O Caledonia

“Come in for a moment, Janet, and play the lyre,” invited her father. Lila beamed uncertainly, her ragged black locks hanging over her dark and bloodshot eyes, her tumbler tremulous in her hand. Janet stood by Lila’s chair in her social position, one foot firmly planted on the carpet, the other entwining the opposite leg and moving up and down while she slipped the end of a pigtail into her mouth. “Well,” demanded Vera, stepping over the low windowsill, “What did Mr. McConochie have to say this morning?” “It was the wrath of God again,” mumbled Janet, chewing vigorously at her green hair ribbon. “Take that out of your mouth. Were there any good hymns?” “We had ‘Work, for the night is coming’ and ‘There is a fountain filled with blood’ and ‘Who would true valour see.’ ” She liked “Who would true valour see,” especially she liked the bit about “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend,” it reminded her of Jim, the gardener, and Miss Wales, the choleric cook. However, it wouldn’t do to say this. Instead she adopted a solemn downward stare and withdrew into a pleasant dream in which hunchbacked Jim and Miss Wales were crouched in deadly combat on a steaming marshland and she was riding by, casting an unruffled glance their way, above and apart from their feud, one of nature’s elect. A gleam from the occluded sky illumined the fearful pink knob which rose through Miss Wales’s grizzled hair. Jim’s face was darkly murderous. Janet had seen this look when he was clubbing the myxomatosis rabbits and stuffing them into a sack. When he had filled enough sacks he would stow them in the tractor’s trailer and roar up the back drive and hurl the lot into the gaping maw of the furnace which throbbed and quivered in the boiler room, ineffectually labouring to feed the central heating system.

The horror of this was comparable only to the times when Miss Wales boiled lobsters and they would scream a high thin scream and wave their inky antennae and scrabble at the steep sides of the great black cauldron. None of the grown-ups paid any attention to Janet’s desperate pleas for intervention, for mercy for these creatures; in fact, they became angry; “Don’t interfere, Janet. It’s none of your business, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And don’t answer back.” She could not bear it. The kitchen was the one part of Auchnasaugh which she avoided. Besides Miss Wales’s resentful presence and distressing scalp, besides Jim with his bloodstained trousers and his hands ingrained with soil and blood and death, and his hinged knife with fur and entrail fragments stuck to its blade, there was almost always a wide enamel bowl containing salted water tinging to rose pink. In this water lay two skinned and headless rabbits, pale and foetal, slaughtered innocents for all to see. The next day, when they were being forced to eat their rabbit stew, outside the French windows on the lawn and up the steep bank where a thousand merry daffodils blew in the spring breezes, rabbits would be scampering unaware.

“You will finish it up. You will not leave the table until you have finished.” This was the rule for all meals, for all courses, and many were Janet’s counter-stratagems, some more disgusting than others. While patting her lips daintily with her voluminous table napkin she could systematically disgorge her mouth’s contents and enfold them in the snowy linen. At the end of the meal napkins were rolled, ringed, and placed tidily in a drawer. Janet would return in stealth and shake the grisly wreckage out of the window; the feral cats who lived in the rhododendron thickets would streak out and crouch greedily over it. Near the dining table stood an old harmonium, long disused and silent. Behind its pedals a substantial cavity offered a refuge for food too repulsive even to enter her mouth, chiefly herrings and kippers. It was quite easy to drop her napkin, bend down to retrieve it, and, with a deft flick of the wrist, lob the fish into the dark recess. Vera’s dog, Clover, could be relied upon to clear it out later.