‘I had my own berth on the Night Ferry,’ I told him modestly. ‘Men and women are separated.’
I didn’t tell him I was coming home from my Swiss boarding school for the summer holidays – I’d spent the entire trip carefully trying to disguise myself as being closer to twenty than to sixteen. I’d put my hair up in a chignon and hidden my ridiculously babyish panama school hat in a big paper bag. With my childish socks and school blazer crammed into my overnight case and the collar of my blouse undone, and the help of a lipstick bought in the rail station in Paris, I thought I pulled off a believable imitation of someone old enough to have left school.
‘But I did arrange the journey myself,’ I couldn’t help boasting. ‘My people aren’t expecting me for another three days. It may be my own fault I’ve lost my luggage though. I think it is having its own little secret holiday in a hidden corner of the port at Dunkirk.’
The taxi driver laughed. Now we were on the Perth Road on our way to Strathfearn House. Nearly there – nearly! Scotland, summer, the river, Grandad …
And then that moment when I realised all over again that Grandad was gone forever, and this was the last summer at Strathfearn.
‘My grandfather died earlier this year and my grandmother’s selling their house,’ I told the taxi driver. ‘My mother and I are going to help her with the packing up.’
‘Oh, aye, Strathfearn House – he was a good man, Sandy Murray, Earl of Strathfearn. I saw in the Perth Mercury that the Glenfearn School bought the estate. They’ve been working like Trojans to get the house and grounds ready for the students to move in next term. Lucky lads! Your grandad had a nine-hole golf course out there, didn’t he? Good deal of debt though …’
Bother the Mercury. I hoped they hadn’t published an amount, although I supposed they must have printed some number when the estate went up for sale, including the house and everything in it that my grandmother hadn’t brought with her from France in 1885. She must have been so ashamed. Grandad left tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of debt. Originally he lost a great deal of money when the stock market collapsed in 1929, but then he added to it by borrowing to put a new roof on Strathfearn House; then he’d had to sell parts of the estate to pay back the loan; and then he’d been struck with bone cancer. And the treatment, and the visits to specialists in Europe and America, and the alterations to the house so he could go on living in it, and the private nurses …
And suddenly I was longing to be at Strathfearn, even if it wasn’t ours any more; longing to see my mother and grandmother and my friend Mary Kinnaird, longing for one last summer of childish freedom on the River Fearn; but also full of grown-up excitement about being included as someone sensible enough to help settle the Murray Estate, when any one of my five big brothers could have done it. I didn’t want the summer to begin. I didn’t want it to end.
The taxi could not go right up to the house because a digger and a steamroller were engaged in widening the drive. I had to put the fare on my mother’s account, but the driver just laughed and said he knew where to find us. I got out to walk the last third of a mile.
The first person I recognised was Sergeant Angus Henderson, the Water Bailiff whom Grandad sent for to take custody of the pearl thief we caught. Henderson was there with his bicycle, with his tall cromach across the bars as if he were about to do a high-wire act and needed a long stick to balance him. He was having a row with the driver of the steamroller.
‘I’ve told you before to keep your men off the path by the Fearn when they’re ditch-digging!’ the Water Bailiff roared. ‘Bad enough the place crawling with those dirty tinker folk camped up in Inchfort Field, in and out the water looking for pearls. That river path to the Inverfearnie Library is off limits to your men.’
‘Those men are digging the pipeline for the new swimming pool – how d’you expect them to stay off the river path?’ steamed the roller driver. ‘All the work is downstream of Inverfearnie. I dinnae want them mixed up with those sleekit tinkers anyway. Bloody light-fingered sneaks. You’d not believe how many tools go missing, spades and whatnot.’
I did not want to get caught in the crossfire of this battle. The Water Bailiff is a terrifyingly tall and gaunt ex-Black Watch policeman. Grandad told us that in the heat of the Great War, Henderson allegedly shot one of his own men in the back for running away from a battle, and then strangled a German officer, an enemy Hun, with his bare hands.
‘I’m off down the Fearn path now, and if I catch any of your men there …’ Henderson let the threat hang, but gave his cromach staff a shake.
The Water Bailiff had been known to thrash every single one of my five brothers for some reason or other in the past – guddling for rainbow trout out of the brown trout season, or swimming in the Fearn when the salmon were running, or just for getting in his way as he patrolled the narrow path along the burn on his bicycle.
I stepped back so I was well out of his way as he set off along the drive ahead of me. When he’d become nothing but a dark beetling shape among the bright green beeches, I held tight to my small overnight case and set off after him, considerably more slowly. I was looking forward to getting out of my modified school uniform if I could. But the dark skirt and white blouse did give me a smart official air, like a post office clerk or a prospective stenographer for the Glenfearn School, and the men working on the drive paid no attention to me.
My grandmother’s roses in the French forecourt garden in front of Strathfearn House were blooming in a glorious blazing riot of June colour, oblivious to the chaos throughout the rest of the grounds. There were people all about, hard at work building new dormitories and classrooms and playing fields. None of them I recognised. I let myself into the house – the doors were wide open.
The whole of the baronial reception hall had been emptied of its rosewood furniture and stripped of the ancestral paintings. I felt as though I had never been there before in my life.