The Winter Ground

1

Twice a year, for a week or so, for half an hour each day, it is easy to feel glad to be in Perthshire. Between one morning and the next, when spring is unfurling, the beech walk between the edge of the park and the cottages becomes a sort of hushed nave where the sunlit green of new leaves against the filigree can lift the hearts and calm the minds of all who pass along it. And then again, when summer gives its first sigh and begins gently to sink into autumn, one day the green will turn to gold and the breeze will shake a few golden shingles free, sending them spiralling downwards and letting the sunshine dazzle through the pinprick holes in the canopy, so that one wants to stand in the dappling light and raise one’s face to heaven, feeling the leaves brush past as they fall.

Today was not one of those days. A particularly gusty November had seen off the last leaf weeks ago and now the bare branches, black and slick, offered no shelter but instead only organised the raindrops into larger servings, the better to soak Bunty and me as we plodded underneath.

For all the murk and chill, though, I had been eager to set out on our walk this morning. My husband, over breakfast, had been waxing political again.

‘Our days are numbered,’ he had begun, from behind The Times, after a hefty sigh.

‘Everyone’s days are numbered,’ I replied, hoping to offend him with my frivolity and avoid an out-and-out conversation.

‘Well, you laugh while you can,’ said Hugh, bending his newspaper down to look at me, ‘but mark my words, we won’t survive this, not this time. It will be upon us before we know what’s hit us and we will all be swept away.’ Hugh could find in the most blameless little Times leader sure signs of revolution blowing in like a ice-storm from the east and engulfing Perthshire. ‘Lenin-’ he went on, but I nipped it in the bud, for when he got as far as Lenin there was no stopping him.

‘-is dead,’ I said.

‘-has more people coming to visit his tomb every month, it says here,’ said Hugh, ignoring me.

‘Why not stick to the national news at breakfast?’ I suggested. ‘I’m sure Russian politics can’t be good for one’s digestion.’

‘Irish Free State.’

‘Or the book pages.’ I was getting desperate.

Hugh gave a bark of very dry laughter.

‘The book pages!’ he snorted. ‘That Kafka fella has a new thing out, worse than the last. The book pages, Dandy, are far from the oasis of comfort they used to be.’

‘But hasn’t Mr Wodehouse just published again?’ I asked.

‘He has indeed,’ said Hugh, with an air of triumph for which I could not account until he went on: ‘and has fled our shores and gone to live in France. Must know something the rest of us haven’t heard yet.’

I could not help the sudden leap of hope in my breast.

‘Well, as to living in France-’ I began, trying to sound casual. Once again, Hugh interrupted me.

‘Never!’ he thundered. ‘If we are going down, then down we shall go, fighting to the last.’ With that, remembering that the coming revolution would provide scope for valour and glory as well as an end to life as we knew it, he took a satisfied bite of his toast and folded the newspaper to the sporting news.

Plotching rain, leaden skies and Bunty’s listless snuffling in the mats of leaves (she knew that all the little creatures were burrowed away for the winter) were welcome notes of cheer after that. I trudged on, inwardly counting my blessings as Nanny Palmer’s early training had left me all but unable not to do. Peace was still on the list even seven years after the armistice that put it there but it was beginning to lose its place to the everyday: stout shoes, warm clothes, a solid roof awaiting my return, hot coffee – chocolate even, if I asked for it – and health and strength and… I willed my thoughts towards less depressingly wholesome blessings… a new sable-tipped evening wrap, Christmas coming but no family visits coming with it and, next week, Rudolf Valentino at the Cinerama.

As I lifted my head, clicked my teeth at Bunty and quickened my pace for home, I caught sight of a little group of rather bedraggled strangers crossing the lane ahead of me, as though sent by Nanny Palmer’s ghost to remind me that simple comforts were not to be sniffed at, not when many a decent-born family was reduced to tramping around for work and shelter. I peered after them, wondering where they had come from and where they were bound; our lane is not accustomed to much traffic. A tall thin father, a far from thin mother, a biggish child and a tiny one, I thought, and then I blinked. The father had stooped to pass under the lowest branch of a beech tree, a branch to which I could not have reached my fingers if on tiptoe, the tiny child had spoken with the voice of a man, the bigger child was smoking a pipe, and the ‘mother’ was lumbering along with the heavy tread of a… bear? A giant, a smoking child, a midget and a bear? Beside me, Bunty growled. I caught her muzzle in my hand and held her head against my hip until they were gone and I could step quietly away.

My maid was still in my bedroom when I returned. I am sure she would have described herself as bent upon some essential task without whose execution my wardrobe would fall to mothy dust but really she was only cooing over my newest clothes like any miser with his gold, scattering a little lavender, pinning lace to tissue-paper, rolling a cashmere jersey around one of her little ticking bolsters as reverently as though the jersey were gold leaf and the bolster destined to lie beneath a mummy’s head in a Pharaoh’s tomb for all eternity. Grant really was born fifty years too late: stuffed bustles, whalebone and ten layers of starched petticoats would have soaked up a great deal more of her talent than my array.

‘Filthy morning still,’ I greeted her. I am quite an old hand at Scotch greetings after all these years.

‘You’ll not be going out again, madam,’ Grant informed me, ‘so I’ve laid out your pale blue wool and indoor shoes.’ I sighed. The way she forced me into carpet slippers and whisked away my walking shoes the minute I was in the door always gave me a trapped feeling, even on a day as unappealing as this. My friend, Alec Osborne, was wont to say ‘Ah, house-arrest!’ whenever he put his head around my sitting-room door in the morning and saw me with my feet in little bags of felt with threaded ribbon. Besides, the blue wool get-up made me feel like an overgrown baby in a romping-suit. Thinking of which, I considered how to broach the subject in hand without sounding peculiar and making Grant stare.

‘Have there been any visitors today?’ I asked her. ‘Downstairs, I mean. I thought I saw strangers in the lane.’

‘Mr Pallister doesn’t allow visitors in the morning, madam,’ said Grant. ‘Mrs Tilling was speaking of it only the other day again. She had the fish man in for a cup of tea and a slice of her fruitcake and Mr Pallister walked through the kitchen four and five times with a face on him like-’ Grant caught herself just in time and I was sorry. She has a talent for rather cutting physical description and I had never heard her thoughts on Pallister in a temper. ‘But as Mrs Tilling said, you have to keep in with the fish man or who knows what he might not palm off on us, stuck here away at the end of his round as we are, and it’s not her fault he fetches up before dinnertime, is it?’

‘No, quite, quite,’ I agreed. I had never suspected before that the price of an occasional turbot along with the herring might be the compromising of Mrs Tilling’s honour in Pallister’s eyes. ‘But I didn’t mean visitors exactly. I suppose I meant tinkers. Knife-menders? Gypsies with pegs to sell?’

‘Oh no, madam,’ said Grant. ‘John Bailey does all our knives every May and the gypsies – our gypsies, that is: the McRortys – are long gone back to Ireland until the spring. Mrs McRorty was expecting another baby and she’s always happier if the babies are born in Ireland. Mind you, Margaret was born right here at Gilverton, two years ago at midsummer, because they could hardly interrupt themselves at their busiest time and…’

I marvelled to myself as she continued supplying unwanted and unheard details. To me, gypsies and tinkers are undifferentiated, welcome and useful of course, but really just part of the landscape with their ponies and wagons and black cooking pots over fires. It had never occurred to me that the camps I glimpsed now and then every summertime were our gypsies and that our gypsies had a name and a history known to all, that gypsies no less than fish men had their rounds.

‘Well, I can’t imagine who this was then,’ I said, feeling rather chastened and thinking there were no end of people it could be, people who were woven deep into the fabric of Gilverton and about whom I would know nothing, since I seemed sometimes to know nothing at all. ‘They were a funny-looking bunch, that’s all.’

‘Oho!’ said Grant, looking up from her work and not even flicking a glance over me to see that my seams were straight. ‘Well, then! It’ll have been the circus.’

‘The circus?’ I echoed. And even though midgets and bears bore no better explanation, when I turned my eyes to my bedroom window and looked out at the grey blanket of sky, the black trees and dead bracken stretching to the brown hills in the distance, sheeted with rain and bare of a single other roof as far as the eye could see, I half suspected she was teasing me. There could no more be a circus here than a nightclub with roulette and dancing.

‘At Benachally, madam,’ said Grant. ‘Have you not heard, then?’

I had not, but to be sure if I had to stretch my imagination around a circus without it snapping, then Castle Benachally was the only place a circus could possibly be.

‘I hope they keep the bear on a thick rope,’ I said. ‘While they’re walking around Gilverton anyway.’

It was Grant’s turn to show saucer eyes to me.

‘A bear?’ she whispered. ‘They never said there was a bear. Dogs and ponies and a black monkey in a coat, they said, but nobody breathed a word about a bear.’ With that, she abandoned a lace cuff half-pinned and flitted from the room to take the dread news to the kitchens and cluck the rest of the morning away.

I did a fair imitation of flitting away myself, straight to my sitting room to the telephone to ring up Benachally and invite myself to tea. I did not try to cloak my attempt in disingenuousness; for one thing I would have been seen through and for another I, almost alone of our neighbours, had accepted all the oddnesses of the new arrivals with polite indifference, neither huffing nor interfering, and so I thought I had worked up a little credit which could perhaps be cashed in now.

‘Oh yes, do come,’ said the slightly husky voice of Ina Wilson, doyenne of Benachally. ‘We can go over to their camp before tea and I’ll introduce you. We could even walk if it ever stops raining.’

‘But what are they doing here?’ I asked her. ‘Why on earth did they come?’

‘I’ll tell you when you arrive,’ said Ina, with something between a laugh and a sigh. ‘And bring Bunty,’ she went on. There was a slight pause. ‘Albert is at the works today.’

Ah, I thought, ringing off again. That explained the possibility of the walk too, for while Grant made life easy for herself by consigning me to my sitting room from time to time with impractical pale garments and fluffy footwear, Albert Wilson kept his wife in solitary confinement in Castle Benachally almost permanently and did it, so far as one could tell, by sheer force of personality and, one hoped, out of love.

It was impossible to say what Ina Wilson might have expected from her marriage – the alliance was a considerable leap into the unknown – but it cannot have been what she had got and I always felt rather sorry for her. Her own background was one of perfect rectitude, although not elevated socially speaking. Her father was a don at the university in Glasgow, terribly learned in one of those branches of science which the Victorians went in for, lots of cases full of samples and pieces of delicate equipment and great excitement at – it always seemed to me – the same discovery over and over again. Her mother was no less a scholar, although her passion was for the medieval. I never learned whether it was stained glass windows, epic poems or martyred saints which inflamed her since all I ever got were odd snippets from Ina that Mother had had a terrible crossing to Lindisfarne or had sent a postcard from Norwich where she was looking at an illuminated manuscript before it got sent to its new home in a library in Boston.

It can only have been the war, surely, that put the flower of this studious little household in the way of a self-made businessman, twenty years her senior, with a red villa in the suburbs, whose very name – Albert Wilson – must have made her mother wince. (As to the nature of his business, Wilson was given to muttering vaguely about architecture if anyone tried to pin him down but in plain fact he was a brickmaker, a very successful brickmaker, with a brickworks in Paisley and another in Leith, and lately – thanks to the number of shelters, factories, hangars and warehouses thrown up for the war effort – an extremely wealthy man. Ina to her credit never tried to finesse any of this: witness her telling me that Albert was ‘at the works’ today, when I am sure he would have described himself as ‘in town’.)

But when Ina left the West End flat full of her parents’ textbooks and gave up her daily walks to chamber recitals in the winter gardens she did not settle for long in the red villa entertaining the cream of Glasgow’s Rotarians. She succumbed, in the winter of 1918, to the villainous influenza which swept across what seemed like the whole world, borne home by the returning troops and wiping out great swathes of exhausted humanity as though it were swatting so many flies. Young and strong, well-nourished and comfortably tended, Ina fought it and rallied but her child, a girl of ten months old, was less fortunate and as soon as the funeral was over and Ina was well enough to be moved, her husband had sold the red villa and carried her off to a hillside far from the crowds of Glasgow to clean air, clear water and – as I could attest – endless solitude.

For six years now Ina had been convalescing at Castle Benachally, drawn up in high-backed chairs in front of roaring fires, or tucked under blankets on sunny terraces, and I had watched the fleeting pallor of recent illness deepen and settle. I had watched too as Albert Wilson’s concern for his wife and grief for his daughter had grown and twisted into something darker, something a great deal harder to name. Ina bore it with patience, even sometimes with cheerful patience, but others in the neighbourhood, with much less excuse since they were only visiting and did not have to live under the regime, soon became exasperated and stayed away, so Ina’s isolation grew and grew.

I cannot quite say why I was not among them; I am perfectly able to summon unwarranted exasperation, but for some reason Albert Wilson’s regulations did not trouble me. I accepted sitting far across the room from Ina, shouting over to her, accepted my tea being brought on a separate tray, accepted the inevitable telegram on the morning of my visit asking if anyone in the household was unwell, or had been heard sneezing, or could feel the beginnings of a cough. I even accepted the banishing of Bunty from Benachally, despite the fact that people cannot catch distemper nor dogs carry flu. Besides, today Albert was at the works and Bunty was beside me in the little Morris Cowley with her front paws on the dashboard and her tail whipping smartly back and forth, in anticipation. She has high expectations, when taken out in the motor car just after luncheon, that she will be having saucers of milk and crumbled cake for tea.

It was a fair drive from Gilverton to the Wilsons’ – although the estates abut along our eastern boundary – and three o’clock had struck when I turned in between the gateposts with their sleeping dogs, swept past the lodge, up the avenue and over the little bridge with the gothic folly of a gatehouse built above it, and crunched to a stop on the gravel.

Bits of Castle Benachally have been standing these five hundred years and it has some Maxwells and Douglases to its name, as well as the obligatory legend about Charles Edward Stuart stopping off full of hope on his way down or washing up full of despair on his way back again, although at least there is no scrap of tapestry said to be stitched by his mother and her handmaidens while they waited there. (Really, if Mary Stuart had done even a tenth of what adorns castle walls in her name her life would have been the equal of any Huguenot tailor on piece-work rates – locked up for a week, bent over her needle night and day, then let out and on to the next job.)

Despite all this undisputed history, however, Benachally had had the misfortune to be sold to an architect in the fifties and he had spread himself with no little abandon, running up towers, throwing out turrets and tacking on widows’ walks until the whole place looked like something from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Albert Wilson, I am sure, would have pitched in with fumed oak and heraldic pennants if left to himself, suits of armour at every turn on the stairs, but Ina was a calming influence upon him and the inside of Benachally was a delight. The Wilsons had been handed down no family portraits nor dubious Dutch landscapes and rather than buy them up by the yard, which they might easily have afforded to do, they had left the walls almost bare: just plaster painted in cool, powdery shades like sugared almonds, against which sat oversized vases of modern design, filled with branches, looking quite Japanese in their austerity. (I had often envied Ina Wilson’s vases of branches – willow, orange blossom, beech or holly in season – but when I tried the same thing at home against the wallpaper and etchings they looked very messy and made the housemaids sneer.)

Albert’s one contribution to the interior was to forbid much in the way of carpets, for fear of what fusspots the world over call ‘germs’, and Bunty’s toenails sounded like castanets on the marble floor as we approached the main sitting room, so that Ina was calling her name even before the butler swept open the door and announced me. Bunty bounded in, rushed over and subjected Ina to her usual feverish hello. The butler gave me a knowing smile and drew the door shut behind me.

‘Won’t he-?’ I began, but I stopped myself in time. I was unsure how plainly one could talk about Albert’s peculiarity without causing offence, but I suspected that one could not wonder aloud if the butler would tell tales. ‘What a nice friendly butler you have,’ I said in hasty substitution. ‘I always think so when I come here. Mine is a fiend.’

‘We’re very lucky in our servants, Albert and me,’ said Ina Wilson. She was tickling Bunty and so could say the next bit without quite meeting my eye. ‘That is, Albert chooses them very carefully and pays them very well to follow his instructions and I am lucky that, despite all of that, they don’t.’

This was a typical comment of hers: not quite admitting that she shared the general view of her husband and even saying as much as she did with such sweetness that the barb was lost amongst it.

‘Now,’ I said, once I was settled into my chair, ‘please explain, because my mind is absolutely boggling. I thought I was seeing things this morning between the little man and the giant man and the bear.’

‘It’s not a bear,’ said Ina, giggling again as she had on the telephone. I had not seen her so animated in all the time I had known her. ‘It’s a strongman. His name is William Wolf – Big Bad Bill Wolf, he calls himself – and he has a long beard and wears a shaggy suit. I’m sure that’s who it was you saw. I almost fainted when I met him.’

‘But what are they doing here?’ I said. Now, when Ina smiled at me, there was the usual trace of sadness in it.

‘Albert brought them,’ she said. ‘For me.’ I awaited further explanation; for Albert Wilson, whose sole aim in life was to keep his wife from the world and the world from his wife, to bring a circus camp right into his estate grounds seemed impossible. ‘It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds,’ she said, reading my mind. ‘You see, I love the circus. I used to go every day I could get my nurse to take me when I was a child and, in Glasgow, you’d be surprised how often you could find a circus of some description somewhere. Now, I don’t know if you know that I paint a little sometimes to pass the time? Well, recently I decided to paint some circus scenes – quite a compositional challenge, as you can imagine.’

‘Not to mention the horses’ legs,’ I put in. ‘Although, I suppose one could go in for very active scenes with a lot of sawdust kicked up.’

‘Anyway,’ said Ina, who was not exactly solemn but who nevertheless could sometimes make me feel, in contrast, rather flighty, ‘I happened to mention to Albert how much I wished I could see a circus again and he – silly old thing that he is – he said he would learn to juggle and wear a costume if it would amuse me.’ I raised an eyebrow, thinking of Hugh. ‘And then I joked back that we could train up all the servants – housemaids on the trapeze, boot boys turning somersaults – and that way we could have a circus right here at home without any…’ She stopped and I carried the thought to its conclusion for her. Without any strangers, Albert would have said. Without any danger of incomers bringing death along with them. ‘And then,’ Ina resumed, ‘Albert had a brainwave. Instead of turning our household into a circus, why don’t we turn a circus into our household? I couldn’t imagine at first how he could do it. I knew that all the circuses I ever saw were in the summer, or maybe at Christmas sometimes, and I had never wondered about where they went in winter to wait for spring.’

‘Nor I,’ I said. ‘Don’t they go home?’ Then I flushed. ‘Oh. Of course. The caravans are home, aren’t they?’

‘They go – poor things – to what they call a winter ground. Somewhere as sheltered as they can find and as cheap as they can get it, because they won’t make another penny until the spring comes and they start the show again. The Cooke circus was camped out on some horrid bit of waste ground near the brickworks in Leith – that’s what gave Albert the idea – and so he went and spoke to Mr Cooke and said they could have a lovely woodland site, with clean water and plenty of firewood, all free of charge so long as they stuck to – you know – Albert’s rules.’

I did indeed know Albert’s rules, as they applied to the servants. No popping into the village even on days off, no evenings in the pub, no visits to the cinema, no going to see their family if anyone in their family was ill or had been heard to sneeze or thought they could feel a cough coming on. The Benachally servants were handsomely paid but they certainly earned it.

‘And in a week or two – for Christmas or New Year – if everyone is in good health, they’re going to put on a show and I’m going to go to it.’ Ina beamed at me. ‘Isn’t he sweet, really?’

‘Except you’re going to the campground this afternoon with me,’ I said. ‘And you’ve already met William Wolf.’

‘Well, when Albert goes to the works, things are rather different,’ she said and her smile faded. ‘Don’t look at me that way, Dandy,’ she said. ‘He really is very kind, but it’s only the days when he’s gone that have made me able to be kind back again. So don’t look at me like that. Don’t think ill of me.’

‘My dear,’ I said, ‘nothing could be further from my head.’ This was true. I was not sitting in private judgement on Ina or her husband; I was merely marvelling at the rich feast of strangeness in other people’s lives, like looking down a microscope into a scoop of water from a pond. One hardly needed a circus at all.

Still, nothing would have kept me from going to visit it and, since the rain had almost stopped, we set out on foot with me holding Bunty very firmly on a short lead wound twice around my wrist. I had no concerns about her mixing with rough company (as I always tell Hugh – a Dalmatian might be decorative but it is a real dog, not a toy) but I was sure circus dogs would be beautifully trained and would sit at their masters’ sides and look down their noses while she racketed about, trampling over tents and knocking down small children, if I let her.