Читать книгу The Rutherfurd Saga - Anna Buchan - Страница 18

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“It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill.”

Jane Austen.

A week or two later Nicole wrote to her friend Jean Douglas at Kingshouse:

You blame me for not writing, and ask what I can possibly have to do except write, but you’d be surprised how full the days are and how quickly they pass. Anyway, for me. Barbara still kicks against the pricks. Mother smiles her absent smile and accepts things as they are, but I think perhaps she hasn’t been quite so “absent” lately—you know what I mean, present in the body but her thoughts not of this world. She is sometimes quite like her old self when she is talking to Alastair. I told you—did I?—about him. He is a small boy, the nephew of Miss Symington who lives in the biggest of the red villas, six years of age, plain of face, superficially quite unattractive. You know how my heart always did melt to small boys, and there is something about Alastair that appeals to me mightily. He reminds me in the strangest way of Ronnie and Archie, and I think Mums must feel the same, for I’ve seldom seen her so absorbed in any one as she is in this child. He is old enough to begin lessons, but there is nobody available in this place to teach him, and his aunt doesn’t want a resident governess, and—actually—mother offered to give him lessons for two hours every morning! So punctually at ten o’clock he arrives with his nurse—a large Fife girl, quite young and full of common-sense—we call her Gentle Annie, because of her liking for a song of that name—whom he admires exceedingly. (When we read to him about a beautiful princess, he asks, “As beautiful as Annie?”).

Alastair sits at a table with an exercise book and a pencil and learns to recognise and make letters and read little words. So far his progress is not striking. I heard Mums going over with him a n, an, with great patience, then she said: “Now, Alastair, tell me what is that word?” and Alastair with the most charmingly helpful air said, “I’d tell you in a minute if I knew.”

You say you want to know all about the people here. Barbara says they are the dullest crowd she ever struck, and indeed they are utterly ordinary—what are we ourselves?—and very far from exciting, but I like them.

Mrs. Heggie, who can’t see any one without offering hospitality, came to tea with her daughter the other day. The daughter was calm and collected and condescended to us a good deal, but her mother was absolutely simmering with excitement. It seems she has always had an intense desire to be inside the Harbour House, and she was like a child at her first pantomime. I escorted her through every nook and cranny of it—we even visited the coal-cellar—and she gasped out admiration at everything she beheld. She was so interested in the few photographs she saw in the bedrooms, that we raked out boxes of them, and I believe she would have sat entranced till bedtime listening to the life-histories of people she had never known existed. The daughter, Joan by name, dragged her away in the end, evidently ashamed of her exuberance. She writes, this girl, but I can’t quite gather what. She is rather plain, with a long nose and chin, and an ugly laugh.

Miss Symington, Alastair’s aunt, is a woman of about forty-seven, quite good-looking if she knew how to make the best of herself; rich, free to do what she likes; and here she stays all the year round in a hideous house, eating badly cooked food, wearing ugly clothes, seeing nothing beautiful, hearing nothing beautiful, hardly, I think, aware that there is such a thing as beauty. What could one do to wake her up?

Her minister and his wife are so different. The Lamberts live in a plain little grey stone house in the middle of a walled garden; you enter by a green door in the wall. They have £300 a year to live on, and it shows how little money really matters, for they are absolutely happy. They have everything that any reasonable being could desire, a house where love is, good health, good books and a good fire. Also, by a merciful dispensation of Providence, they have a small servant called Betha, a wise and virtuous child, and she and Mrs. Lambert between them cook, clean and look after the two children. Always by one o’clock Betha has got on her black dress, ready to carry in the early dinner, and when she has washed the dinner dishes out she goes to give the two little girls their daily walk. Mrs. Lambert makes all the clothes for her babies, besides visiting the congregation, presiding at meetings, and reading every book she can lay her hands on. Mr. Lambert is rather a pet. He has a most engaging stammer and helps out the words by giving himself little slaps; but he also has what his wife calls “a dry manner,” and isn’t sufficiently affable to his congregation. Small and thin, with a sort of twisted smile, he is like a benevolent gnome; but his sermons are excellent, and he is a man of wide reading.

Then there is Dr. Kilgour and his sister. He delves in the past and writes of what he finds without hope of it ever seeing the light of publication; and his sister collects pretty well everything—old glass, china, furniture, brass. Her house is like a very nice museum; everywhere you turn there is something worth looking at, not the least being Miss Kilgour herself. Quite old—seventy, I believe—round and comfortable, with such white hair and blue eyes, she is full of funny old rhymes and stories of the people who once lived in Kirkmeikle, and the rise of the new people in Langtoun. There is a bite in her talk which is refreshing; it is so tiresome when everybody says nothing but good of everybody else!

As to men, I’ve already mentioned Mr. Lambert and Dr. Kilgour. Then there is Mr. Buckler, the retired Indian judge, and—Mr. Simon Beckett. I’ve kept him to the last like the bit of icing on a cake, for he is no less a person than the Simon Beckett who almost succeeded in climbing Everest. You remember Beckett and Cullis were together, well on their way to the top, when Cullis was killed and his companion had to return?

We couldn’t believe that it was the same Beckett, it seemed so utterly unlikely that he should be here; but it appears that when he was a small boy he and his brothers came here for sea-bathing, and the little quiet town remained in his memory, and he thought of it when he wanted a place in which to write in peace. For, you must know, he is writing an account of what happened on that expedition, thus late in the day because he was for long ill and broken.

I like him for his kindness to the small Alastair, who follows him with dog-like devotion.

Poor old Babs sniffs at the whole of Kirkmeikle, but—thanks to Aunt Constance whose acquaintance list I am convinced ranges from Kew to Kotmandu—we have got to know one family with whom she can feel at home, people called Erskine, who have a place about ten miles from this, Queensbarns. They are very pleasant people and are full of schemes for amusing us. “What d’you do here?” one of the girls asked me, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell her. I could only assure her that I didn’t play bridge, and that stunned her into silence. Babs and I went over and played badminton the other day at Queensbarns: it was very nice, but oh! how glad I was to creep back to our own funny little house.

Could you help liking a town that contained a place called The Watery Wynd? and another of the name of The Puddock Raw?

I like Kirkmeikle, but I ache all the time for my own countryside. D’you remember what the old woman said to Dorothy Wordsworth when she told her she lived in a pretty place? “Ay, the water of Tweed is a bonny water” . . . Isn’t there a text about “Weep not for him who is dead but weep sore for him who goeth away. . . .”

All the same, I’m happy.—Your loving

Nicole.