A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle Read online

  I only know these things because I was told about them. At the time, I was four thousand miles away with my husband and children, on the Indonesian island of Sumba, walking at toddler pace along a jungle path near a remote camp that was our new home. If the sandflies weren’t about, I was planning to look for butterflies where a small stream emerged from the edge of the jungle and had dug a miniature delta across the beach before entering the sea. My children were aged one and two, so I could just about manage them in papooses strapped fore and aft and still have a hand free for the butterfly net. It isn’t until you start hunting butterflies that their mazy flight takes on new meaning. What looks like purposeless fluttering is in fact extremely wily defence tactics. Willie, my husband, in his capacity as the camp’s marine manager, was out at sea checking the marker buoys on a new dive site.

  ‘Liza! Liza!’ The camp manager came running down the path towards me waving a fax. He handed it over, adding quickly, ‘I’m so very sorry,’ before retreating a few paces. The printout was from my youngest brother, and it read:

  After a week in hospital trying to fight off blood poisoning, Pa died peacefully, on June 20th. Emma, Laura, and Angelika were with him. Colin and I were in Norway. We returned a day too late. No signal in the effing fjords. Angelika wants to press ahead with the funeral, which will be at Pluscarden on June 23rd. Hurry back. God bless, love Fred.

  I looked at my watch. It was the 23rd. Suddenly it was oppressively cold in the heat. A strange moan floated by that I vaguely recognized as coming from my own throat. The manager backed away looking unsettled. Sobs seemed to collide and crash through my whole body. The children looked at me in horror and instantly joined in with a chorus of terrified wails – grief trapped in reflecting arcs. My father had been dying for a whole week. We were remote, sure, but we had a two-way radio and faxes were forwarded to us via an office in Bali. Why had no messages reached me? I was shattered. I had been living in far corners of the world, but I had never meant to be beyond reach; yet, plainly, that is what I was. It was clear from Fred’s fax that even my sister Emma had made it back from her home in Africa. And why was Pa being buried at Pluscarden? The family church stood in the village, a stone’s throw from Cawdor; Pluscarden was a monastery twenty-five miles away.

  * * *

  Pa had only recently been diagnosed with cancer. It had started innocuously enough. It had been only six months since he had taken to his bed with something initially diagnosed as flu. He wrote me a letter in which he complained of being bored, saying that he couldn’t find anything written with any pith. The only thing that had caught his eye was the odd fact that Boudicca’s grave was thought to be ‘underneath platform 8 at King’s Cross station’.

  When the flu developed into pneumonia, his doctor sent him to a specialist. He rang to tell me about the cancer before Christmas, when Willie and I were still living in England. He said the news had been ‘like receiving registered post’: once you sign for it, you can’t pretend it never came. Despite being very asthmatic, my father had been an ardent smoker throughout his adult life. He had chain-smoked since his early teens, graduating from single Woodbines bummed off the gamekeepers to catering packs of Rothmans. Later, when my stepmother Angelika insisted that he give up, he compromised with cigars which he surreptitiously inhaled. He saw it as a clever cheat, but who he thought was being cheated was a little ambiguous.

  When we left for Sumba two months later, it was in my mind, but only in the most abstract of ways, that perhaps I would never see my father again. I adamantly believed that he would survive another year. It would have to be another year because, subconsciously, I could only envisage him dying during the winter. It suited his character. Not now, at the peak of a British summer. It made zero sense, and barely three seasons had passed from detection to death. Of course, we none of us know our sell-by dates and the timing is an inexact science, unless you are at the business end of a lethal weapon. The best we can hope for is that our dying will be comforted and not alone. Missing the instant of death is not unusual, but at least my stepmother Angelika and my two sisters Emma and Laura had been there. Like me, neither of my brothers Colin and Fred had made it to his bedside in time either. Soon after, Emma said she thought it was a good thing, saying, ‘Death is women’s work. Like birth.’ But to miss the burial? I could never, ever have imagined that I would miss my own father’s funeral.

  I stumbled towards our cabin in a daze. Word had spread. The workmen in the camp stared at me shyly, but no-one said a word. I tried to quieten the children, but they would not be quietened. Nothing in my manner reassured them. My pink swimsuit and sarong seemed suddenly to throb with incongruous cheer. How strange, I thought. Here I am, half a world away from any ceremony, and my first impulse is to find something black to wear. I rifled through our sea-chest. Rats had nibbled a vertical cross-section of our clothes. I hated this co-habitation with the rats. Our bed was two singles pushed together and the rats used the central gulley made by the wooden bed frames as a nocturnal highway. I could hear them scuttling up and down it; once I woke up to find one squatting nonchalantly on my chest. The rats had no fear of us and I worried that they would eventually find a way into the children’s cots and bite them. The closest thing to suitable mourning clothes was a dark blue dress that the rats had missed. I put it on and settled down on our doorstep to scan the sea for a sign of Willie’s boat returning. Storm and Atticus began to play with a line of ants, and a while later I spotted the boat’s hull, a pale smear just below the horizon. I gathered up the children, fed them an early lunch of noodles, bathed them in turn in a bucket to cool them, and stroked their foreheads until they slept.

  Up in the shadows of our thatch a new gecko started up its racket. The geckos on Sumba were enormous and made deafening clicks and sounds like the ‘he he he’ of mirthless laughter. The crashing of surf made it hard to sleep, but the geckos made it harder still, and eventually Willie borrowed an air rifle from the camp manager. The offending gecko was directly over our bed when Willie shot it through the neck. Its head fell back, one suction-padded foot fell away, then another, and then a third; but the last foot kept its grip and the corpse hung there, dripping blood onto our mosquito net, until days later, when Willie finally scrambled up the roof beams and knocked it down. The new gecko took up residency the following evening. So far, life on Sumba had been more slog than adventure. There were no friends for thousands of miles, no-one to laugh with and downsize little ordeals like the geckocide.

  I sat back down on the steps and waited another hour before the boat finally chugged to shore. All the time I was very quiet, very still, but my entire nervous system was humming like a faulty reactor. My thoughts kept returning to the fact that I did not know the identity of the huge tree that shaded our hut, and how Pa would have sagged his knees and clapped his hand to his forehead in mock despair at my woeful lack of local knowledge. And now he was dead. I walked down to the beach and told Willie my news. I hugged him, then clung, then reverted to hugging, and finally let go. The crewman Mo, who had had a Jesuit upbringing, stood beside us and sang ‘Vaya con Dios’ in a beautiful bass. These were the first two people who had fully responded to what had happened and I felt misery and gratitude.

  Deep breath. OK, so I wasn’t going to get to the funeral. I must mark it in some other way. While I had fretted about the tree and waited for Willie’s return, a sketchy plan had formulated in my head. First, I needed to go into Waikabubak to try and put a call through back home. Secondly, I wanted to launch my Balinese kite off the hill above the camp and cast it free to fly away on the wind. Lastly, I wanted to buy a lot of candles and light them in tribute. My father had died at the age of sixty. I had never thought of sixty as young before, but it was. It was no age.

  The small town of Waikabubak was only twelve miles from the camp, but the track was so rutted it took nearly an hour to get there. Still, being eight hours ahead of GMT meant I had time in hand. I went into the telephone exchange. It was a bar
e room with peeling plaster, a faded poster advertising Komodo dragons, and a bored-looking clerk sitting behind a metal grille. I gave her the number and waited in a small phone booth on the far side of the room. I did not feel at all hopeful. A few moments later the clerk called and told me to pick up the receiver. The number was ringing. Someone picked it up.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hello,’ came a tinny echo.

  ‘It’s Liza.’

  ‘It’s Liza!’

  Another voice, not an echo this time, cut in. ‘I’ll get Emma!’ it called back, as if shouting down a garden hose stuffed with socks. And then Emma came on; then Laura; then Fred; and, lastly, Colin. They told me as much as they could. It was hard to hear, but such a great, great comfort to actually speak to them.

  ‘What time is it there?’ I asked.

  ‘About half six in the morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry to get you out of bed.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  They’d been up all night by the bonfire. They had holed up with the keepers who were tending the beacon. Drams were pressed on them as the men reminisced fondly about Pa. The whisky sent stabbing warmth down their gullets and the kindly talk soothed. Toasts were drunk and then some more, and then another bottle appeared. Some time later they were all lying on their backs away from the ferocious heat of the fire, watching the trajectory of chosen sparks against a grey and pink herringbone sky slowly darkening to blue. Many of the keepers, past sixty themselves, lamented the dreadful shame of their boss’s premature death and drank the health of Colin, the new young Thane.

  ‘When is the funeral your time?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How long before the funeral?’

  ‘Four and a half hours.’

  ‘OK, I’ll do something then too.’

  ‘Good idea. We’ll be thinking of you here.’

  I learned that Pa had been responding well to the treatment. So well, in fact, that Angelika thought it would be a treat for them both to go to a party given by some friends of hers in Paris. While there, Hugh developed a cold sore, probably the first one of his life. His immune system was so shot that by the time he and Angelika flew back to London it had developed into septicaemia. When Laura arrived at the hospital Pa had an oxygen mask on and she could hear his lungs bubbling. He was very agitated. Each time he managed to catch enough breath, he would ask her where Colin was.

  Lonely and unsure of how critical the situation was, Laura tried to contact us all. She had no luck with our brothers, who were away together on an architectural study trip in Norway. Nor did she have any luck with me. But Emma was at her home in a suburb of Nairobi and her telephone, for once, was working. Laura was apologetic: ‘It could be a false alarm, but I think maybe you should come.’ So Emma flew to London and arrived at the hospital two days before he died. As soon as he saw her, Pa looked terrified. Why would his eldest daughter have flown in from Kenya unless it was a crisis? Spotting the expression in his eyes, she quickly remarked that wasn’t it lucky she was by pure chance in London to see possible schools for her son Jack? By then, Pa was so weak he could not respond; the last words he had managed to utter had been to ask for Colin. Emma and Laura kept each other company when not taking it in turns to sit with Angelika by his bed. Whenever they felt tears welling up, they left the room and wept in the passage.

  Hugh rallied fractionally and, although he could not speak, he mimed to them that he wanted a pen. But when they put it in his hand, he could hardly hold it. There was something he desperately wanted to communicate. He spent an age trying to write something. Eventually, painfully, he managed to form four spidery letters: A, L, N, and W. It had taken him half an hour and he was exhausted. Was it an acronym? An anagram of ‘lawn’? After lots of questions and lateral guesses they finally realized the word he was aiming for was ‘Alnwick’. He wanted to know if the Percy family from Alnwick in Northumberland had replied to an invitation he had sent them for a party to celebrate White’s Club’s three hundredth anniversary later in the summer. ‘It’s good he thinks he’ll be going to it – he must believe he’ll get to the other side of this,’ Laura said, trying to reassure herself as much as she was trying to reassure Emma. Emma wasn’t so hopeful because he rolled his eyes at her and drew a knife-like finger across his throat. She noticed that he no longer looked at them. All his concentration was on the nurses: his eyes followed them around the room as they checked the monitors and the various tubes penetrating his body. Only they interested him; only they could help. He gazed after each of them in terror and expectation.

  Laura spoke about the weather outside the hospital being incongruously sublime, although each day she found herself wearing sombre clothes ‘like a funeral parlour maid’. She and Emma took a break from the sterile vigil at the hospital and went for a walk in Regent’s Park. On their way back, Laura bought Pa a bunch of oversized sunflowers, but when she got to his room, she lost her nerve. Perhaps he would find the flowers ridiculous, cartoonish. Scorn was something he could deliver as easily in a tiny gesture as with words. She ended up giving the bouquet to a staff nurse, and when she rejoined Emma at his bedside they sang him his favourite song from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:

  Did you ever hear tell of sweet Betsy from Pike?

  Who crossed the wide prairie with old Uncle Ike,

  With two yoke of cattle and one spotted hog,

  A tall Shanghai rooster and a large yellow dog.

  Singin’ toora-li, loora-li, loora-li, ay …

  On day five Pa’s kidneys collapsed. The intensive care team sprang into action and the doctors managed to stabilize his condition. Once the crisis had passed, the consultants gathered around his bed to discuss Hugh’s progress. While they talked, my sisters nipped to a local café to fuel up on some half-decent coffee. When they returned everything had changed. Pa was in a coma. It looked as if the doctors had decided they could not go on bump-starting his body; that the fight was, effectively, over. His monitors blipped away softly, his life winding down. Pa died at noon the following day. Father’s Day.

  While Emma and Laura had been spending their days at the hospital, our mother had been set the task of tracking down her other three absent children. She had had no luck, and by the last day she had resorted to calling the Indonesian embassy, the Norwegian high commission, and even the police in the relevant countries, but to no avail. The last time our brothers had spoken to Pa, less than a week before, he was heading off to Paris in high spirits, so it was only by chance that Colin happened to ring our mother while he and Fred waited for their plane out of Oslo. Ma had heard nothing from Emma and Laura at the hospital, but feared her ex-husband might now be very close to death. She decided not to say anything, but told Colin to ring the hospital as quickly as possible.

  Laura and Emma drove out to Heathrow to meet the Oslo flight and take their brothers back to see Pa’s body before it left the hospital. Fred, for reasons known only to himself, had taken his kilt with him to Norway. On the return journey he had had trouble shutting his case and ended up wearing the kilt. Any composure Emma and Laura had dissolved the moment they caught sight of him, white with misery, striding towards them wearing our family tartan. It was so unexpected, so incongruous, yet it added a poignancy that perfectly fitted this family upheaval.

  ‘Why is the funeral going ahead so soon?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s only three days since he died!’

  Even if I had been told the instant it had happened, this timetable would never have allowed me to reach Cawdor in time – even if every single flight co-ordinated seamlessly. First, there was the bumpy crawl from our camp to Waikabubak, then it was a four-hour bus ride to Waingapu, the capital of Sumba, then a two-hour plane ride to Bali, and then seventeen hours from Bali to London that included a mandatory stopover in Singapore and a further flight up to Scotland.

  ‘None of us know whether we’re coming or going. It’s been completely surreal.’<
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  ‘Why is the funeral happening at Pluscarden?’ I asked.

  ‘He became a Catholic on his deathbed.’

  ‘You are kidding!’

  ‘Nope. How strange is that?’

  How strange indeed. Both Hugh and his father before him had been rabidly anti-Catholic. I had always assumed this loathing was a remnant from times long past, when Scottish politics and affiliations divided down religious lines. Most of the families to the east of us were, like us, Presbyterian, while to the west we abutted the very big, very Catholic Fraser clan. Border folk hold their differences higher than those in the hinterland, but Pa’s antipathy to ‘left footers’ went so far as shunning any socializing with the Frasers, even though neither he nor Jack was remotely devout. They attended the Presbyterian kirk to show their faces and pay lip service, but Hugh showed all the signs of being, if not an atheist, then a steadfast agnostic. It was not until we formed firm teenage friendships with young Frasers that Pa finally relented and allowed us to invite them over and offer them the first Cawdor Campbell hospitality in generations.

  ‘I’m coming back!’ I called out.

  ‘There’s no point! Half of us leave here tonight after the funeral and the rest tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m coming back anyway. I can’t just stay on here as if—’

  ‘What’s that humming? Your voice has gone crackly … Liza … Hello?’ With much clicking and whirring, the line went dead. My head jerked back from Scotland to Sumba.