Not to the manor born
Amanda Herries
THE GUYND by Belinda Rathbone W.W. Norton, £14.99, pp. 293, ISBN 15493720157 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Six years ago I embarked on a little redecoration of my husband’s family house, over 200 years old in southwest Scotland. ‘Ah’, said a knowing friend from the Highlands, now a neighbour, who would soon embrace the same task, as we ripped up floorboards, struggled with ancient heating systems and filled skips; ‘ah’ she said, ‘the generational refit.’ It is the same exercise which lies at the heart of Belinda Rathbone’s well-observed description of ten years of similar effort near Arbroath in the Scottish Highlands, at her new husband’s ancestral home, a Georgian mansion called the Guynd. ‘Mansion’ is a word not much used in the description of country houses these days; it is more favoured by estate agents in reference to large early 20th-century blocks of flats. But ‘mansion’ is a word commonly used in America, and Belinda is a New Yorker historian who meets her Scottish cousin-bymarriage at a family wedding. John Ouchterlony, 53 (to her 39) and a bachelor, represents something of a mystery to Belinda. He has the easy manners and deep innercore confidence of ‘an upper-class British background’ combined with eccentricity and obvious ambivalence of feeling towards his inheritance, the house and 400-acre estate. Love, or perhaps passion, overtakes them, Belinda is offered ‘it all, if you want it’.
With the enthusiasm, energy and efficiency that Americans so often bring to a challenging project in a foreign land the new bride attacks the quantities of clutter accumulated by acquisitive forebears. In a house of 36 rooms, at one time requisitioned by the Wrens (‘gentler tenants than men’) she counts 72 assorted chairs, five vacuum cleaners, drawers full of ancient underwear and much else. She hacks at the wild, overgrown abandon of a once tended walled garden and landscaped grounds. Recognising that (as is often the case with the British ‘landed gentry’, especially after the demands on an estate following two wars) she is land-rich and cash-poor, Belinda nevertheless manages to breathe new life into the old house. She tells with humour of the arrival and departure of a variety of tenants in their assorted cottages and flats, from merely feckless to downright criminal, and through diaries and memoirs she becomes familiar with family ghosts and, in particular, the increasingly strained and eventual desperate barrenness of John’s late parents’ marriage. In 1990, within her first months at the Guynd (rhyming with the wind) she has perhaps the greatest success in this world steeped in primogeniture and ancestral awareness; she produces the son and heir, and enjoys the social access his childhood affords her, whilst appreciating that her son, attending the village school, will develop a broader social mix.
Despite Belinda’s successes and achievements, described with gentle charm, as in the serendipitous discovery of bits of string of all lengths and thicknesses kept by John’s mother ‘just in case’, a shadow lurks constantly. She is well aware that her husband’s relationship with this house is confused. The book opens with her knowing that when she married the man she ‘married the mansion’. On her first visit, unlike Dickens’s clerk Wemmick whose post-box mouth relaxes, whose demeanour softens tangibly as he approaches his fortified cottage and the Aged Parent, she is dismayed to see that John’s profile tightens, his openness disappears, he withdraws totally into the burden of his house and his thoughts.
To John the house is redolent of his father’s lifetime of disappointment and his mother’s bravely endured unhappiness, yet he was brought up to know it as his heritage and he is bound to it with a love tormented by an inability to come to terms with his history while embracing his future. As his new wife, with her American instinct to take on the challenge of her new life, teases away at everything familiar to him, he retreats further into his resistance to change, however uncomfortable their living conditions may remain.
Inevitably, perhaps, and with somewhat disconcerting abruptness, Belinda comes to the conclusion that although all her efforts might make superficial — and generational — differences to the ‘mansion’, her ten years of living with ‘the man’ have only intensified his abstraction, and she is in danger of slipping into the very same distant, silently corrosive relationship with John as that of her unknown parents-in-law. Living now in Massachusetts with her son, she writes this account for an American readership, using words, therefore, that sometimes grate (why is ‘burn’ always printed in italics?) and some strangely uncomfortable descriptive idioms. But the poignancy of her fractured love affair with both the man and the house shines through. While it may be surprising to realise that this way of life still survives, perhaps only an ‘incomer’ could have written such an intimate and acutely observed account of a disappearing social order which deserves a memoir like this as a lasting testimonial.
Previous page
