two weeks in London once, researching in the British Library, and had felt confused and threatened by the crowds of people on the street (“All going somewhere,” she had complained. “Nobody actually staying where they are.”)
Antonia had married young. Her attractive looks and her amusing tongue had caught the attention of the son of a pros-perous East Perthshire farmer, a man who was regarded by his father as a hopeless prospect, by virtue of his complete lack of interest in crops and cattle, but who had, nonetheless, a talent for dealing in stocks and bonds by telephone. This young man, Harry Collie, found in Antonia an easy companion. They set up home in a converted mill at the edge of his father’s sprawling farm, and enjoyed the country life that such people might lead.
This was an existence dominated by a social round that both of them came to regard as ultimately rather pointless, although diverting enough at the time.
Harry encouraged Antonia to pursue her interest in history.
She enrolled for a Ph.D. at Edinburgh, and spent a great deal of time travelling to and from the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Records Office. She found herself drawn ever deeper into the mysteries of medieval Scotland, and completing and submitting her doctoral thesis was, as she described it, like having, at last, a baby, which one then promptly gives away. Its publication by the Tuckwell Press was a matter of pride not only to her father, the now retired professor of anatomy, who had taken to writing monographs on silkworms, but also to her husband, who liked the idea that intellectual distinction might shine from a corner of Perthshire generally only associated with the cultivation of soft fruit.
Antonia and Harry had two children, a son and a daughter, Murdo and Antonia, known in the family as Little Antonia.
When the children were ten and eight respectively, Harry started to see a woman in Perth who owned and ran a dress shop.
Antonia became aware of this, and thought that his dalliance with this woman, whom she called the Dress Shop Assistant, 88
would pass once he saw through what she imagined to be the other woman’s intellectual vacuity. She was wrong. Although he was not by nature fickle in his affections, what developed between Harry and the Dress Shop Assistant was a deep mutual dependence which neither was capable of defeating. Antonia suggested that Harry should move into Perth, but he refused.
His family had lived on that bit of land for several hundred years, and it was all he knew. So Antonia decided that she would move back to St Andrews, taking Murdo and Little Antonia with her, and would live in a corner of her father’s house.
Then disaster struck. When she explained to Murdo and Little Antonia that they would be coming to live with her in St Andrews, they refused to go. Murdo, in particular, had a deep affection for the farm, and said that he would simply run straight back if taken to St Andrews. Little Antonia wept copious tears and said that she would not touch a morsel of food until the decision had been rescinded. She was as good as her word. She simply stopped eating, and in admiration for his sister’s act of defiance, Murdo climbed a tree in the garden of the house and refused to come down.
“But if you stay here, then you’ll be staying just with Daddy,”
shouted Antonia into the foliage.
“Exactly,” came a disembodied voice from above. “That’s what we want to do.”
Antonia left him where he was. Those who climbed trees usually came down from them after a short while, although in the back of her mind she remembered Calvino’s novel
Murdo could hardly remain where he was for very long. Cosimo lived in a more forested age; Murdo had only the one tree, with sky on every side.
She returned to call him down an hour later. He was still
89
there, though uncommunicative, and an hour after that she returned with the eighteen-year-old son of the stockman. “I’ll get him down for you,” muttered this young man, and he promptly scaled the tree, worked his way out onto the bough on which Murdo sat, and grabbed at the young boy’s shirt.
In his attempt to avoid capture, Murdo hung for a moment on the branch and then fell, crashing through lower branches on his descent. Antonia screamed and ran forward to attempt to catch him. She could not, of course, and the boy fell heavily on a grass-covered mound of earth at the base of the tree, winded and unable to cry, but otherwise unharmed. For the next five days, he refused to talk, and turned his face away from Antonia whenever she addressed him.
She had little alternative. The children stayed on the farm with their father and the Dress Shop Assistant. Antonia went to live in St Andrews, which made it possible for her to see the children regularly and also to look after her father. It was an arrangement that seemed to make everybody content, and Antonia, rather to her surprise, found that she was inordinately happy. Even the formal ending of the marriage was amicable, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it was not her fault. In this state of blessedness, she began to write her novel.
The idea of spending several months in Edinburgh appealed to Antonia. Novels – and other works of the imagination – are sometimes best written in unfamiliar surroundings, where the mind can wander without being brought back to earth by the constant interruptions of one’s normal life. In Domenica’s flat in Scotland Street, separated from St Andrews by the green waters of the Firth of Forth, she felt quite free of distraction.
She knew one or two people in Edinburgh, it was true, but she had not told them that she was there and there was no reason 90
why they should find out. If she walked up Scotland Street, if she wandered about Dundas Street, which was about as far as she intended to go, nobody would know who she was nor have any reason to speculate. Of course
