Gwendoline Butler - The Red Staircase

I was always happy to see my home again. Jordansjoy was the shell of a once great house. The castle was in ruins, a romantic and beautiful wreck which had inspired Sir Walter Scott to a well known effusion. The grand mansion, erected by an early Gowrie in 1790 and decorated in the finest neoHellenistic taste of the period, had proved impossible to heat or live in, especially as the family fortunes fell away. For the last generation the Gowries had lived in eight or nine rooms in the stable wing, which was in fact a remarkably beautiful quadrangle of stone buildings, our ancestor having demanded a high standard of living for his horses. We, of course, kept none. Behind the shuttered windows of the mansion lay rooms full of mouldering hangings and worm-eaten furniture, anything of any value having been sold long since.

Tibby took a sharp look at me as I came in. Not much missed her eyes, and I have no doubt she read my mood. ‘Come away in and get your breakfast,’ she said. ‘And after you’ve eaten you can take a rest. Grizel, put a hot-water bottle in your sister’s bed.’

‘I’m not cold,’ I protested, although it was true that my native air did seem fresh and eager after sultry London.

‘Oh, it’s a cosy thing, a bottle,’ said Grizel, dancing away. ‘You can take it out when you get in.’

Tibby poured me tea and took a cup herself. ‘You’ll need to go down and see Mrs Graham when you’ve had your rest,’ she said. ‘She’s been sending up messages for you. Anxious to know the news of Patrick, I suppose.’

‘I’ll go down this afternoon,’ I said wearily. ‘Patrick sent her a letter and a book: a life of Lord Salisbury, I think. She reads a lot of memoirs, you know.’

‘Tired of life, poor thing,’ said Tibby briskly. ‘That’s what she must be, to spend her days reading of what’s done.’

I went to see Mrs Graham next day, and we talked about my visit to London and about Patrick, whom she adored. She was a gentle, delicate woman in increasingly frail health, but she was always good to me. Just as I was leaving, a boy arrived with a telegram for her.

She read it without comment, and then handed it to me. ‘From Patrick.’

I took it and read: ‘ Arriving Thursday morning. Staying one night. Do not meet the train .’ I looked up and met Alethea Graham’s eyes.

‘He’ll come to you before he comes home. That’s what the telegram means,’ she said.

I nodded, full of a disquiet I could not explain.

Patrick and I had met at a ball at Holyrood House, to which I had been taken by old Lady Macalister, who had been my grandmother’s friend. She introduced me to Patrick and we had the supper dance together, and then the dance after, and by the end of the evening I, at least, was in love.

We had many meetings in the weeks that followed, while Patrick had leave. Little meetings, I called them in my own mind, because we were never alone, being either in his mother’s company or that of other young people. But we seemed to grow closer at each meeting, and although several people took it upon them to remind me what a bad gambler Colonel Graham had been and how there might be something in heredity, I was not daunted. No doubt Patrick’s friends were telling him the worst they knew of my family, and how the Gowries had always been chancy, impecunious folk. ‘Good looks and bare acres,’ was the phrase around here. But Patrick and I seemed to prosper, and when he asked me to marry him on the last day of his leave, I accepted at once. It was romantic, it was right. I never had a moment’s doubt.

The spot where we became engaged was the Orangery at Lady Macalister’s place near Jordansjoy, and the occasion her annual garden party when she ‘worked off, as we used to say, all the hospitality she owed. The air in the Orangery was sweet and warm, outside in the garden a band was playing a waltz from ‘The Balkan Princess.’ It is a mistake, I’m sure, to think that men don’t succumb to the romance of an occasion as easily as women. I am convinced now that Patrick was powerfully affected by the sweetness of our surroundings, following upon the happy sequence of our meetings, and by a sense of what was somehow appropriate and expected.

Perhaps I underrate myself. I remember saying to Patrick then: ‘But I can’t understand how you came even to notice me.’

‘Can’t you?’ A quizzical look.

‘No. Grizel is the beauty.’

‘Well, there I don’t agree with you. But you need not wonder, Rose. Amongst all those people you really stand out.’

‘I do?’

‘Yes, you’re different. Rose, different from most girls.’

‘I suppose it must be a result of my training in Edinburgh,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘My look, I mean.’

‘It was different to start with.’

‘Yes, in our set it was.’ Which was true.

‘Do you regret not finishing?’

I gave him a radiant smile. ‘Not now, my darling Patrick.’

It wasn’t true, though; I did mind, and perhaps Patrick sensed it.

‘Patrick’s arriving the day after tomorrow,’ I said to Tibby and Grizel, when I got back home. ‘His mother had a telegram while I was there. Arriving in the morning and not to meet the train.’

‘And nothing to you?’ said Grizel indignantly.

‘Oh, I knew anyway. He told me in London’.

‘You never said.’

‘I was going to.’ And I saw Tibby’s eyebrows go up. She knew, and I knew, that I usually came out fast with things I wanted to say.

I knew to the minute the time when the London train arrived at the junction, and knew too how long it would take Patrick to get to me if he took the station fly, and I made up my mind to be waiting for him in the garden so we need not meet in the house. I had an irrational fear of being in a confined space while we talked. I suppose Tibby saw what I was up to, but she helped me by agreeing that the more I weeded that path where the hollyhocks grew, the better.

The time of the train’s arrival came and went, but Patrick did not appear; I waited and waited. ‘This will be the best weeded path in Perthshire,’ I thought in desperation. I was on the point of giving up and retreating to the house when I heard him coming. He was whistling softly to himself as he did sometimes when distracted. I recognised the tune: a poem of Robert Burns’ set to music. ‘My love is like a red, red rose’. I doubt if he knew what he was whistling, and in any case he stopped when he came into view. His shoes and the edge of his trousers were covered with dust. We have very dusty lanes here about Jordansjoy when the weather is dry, and I knew by that dust that Patrick must have been walking and walking around them since the train got in.

‘Hello, Rose,’ he said. ‘You here?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Thought you might be. Sorry if I was a long while coming. I’ve been walking about. Thinking.’

I saw Patrick had someting in his hand: a small packet, neatly done in fresh brown paper. I thought it might be a little present for me. Patrick did sometimes give me presents – a good book or a leather notebook for my accounts, that sort of thing – and now was the time for presents if there ever was one, these weeks before our marriage. I couldn’t expect much after we were married. A brooch with a white river pearl from Perth, perhaps, if I had the good luck to bear him a son.

He did not look in a present-giving mood; he was wearing his dark town suit and carrying lavender gloves. The clothes about which Alec had once been heard to mutter: ‘The mute at the funeral.’ There had never been any love lost between Patrick and Alec since Patrick recommended that Alec, that freedom-lover, be sent away to Eton, for ‘only a top flight public school could whip him into shape’.