Belinda Rathbone - Living with the Laird - A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion

In spite of its glorious light, its air of gentility and its fine antiques, the drawing room depressed me as much as any other. Perhaps even more so, because of the effort implied in making it cheerful and elegant and, above all, correct. There was nowhere in the house where I felt I could sit down and relax without feeling the massiveness of the gloom that surrounded me.

As I climbed the stairs my heart sank even lower. The landing was heaped high with old curtains and cushions, a glass-fronted bookcase stood half empty, books all askew, as if it had been hastily scoured and relieved of its choicest treasures. Wherever I looked I felt the stillness of John’s mother’s death three years before, and the disarray following the task of sorting her belongings. Various relatives had made their passes through, taken what they wanted and vanished. What they left behind was drained of life and tainted with rejection.

I had always thought of myself, having grown up in New England, as someone well prepared to confront the baggage and the bumps of an old family place. I had known enough old Boston families, old money, deeply imbued with the ethic of inconspicuous consumption, to appreciate the beauty of an unrenovated country kitchen, the charm of faded upholstery and the clutter of dusty heirlooms. But this was not the warm, drab grandeur of an old summer house in Manchester-by-the-Sea. This was not the cherished family retreat in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the lakeside log cabin camp in the Adirondacks. Love must once have been felt for this place, but it was not the kind that passes like a gift from one generation to the next in the name of summertime pleasures and memories. This was the centrepiece of a system gone to seed, deeply suggestive of the forbidden desire to give up and get out. Some hidden force kept them there, but it wasn’t exactly love.

I felt a strong urge to start moving things around, but I didn’t know where to begin. I decided to take a walk.

I found John around the back of the house, immersed in a sea of tools and spare parts in a vast skylit garage. He was working on the brake system of his mother’s Scirocco. Now that we were here I wondered if I would ever be able to tear him away, as he was already in the grip of so many problems. A young man with wavy brown hair was trying to get John’s attention. Turning to me he introduced himself as Stephen, the artist who lived in the basement flat at the West end of the house, the one who was always there. And that was Foxy, the yellow Labrador Stephen had been looking after whilst John was away. It was clear that no one could be bade to accompany me on anything so unnecessary as a walk, not even the dog.

‘She won’t go with you,’ said John, ‘doesn’t know you well enough.’ But he assured me that I couldn’t get lost if I simply followed ‘the circuit’.

On my own I followed the invitation of a road just in front of the house, which led between two fields. My heart lifted at the sight of a gigantic sycamore before me, its massive trunk holding a perfectly shaped crown of deep green leaves. There was a fair breeze. The sky was big and near and clouds moved rapidly across the blue; the sun winked in and out, angling across a field of wheat. A pheasant squawked and fluttered out of the tall grass in front of me. Handsome old specimen trees dotted here and there in the fields made the scene look not so much like a farm as resembling a pleasure park. Now rounding a corner and looking back across a field of grazing beasts I caught sight of the house in the distance, perhaps a quarter mile from where I stood. I suddenly imagined myself a character in a Jane Austen novel. There was nothing in my view that declared the arrival of the twentieth century. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a horse and buggy wheeling by. For the most essential thing—the house and its command of the landscape—had as much authority as it would have had two hundred years ago.

I FOUND JOHN in the kitchen, a narrow room on the north side of the house with strangely high ceilings. It was chilly. There was no need to refrigerate the chicken we had bought for supper, which sat next to the sink in its plastic wrapping. The wooden counter around the sink looked damp and had a lip along its edge, like a ship’s galley, as if to keep things from sliding off in case of a storm. The narrow workspace was cluttered with a collection of toasters and weighing scales and big crockery jars stuffed with wooden implements. An overworked roll of flypaper hung in a twirl from a fluorescent light fixture. A long terry-cloth hand towel hung from a wooden roller in a loop and looked overdue for a thorough laundering.

‘Used to be the butler’s pantry,’ said John. ‘The original kitchen was downstairs on the basement level, just below us. Now it’s the main room of the East flat.’

‘Isn’t it awfully far from the dining room?’ I asked naively.

‘That was the whole point. You weren’t supposed to smell cooking until it was on a plate in front of you. It was a bit of a trek for the maids, though, with their platters of hot food, scurrying up and down the stone stairs. Though of course there was also the dumb waiter.’ He opened a sliding, square door to a wobbly shelf at counter level, where a large aluminium pot was parked. ‘I sometimes keep a head of lettuce in there. Better than the fridge, really. Anyway, why not save a watt?’

‘Why not,’ I agreed, somewhat mystified.

‘How about a drink?’

I couldn’t think of anything I needed more. Ice cubes could be wrested from a frost-ridden, doorless freezer compartment in a bar-sized fridge.

‘I never use ice,’ said John, which was plain to see. ‘Unnecessary in this climate.’

We would not be eating dinner in the dining room that night, I was relieved to hear. It was too cold, and too big for the two of us. Instead, as John used to do with his mother, we wheeled our trolley of food out of the kitchen and into the library. John unfolded a little Pembroke table in front of the sofa, drew up a chair on the other side and lit a fire.

In the dim light of two undersized table lamps and the warm sparkle of the fire, I could forget for a moment the miserable clutter and dowdiness of this once proud room. We had, for the evening, claimed for ourselves a little corner of it and brought it to life. John laid our table for two with sturdy place mats, the family silverware, chipped kitchen plates, saltcellar and pepper grinder, seersucker napkins. With a pair of grape scissors he snipped fresh parsley over our boiled potatoes.

‘Duke of York, these are, earlies.’

Whatever that meant.

‘First crop of the season,’ added John, relishing the prospect. He brightened the fire with a few gentle blows of the bellows, then took a little hearth broom and swept the ashes away from the lip of the Franklin stove and into a shovel. The inscrutable Foxy stretched herself elegantly across the fire stool and closed her eyes.

There was so much to learn.

‘What are all these books about?’ I began. ‘Have you read any of them?’

‘Oh sure. Well, some,’ he answered. ‘They’re about all sorts of things—poetry over in that corner, English history down there, estate management, gardening, architecture, that sort of thing, over here. A lot of them were bought by subscription.’ He stabbed a spud with his fork. ‘Sometimes you find that the pages haven’t even been cut.’

‘That’s an elaborate cornice,’ I said, gazing upwards. ‘Is there some symbolism there? I see a crown.’

‘That was one of my in-laws, Elizabeth Grant. She was supposed to have descended from three kings, thus the three crowns. They just made that stuff by the yard, from a mould.’

‘The cornice was made by the yard?’