‘That’s a lie.’
‘Emmy, don’t,’ mamma cried.
‘Say you don’t like him now after this has happened, but don’t say now you never liked him, for it isn’t true and you are merely deceiving yourself.’
Julia stood gazing fixedly across the table at Emmy’s face.
‘I’ll tell you one thing’ she said slowly, after a long pause, ‘that man and his emotions are not to be depended upon. He’s shown that clearly. If he can do this kind of thing once, he can do it again.’
The hapless Christine drowns herself, and Julia’s distrust of Wingate shows itself to be at least partially justified, though not wholly, when he devises a complex and desperate scheme to elope with Emmy, marry her by declaration before a witness, and sail off with her to rejoin his regiment in India. The elaborate logistics of the whole operation might just have worked, but for the sly machinations of the abominable Boyd. The painful realism of Emmy’s fruitless search for some conveyance to take her to the rendezvous in time, and her fatal trudge on foot through wind and rain, are the most affecting part of the novel.
Even after she was dead, her face quivered and the pulse in her neck leapt, as a feather sometimes gives semblance of life.
The Scottishness of the book is nicely managed through a combination of Scots-speaking characters (Nannie, Mrs Wands, the kirk elders) and a narrative voice which is in general English but which uses many Scots words quite naturally, somewhat in the tradition of John Galt (e.g. swee, fliped, Cloutie, craikie, creepie, howffs, gangrel, tirled, fank, sheiling, kelpie, wridy, scaurs, eardmeal). Scottish country superstitions are given an airing on several occasions, usually to be undercut by the robust common sense of Julia and Emily, but perhaps also to induce an intermittent suggestion of fateful forces working behind human affairs, as if the author had not quite made up her mind on this point. Even the last sentence of the book, simple though it is, has a thought-provoking ambiguity. As the carriage taking the Lockharts to Glasgow passes through the village, Lisbet looks back:
The last glimpse I had of it was of the raised, hummocked graveyard on the hill, with its grey gravestones all blankly facing east.
The gravestones face to the east as an outward sign of the Christian hope of resurrection, but the fact that they stare ‘blankly’ seems to reduce the hope. The reader may also remember that Stephen Wingate, heart-broken in India, is himself in the east, leaving behind two buried women whose deaths he had unwittingly contributed to. Any suggestion of a reference to Wingate could only be a sub-text, but the fact that it can even cross one’s mind shows that the generally forward-looking and hopeful conclusion of the story retains its suspension of the tragic.
Edwin Morgan
I can remember the trees in the garden at home. The manse was built in a very sheltered place, for to reach it from the road one had to walk through a wood, and it was shielded from the loch’s storms by tall trees, stripped bare on one side by the wind. The garden was so full of trees they left little room for anything else. Yellow doronicums used to make a valiant show, and in autumn, amongst skeleton grey leaves, we found veined crocuses. Everything grew a little wildly in that muffled, breathless place. All the trees’ strength went into their straggling height and each one seemed to be stretching upwards in an attempt to see over its neighbour’s untidy head.
Most of the furniture was too large for the irregular rooms. It had come from mamma’s home, and although some of it was good it had all seen better days, so that the manse was shabbily resplendent. The ponderous grandfather clock made the hall look uncomfortably small and on a quiet afternoon its ticking could be heard in every room of the house. Once, when grandmamma died, it stopped, and after it was mended by papa it always struck the hour at the twenty to. We grew so accustomed to it that other people’s clocks seemed wrong.
Nannie also came from mamma’s home where she had been nurse to her and her eight brothers and sisters in the days when the nineteenth century had been as youthful as they. She had shown a marked preference for the boys, to whom she used to give the white crusts of bread while she made the girls eat the black. But she was a Graham and let no man have his way. When any of the brothers had the mooligrubs or sullens, she would tell him she would whip him—ay, even if he were the Duke of Buccleuch.
She had comforted them in grief and watched over them in sickness, had rubbed butter on their bruises, seen that the adventuresome boys did not walk too soon, and sung to George and Frederick, long-since-dead Uncle Oscar and her favourite Octavius, when they were small enough to sit on her lap:
Here’s a braw wee rascal
Straddling on ma knee,
Clutching hand and kicking foot,
Shouting loud wi’ glee.
Are ye ready for the hunting-field?
And ready for the Race?
Ready for dirk, dagg and shield?
For honour or disgrace?
Ah, ma braw wee braggart,
Bide ye by me still—
Time enow for your ain gait
And your ain headlong will!
Papa, whose church was small and Highland congregation poor, could not afford a nurse, so that Nannie had to be maid, cook, nurse, rolled into one. She could not show favouritism between us for we were all girls, which I believe was a great disappointment to her. I could not tell which she loved the best. I think she was proudest of Julia, and she loved Emily because she needed the most care, and me because I was the youngest.
She was very wise and very strict; bread and butter, even on birthdays, always had to come first, and at tea-time we had to leave something over on the table for Lord Manners. Her voice was soft and had a Highland up-and-down intonation. When she wanted to say it was a stormy night, she used the word gurlie; when she meant some one was garrulous, she said wanwordy. When an apple was bad, it was wersh, and I was not the youngest but the shakings-of-the-pot.
We never grew older in her eyes. When Julia used to return, I think the sight of her was confused for Nannie by the memory of a little girl playing thoughtfully by herself at the fire; and when Emmy was quite grown up, Nannie always used to treat her as though she were a child too fond of her own will.
Her ay was ay, and her nay, nay. I used to weep sometimes when she would not give me what I wanted, and say that perhaps I would die soon and then mebbe she would be sorry. It was only the very good and the very old who died, Nannie, unmoved, would tell me.
BOOK ONE. CHAPTER ONE
A pale green light poured down from the wintry sky, as though this earth were lit by chance rays from some other world. Grey sheep silently ate split turnips in the brown fields. The snow had melted in the low lands, leaving everything sad dun shades, and only streaked the mountains, where it lay like the skeletons of huge, prehistoric animals. The shouldering outline of the mountains cut against the horizon, their detail of burn, crag and ravine lost in the immensity of their shadowed bulk. It was as though, in those transient windless seconds between dawn and daylight, the world had resolved itself again into the contours and substances that composed it before man trod on its earth and drank in its air.
It was not yet breakfast-time when I entered the manse. I sat on the window-seat in the parlour and waited for it, looking out at the moss-covered garden wall and reading over to myself ‘The Unquiet Grave’ from