What to Look for in Winter (17 page)

 

There is no avoiding boats on an island. The miracle of the ferry, for as long as I was at boarding school and then at university, was that there might be periods for as long as three weeks when the island was stormbound and the
Columba
could not get through. This must have been both worrying and tedious for all the adults concerned,
but I was having a honeymoon with infancy and felt it bliss to be stuck safe at home, with its routines and rules and habits.

We did run out of food. We tell people we ate curried dog food. I can't remember if it's true. It might as well have been. We did eat any quantity of a magnificently Scots viand, buyable in bulk, named SwelFood. It had a connection with the vegetable kingdom. It lived up to its name should you add water. A little heat improved things. I ate and ate on Colonsay and, though not lean, like the others, I didn't get fat, because I was living a life beyond books, though not without them.

I have never quite got over a bad tic I taught myself, very likely unnecessarily, under my stepmother Christine's regime–to leap up as soon as one heard footsteps approach, to hide one's book, and ‘look busy'. I didn't do that much on Colonsay, at Colonsay, in Colonsay. The nature of my anxiety changed. I wished to fit in. In this I lost bits of myself. This was all my own fault. I think the Howards wanted me
as
me, if they thought about it at all.

 

When people look knowing and talk about the popular music of their childhood, I can honestly refer to both my childhoods, in Edinburgh, and on Colonsay, and look blank. When the electricity worked on Colonsay, the gramophone played classical music. Quite by chance I had lit on another musical household. To reach the drawing room from the front hall, you had to go through a curved room called the corridor-room; there was a smiley bison with a centre parting in his horns over the pianola that had sheets taken from Paderewski's own playing of Chopin, and a piano that we sang around. Mum or Caroline played. It was from the corridor-room gramophone that I first learned to listen for the style of a conductor, though frequently the tempi must have been affected by the wind or the rain outside. We listened a lot, together, to music. I remember the
Brahms Violin Concerto and his Hungarian dances, the Mozart Coronation Mass and Litanie Lauretanae,
The Marriage of Figaro
and
The Magic Flute
, and Haydn and Boccherini. Just sometimes, Edith Piaf, whom Mum and Papa had seen in Paris. No Messiaen, no Mahler, no Russians, no Wagner, all of whom I love, but came to later. Papa, as on every ‘cultivated' topic, knows more than he affects to know. He is a natural teacher, the only man I would allow near my younger son with a fretsaw, or near me with an explanation (all done in salt cellars and napkin rings) of how the universe works or what diatonics are. He is intriguing for many reasons. He has not grown old where old means bitter or incurious. Of course he repeats himself. That is because we force him to. We say, ‘Pop, Pop, do the one about…'

We are in our fifties and forties, he halfway through his eighties. I'm lucky to have been caught in his slipstream (he will correct the term, no doubt).

His brother Barnaby, who is perhaps eighty-two, was dying last year. He had had three wives, three children, seven stepchildren. Papa went over to St Louis, where Barnaby has made his own version of Colonsay, to say farewell for good to his younger brother. Papa officially hates death. Barnaby's nurse fell in love with him. Instead of a funeral, there was a wedding. Barnaby shares his brother's good looks, though without the beard. Height, black hair, now white but still thick, and cruel blue eyes belied by that smile wide as a wolf's and as perturbingly white. Papa smiles while he is working, biting down on a small piece of his tongue. His children and grandchildren do it too.

They all carry multifunctional knives around their waists on lanyards, though have had to rethink this since airports grew difficult. Each one's knife is of great sentimental value, having been given as a reward when, one by one, the children learned to sail their respective wooden boats around the tiny island in the loch.

I've never been in danger of possessing such a knife.

 

The Howard children were sent away to school considerably later than many children of their background, as it might conventionally be imagined. All the children owe their general knowledge and handwriting, their sense of lore and their manner of keeping things shipshape to their governess, Val, who had also been governess to their mother and her six siblings. The big house is full of things Val made with the children: tables with glass tops covering labelled shells gathered during afternoon lessons and laid on old green velvet; lists of birds seen and illustrated; children's books carefully inscribed in the same fluent rounded hand as each child came to learn it. Val never taught me but the others had that kind of skater's grace to elide this so that I might sink my roots deeper into the family myth.

Yet I was unconsciously deceiving myself on far too many levels. The fact remains that there are six Howard children, whom I love, and that they are not my siblings. Nor are their parents mine, though it is my belief that I love their father very much as people do love their fathers, as far as I can see it. It is far too late to untangle anything that goes so deep, but it is not too late to be clear about who is whose. I speak in this apparently chilly dissecting sort of voice on account only of knowing that it is with the precise naming of things that my sight will,
if it will
, return; and that the truth matters.

It is with reference to boats that I am able, perhaps, to express the intensity of my affection for this family. I trust my life to each member of it and have been hauled from the possibility of a watery grave, as has my younger son, by their strong arms more often than I can admit. (Minoo and I have spindly, useless arms.) Life on Colonsay is lived, very considerably, on boats. Given the chance I would rather step out of a boat than into one, be this into a harbour, which has happened countless times in Colonsay (and once in Tonga), or at sea, or into a loch (or into the South Pacific, where I hadn't a Howard with me and which comes later). Perhaps at root there is little higher one may say of another individual with whom one has spent a mort
of time than that one feels safe with them. The Howards make me feel physically safe, which is a state I achieve in few other circumstances. What these circumstances are will make itself plain to readers.

 

It was from Colonsay that Katie was first married at the age of seventeen and a half, in her wedding dress ironed by Val. Rosa and I made bowls of philadelphus and daisies. There was a marquee and the honeymoon was taken on the Isle of Barra.

In the photographs we all, including the grown-ups, look like children.

Marriage was still at the time the suitable terminus of the story of a childhood. Girls were married ‘from the nursery', like trees taken for grafting.

During the time we were at Cambridge together, Katie and I were, I think, unsure of what narrative to follow. The times were changing, but nothing like as swiftly as retrospect might have you think. Girton was quite as sequestered and well-behaved as Sherborne School for Girls had been. Many of my contemporaries in college arrived engaged and left after their degree to enter into marriage.

The first night in the dining hall at Girton, which is a red Victorian Gothic structure, designed by Waterhouse, three miles outside Cambridge on the Cherry Hinton Road, a sturdy pink blancmange was served; I said I wouldn't have any, thanks, and a shiver went down the table.

Later I sustained two approaches, one from a quietly spoken American girl who turned out to live just off Washington Square with her grandmother and two giant poodles and who became a friend for life, Miss Sarah Montague, gymkhana star and radio performer; the other from a girl I regret having lost touch with, who said, ‘You went to fucking public school, didn't you?'

I think the truth is that I only went to fucking public school because my mother was dead, and that is the answer to the question
I asked some chapters ago, would it all have happened if I had stayed at home? I wouldn't have fucking talked like this. I might have talked like fucking that, and that in itself might have been a great big fucking relief. Not that, actually, all Scots do swear all the time, nor
pace
some English critics, does that brilliant writer James Kelman use such language, save where to do so holds to the truth.

If I had stayed at home, I wouldn't have talked like this and I might have married a nice Scots boy who really could dance (though in the East Coast fashion) and we might have settled down to the couthie Edinburgh life for which, I think, I hanker so, now that I definitively have not lived it.

Scotland itself is zigzagged with strifes and loyalties, with roads that wind north in listlessness, desolation and ancient war; there are many sects and septs of Presbyterianism and many families who raise a glass to the king over the water. I won't here go into Rangers and Celtic, for I'm ignorant, but so little is the country, so small its population, so deep its habit of talk and of remembrance, that the past lies over and within everything. While it is a hard fact that Papa's great-grandfather received the Island of Colonsay in lieu of payment of a lapsed debt by Sir John McNeil, it is also true that if to own a boat, as the vulgarism goes, is to stand in a shower tearing up fifty-pound notes, to inherit an island is to stand in a maelstrom doing much the same, with added responsibilities for its human residents. Papa was born in South Audley Street to parents of improbable wealth, deriving in the main from the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Hudson's Bay Company. His great-grandfather endowed McGill University and Papa said once that he seemed to remember a lintel over a door in the ‘Old Man's' house in Montreal that was made of solid gold. His great-grandfather, Donald Smith, became first High Commisioner of Canada and later Lord Strathcona (Gaelic for Glencoe which he also owned) and Mount Royal (which is just Montreal). Goodness knows if this lintel was a metaphor or what he literally saw, but Papa's own life has been entirely unembittered,
as he saw most things except for Colonsay go. He is a born master craftsman.

The words ‘private island' come nowhere near Colonsay; it is not a plaything but a society, and most of the boats, houses, cars that pertain to the family that accidentally presides amid it with patience, beneficence and nothing short of love, are held together, bodged in some way. Papa is a genius at bodging. So are his children. It's my sense that they don't really like things that do not need fixing.

When we were younger, Katie, Caro and I shared clothes. Jane was careful and neat and very sensibly kept us off. Caro had a red jumper knitted for her by Val, Katie a becoming cream jumper knitted by her grandmother with a repeat motif of the Strathcona crest, a beaver chewing its way through a log. I had two jerseys, one of which I'd received for Christmas from Mum and Papa so it was sacred and came out only for evening wear. My other jumper was grey, knitted on needles the size of rolling pins, edged in grey velvet ribbon, large enough for a shire horse and had been thrown out by Daniel Day-Lewis, the weedy younger brother of our friend Tamasin. No. I don't know where it is now. It disappeared with my dried-out and reassembled lobster, some old love letters, and the Clarendon Press George Herbert, all of which were by my bed, when I ‘grew up' and Alex and his wife Jane took over the house.

There is a strong bohemian streak in the Howards. Papa's mother, confusingly known as Oma, really could paint and her many swift oil sketches of the island catch it just so. Papa was brought up with Peter Ustinov, whose mother, Nadia Benois, used to paint with Oma. There are two ‘reciprocal' paintings made by the two women on a summer day on the island in the nineteen-thirties that hang in the corridor-room on Colonsay. Tulips in a vase, dropped-waist dresses, a departed Hebridean afternoon seen through differing eyes. Many of the Howards' close relations are artists; one, Linda Kitson, who briefly married her cousin, Papa's brother Barnaby, was a Falklands
War artist. Papa's sister Didon was a creator in her every gesture and she leaves girl twins who have the very same trait; one of them, lying in Barcelona, felled in her forties by a stroke, is literally drawing herself out of it with pencil and paper. The Howards are not spoilt. Their affection for things is greatly enhanced when that thing is to some degree damaged or, even better, hopelessly broken.

It is my private belief that Papa rather resents things that work perfectly first time. I don't mean he sabotages them, but he perceives less of a challenge in the spanking new than in the clapped-out old. He is without doubt an artist in wood and metal. It was a sad day when he moved out of the big house and his entire run of
Wooden Boat
magazine was on the line. He had first subscribed to it aged thirteen. In the end it went, though he has kept the squared notebooks in which he draws inventions and improvements upon machines that have caught his attention. One of the most happy days of my second childhood was spent not actually on Colonsay but off the old A40 in a disused church with Papa, Katie and Caro; we were there to meet one of Papa's innumerable correspondents. His family used to say of Papa that he kept a steamboat hidden on most canals as other men keep mistresses, but that day we were privileged to enter the largest steam-driven Wurlitzer in the known world. We climbed inside its entrails, saw the real coconut husks that made clip-clop sounds for the movies, and Caro was allowed to play it while Katie and I stood inside and watched the bellows do their elephantine work. Papa, although he is, as I have said, a man resistant to the soapier sides of faith, is a soul whom it is a pleasure to see transported, whether by a Wurlitzer, the Queen of the Night, the way the bark grows on eucalyptus trees, or when a rope goes clean around a cleat.