Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion. Belinda Rathbone
had built in 1830 on the main street of Greene, New York. Everything in that house, from the pair of stuffed pheasants on the dining room sideboard to the old toys in the attic, was woven into a warm, fragile tapestry of my father’s American childhood. On my mother’s side, worldly and artistic Europeans with intermarriages of French, Italian and English connected in her parents’ marriage with a long line of Quaker Philadelphians. At home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I grew up with antiquities collected by my great-aunt when she lived in Egypt, Victorian furniture from the house of my Philadelphia great-great-grandparents, Irish glassware and French china. There were family portraits in oil, silhouette and daguerreotype. These family treasures came together in our own house from so many different sources, now mixed with my father’s collections of modern European art, English delftware and pre-Columbian pottery, that the pieces of my family history took years for me to unravel. In spite of these tangible artefacts there were so many sources, names, places and stories to remember about them. So few cousins, so far away. There was no tying them in with a single family house or even a single family name.
It was the critical difference between my background and John’s. John could reach into his family history effort-lessly, with hardly a leap of the imagination, for the stage was still set in his native Scotland. On the shelves of the library he could handle the very books his ancestors had consulted. He was sitting in their chairs, looking into their mirrors, literally walking in their footsteps, shaded by the trees they had planted, sheltered by the house they had built and carrying on the same name. This was continuity to be envied. Yet it comes with a price.
In Scotland a man of John’s class is himself less important than his name, his ancestral home and his estate. He is merely a link in the long family line stretching before and after him, and his duty is clear: to keep it up. Rural gentry like those of John’s family have stood their ground for so long that they are depended upon to remain in place as part of the stonework of society’s foundations, part of the general effort to keep things just the way they have always been. Whilst in school I was raised on stories of the pilgrims, the early homesteaders, the gold rush and the life ethic conveyed by Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’, of Thoreau’s ‘castles in the air’ and Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’; John was made to memorise a succession of kings and queens. Thus I grew up with one myth of the possible—of wide-open spaces and eternal movement—and John grew up with another, that of the security of a closed gate at the end of the drive.
THE SUMMER BEFORE we were married I spent two months at the Guynd, from late June to late August. Was it true, I needed to know, what John’s father had said—that he would never get any pleasure from this place—when it showed all the potential for being a paradise? In what way was he meant to defy his father’s fatalistic words?
Since my first visit to the Guynd, our courtship had carried on in New York and in London, where John still had a flat. We had also travelled together, getting to know each other’s friends and family, daily life and work. No American beau of mine had ever been so open, so curious and so delighted by the people and places I had to show him. He arrived in New York with all the exuberance of a schoolboy let out to play or a sailor home from the sea. In my apartment, the top floor of a brownstone building on East Ninety-second Street, he quickly made himself at home, unpacking his grey duffel bag (hiking boots, a few shirts, a bow tie or two just in case of an occasion, and a quantity of loose tea, not quite trusting that the right thing could be found in New York City), pottering in the kitchen (don’t you have a wok? where do you put the compost?) and sinking into the sofa with the Financial Times(delighted to find he could buy it out of a box on the corner of Fifth Avenue).
He read anything I put in his hands, ate anything I put on the table (his plate as conscientiously scraped as if a dog had licked it), looked with unequivocal interest at anything and everything in any museum or gallery I took him to in New York, not to mention everything on the way there. It was exhausting. But his dogged attention to detail slowed the rush of the city, and his observant foreign eye and the swift backhand stroke of his wit lightened my step on the pavement. His engineer’s logic combined with a bracing cynicism and a nose for the corrupt. All sorts of badly made things, for instance, were ‘good for business!’ he’d say triumphantly. He’d caught the devil at his game.
His intimate understanding of materials brought another way of appreciating almost everything, including works of art. ‘Wood,’ he might offer, admiring a work of modern sculpture, ‘is difficult to work with, in that it’s delicate and unpredictable, whereas metal is isotropic. It does what you tell it to.’ Isotropic. A brick wall curved in a continuous wave pattern, which I assumed was purely an aesthetic choice on the part of its maker, was very practical, according to John. ‘A sinuous wall is self-buttressing, and therefore doesn’t need to be as thick as a straight wall.’ The meaning of objects took on a whole new dimension. They had lives—even minds—of their own. A string, John told me in all seriousness, has a memory.
My friends regarded John as something of an exotic, unable to measure his worthiness on the usual scale. He had a wiry energy; there was something embattled and vulnerable about him, but also a toughness born to a tough breed. He seemed to be on intimate terms with the earth, the way a Scot—not an Englishman—would be. The reputation of his rather large house in the country awarded him a mysterious status. He was an Old World radical, an aristocratic country rustic. He used arcane expressions such as ‘the nether regions’ and ‘in days of yore ’ as if he really meant them. He possessed a depth of practical know-how and a living sense of history they couldn’t quite touch. With my mother he was completely at home; he knew she appreciated that depth, that sense, without having to say so, like a silent pact amongst the Europeanborn. At times I felt they understood each other better than I understood either of them. They shared the toughmindedness of survivors, an ethic of simplicity and economy, a conscientious reading of newspapers and a passion for plain, dark chocolate.
Visiting me in America, John said, was like a dream. How funny. It was the Guynd that was like a dream to me. He departed after a month with a reluctant flurry of lastminute packing to head back to the loneliness of his responsibilities.
Alone again in New York I listened to the strains of Elgar’s Enigma Variations and the soundtrack of A Room with a View, stared at the ceiling and wondered what was happening to me like some modern-day Henry James character, the innocent American about to be plunged into the murky depths of European aristocracy.
The responsibilities of the Guynd seemed awesome to me and yet, for some reason, I had been chosen. What was the point of romance anyway, I had always thought, if it wasn’t to take you somewhere you never expected to go, to make you intimate with a place or a culture in a way no other route could take you, to start life all over again from scratch, as a stranger in a strange land. Or, perhaps, in this case, to mend a broken connection, to complete the cycle back to my mother’s British upbringing. It was as if I were answering to some cosmic force. The beauty and the poignancy of the Guynd haunted me; it seemed to have called upon me to awaken it, a doll-house gathering dust in the attic. And John’s ardent pursuit showed no signs of letting up, even over the course of many weeks and an ocean apart. With no warning his excited voice from a phone box in London (breathless, out cycling in the rain, just had to call) would jar the streamlined images I had formed of my safe future as a New Yorker.
We became engaged on the night train from Paris to Zurich. This was thanks to my English cousin Cecilia, who lived outside of Paris and who was like an older sister to me. She had met us for dinner on our last evening there and presented me with a cameo brooch from amongst her family treasures ‘as an engagement present ’. Though marriage was a prospect we had both been studying seriously in our separate minds, we had not said anything to each other about getting engaged. After dinner in a crowded bistro Cecilia hurried us into a taxi to catch our train, beaming with goodwill and happiness for us, and we chuckled along with her excitement. We had booked ourselves into the most unromantic of sleeping arrangements possible, the third-class couchette.Whilst travellers with rucksacks mumbling other languages staggered through the door and wrestled themselves into their narrow cots below us and the train lurched through the night, we held hands across the two top berths, laughed and agreed that Cecilia’s gift had more or less confirmed what we already knew.
STILL, THE