers—was hard to refute. With his ancient ties to this storybook scene, John offered an adventure I didn’t even know I was looking for. Still, I wondered, how could I, in my American way, help him to realise a viable future for a crippled estate and the dwindling remains of a family, now amongst the ancienne pauvre that cling steadfastly to the mast of their aristocratic ship as it goes down?
When we drove to London a week later to catch my plane at Heathrow, my head spun with these questions, whilst John, his sharp eyes on the road, was quiet and tense. Saying goodbye, amidst the hasty confusion of checking bags, rummaging for my passport and ticket and the bustle of other anxious travellers, John threw up his hands in one final gesture and cried, ‘It’s all yours if you want it!’
‘You’ll never get any pleasure from this place,’
John’s father had told him repeatedly over the years. And by most accounts other than his own, he made every effort, or lack of effort, possible to ensure that his prediction would prove accurate, and that his eldest son—his principal heir—would fail at the role fate had dealt him.
‘YOU’LL NEVER GET ANY PLEASURE FROM THIS PLACE,’ John’s father had told him repeatedly over the years. And by most accounts other than his own, he made every effort, or lack of effort, possible to ensure that his prediction would prove accurate, and that his eldest son—his principal heir—would fail at the role fate had dealt him.
The ancient system of primogeniture, which decrees that the eldest son is heir to the entire family estate, is still going strong in Scotland. From birth he is groomed, pressed, and moulded by family and society into his role as landowner—in Scotland, the laird. Primogeniture is based on a feudal system that has changed remarkably little since the Middle Ages. Whilst in England the march of progress and the greater population have blurred the rigid lines of the class system in recent times, Scotland still offers a clear window on the past. Its unspoilt view of the pastoral countryside of the Lowlands, and of the vast shooting estates of the Highlands, owe much to the persistence of primogeniture. Eighty-eight per cent of Scotland is privately owned, and if you buy one of those clan maps they make for the Scottish tourist trade, you will find that it is still largely owned by the families who drew the lines centuries ago.
The landed classes. Since knowing John I have come to better understand the meaning of this term. In Scotland it means not only that these people have land but, once landed, that they intend to stay. Forever. It is almost as much of a personal failure for a Scottish male heir to leave the ancestral home behind him (read, lack of commitment) as it is for the American to stay (read, lack of enterprise). It is no accident that in colloquial Scots, when they ask someone where they live, they ask them where do they ‘stay’. In Scotland it is not so much that one owns a country house as much as it is the other way around. In America, though we could all trace our family history through various houses and buildings, few amongst us know where they are, or if indeed they are still standing. And we don’t really care. After all, we Americans are largely the descendants of second sons who expected to strike out on their own.
I was raised with a relatively strong sense of my own family history. On my father’s side the Dutch merchant class of New York City and upstate crossed with Puritan