Poverty Castle (13 page)

‘I hope they did it sensibly. Fiona McTaggart's got a collie called Faithful. When are we going to get a dog, Papa?'

‘When we move into Poverty Castle you can have all the pets you want.'

‘But when will that be?'

‘I hereby announce that Poverty Castle will be opened on Saturday, 11th September, in less than three weeks' time.'

‘That's marvellous!' Diana looked at her sisters, expecting them all to be as pleased as herself. She knew she might have hurt their feelings by using the word ‘sensibly' but they ought not to be so sensitive.

Their faces remained solemn.

‘There will be a celebration,' said Papa. ‘An At Home. Everyone in the village will be invited.'

‘Can Fiona come?' asked Diana.

‘She's not from the village,' said Effie coldly.

‘Of course she can come. Invite all your friends.'

‘Can Annie come?' asked Rebecca.

‘She would be an honoured guest, my sweet. Her mother too.'

Afterwards in the room they shared Effie and Jeanie discussed the situation and came to philosophical conclusions. The change
in Diana was not something she had brought on deliberately: it had just happened to her, like having bosoms. It would happen to them too, whether they wanted it or not. They were lucky; for being twins they would always be close to each other. Rebecca was the one of the family most to be pitied. Being the youngest she would be left behind, except if Mama had the baby boy she was always talking about. In that case he and Rebecca could be companions for years. That was to say, if nothing bad happened to Mama. They had heard Granny Ruthven telling Mama not to be foolish, five children was enough for any woman, and besides, wasn't Edward always moaning about the over-population of the earth? Diana had told them having a baby could be dangerous for a woman if she was over thirty. Mama had been quite ill after having Rebecca. So it might be just as well if she didn't have another. Did it happen by accident or had something to be done to make it happen? When Diana was asked she had been confused and evasive. It seemed to be a secret that she hadn't yet been let into.

They forgave her for calling them a bunch of silly little kids. They were sorry they had teased her about Edwin.

A
NOTICE
, designed by Papa, with a sketch of the house, was put up in the village shop: ‘Mr and Mrs Sempill, and the five Misses Sempill, late of Edinburgh, cordially invite their neighbours to an At Home on Saturday, 11th September, from 3pm to 6pm, to celebrate the re-opening, after years of dereliction, of Poverty Castle, formerly known as Ardmore.'

The girls were sure that nobody in Kilcalmonell except Miss McGill would know what dereliction meant, but it wasn't the use of the big show-off word that provoked criticism from Mr Campbell's customers, it was the cheek of the newcomers in calling their house Poverty Castle.

‘Surely they know that it was just a nickname!'

‘Some poverty! They're spending thousands on it.'

‘Is it legal to call your house a castle? Doesn't it have to be registered at the Court of Heraldry or something like that?'

‘The Big House has never called itself a castle.'

‘It's her doing, if you ask me. She fancies herself as lady of the manor. All that jewellery! All that waving of her arms!'

‘And she's got those five girls as bad as herself. They think they own the earth, that lot.'

‘Sempill himself seems a nice person.'

‘He's too soft for her. You can see she's been spoiled.'

‘Not to mention the girls.'

‘You wait and see, they'll want to keep Ardmore beach for themselves.'

‘They can't do that. It belongs to the estate. It's the estate that puts up those Private notices.'

‘All the same, my mother, who's over eighty as you know,
was born in the village, says that folk at Ardmore always had use of the beach. It must be in their title deeds.'

‘Well, I don't think you'll see me at their At Home.'

‘Why not? It might be interesting to see inside. I hear only the best materials have been used, expense no object.'

‘They've painted it white. It looks like a lighthouse, seen from the sea.'

‘Four men have been working on the garden for weeks.'

‘They've put in central heating.'

‘They've made use of land that doesn't belong to them. The laird won't be pleased.'

‘He thinks he's the laird.'

‘She'll have put the idea in his head.'

‘I wonder where they got all their money. He's an architect, they say, but he seems to be retired.'

‘Is it true, Dugald, that there's to be champagne?'

Mr Campbell confirmed that there was to be champagne, as well as coca-cola for the children and beer for the men that wouldn't thank you for champagne. Dougary's, the biggest and best bakers in Tarbeg, were to do the catering. There would be strawberry tarts.

‘Well, upstarts they may be, but we've got to admit they're taking more interest in the village than the new laird's ever done. I might take a look-in, just for curiosity's sake.'

That summed up a general attitude. Mr Campbell warned Mr Sempill to expect an invasion of nosy-parkers who wouldn't say no to a glass or two of champagne and a strawberry tart.

Special invitations were sent to Mr Patterson the lawyer and his wife; Miss McGibbon, his clerkess; Mr McDermott the builder and his wife; Miss McGill and Miss McKay; and the Rev. Mr Angus Buchanan, of the Church of Scotland, and Mrs Buchanan. All accepted except the minister who not too truthfully pleaded other business. He had once called at Bell Heather Cottage to welcome his new parishioners and had discovered a nest of incorrigible pagans.

Annie McPhee and her mother would not be present.
There had been trouble at the camp. The police had had to be summoned. It seemed that Annie's father had got into a fight with two other men who had insulted his wife and daughter. He had gone to Knapdale, with a black eye and teeth missing. Annie had not yet enrolled in school there: this Miss McGill had learned from a telephone conversation with her colleague.

Rebecca was sad because she would never see Annie again. The twins urged Diana to telephone the Big House and invite Edwin. She declined, so they did it themselves, to be told by the caretaker that the family had returned to their home in England and would not be back in Scotland until next summer. Diana pretended not to care but her sisters noticed how she went off to be by herself for a while. When she came back she was in a peculiarly cheerful mood, but they weren't deceived: they knew her heart was breaking.

Fiona McTaggart was being brought in Mr Patterson's car.

The Sempills themselves flitted into Poverty Castle on the Wednesday. The girls took the day off school. They had seen the reconstructions and renovations in all their various stages but they were still astonished and enchanted when Papa took them on a tour of their new home. Proudly he pointed out how the ceilings had been replaced with real plaster and not shoddy plasterboard. The elaborate cornices were of a kind popular at the time when the house was built, in 1812, before the Battle of Waterloo. He had assured them many times that the exterior of the house, with its unadorned four-foot-thick walls and rather small windows, was not as bleak as many people might think (including his wife, it so happened) but solid and dignified. Those were the qualities he had been after: solidity and dignity. Examples were the mahogany doors and foot-high skirting boards, not to mention the lavatory pans, of white porcelain decorated with flowers, in one case roses, in another forget-me-nots and primroses, and in the third, in his own private closet, thistles. They had not been easy or cheap to obtain but they were well worth it. Effie
whispered to Jeanie that it didn't matter, did it, where you piddled? But they didn't giggle, for Papa had worked very hard and they had never seen him so happy and self-confident. In this house, in its every aspect, from the door handles to its coal scuttles, he had expressed not only his artistic temperament but also his secret longings. It might be, to begin with, an awkward place to live in for it was like a kind of museum where nothing was to be displaced. When Effie picked up a wooden carving of Don Quixote on his horse Rosinante and put it down again two inches from where it had been Papa without a word replaced it. They loved him for his enthusiasm and were glad that he was so happy, but they were afraid that he would not be able to keep it up and would lose heart, as he always did.

In all the rooms and on every landing were vases, of crystal, china, pewter, and silver, full of flowers culled from the garden or bought from a florist in Tarbeg.

In spite of the garden's many flowers, shrubs, trees, statues, and urns, in Papa's eyes its glory was the big rowan, at that season of the year resplendent with crimson berries. He had carved all their names on the trunk, as in the song. He would stand beside it, looking lonely and vulnerable, so that the girls wanted to protect him, though from what they could not have said: himself, they vaguely felt. On the evening before the At Home they saw him from the window tying something to the tree. They ran out and found it was a flag, the Lion Rampant. With a faraway look in his eyes he explained that in Borneo there were sacred trees in which the natives believed ancestral spirits dwelled. In honour of these they festooned the branches with coloured rags. The girls knew him so well that they could tell he wasn't joking. They had heard Granny Ruthven say to Mama, ‘I declare, Margaret, there are times when I'm convinced Edward is simply not all there,' and they had come to realise what she must have meant. Part of Papa was hidden away where even they could not get in. It was true that sometimes all of Mama was missing, but it was never for long and when she
came back she was always her old familiar self, frequently inattentive, but wholly knowable. There was really no mystery about her as there was about Papa, and never more so than when he worshipped at his rowan tree.

A
CCUSTOMED TO
suiting themselves as to what they wore the girls were indignant when Diana forbade them to put flowers in their hair instead of ribbons: it would make them look ridiculous. Rowena paid no heed and went on arranging the blue lobelia. The twins, who hadn't been sure it was a good idea, were now determined to go ahead with it. They chose red roses and helped Rebecca to choose pansies.

Diana no longer conferred with them: she just ordered them about like a grown-up or rather like all grown-ups except Mama and Papa. If the girls had worn nothing but bikini bottoms Mama would merely have murmured that it might not be wise with so many clegs and wasps about, and Papa would probably have said that when the missionaries in Africa made the natives put on clothes they hadn't given them innocence but had taken it from them.

Papa himself wore a kilt, for the first time in his life. After much self-examination he had bought one, with accessories. Belonging to no particular clan the Sempills, it seemed, had no tartan of their own. He had chosen one called the Jacobite, because he had liked its colours, yellow, red, and green, and also because it had been sported in 1707 by Lowlanders protesting against the infamous Act of Union.

The girls thought he looked magnificent in it, even if his legs, to use Granny Ruthven's word, were like spurtles.

Mama wore a dress with lots of yellow in it, and green combs in her hair. Either she forgot to put on a brassiere or more likely decided one wasn't necessary, her bosoms being able to support themselves.

They knew about her bosoms because they sometimes went in and chatted with her while she was having a bath. She had told them they were still beautiful, especially since she had had five children. They had pretended to believe her, though they had really thought that having big shoogly lumps on your chest must be an inconvenience. They had been fascinated by the hair on her body but were too polite to enquire about it. It must be one of the more gruesome consequences of growing up.

Diana wore the same white dress in which she had played cricket at the Big House. Rebecca guilelessly asked if it was because it reminded her of Edwin. Diana rather grimly kissed her but didn't answer.

The visitors would come by the resurfaced splendid new road. Cars would be parked in the enlarged courtyard that had been cleared of brambles and briers and paved with flagstones.

More cars could be accommodated in the wood, in grassy spaces between trees. Guests would walk past the gable to the front of the house where they could either go in by the main door or stay out in the garden sipping cold champagne. A barman had been borrowed from the hotel to dispense the drink and the woman who cooked the school lunches was put in charge of the eatables. Against the girls' advice a piper had been hired, to play patriotic and nostalgic tunes.

The first car to arrive was Mr Patterson's. Diana raced to welcome it, pursued by her sisters who were as eager as she was to greet Fiona, though for different reasons. They hadn't made up their minds yet how they should treat her. She had stolen some of Diana's affection but perhaps that wasn't her fault, and wasn't Papa always saying that love had no limits? If he was right there was room in Diana's heart for them and Fiona too, not to mention Edwin Campton. It would depend on whether or not they took to Fiona. Diana's description of her had been very brief and rather snappish: so much so they wondered if Fiona was fat or cross-eyed.

What she was was shy, more so even than Annie McPhee,
who had so much better cause. Fiona hung her head, peeped at her toes, blushed, and spoke in babyish whispers. In appearance she was passable though she wore spectacles, and her skirt and blouse were all right if a bit old-fashioned, but it remained a puzzle as to why Diana, fierce as a lioness, should have made this timid doe her friend. Could it be because she knew that Fiona would be easy to boss? Granny Ruthven often referred to her as ‘Miss Bossyboots'.