Lament for a Maker

2

Christmas Eve at night

No go. Infuriatingly, I am hung up by blizzard for all the world like an Antarctic explorer a march short of his depot. The village – Kinkeig – is just a short Antarctic march away – nine miles or thereabouts – but the conditions are hopeless: the posts that serve to mark the track in common snowfalls will be most of them buried; a great wind and a steady fall between them surround one with a dizzying curtain of white the moment one steps beyond the door; and every hour the drifts must be becoming deeper and, I suppose, more dangerous. Even our prodigious Tammas – the Erchany odd lad, that is, who turns out to be a sort of low-grade moron (a nice finish, surely, to the amenities of the castle) – even Tammas is halted by this storm. So I must resign myself – Diana, maiden and mistress of the months and stars! – to your spending Christmas ignorant, alarmed and furious. That’s the worst of being so closely netted round by civilization; it’s hard to imagine a person dropping tolerably comfortably through and out of it without disaster suffered. I haven’t broken a limb – or anything more than a nice young lady’s baby car – and I haven’t been put in gaol; I’ve simply got myself nine miles from the nearest telephone in a spot of dirty weather.

And I’m bored. After all my lucubrations in the small hours this is something of an anti-climax, but the mystery of Erchany fades away rather – as you might expect – in the light of common day. My host was the linchpin of my imaginings and today he has remained invisible, sending civil messages that he is a little unwell. Perhaps the caviare was too much for him; I don’t believe somehow that caviare is a regular part of the Erchany diet. You know it was a mysterious supper. I believe the Erchany equivalent of the fatted calf would be a spot of stewed rabbit – and why even stew the rabbit without a prodigal son? Because Sybil may be all unknowing a prodigal second cousin thrice removed? Surely not. Or in honour of the favourite great-nephew of the deplorable Horatio? Surely, again, not.

We have been left to ourselves rather, Sybil and I. Christine has presided at two meals – simple enough this time – and vanished away on the plea of vaguely described duties. After breakfast she took us up to a long sort of gallery-place, full of dead Guthries and still-born theology, and invited us with downright malice to choose a book; after luncheon she bowed us into a billiard room, whisked a dust-cloth off the identical table, one must believe, with which Noah beguiled the tedious hour, and said: All American women played? Tricks gaily and fantastically performed; the devil or an angel has entered into Christine today; she has put her fears – if I wasn’t imagining them – behind her. And still she is beautiful.

So Sybil and I played billiards. There are no cues, one of the pockets is missing, and a fair part of the cloth has gone to nourish generations of moths; still, wrapped in our overcoats, we have played a sort of billiards and rather enjoyed it. Mrs Hardcastle brought us two large cups of villainous tea and stood for about half an hour listening to the click of the balls as if it were something as good as a wireless set. We have even had some conversation with her – thanks to the initiative of Sybil, who suspected the old soul might want a gossip.

‘Do you have much company at Erchany, Mrs Hardcastle?’

Mrs Hardcastle looked bewildered. ‘You’re saying, Miss?’

‘Do you have many visitors?’

Syllable by syllable Mrs Hardcastle digested this. Then she shook her head with decision. ‘The laird’s over narrow.’ She nodded with a sort of gloomy satisfaction. ‘There are few in these parts nearer-going than Guthrie of Erchany.’

This was hardly a theme we could with propriety pursue – though Mrs Hardcastle had rather the air of regarding it as a main asset of the establishment. And Sybil was just casting round for another theme when the old person sank her voice to an eager whisper and said: ‘It’s the rats!’

‘The rats, Mrs Hardcastle?’

‘The Guthries have ever had black imaginings. He thinks the rats are fair eating him up – him and all his substance. He’s that near- going as he is because he thinks he’s fighting the rats. If you please – there will be plenty of places with no rats – islands and such?’

We made embarrassed affirmative noises.

‘They should get him away to an island. I told the doctors that when they came. He’d sleep of nights then and be fine, poor gentleman.’

Sybil said awkwardly: ‘You think Mr Guthrie is very worried by the rats?’

Again Mrs Hardcastle gave her vigorous, senile nod. ‘And he won’t spend his silver on the poison for them. He says he prefers his wee penknife.’

So many bloodthirsty persons in the Scottish ballads perform unlikely feats of slaughter with their wee penknives that I suspected here a little literary joke of the laird’s. But Mrs Hardcastle went on seriously: ‘Real skilly he is at the throwing of it. And right loudly the creatures squeal.’

Unedifying revelations these, I thought, of the perversion of sporting instinct in the country gentry: Mrs Hardcastle’s confidences were making me distinctly uncomfortable. But Sybil was interested. ‘He goes about spearing the rats?’

‘Just that. And now it’s a hatchet. Sharpening and sharpening it yesterday he was in the court. And cried out at me right fearsome: “To settle accounts with a great rat, Mrs Hardcastle!” I wish he’d settle accounts with them all. I wish there were no rats. They squeal inside my head at night.’

A cheery old soul. Sybil said rather feebly: ‘Couldn’t Mr Hardcastle get rid of them?’

Mrs Hardcastle peered nervously about her. Her whisper grew hoarser. ‘Hardcastle’s fell unkind!’

I believed her. At the same time I felt that a recital of the domestic infelicities of the Hardcastles would be singularly lacking in charm and I banged the billiard balls quite violently as a possible distraction. Their music, however, had ceased to compel; the unsightly old person advanced unheeding and laid a claw-like hand on Sybil’s arm. ‘And for why?’

Neither of us felt capable of dealing with this idiomatic demand. But Mrs Hardcastle scarcely gave us time to answer. Her voice sank yet farther to an impossible croak. ‘It’s the rats!’

We both said blankly: ‘The rats!’

Mrs Hardcastle’s affirmative nod this time involved not her head merely but her whole body: if I remember aright, witches and bad fairies indulge just such emphatic bobs in pantomime. ‘I’m right fashed I didn’t think to warn you last night. There’s a terrible number of rats in Erchany.’

Variations on a theme. Come, Muse, let’s sing of rats. And Mrs Hardcastle went on, a horrid and growing conviction in her voice: ‘It’s the rats. For years now they’ve been working on my man. The rat-nature working on him! I think they go through his head at night, squealing – the coarse creatures. He’s half-turned to rat now and he feels it. It makes him fell unkind. What will become of us? I lie in bed at night, Miss, and whiles the rats go squealing through my head and whiles my man. But more and more my man’s like a great grey rat, and what will become of us when I can’t any longer tell man from rat?’

Mrs Hardcastle, you will agree, has a knack of posing awkward questions that would do credit to a nineteenth-century Scandinavian play. At the same time she plainly has, as an imaginative psychologist, a touch of genius, and her conversation, if somewhat limited in range, has powerfully reinvoked the atmosphere that was so heavy about us last night. I was just going to explore her views on the influence of the Erchany rats on the moron Tammas when Sybil said abruptly: ‘Mrs Hardcastle, has the doctor come?’

Interesting that the doctor had continued to puzzle Sybil as well as myself; more interesting that the question drew a complete blank. ‘The doctor, Miss?’

‘I thought you were expecting a doctor last night.’

‘Faith, Miss, we never expect anyone at Erchany. Dr Noble at Dunwinnie is the family doctor, but he hasn’t been here these two years – not since Miss Christine sprained her wrist. There were some doctors a year or two back – the same I told you of – and it was but a sad welcome the laird gave them. Were you expected?’

The question suggested that outside the rodent sphere the good Mrs Hardcastle’s perceptions are dim. We said our arrival was singularly unpremeditated. Whereupon she looked from one to the other of us doubtfully before turning again to Sybil. ‘I just thought that seeing you are a kinswoman of the laird–’

But at this point Sybil, whose interest had been waning and who was rolling the balls vigorously about the table, hurled a ball clean over the cushion and into the pit of old Mrs Hardcastle’s stomach.

‘Oh, Mrs Hardcastle, I’m most terribly sorry–’

Mrs Hardcastle picked up the ball and looked at Sybil with great respect. Her voice took on its familiar hoarsest tone. ‘Faith, Miss, were you after one of the rats? There’s a terrible number of rats in Erchany.’

With that, Diana, I think you’ve made the grand tour of Mrs Hardcastle: other facets there may be, but as yet they have not revealed themselves.

Which reminds me I rather want to make the grand tour of the castle. It seems a rambling place, added to from time to time in a fashion more or less in keeping with its medieval character. The oldest part, plainly, is the central keep or tower; I gather that the laird has his own set of rooms there and seldom comes out of them. So his indisposition may be a polite fiction. Still, if he is supposed to be keeping his own rooms, unwell, one can’t very decently explore in that direction. It will be dinner or supper time presently, and I am waiting with the futile bored impatience with which one waits for a meal in a dull hotel. I look forward, it must be confessed, to another appearance of Christine, and perhaps I can make the beguiling mysteriousness of the place serve as amusement for another twelve of twenty-four hours. But I am so annoyed that I am not far on the other side of the Tweed!

Christmas eve at night – and my birthday. Shall I hang up my stocking for the owls to nest in and the rats to gnaw? What sort of presents, I wonder, come to Castle Erchany this season? I look out of my window and see that there is a lull in the gale; the gloaming is falling over a landscape wonderfully still, peaceful, white. Noel, Diana, Noel!

Your

NOEL.