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

  I had been sitting in the Waikabubak telephone exchange for nearly an hour, and suddenly it felt stifling. I stood up and moved closer to the window, stretching the telephone cable as far as it would go. On the road I could see a small dust-devil, red from the soil, whirling towards the boardwalk outside the Chinese-owned hardware store. I gently replaced the telephone on its cradle and then sat back down on the chair for a little while longer. The operator looked at her watch and calculated my bill. My ear ached, everything ached, my pulse felt bruised.

  On the way home from Waikabubak we passed a whitewashed church standing in a banana grove. I asked Willie to stop the car. I wanted to pray, or to try to, but when I got there the interior was a building site and a group of rowdy children were running up and down a large pile of sand beside a concrete table that served as the altar. As I walked up the aisle, they crowded around me, laughing and shouting ‘Salamat pagi!’ – ‘Good day!’ I left, got back in the car and leaned my head against the side window. We drove home in silence.

  Our sunset was the time of the funeral in England, and the children were tucked up in their beds once more. Willie and I climbed to the top of the hill above our cabin, from where there were beautiful views over the reef. Venus was in the western sky, and extraordinary little patches of rainbow called Newtonian prisms were visible at the edge of the backlit clouds. I had never seen these before Sumba, nor have I since. The kite was in the form of a bird of paradise, with multi-coloured streamers for a tail. I wanted it to soar away until it vanished in the distance, but the wind kept gusting, then promptly dropping, and the kite nosedived into the ground again and again. Eventually I had to admit defeat. I moved on to the candle idea and pulled handfuls of tea-lights out of a basket I had brought along. I arranged them into two back-to-back Cs, which symbolized our family names of Campbell and Cawdor. Every time I lit the last few candles, the wind, which I now wished to stay becalmed, did the opposite and began to gust. The flames blew out repeatedly until the lighter packed up. My ceremony had been a washout, totally unsatisfactory. In fact, it was pathetic. It would have been better to mark the funeral quietly in our cabin rather than with these futile gestures on the hill.

  We headed back down and I told Willie that I needed to go home for a week, maybe ten days.

  * * *

  My father’s grave was still covered in flowers when I finally saw it. I added my wreath to the pile and sat there in the sunshine, unsure what to do next. Emma had told me as much as she could about the funeral. Trays of champagne and whisky had been served as the mourners gradually assembled in the drive outside Cawdor. Regulation black was interspersed with the tartan of men’s kilts. In an apt end to my father’s earthly existence, the gathering swiftly developed into an impromptu party. The funeral was well behind schedule by the time the undertakers finally managed to convince everyone to get into their cars and leave. In a bid to make up time, the lead hearse sped along the winding route at rally pace. Behind it was strung a sinuous cortège of four-wheel-drive cars in hot pursuit, breath-test failures to a man.

  I sat in the grass and looked across the field beyond my father’s grave. The graveyard he had chosen was old and full, so he lay alone, outside its walls. I realized, suddenly, that after the initial physical impact of overwhelming grief, a tiny spark of ambivalence had guttered into life. Part of me felt vertiginous from loss; but part of me felt thankful that this intimidating central figure in my life was gone. The family had a chance of a fresh start.

  * * *

  I searched out the anonymous posy of cream roses my mother had asked to be put on the grave, and placed it beside mine. Aside from wanting to enter the Catholic Church, Pa had apparently expressed a dying wish that our mother keep away from the funeral. It seemed unnecessarily cruel of him: my mother had been married to him for twenty years and had done nothing meaner than believe that she could love him back to sanity. I read some of the notes on the other flowers. There was one from our Gordon Cumming cousins, one from John Stewart the headkeeper and his wife, one from Hugh’s brother-in-law Peebles, one from the Percys. Reading these moving messages reminded me of the monumental effort he had made to write ‘Alnwick’. Not ‘I love you’, or ‘There’s something I need to tell you’, or even ‘This train ain’t going nowhere’, just social fussing. It was so lamentably … shallow. Almost an hour of effort to get across his last communication in this life: are the Percys coming to dinner? Bloody hell. I hope I don’t die with ‘There’s a terrific offer on asparagus spears at the supermarket’ on my lips.

  * * *

  I drove over to Pluscarden to keep an appointment with the monk who had converted my father. I struggled to express my confusion about his religious switch to this polite stranger who had dedicated his life to God and who had flown down to a London hospital in order to take a dying man into the Catholic fold. He described the process of conversion. I asked him whether my father had made a confession. ‘Oh no,’ he said, and paused. ‘No, that is not necessary, in the extreme circumstances of … such … gravity.’ I left Pluscarden with a queasy feeling about my father’s conversion to Catholicism. My sisters had told me he could not talk, and later he lay unconscious. Certainly, from what they said about how scared and surprised he had been in hospital, he had not been anticipating his own imminent demise. At what stage had he suddenly decided to change his faith? How could he indicate his request when he could write only A, L, N and W? His mind had appeared to be fixated on a party rather than the possibility of purgatory. Was it possible that these Catholics were so eager to claim another soul? The conversion happened without either of my sisters’ knowledge and the monk was nowhere to be seen as my father’s life ebbed away to the subaqueous blips of hospital machines. Angelika has always maintained that it was entirely at his own volition, and as I had ceased to understand the knotty workings of my father’s mind over the years, that might be perfectly true. He was a man who had kept some pretty huge secrets and displayed giddying contradictions. Maybe, just maybe, he had had a last-minute panic and wanted to ensure that the lift button was pressed for Up, rather than Down.

  I flew south to London and met up with my brothers and sisters. We grew up with the same parents in the same castle, but in many ways we each had a moat around us. Sometimes when visitors came they would say, ‘You are such lucky children. It’s a fairytale life you live.’ And I knew they were right. We were indeed incredibly lucky. We lived in the greatest comfort, roamed freely, and had parents whom we adored. Our mother would make a picnic, bundle us into the car and turn our trip into an adventure by letting us take it in turn to choose which way we went at each junction. Our father made us laugh until our sides ached, and filled our dolls’ house with chic, ultramodern furniture he had made from stiff white card. It was a fairytale upbringing. But fairytales can be dark, and I had no way of telling either a stranger or a friend what was going on. The abnormal became ordinary. When life became frightening on a nightly basis, I just blindly hoped that it would all somehow sort itself out for the best.

  After my father’s death, something strange and unexpected happened to us as a family. We had been so united in our feelings of anxiety around our father, but now that he was gone it was hard for us to reach each other. The only thing we could be sure of being in one mind about was that we all had the same lyrics stuck on the brain for months after his death. It was a song by Louis Prima called ‘Just A Gigolo’, about growing old and commenting on the emptiness of his life.

  But whatever vulnerability I felt at losing a parent, there was also that sense of deliverance, growing now since I’d first felt it at his graveside. His angry presence no longer loomed. The noisy silences of his moods were over. The power he once wielded had gone. By the time he died we were all wrung out. As a father he had provided us with an emotional rollercoaster ride, and however much any of us wanted to get off, none of us could. I was wrong, though. The sense of release within the muddle of grief was shortlived, and it vanished altogether wh
en I discovered that there was a grand finale from beyond the grave. None of us had any idea that he had concealed a dirty bomb, timed to detonate only after his death.

  * * *

  In December, as we prepared our move out to Indonesia, I had snatched a weekend on my own at Cawdor during a lull in the packing. When I arrived, Pa was sitting in ‘his’ chair to the left of the fireplace in the Tower Room, surrounded by precarious piles of books on all sides. He was wearing his ubiquitous black polo-neck jersey, plough brown corduroy trousers, a belt with the family crest on it, yellow socks and Gucci loafers. His compact hair was looking a little greyer, but even though he had begun chemotherapy, it still looked as if he would need a poker to force a parting. I leaned down to kiss him; he turned and gave me his ear – always a bad sign. He remained in a filthy mood throughout my stay. How do you say goodbye to a dying man? I had no idea. The mention of anyone’s name seemed to trigger fresh fury. Of Emma, he said, ‘She’s been sneaking around her room like a rat in the attic. Rummaging. I think she’s stealing.’

  ‘But she was in her own room, Pa! You’ve just said so yourself.’ Emma had been at Cawdor the week before me. She had told me when she got south that she had been searching for the letters he had sent to her at school. I felt shy about letting him know exactly what Emma had been doing; I thought it might sound like a premature memento mori. Instead I said, ‘When we spoke, she told me she’d been searching out her old school diaries. Does that help?’

  ‘No it does not, especially when I hear rumours that Colin has plans for your mother to return to live up here.’ This was madness.

  ‘Where on earth did you hear that?’ I said. ‘Ma is perfectly happy in London! She has no intention of coming back north, and even if she did, what business is it of yours?’

  The day dragged by. My father was in a door-slamming frame of mind and conversations were like wading up a cul-de-sac full of cold porridge. After lunch on the second day I excused myself, borrowed a car, and drove over to Jane Stuart’s house. Jane and her husband had been family friends through both my father’s marriages. I found her with some cut branches in the garden.

  ‘How lovely to see you, Liza!’ she said in her slow twang of the American South. ‘I didn’t know you were up here.’

  ‘Yes, I…’ But I got no further before bursting into tears. I described the mood at Cawdor and how my father was so full of venom that I felt utterly cowed. I had always imagined that if I knew I was dying, the world would have a desperate preciousness – that birdsong would be sharper, colours more vivid – and I’d want to tell everyone I loved exactly that. Pa seemed to be experiencing the polar opposite and I had no idea how to respond.

  Jane led me into her kitchen. She made tea, and when I was all talked out she said, ‘You might think that you’d feel those things, and maybe you would, but maybe you might also feel frightened and angry. No-one, but no-one, in my experience, is more tormented than your father. It can’t help but spill over and splash folk from time to time.’ This was fresh news to me. My father was so busy throwing verbal grenades around it hadn’t occurred to me they might be exploding inside him too. Jane went on. ‘Here’s my advice. He’s probably not at his best right now; he’s on steroid medication, which makes people extremely aggressive. Remember, it doesn’t matter one bit what he says, just tell him what you need to say. If you don’t, you’ll always regret it.’ I had been wrong-footed by his paranoid ramblings and it was a relief to have someone slice through to what actually mattered.

  I returned to Cawdor in time for dinner. On the walls of the dining room hang a series of tapestries depicting the adventures of Don Quixote. The candlelight gave them a warm glow that singularly failed to match the atmosphere. My father was completely drunk. His mouth was a purple hole, and Angelika was standing behind his chair hand-feeding him morsels of food. It was something she had done throughout their marriage, but this time he spat them back out onto his plate after a couple of chews like a petulant old baby. The excited barks of their four Jack Russells broke up this ghastly scene and Angelika swept out of the room. Doors opened and shut. We could hear her in the courtyard shouting the dogs’ names repeatedly. She rejoined us a few minutes later. ‘Those damn animals have been hunting again. Looks like they caught a young rabbit.’ Then she vanished again. I could hear her next door, in the flower room this time. When she reappeared, she had put on a calf-length coat trimmed with mink. ‘Will you say I would like tisane served in the Tower Room?’ she said, and turned on her heel.

  As soon as we had finished eating, I went off and watched television on my own. Pa stayed on drinking alone in the dining room. Later, I heard him climbing the stairs to the little sitting room where I had holed up, but a thump, a curse, and then a tinkle of breaking glass on stone gave me time to make a swift exit out of the far door.

  In the morning, I packed and called a taxi. My father offered to drive me, but I could see the extent of his hangover and I couldn’t face his driving or the cigar he had just lit. We stood rather awkwardly in the drive as the taxi driver placed my suitcase in the boot of his car. In a flash, I knew how to say goodbye, and it was incredibly simple. I hooked my father’s little finger with mine. ‘I love you with all my heart, Pa.’

  There was a long pause. He looked at his shoes. I looked at his shoes. He looked up at me. I returned his gaze. His puffy eyes narrowed.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so boring,’ he hissed, and turned on his heel.

  I turned to wave as the taxi set off down the drive, but he was slouching into the house. He didn’t look back. I could not conceive of the bleakness of the hole in which his soul must have been squatting that day. I didn’t want to embarrass the taxi driver, or myself, so I tried not to blink and rifled purposefully in my bag for the duration of our journey. All the wise advice Jane had given me was forgotten now, and years passed before I could feel compassionate towards my father for his reaction.

  When I got back to London there was a message on my answering machine from him. ‘Oh, I wish you could have stayed longer. Now I miss you, and apropos of nothing, I suggest you look up the derivation of “samphire”. Laura arrived tonight. Thought she’d bring her new beau, but she tells me he has set sail for Nineveh on a quinquereme. Better go…’

  Ah, the joys of the answering machine, the spoken letter: emotions expressed at one remove. Listening to his disembodied voice speaking to me as I sat on the sofa going through the mail made me sad. It was as if our last conversation, the whole weekend even, had been either blanked or reinvented. I didn’t know it then, but the weekend had been not only the last time I would see him but the last time I would ever stay at Cawdor. In fact, it was the last time I would go home without paying for a visitor ticket for the next ten years.

  Chapter 2

  Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are babes in the cradle.

  Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

  Once upon a time in Scotland, It must have been unimaginable that feuds and obsessive cattle rustling would one day be seen as finite cultural tics. Treachery, clan warfare and shifting allegiances were like oats and whisky to the populace. There was scant expectation of people reaching the biblical objective of three score years and ten. Even during peaceful periods, a premature death came easily: a bone fracture, a tooth abscess; the unhygienic attentions of a doctor. There was the pox, the palsy, religious persecution and its cousin, superstition. While Cawdor was under construction, the Spanish inquisition was in full swing, America would lie undiscovered for another century, the Hundred Years War was being intermittently waged, Plantagenets were on the throne of England and the Black Death was sweeping across Europe.

  If asked to draw an imaginary flower, in general children come up with something that roughly resembles a gerbera. If a child were asked to draw a castle, they’d probably come up with something that looked l
ike Cawdor. Like all medieval castles, it is essentially a colossal bunker in a traditional sandcastle style. The front is protected by a dry moat, and at the rear the building merges into a rocky outcrop. Battlements, drawbridge, bartizans, portcullis, etc. were all designed to say ‘Fuck off!’ with some conviction. Other castles that fell short of this mission statement lie in various states of dilapidation all over the kingdom. When I was little, my favourite ruin was Castle Campbell. Sacked by Cromwell, it stood in the parish of Dolour on top of Gloom hill and two small rivers passed on either side of it: one was called Sorrow, the other Care.

  * * *

  The fertile plain where Cawdor stands is an example in microcosm of Scottish life through the ages. Within a twenty-mile radius there are a dozen surviving castles and as many ruins – all testament to hundreds of fractious years when, if you were not with someone, then by definition you were fatally against them. Even with the protection of castle walls, enemies would make every effort to destroy you by lobbing decomposing animals over the battlements in the hope of starting a plague. And to think their descendants now loan each other their lawnmowers.

  Our oldest forebears would have no problem recognizing the Cawdor of today. They might be pleasantly surprised to note a few restrained decorative flourishes, like the enlargement of arrow slits into windows. The only time there was any extensive refurbishment was in 1684 when Britain was going through a ‘mini’ ice age. It was a time when winter Frost Fairs were held on the Thames. The Thane wanted to make the house as warm as possible for his nine children, a chaplain, a butler, a gentleman’s gentleman, a cook with an assistant, a porter, two footmen, two gentlewomen, a coachman, a chambermaid, three stablewomen and a dairymaid. His biggest innovation was to incorporate the main staircase into the body of the house so that it was no longer a refreshing outdoor climb to the upper floors. He also draped the walls in tapestries and built a massive fireplace in the great hall. The stone chimneybreast was carved with the family crest of a stag’s head and the family motto ‘Be Mindful’ underneath.