O Caledonia (20 page)

 

*

 

She was aware that she was trying not to think of the asylum and the people she had seen there. Later, there would be a time for this, and she feared its coming. One lovely thing had happened. As she walked away from
‘
Sunny Days
'
along the cliff road, she had been followed and escorted by a great white bird, a fulmar. It floated just below her, beneath the edge of the cliff, dipping and drifting, its inscrutable disc face turned towards her. She thought that perhaps it was Lila
'
s soul, briefly escaped from her little white cell and narrow bed and slumbering physical being, and ranging free on the back of the wind, a phantom presence come to wish her well.

Vera met her off the bus. As they drove up the glen road she questioned Janet about her day. Janet talked with animation for, as part of her strategy, she had researched intensively in
Vogue
and
Woman's Journal.
She described the cup of coffee she had taken in Watt and Grants, and the haughty mannequin who had glided up and down between the tables, expressionlessly flinging a fur wrap over one shoulder, revolving like a mechanical doll so that the pleats of her Gor-ray skirt fanned out above the ruler-straight seams of her stockings. She spoke of A-line dresses and pencil skirts, of shot taffeta ball gowns and fashion
'
s hideous new colour, shocking pink. She claimed that she had tried on a pair of shoes with Louis heels,
‘
just for fun, of course. I know I
'
m not old enough to wear heels.
'

Vera was astonished and delighted. Perhaps at last Janet was growing up, becoming more feminine. How she yearned for a companionable daughter. Rhona was always a pleasure, but she was still rather young. What fun it would be if she and Janet could exchange girlish confidences, complicit glances, enter into the powerful freemasonry of the female against all that was uncouth, barbaric and disruptive (well, masculine) at Auchnasaugh.
‘
Shoe kicking time
'
, she thought, in happy anticipation, imagining the two of them, lounging and lolling on Janet
'
s bed, chattering and giggling late into the evening, perhaps over mugs of drinking chocolate. Of course she would have to provide Janet with a different bedside lamp, some floral affair in china, with a rosy silken shade. This scene could not be enacted in the harsh light of her Anglepoise. Janet, aware of her mother
'
s new warmth of spirit, ventured to ask whether she might just possibly, as an end of holidays present, have a copy of the
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.
Vera frowned, remembering the books stacked slithering and topsy-turvy all over Janet
'
s bedroom floor. Why add to them?
‘
All right,
'
she said,
‘
I
'
ll ask them to send it straight to you at school.
'
Janet eyed her distrustfully and saw that it was best to drop the subject.
‘
Where, incidentally,
'
demanded Vera, still ruffled,
‘
are the things you changed for whatever it was?
' ‘
Oh,
'
said glib Janet,
‘
it was the Celanese knickers and they wouldn
'
t swop them. Oh goodness, oh dear, I must have left them on the bus.
'
Vera sighed.
‘
Your poor great-aunt. What a waste,
'
she said.

‘
Typical,
'
she said.

 

*

 

That winter lasted even longer than usual. In late March Janet walked slowly up the drive; her feet were beginning to ache with cold, but she could go no faster for fear of falling on the dense sheet ice. The air was hushed and clouded as though it too were about to freeze. The rhododendron leaves hung stiff and shrivelled, the trees loomed black and still. Nothing stirred. It seemed a dead landscape, imprisoned beneath a colourless sky. Great icicles hung below the bridge over the burn. The water moved wearily, obstructed by tangles of frozen branches and random chunks of ice; the glen was drained, exhausted. Janet thought of Tennyson,
‘
I dreamed there would be spring no more.
'
As the words formed in her mind, a kingfisher shot from under the bridge and sped in brilliant zigzags down the dreary burn, glorifying the winter world. Janet was exultant. She had been accorded a vision.
“‘
What, though the field be lost, all is not lost!
”'
she cried aloud to the silent hills and the echo returned, giving her the lie,
‘
Lost, lost, lost
'
. Unheeding, she hobbled on to Auchnasaugh; a spring of crystalline joy was leaping in her heart.
‘
Wherefore let thy voice Rise like a fountain in me, night and day.
'
She thanked God, she thanked the moon, still visible in the midday sky. The pale sun and the pale moon hung opposite each other in that white sky. It was like the Book of Revelations.

Over lunch she related the miracle to her family. Hector and Vera became bored as she described with unnecessary detail, her progress up a drive whose every tree, bush, ditch or frozen puddle they knew just as well as she.
‘
Do get to the point Janet, you
'
re just blethering.
'
She got to the point. There was a moment
'
s silence, then everyone spoke at once; Francis
'
voice was loudest. He and Rhona were exchanging a meaningful look.
‘
I won
'
t say it
'
s camp,
'
said he,
‘
but it
'
s tantamount. And of course, purest Disney.
' ‘
Drip, drip, drip little April showers,
'
sang Rhona gleefully. Francis joined in, so did Lulu. Caro squealed with delight. Hector and Vera subsided into mirth. Janet wanted to cry, but she would not give them that satisfaction. She had been trying to read Proust recently and she had pounced with relish on his phrase
‘
l'etouf- foir familial
',
the family suffocation chamber. Vengefully and silently she repeated it.

Late in the afternoon she did something which even she regarded as criminal, albeit an act of retribution. She slipped into Francis
'
room, haven to his bizarre collection of cacti. Some stood in sandy desert land, a miniature Arizona, curvaceous and, as cacti went, normal-looking. Others were veiled by tawny tresses or wispy white beards; some sported jaunty and unconvincing scarlet flowers as though trying to pass themselves off as South Sea Island beauties. Some pointed stiffly with odd truncated limbs, reminding Janet of the amputees among the war-wounded, so long ago. There were tall ones like trees and little ones like hedgehogs; and there were succulents. Janet disliked the succulents. Their complacent, smooth green flesh bore witness to ugly subterranean greed. She could imagine them feeding off blood. They were dewy and plump. They were repulsive. With care, she selected her victim. The rising moon assisted her, illuminating the spectral throng. She stooped over the tallest, broadest succulent. It was crowned by a moist jade leaf, a new leaf, the product of many months of self-regarding ingestion. She plunged her thumbnail, filed to talon sharpness, deep into its thick flesh. She stabbed it through in one deft movement, leaving a crescent-shaped wound. With a sigh of satisfaction she turned away. She paused to look at Francis
'
slow-worm, known to him as Montgomery, known to all others as Gloria. In his huge vivarium, Gloria was contemplating his prey. Sometimes he did this for so long that even slugs moved out of his reach. The moon rippled across his burnished pewter back and lingered on his azure spots. Janet stroked his ancient forehead. He ignored her, gazing balefully into his litter of earth and leaves.

Within a few days the succulent
'
s proud new leaf had withered, etiolated and fallen off. The wound gaped. Francis was mystified. Eventually another leaf took its place. On its bland surface it bore a crescent-shaped mark and as the leaf grew the crescent cracked open, until this leaf fell also, fatally wounded. So began a long sequence of doomed leaves, always growing singly in that same spot, always stamped with the crescent of Janet
'
s thumbnail. She felt no guilt. She believed it was the moon
'
s revenge.

 

*

 

That year the daffodils would wait no longer. They forced their way through the earth
'
s chill carapace and bloomed in the tarnished snow. At once a wild wind swept in from the west and whirled them into crazed confusion, snapping the stems, tearing off the golden trumpets, tossing and flattening the survivors. The cats paced and hovered by the back door, uncertain whether to risk the outdoors; with wrinkled muzzles, they tested the wind. Among the swirling daffodils the old labrador lay out, in the heart of the gale. Her head was raised, her ears were pricked; alertly she snuffed the air; she watched the world turn, the new season approach. Looking at her, Janet thought in sharp sorrow,
‘
I will not see this again,
'
for now the labrador could scarcely walk; her hind legs were emaciated and she had to be helped in and out and up the stairs. Yet she was couched out there, unafraid, welcoming with dignity whatever was to come, among the reckless, gaudy flowers whose time was even briefer.
‘
Fair Daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon.
'
Fair Labrador. Sometimes Janet thought that life
'
s sole purpose was to teach one how to die. As in most spheres, so in this, animals did better than people.

She mused upon her own remote and unalarming death and the arrangements for her funeral which she had for a long time now been inscribing in the back of her special notebook, adding new pleasures as they came to mind. The place was, as always, up in the hills, among the pine groves above the brown and secret pool. There would be bagpipes and there would be Gregorian chants. The Papal Count might be present, as a disembodied voice, singing
‘
Danny Boy
'
; she was not entirely sure about this. For a little time one faithful dog would sit beside the grave, while others ran and skirmished in merry insouciance along the shadowed woodland paths, possibly flushing out the capercailzie. This was another point of uncertainty, for although he was a kind of
genius loci
, his demeanour might lower the dignity of the occasion. The word preposterous, she thought, could have been coined especially for the mighty caper. Cats would be stretched, couchant and motionless along the tree branches, staring down with glittering eyes. She saw no people there. If John McCormack could be disembodied so could the piper and the chanters. But in time to come an occasional ghostly visitant might make his way through the trees and pause by her stone and think of how she had loved him, furling his cloak against the winds of dawn. At present these pilgrims would include W. B. Yeats, Catullus, Virgil, Alfred de Vigny, Rupert Brooke, John Donne, Racine, Alain Fournier, Henry Vaughan, Sophocles and Tacitus. Shakespeare would be too busy. She would have liked to have had Baudelaire, but she could imagine no circumstances, ghostly or otherwise, which would have persuaded him to come. If only she were an
affreuse juive.
Oh well,
tant pis.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TEN

 

 

Janet lay in bed in the sanatorium at St Uncumba
'
s. In the distance she could hear the girls
'
voices, jostling and raucous like birds, the thud and bounce of tennis balls, the click of a cricket bat, cries of seagulls. Through the drawn curtains watery light washed the room, forming and reforming intermittent bright splashes which trembled against the walls and ceiling. She felt weightless and immaterial, deliciously remote. With great caution she moved her head, moved her eyes; the headache had gone. She rolled her eyes in all directions. There was no answering pain. The iron vice which had been clamped about her skull for days on end had dissolved into thin air, just as though it had never been. Now she could scarcely imagine it, had almost forgotten how she had been walking and seen rain about her but had felt none, so that she had moved forward like a blind person, with hands outstretched trying to catch the bright droplets, until the sudden agony had gripped her head and she dared not make one step further, dared not cry out for help. Motionless she had stood, engulfed in pounding pain while the crazy rainstorm flashed about her and her lips moved silently. Girls wandered past, unsurprised by her behaviour, nudging each other or tapping their foreheads. Break ended, lessons began again and still she stood there. Far away in the black pulsating torture chamber of her skull she perceived the form of the weeping manatee, and the word humanity and the word manatee merged in dolour. At last someone had come and led her in to the matron.