Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion

Rita and her family reminded me of families I knew back home—history-minded, humorous and unaffected, relaxed amid their inherited surroundings. Like good old Bostonians they were obviously concerned but not anxious about the imperfect state of Blair Adam. Furthermore, for me there was an added connection to the Adam family. My own great-great-great grandfather Bonomi (the one whose drawing hung in our dining room) had begun his architectural career as a draughtsman for Robert Adam.

‘What did you say his name was? Bonomi?’ asked Keith. ‘No, I’ve never heard of him. I wonder if we could find his name in one of these volumes,’ and he began searching the library shelves.

‘Robert Adam met my ancestor in Rome,’ I explained. ‘Apparently he was impressed with Bonomi’s draughtsmanship and his intimate knowledge of classical Rome, so he imported him to London, I think about 1760-something.’

‘Of course there were a great many draughtsmen, or decorators, in the firm,’ Keith said in defence of his ignorance, leafing through a large leather volume.

‘Bonomi,’ I felt I had to say, ‘went on to establish his own practice as an architect. Have you ever heard of Rosneath Castle? He designed it for the Duke of Argyll.’ (Unfortunately, Rosneath also happened to be one of the doomed piles in Roy Strong’s catalogue of destroyed country houses.)

What would the architect and his draughtsman think of us now, of their various descendants meeting by sheer coincidence, caught by surprise in a transatlantic alliance of country house maintenance in the late twentieth century? And had we met in London, say, or New York, would the meeting have anything like the same resonance, the same tangibility for that historic connection, that it had in the architect’s library in the kingdom of Fife?

BACK AT THE GUYND the autumn sunlight slanted across the rooms, raising the spectre of dust on every surface, illuminating the chipped cornice or cracks in the wall paint. The ironwork of the banister cast a sharp-focus shadow on the wall, crisp as the echo of a voice across a frozen field. Then the sun disappeared suddenly behind a cloud, the light was too dim to remember where to dust, and it didn’t matter anyway.

The long days of a northern summer were now traded in for the short days of a northern winter, and I wondered if we had invested heavily enough in the daylight hours that were once abundant and now so scarce. Some mornings we would wake to see a coat of hoarfrost over the green fields. Matted brown leaves, their veins painted silver, sparkled and crunched under my wellington boots as Foxy led me along the open roads. The ‘beasts’ were still in the fields, but soon would be moved to their farmers’ sheds for the winter. From across the field the house stood starkly; the windows like sheets of silver winked back at me as the sun hit them sideways. The strange thing was that the frost would still be there just the same in the afternoon; the sun never rose high enough to burn it off. It just hung there, at half-mast, and then went down. This was a twilight world.

There were various residential tenants in place, which helped to tone down the effect of gathering winter isolation. Stephen, the artist, lived downstairs in the West flat. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Stephen painted dark, foreboding landscapes in a style that John facetiously called the Scottish School of Gloom, and which clearly drew much of their inspiration from the Guynd. He lived with his German girlfriend, Ilka, and their one-year-old daughter, Gwen. Stephen was frankly delighted to find in me someone with whom he could talk seriously about Max Beckmann. As for me, the idea of making a studio visit under our very own roof was well beyond my expectations.

‘Stephen prices his paintings by the yard,’ explained John, rather derisively, I thought, even if it was true. Paintings weren’t the same as cornices, please.

‘A large painting is a more ambitious undertaking than a small one,’ I told him, a mite stiffly.

In the East flat lived another young couple. David had a second-hand furniture business in Dundee, and his wife, Jill, was a vet. The entrance lodge at the front gate was occupied by a young bachelor named Robert, who worked for the telephone company. Living alone at the edge of the estate, he hardly ever crossed our path. There was a complex of farm buildings half a mile down the East drive at the back gate, which included an L-shaped steading, a U-shaped piggery and a row of three attached cottages, at the time empty but one, which housed an old widower named Fayerweather. A passionate gardener, Fayerweather single-handedly managed a large vegetable patch behind the old piggery. We’d encounter him, a stooped white-haired man, harvesting the last of the summer crop, and he would invite us to help ourselves to the Brussels sprouts, whenever. And he told me where to look for the ‘wee wild orchid’ that grew near the dam. Finally there was a mysterious old couple, the Fishers, living in a grim little house near the farm, which used to be the residence of the overseer. We could tell that the Fishers were home from the coal smoke curling out of their chimney, but we hardly ever saw a figure emerge from that house to find his or her way through the thicket of weeds and past the graveyard of half a dozen or so dead automobiles that surrounded it.

Upstairs in my study John inserted a stainless steel coil of chimney liner through the opening in the fireplace to the roof and hooked up our brand-new woodstove. Matt black with sturdy old-fashioned lines and a window through which you could see the silent waving of orange flames, warming the room through and through, my stove was more comforting to me than an open fire. During the shortening days of late autumn I escaped into my work, my trap door back to America.

We still observed the ‘tea ritual’, as John drolly referred to it, every afternoon at about five o’clock, but we no longer trekked with the trolley out to the drawing room, which was too cold for comfort, its draughts now isolated behind a heavy curtain in the library. We gave up the silver teapot for the fat white kitchen model, more or less permanently dressed in its crocheted tea cosy that looked like an old ski hat out of the Lost and Found. Forget about the bone china cups and saucers; one of the variety of chipped mugs out of the kitchen cupboard would do. But the tea itself, in spite of its ritual being trimmed down to a kind of stand-up affair, was as good as ever. It seemed there was always something more to learn about making a ‘proper pot of tea’. Like pouring the boiling water into the pot from a height, ‘to help it aerate ’, explained John. Or, one should ‘always mix the Lapsang Suchong with an equal amount of Bengal, to tone down the smoky taste.’ And then, as I poured out the first cup, ‘How long has it been steeping?’ He always checked; and, ‘Did you remember to give it a stir?’

This ample supply of loose tea came from an oldfashioned emporium in Dundee called Braithwaite’s, which stood in the same location on Castle Street where it had opened a hundred years ago. Miraculously, twentiethcentury progress had left Braithwaite’s in its wake. An attendant in a red smock would appear behind the counter at the jingle of the bell on the door as we entered its scented sanctuary. The two-foot-high japanned tin canisters still lined the upper shelves labelled China, Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Lapsang Suchong and Bengal. Lifting down the great tin of Darjeeling from above, the attendant’s experienced hand would tap the nearly exact quantity into the shiny brass scales on the counter, and then with a series of counterweights tap a little more until the scales hovered in perfect balance. ‘Anything else? Two pounds fifty, please!’ was the cost of this performance, and with a quick exchange of coins and the thrrinng!of the old cash register we were out the door and into the twentieth century again.

These were the simple comforts of country life in winter, I thought to myself as we climbed the grey roads out of the depths of not-very-bonnie Dundee, making our way past faceless housing blocks, where people whose lives I would never know carried on day to day, their windows decked out in frilly curtains and lit up now in the yellow glow of electric lights as dusk fell. We sped past supermarkets, industrial estates and around so many roundabouts that I thought we were going in circles until we finally made the turn on to the back road that leads eleven miles to the front gate of the Guynd. Home in time for tea.

Late November closed in on us. At sunset, about three-thirty in the afternoon, we went around the house closing all the interior shutters against the cold. The sun, if it had appeared at all, would have done what it could to warm the rooms. It was still too soon to fire up the boiler. (Never before the first of December, goes the local convention. And off by the first of March, as John explained was the custom of his friends at Dunninald, another large house nearby, suggesting strongly that we too would be following the same sensible, ritual logic. Do you think this is America?) Once the heat was on, the small radiators had only from four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight to do their job.

The kitchen was the coldest room in the house. I pared down my cooking efforts from the stews and salads I had enjoyed concocting in the summer to the bare minimum on a wintry evening. A quick dash into the kitchen to shove a frozen breaded chicken cutlet into the little portable electric oven, then back to the fireside, or stoveside, as fast as I could go. ‘Close the door!’ John reminded me every time I left a room, so as not to let the precious heat escape into the passages.

‘We are huddled up in my study most evenings now,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘around the Vermont Castings woodstove. The house has become a huge empty shell we walk through in search of this or that.’

I switched on the electric blanket about an hour before going to bed. Then, turning it off again (under John’s strict instructions), I sank into the dry pool of warmth. Just as the pool was beginning to ebb, John would arrive in the dark like a great human radiator beside me. Mornings, I was greeted by Foxy’s wet nose breathing near my face, accompanied by a vigorous wagging of a tail as I began to stir. It took all my strength of character to get out of bed and don my three or four layers of insulation. Once dressed, I could hardly wait for an excuse to jump into the car, turn on the heat and drive away! Off to the bright lights of the Safeway in Arbroath, to the heated aisles of packaged food and fresh vegetables from Africa, and perhaps afterwards a cup of coffee with Angus’s ex-wife Alison, who lived alone in her semi-detached bungalow on the outskirts of town.

Alison had grown up in an unheated shooting lodge high in the hills of windswept Aberdeenshire, had subsequently raised her own family in a damp basement flat at the Guynd and was now as happy as she could be in her tidy little suburban stucco, easy to clean and heat. There she would be in her apron and rubber gloves, rolling up her sleeves to wipe a few stray crumbs from her immaculate worktop, or placing a carefully constructed pudding into the right drawer of her enormous freezer chest. I always took my shoes off so as not to tread on her mauve carpet, and I left the dog in the car. Alison was all sympathy and cheerful banter about the practical matters of life, of cooking and shopping. But our favourite subject by far was family. I quickly discovered what valuable insight she could provide into the native Ouchterlony character. And since she revealed not a shred of envy for my taking on the big house, nor lingering resentment that she had not, our relationship was remarkably uncomplicated from the start. ‘I so admire you,’ she said. ‘I never could have taken on a house like that.’

‘Maybe I just don’t know any better,’ I replied.

Alison was charmed by my daring, and I by her modesty and her candour. She would share from her fund of memories and insights into recent family life at the Guynd and the mysterious past of earlier generations of Ouchterlonys. We compared the two brothers—John and Angus—their characters, their histories, who resembled which parent in what way. ‘They’re as different as chalk and cheese,’ said Alison, ‘and I’m afraid they were not very good friends.’ Angus, with his ginger hair, was supposed to be light-hearted; John was dark, and seemed deeper. Angus was the sporty one, John the intellectual. Angus moved fast and impulsively, John cautiously and with deliberation. Angus was a spendthrift, John was frugal. Angus threw things away, and John, furious, rescued them. Instead of finding in the other a useful complement, their differing natures grated on each other and brought out their worst and most competitive behaviour, each vying, as brothers will, for supremacy.

Posing in their kilts for the lady photographer who toured the county once a year with her 8 × 10 view camera, black cloth and tripod, Angus, aged about nine, appears to be looking up at his older brother with great respect. Perhaps this was just for the picture, or perhaps there was a time, barely remembered by anyone, when they were friends. The more I learnt, the more I wondered which of the two was the prodigal son, or whether they simply took turns at it. Angus, who eventually fled to Canada, leaving his wife and children? Or John, who took off at a younger age, leaving job and career to follow the trail of his curiosity and to get as far away as possible from the fate that was already spelt out for him? Both rebelled in their own way from the strictness of their upbringing, and neither was granted the prodigal son’s warm welcome home by their father. ‘I suspect he was terribly jealous of his boys,’ Alison ventured. ‘Mother-in-law didn’t make it any easier, to my mind.’

BY THE TIME John’s father was released by the Germans and returned to Scotland at the end of the war, John hardly remembered him, Angus had never met him, and their mother, Tom’s ‘darling wee girl’, had grown accustomed to being in charge. Tom was a changed man—two world wars had left their indelible scars on his psyche—and the world was a changed place. It was too painful and too daunting a prospect to recapture the Guynd of the past. Restoring it to the image of his childhood was inconceivable. Anyway, he might have figured, it never had his name on it. Survivor’s guilt dogged him. Two brothers had died tragically, heroically, whilst he had spent the war years watering tomato plants for the enemy.

Doreen was anxious to return the house to the family, but for a few years Tom—the Commander—was satisfied to establish a flat in the West end of the basement, leaving the Admiral upstairs presiding over the principal rooms. Perhaps this was to drive home the point of wartime pecking order, that military duty took precedence over family life. Perhaps it had something to do with Tom’s having spent three years in command of a submarine during the First World War. Did being underneath give him a feeling of safety, or of subterfuge, which he had developed an affinity for? Whatever the reasons, faced with Tom’s inertia it took many months of Doreen’s persistent prodding to get the Admiral’s family moved out of the house and her own upstairs. From then on, as John recalls, his father spent a good deal of his time sequestered in the library in front of the TV with the shutters closed, surrounded by a barricade of club armchairs.

As John remembered him, his father didn’t seem to have a past or a family worth talking about. He was moody, irritable and intimidating. Every morning the boys had to stand at attention at the foot of his bed, waiting for their orders. Tom spent the morning in the desultory business of his new raison d’être as Secretary of the Shipwrecked Mariner’s Society. At precisely one o’clock he would begin to stir, demanding of his wife, ‘Where’s lunch?’ Commanding his two or three estate workers towards the planting of trees, the raising of pigs, the mending of fences and gates and, in a more energetic mood, reprimanding the estate managers, he tried to recapture the sense of power he had felt in his finest hours in the navy. But there was no real enemy to be vanquished, no territory to conquer. Often Tom would take to his bed and not be available for days. It was well known that his marriage was unhappy, and that his two boys were afraid of him. Even in later years, when the boys were grown up, Alison recalls that when the Commander appeared ‘everyone else would sort of scatter’.

As the boys grew up and were packed off to boarding school, Tom and Doreen led increasingly separate lives, each claiming his and her own end of the house. Doreen would retire to her sewing room upstairs to play her accordion to herself. Tom loathed the sound of it. Perhaps he suspected that her love of the instrument had something to do with one of those dashing Polish army refugees that so cheered the lonely wives of Angus County during the war, with their shiny black riding boots and their fast-swinging mazurkas. Tom had no interest in dancing of any kind.

By the 1960s, I learnt from a letter Tom wrote to his middle-aged Canadian nephew, he had concluded that his wife was ‘a townie ’, and that his two teenage boys evinced no real interest in the country. Occasionally he could persuade Angus to go shooting with him, which gave him a ray of hope, but mostly, he complained, ‘parties, cinema, country dancing, pretty well contain their thoughts, except when the lake is frozen’. If Tom had ever felt the same way in his youth he had long since forgotten it.

John’s parents also cultivated different sets of friends, Doreen’s amongst the upper-crust county families, whilst Tom was more comfortable with the local farmers and the transient military population, always in good supply from the nearby naval air base. One such witness to this situation, a retired naval officer, came to call on us one day in the summer, interested to see the old Guynd again. John instantly disappeared, leaving me to receive the man’s candid recollections. ‘The Commander liked me,’ he told me, adding jovially, ‘which of course made me rather unpopular with the rest of the family.’

More than one family acquaintance has told me about having been invited to the Guynd for tea, and then being sent away when the knock at the door was met by the Commander, who knew nothing of their invitation. Likewise, Doreen was known to give a cool reception to anyone looking for Tom. She was not expected to participate in his dinner or lunch parties, nor did she care to, to hear Tom telling the same old war stories and his favourite off-colour jokes. One was either his friend or hers, and whichever one was, it was almost impossible not to take sides in the battle over how the Guynd should best be managed or—God forbid—enjoyed.

Clearly, I realised, it was impossible for Doreen to make the house as beautiful as she would have liked it to be, as beautiful as it deserved to be, without Tom’s support. Nothing like the upheaval I had already caused by raising the linoleum would ever have been allowed, even though it wouldn’t have cost them anything. A fresh coat of paint would have been welcome everywhere but that was obviously out of the question. Soft furnishings, it seems, were Doreen’s only outlet. Even so, the curtains she had made were nervously cut to the narrowest margin, not quite meeting in the middle when they were drawn, and the pelmets were too shallow for those high, generous windows.

The stingy little lamps, the walls in need of paint Tom could abide even if Doreen could not. The feared and isolated patriarch complained to his trustees of his family’s ‘soaring expenditure in electricity, due to staggered meals, and their own private sitting room’. He was known to have cut off the hot water supply when he thought his family was being extravagant with it. Yet a striking double standard was not hard to see in Tom’s definition of luxury. He bought a showy two-seater open-top Lee Francis motor car, which is remembered to this day by certain elderly residents of Arbroath. And there was no surer way to impress the county folk with his youthful vigour and enterprise than a heated outdoor swimming pool, which Tom decided he could afford to build in the early 1960s. Furthermore, there was no more public a rejection of his wife’s desires than to smother her lawn tennis court in the process—the ultimate insult to her Wimbledon childhood.

Tom played his new social asset to the hilt, inviting everybody for a swim. Whilst he basked in his superficial popularity, flirting with the girls in their bathing costumes, exhibiting his own remarkably lean figure afloat in an inner tube, Doreen hurried up and down the stairs for extra towels and fretted as children left their wet footprints all over the front hall on their way to the loo. John, having just earned his engineering degree in Aberdeen, outwardly criticised the pool’s poorly designed drainage system and privately fumed over his father’s disregard for his expertise. Alison worried about the safety of her three small children, as she and Angus then resided in the basement flat. Sure enough, one day little Pete, aged four, was discovered floating head down in the pool; the gardener rescued him just in time.

Some of her friends considered Doreen a saint not to have deserted Tom. Certainly she went to church every Sunday, attended religious retreats in foreign countries and prayed a lot at home. A prie-dieu in the corner of the passage upstairs, upholstered in rough brown stuff, faced a religious icon, which I quietly banished to a drawer. Endurance, one friend told me, was Doreen’s great strength. Her long trial ended in 1971 when Tom died suddenly of a stroke. Wrote the headmaster of Fort Augustus, the Catholic monastery where the boys had gone to school, ‘He has finally gone to that place above the dark cloud that hung over him and made him an unhappy man.’

The dark cloud that had hung over the Guynd began to lift after Tom died. His family was free to make decisions, to go about its business, without the constant fear of his criticism. But Doreen had by then lost her energy to make the house beautiful. It lingered in a state of postwar semi-recovery, as she eventually moved downstairs to Tom’s office, no longer having the strength to climb the stairs. This spacious room with a window to the floor gave Foxy a place to doze in the sun or prick up her sharp ears and announce a visitor approaching the front door. John fitted a stove into the fireplace so that his mother could keep herself warm in winter. With Foxy she took walks in the woods to escape the icy winds of the open road. In April she decamped for Portugal where she shared a house with friends. Back at the Guynd in summer, she spent the last two weeks of every June faithfully watching Wimbledon. John remembers the pop, pop, pop of the tennis balls emanating day after day from behind the closed doors of the darkened library.

That first autumn I spent at the Guynd, Doreen’s freshly dry-cleaned tartan skirts still hung in the cupboard, her feathered hats perched on the shelf swathed in tissue paper. In the drawer of a little Pembroke table I sorted through her powders and pills, creams and lipsticks, and as I tossed them one by one into the waste basket I wondered what it was like to live here all alone. Her diaries, little leather books each no bigger than the palm of my hand, stuffed to the back of a desk drawer, accounted for thirty-six years of marriage, every day of it recorded briefly in pencil, as another test of her endurance passed into night. ‘Rain, walked with Foxy in the woods, T. not speaking to J.’

‘Had she been ailing for a long time before she died?’ I asked John.

‘Not at all. She was out at the theatre one evening with friends. Died of a heart attack. I was in London when I got the call. Got into my car and drove nine hours straight to the Guynd. I was devastated. And then, to get here and find her gone. I guess I always thought she would be here. She always was.’

Even if in Tom’s opinion the Guynd would never give them any pleasure, or perhaps because he was so sure of it, Doreen was determined that it was the one thing they had that was worth her whilst to save. ‘I have to stay for the sake of the boys,’ she would explain to friends. ‘It’s their heritage.’

How were the boys to interpret this heritage, raised in the teeth-gritting cold passion of their parents’ conflicting dreams and desires? How was John to proceed under the heavy memory of a father who did not want him to inherit the family home, and a mother who sacrificed everything so that he could? Now the estate was in the hands of trustees his father had appointed, whose management over the years had been, at best, indifferent. Four hundred acres of farmland had been sold off to give Angus his share of the inheritance, which left John the sole beneficiary of what remained of a crippled and neglected estate—the land, the house and its contents.

Was it the Guynd, I wondered, that engendered conflict, that raised hopes and guaranteed disappointment? Was it the Guynd that ruined Tom and Doreen’s marriage? Angus and Alison’s? No wonder John had held out for so long, observing these casualties with a cautious eye. Yet as outwardly critical as he was of the immediate precedents, did he really have the distance it would require to break the mould? No question about it. We were in a high-risk relationship.