Abandonments

1

        He did it unthinkingly. My brother was staying in the Highlands, shuttling for a few days between our sister’s, in Aviemore, and our parents' place, in Pitlochry, and, while he was at our sister’s, our mother came to visit. He asked if they both wanted a cup of tea, and my mother said she would love a cup. Our sister said she would have one, though more out of politeness than enthusiasm, and so he made three cups and before he knew it put the sugar into one cup which would be our mother’s. Neither he nor Virginia took sugar in their tea. Virginia, who was in the next room, didn’t see him putting the sugar in, but Mum did, and he worried that she might feel hurt if he washed the cup out again and placed sugar in another. The cup with the sugar in it said: The Best Mum in the World. It was a mug that the twins gave to Virginia when they were nine. It was a moment when they could buy presents for their parents, yet not of an age when they would be too cynical to offer such a sentiment in gift form. She adored the mug and, while it wouldn’t be fair to say that she would never let anyone use it, anyone who did so was well aware that nobody else could compete with the claim made on the mug. Certainly not our mother. 

 2

     My sister was eight years older than my brother and me (we were also twins), and our mother had an unusually fraught relationship with my sister that was based more on privilege than deprivation; one that from another perspective could leave both Richard and myself feeling far more resentful than her. Mum had Virginia when she was twenty-one and still at university; when Virginia was five, she and our father sent her off to a private school in the Highlands. It was while our mother was doing a PhD and my father was working as a junior doctor. They didn’t have much money but had more of it than they had time and, since they weren’t sure whether they would have more children, they believed they could send their daughter to a private school. They weren’t sure when they decided this if they were doing what was best for Virginia or best for themselves, and they weren’t in agreement with each other. My mother was privately educated herself and, though with reservations, reckoned it gave her opportunities that might have been absent without it, and I recall her once insisting that as a youthful mother she would have found it harder to have made her way in the world without the compensation of the accent and connections. She believed that men in her last year at university would have viewed her as a young woman who had simply made a mess of her life; instead, she was seen as a novelty — that people with her accent rarely made such mistakes. For whatever reason, I never pushed my mother on this, though I’ve given it some thought in the years since she made it, and while I think she may have been right in her claim, I never quite liked how it was put. 

       My father had probably been reluctant to send Virginia to private school, knowing that while he didn’t doubt his wife loved him, he believed also that there was a reserve in her and a gap between them that would never be closed and might be evident too in his relationship with Virginia. Sometimes when friends came to visit, as many as half a dozen in their seven-bedroom house, with a garden cottage, on what amounted to land several miles outside of Pitlochry, he felt left out of many a conversation if the friends were those from Roberta’s school, or those from university who were also privately educated. He was brought up in Yorkshire and in a house even larger than the one they owned, but his father, while a senior surgeon, was also a man who, though not a socialist, was well aware that were it not for the changes made in Britain after the war, the likelihood of his becoming the figure he became would have been small. When arguing with my mother over whether to send Virginia away, he invoked his father’s claim, one that insisted no child of his was going to be privately educated: in so improving the lives of his children, he would be perpetuating and exacerbating a class system that his generation was fortunate to have a chance of escaping. His father wanted opportunities for all. He didn't want to improve them children through privilege after the gains he made through egalitarianism. This is what my father told me he said to my mother and I’ve heard versions of it from both of them; with mum offering it in a mocking tone, as though my father was as annoyingly self-righteous as his dad, and my father offering it to me as if my mother was oblivious of her privileges. 

     What they both agreed on was the cleverness of my mother’s argument. While she too had reservations about sending Virginia away, she also said that while he was right to continue in the egalitarian tradition of his father, wasn’t she no less entitled to continue the elitist tradition of her family? If they were invoking their parents to win an argument, she said, then why couldn't she use hers just as he was using his? Anyway, if he agreed she ought to pursue her studies, then the best way would be if Virginia pursued hers elsewhere. She would have said it coldly and practically, with a hint of humour. I don’t doubt this was the tone because it is one she has continued to use whenever it has come up on occasion since. My mother added that she didn’t want to resent Virginia curtailing her possibilities in life; instead, Virginia ended up resenting her mother for expanding hers.

3 

             Yet of course that wasn’t how my sister saw it, and I sometimes wonder if there isn’t emotionally much difference between sending your child to a private school or sending them to a children’s home: the gap between them from one perspective is initially small, even if the consequences are enormously different. I’d read that more than half of those brought up in care homes fail to find employment; those who go to private schools can expect to get many of the best jobs — with more than half of all diplomats and senior judges coming from private schools even though they represent about at most 7 per cent of the population. I know these statistics because during an argument between my mum and my sister, they were brought up, after Virginia proposed that she couldn’t understand how my mother could have sent her away. Virginia’s boys would have been around five at the time, and she couldn’t stop thinking about how they might feel were they packed off to spend their lives amongst strangers.  

        That argument was at my sister’s home in Aviemore over Christmas the previous year. Usually we would all gather at Mum’s place one year and the next at Virginia’s. She too had a large house with an extensive garden, but there was no immediate garden cottage anyone could retreat to whenever the mood turned sour, and I would usually enjoy visiting my parents’ place over the festive season if for no other reasons than I knew at any moment I could escape to the cottage about ten metres from the main house. We may have all usually stayed in mum and dad’s place as we tried to give the impression of family unity, but it wasn’t unusual for someone to go off and spend an afternoon in the cottage, apparently to get some quiet but really to cope with the increasingly tense atmosphere that was evident whenever Virginia and mum were in the same space for more than twenty-four hours. 

        At my sister’s, there was Virginia, her husband and their two children, my brother and his girlfriend, my parents and me. My sister was a much better cook than my mother, though she was also more dictatorial in the roles that were expected of people, and saw the main meals we had over the three days we were there (Christmas Eve dinner; Christmas Day breakfast, Christmas late lunch, and the Boxing Day evening meal) operations that required careful planning and roles designated. I would usually load up the dishwasher, and when everything was washed and dried, put the items away. I would put out the rubbish and set the table. My parents were expected to help cut up vegetables and scrub the pots and pans that couldn’t go into the dishwasher. My brother and his girlfriend helped with any of the above. That was all very well; it is only to be expected that everyone should help where they could. However, it was as if what mattered even more than the help people provided was the designation of a job that made it clear who happened to be the boss. I noticed in my brother’s new girlfriend an anxiety that seemed to be that of someone caught between a person who wasn’t only trying to fit into a domestic environment, but also a work one — she seemed to know it wouldn’t be enough that she was perceived as a nice person. It wasn’t only that she had to be helpful; she had to prove herself useful. It is one thing to turn up in a new job and the boss expects you to be effective at it and be trained up in unfamiliar areas - but perhaps one way of defining the difference between the useful and the helpful is that in the former it is an expectation in a work environment, and the latter a polite contribution in a domestic one. How often have we all been aware of failing to cut the vegetables the right way, putting a dish in the wrong cupboard, all the while proving ourselves helpful but finally a bit useless as the host tells us that it was very kind of us to help at all. But at Virginia’s, nobody could merely be helpful, and this is partly what created an underlying tension which could easily be exacerbated by the familial one existing between my sister and mother — and without the escape that my parents’ extra acreage gave in the shape of the cottage.

4

            Perhaps if there had been, my brother and his girlfriend would have escaped into it; maybe the twins would have been asked to go and play in the cottage. Going outside wasn’t much of an option for anybody; the weather was as turbulent as the mood, and the wind had been battering the house all morning. Even stepping outside to get items from the freezer in the shed behind the house was not without difficulties. I almost slipped on some black ice after taking out the frozen peas and berries.

     It was initiated during a discussion over the starter as my brother’s girlfriend, Alexa, spoke about her job. She worked in a children’s home as a residential care worker, after graduating a couple of years earlier in social work, and was speaking about how, while she wanted to remain professional, she couldn’t stop herself from getting emotionally involved. These were devastated young lives and the most love they could sometimes expect would come from the people looking after them. As she spoke I could see that whatever guilt she may have felt spending Christmas with our family over her own parents, and the brother and sister she had talked about, was minor next to the kids who were having Christmas with no loved ones at all and, in turn, this is what she expressed. She said she was lucky — she could choose between celebrating the occasion here with her partner and his family, or with her own. These children had no choice, and Alexa did feel a little that she had abandoned them. She said that she couldn’t imagine how the mothers who had kids taken from them, who had for whatever reason left their children, were feeling, if this is how she felt. 

     The conversation moved onto other things as we moved on to other dishes, though when I cleared the starter plates, putting them in the pantry next to the dishwasher, I overheard my sister in the kitchen whispering to her husband that Alexa could ask our mother how it felt to abandon someone. She said it with what I guess was a smile; Jason looked at her with a grin and his was the only face I could see. The starter was prawn cocktail for all of us except the children and Alexa, who had melon with feta. The main was turkey stuffed with a homemade mix of parsley, celery and onion, and there was also a nut roast rich in walnuts, hazelnuts and spices. The latter had always been an option ever since my brother Jonathan had tried becoming a vegetarian. It lasted about 9 months but it included one Christmas and our mother said we had to respect his wishes and put together a nut roast that was so flavourless and dried out that the three of us — Virginia, my father and I — sometimes wondered if that was why he once again became a meat eater. My sister improved the recipe the next year, and improved it again the year after that, and it has become part of our Christmas tradition, with Virginia taking it with her to Pitlochry on the years we celebrate there. Alexa commented on its deliciousness, and Virginia asked how long she had been vegetarian. She said fifteen years, since thirteen.  At home she was allowed to make her own dishes as she laughed saying sometimes she would commandeer the kitchen, and even occasionally managed to persuade her meat-loving parents, her brother and her sisters, to eat meat loaves that were far less tasty than the one she now had in front of her, daals that were either too runny or too stodgy, and chilli dishes usually too hot or too mild. As she spoke, she seemed aware that any suggestion she might be a better cook than my sister would offend Virginia’s pride. But I suppose the rest of us could guess that my sister wouldn’t make much of the quality of Alexa’s cooking or otherwise; what would cause her consternation was that Alexa could cook so freely in her own home.

       Virginia couldn’t as she was at private school and her cooking freedoms were restricted to the holidays, but it was as if while she could absorb the questions of abandonment Alexa brought up as no more than a private joke with her husband, she couldn’t countenance the freedom Alexa would have as a teenager cooking what she liked. While Virginia was force-fed food she could have cooked so much better, Alexa had been defining her very identity with the food choices she had been making. 

 5

             It appeared Jonathan had told Alexa very little about our sister’s life; she had gone to private school while we hadn’t and there were tensions between my sister and my mother. He probably hoped for the best rather than decided to prep Alexa for the worst, but had she known Alexa may not have commented on her teen vegetarianism, nor talked about how she felt abandoning the children in the home, and how much worse it must be for a mother to leave her children. But as I thought about Jonathan’s potential negligence, I wondered too about how much he would have needed to say about my sister’s resentments and my mother’s indifference to her feelings, how no doubt if he had warned Alexa of the complications between them she might have chosen to stay with those kids over Christmas or gone to visit her own family. He would have rehearsed with her various scenarios of potential tension, and who would wish to spend a Christmas that might have seemed somewhere between playing a part in a theatrical production or involving themselves in a heist that they hoped wouldn’t go wrong? So, instead, Alexa obliviously touched a couple of sore spots that Virginia in the first instance managed to smile her way through but in the second, succumbed to the pain and yelled.  

    But that was a little later. Initially, it was a scowl in my mother’s direction. Virginia looked at our mother and those who caught it could see that she wanted mum to say something; to acknowledge that Virginia hadn’t the same opportunities, a phrase usually used of course in the context of the very education my sister did have, but many who may have benefited longterm from the social benefits an independent education provides, can feel in the short term liberties curtailed. Perhaps one reason why my sister regarded her education as oppressive wasn’t only or especially because she was badly treated in that environment, as far as we knew, she was never bullied, either by the staff or fellow students. It may have been because she had never seen herself having benefited from the chances private schooling is supposed to offer. While my mother finished her PhD, taught for a few years in Edinburgh (commuting twice a week from Pitlochry), and now made a passable living writing popular history books and historical fiction, my sister met her husband in her final year at the school, not long after she had turned eighteen. He was twenty-one and an instructor at an adventure centre where the school had taken them, and she moved to Aviemore to be with him when she graduated. He was helping out at the centre he would go on to run, then go on to buy, and they also bought, in time, several chalets they rented out, most of the year round. Virginia helped out in the centre before the children and, after the kids were born, organised the scheduling for the guests and sometimes helped with the change of linen and cleaning when they struggled to get staff. It gave them a very useful supplementary income, but her central purpose was looking after the kids.  

        Instead of shouting at our mother, Virginia looked across at my brother’s girlfriend and said that it must have been a wonderful opportunity to have the chance to cook your food in your own home as a teenager. Alexa looked a little mystified, but the remark wasn’t for her; it was aimed indirectly at Mum, with that phrase, ‘a wonderful opportunity’, used often enough to silence my sister during her school years whenever she protested her ongoing incarceration. It wasn’t fair of my sister to baffle Alexa with the claim, but even Jonathan would have probably acknowledged that it was a little less troublesome than an argument ensuing between Virginia and our mother. Mum said that childhoods are complicated things and, once again, Alexa was left confused. This language of grievance that we were all proficient enough to understand, and that mum and Virginia had mastered well enough to speak it, was a foreign tongue to Alexa. Her bafflement was perhaps a sign of her health, or at least that she belonged to a healthy family. Either that or the resentment-linguistics offered in her home did not share a common vocabulary with ours. 

                During the main course and in the break afterwards, before dessert, as we continued to sit at the table and drink mainly red wine after finishing a bottle of white over the starter, the chat was a mixture of small talk, big ideas and petty digs. The small talk came from Jonathan trying to keep things light, the big ideas from our father, who wanted to discuss political topics in the news, and the backbiting was evident chiefly in two remarks. Dad mentioned the recent inheritance tax proposals on estates of a certain size, and that he could understand many a farmer’s grievance but that, at the same time, they seemed a bit oblivious to the country’s financial difficulties. Money has to come from somewhere, and you can’t get it from the poor, who don’t have any, nor much more from the middle classes, who too are often struggling. It has to come from wealth, and many farmers seemed to have been hoodwinked by a handful of rich landowners. My father well knew this was a contentious claim, at least in my mother’s company, and yet he seemed to offer it as the least difficult of conversations, or perhaps as the most explicable. If Alexa may have preferred to avoid a discussion around land issues, then she would at least have been well aware of what she wished to eschew. She would comprehend its language and could even contribute if she so wished. And so she did contribute, unaware that this was a cause for consternation between my parents, and perhaps oblivious as well to the size of my parents’ estate. She said there were people all over the country who didn’t have parent,s let alone land and a forthcoming inheritance. She couldn’t understand it when she was at work and trying to help the lives of those who had nothing, kids who were reliant on the state and on the limited abilities of the care workers to make their lives as pleasing, even loving, as they could. Sometimes she was given to tears; other times to anger — and especially to the latter when the rich were hijacking causes to retain their wealth while leaving various services, including hers, impoverished. 

      My father looked a little surprised by her ferocity and was probably half-pleased to have someone pushing further his argument with greater personal investment, yet half-horrified that his attempt to start a debate could conclude on a bigger furore than the one he wished to avoid. My mother, who might have expected to fall out with my sister over Christmas dinner, found herself potentially with a new adversary, and yet for the moment kept quiet. We all knew Jonathan was her favourite, and she wasn’t inclined to upset him even if she might have been tempted to offer a few unkind words to this opinionated young woman who found herself at their dinner table. Instead, she turned to my sister and asked if Virginia would be willing to forego part of what amounted now to quite a sizeable business interest of their own: the house that we were occupying, the adventure centre and four chalets, all about twenty-five minutes away from the house on foot. She asked if she wanted the twins to lose out on any of this, aware at the same time she was also alluding to our inheritance, including that capacious house down in Pitlochry that Alexa hadn’t yet seen. The children were no longer at the table, playing on the floor a board game their nanna had bought, after being told they couldn’t go through to the other room and play one of their new video games - they needed to remain sociable. With the conversation taking this turn, my sister might have wished they had left the room, but she did say she was sure they would be okay with whatever was left to them, just as she and her brothers would be alright if anything were left to the three of us. She changed the undeniable fact of the first into the possibility of the second — yes, she would leave her children what she could; she didn’t expect our mother to be obliged to pass on what she and our dad owned to us. My mother took this understandable reluctance to claim the same assertiveness over my sister’s obligations towards her kids as opposed to our mother’s towards hers as an insult, and perhaps it was. But I believe it was the simple difference between a claim we can make in our name and the reluctance to make one in the name of another. My sister could leave money to her children; she couldn’t demand her mother leave her anything if our mother wanted to donate it all to, for example, a private school in the Highlands. It was the example that came to my mind and probably illustrated my greater sympathy toward my sister at that moment over my mother, and I couldn’t quite hide a smirk at the thought. 

 6

    Further debate would have to wait for dessert. My sister was hardly one to avoid a fight, but she also liked her food to be appreciated, and there was still another course to be admired. There were two choices, a chocolate log and a lemon cheesecake, as well as homemade mince pies and a Christmas cake that was months in the making, with every couple of weeks my sister adding more alcohol to the cake to keep it moist. The cake and the mince pies weren't part of dessert; more a lingering addition to the day’s culinary consumption. 

           We all complimented Virginia on the desserts, but it was Alexa’s remark that led to my sister’s yell. Alexa said that for someone who didn’t have the opportunity to cook during her teen years, it hadn’t appeared to have been much of a loss when she could now make such wonderful dishes, bake such amazing cakes. Alexa offered it as if assuming the reason Virginia never cooked when she was younger was that her mother did the cooking. There would have been various reasons for this that needn’t be controversial: our mother liked to be in charge of the kitchen; Virginia needed to concentrate on her school work; she should be out enjoying herself instead of cooking for the family. 

              It was then my sister screamed: drawing out the words as she said her mother wouldn’t even let her into the house for two-thirds of the year, let alone in the kitchen. She was expelled, she added, while her two brothers weren’t. They lived at home, they could go into the kitchen anytime they wanted; they could sleep in their own beds and could bring friends home and play with them. As she spoke, Alexa looked bewildered, wondering what outlandish people she was dining with. This normal family, with tensions no doubt apparent, had been turned into one of vicious cruelty in an extended, loudly expressed remark. I could see Alexa wondering what made us all eject this sister from our home, and I wanted to reassure her that this wasn’t quite what it seemed — that my sister’s hurt was exaggerated and that my parents only wanted the best for her, not the very worst. But it somehow didn’t seem my place to say it, and offering it would have been tantamount to denying the intensity of my sister’s feelings and siding with my mother’s sometimes horrifying reasonableness. But whose duty was it to reassure Alexa that she needn’t worry; that this family that suddenly looked like it might be mad, wasn’t going to throw her immediately out of the house on a whim?

      The words came from the only person who could have expressed them without escalating the situation: our father. He said Virginia never quite forgave her parents for sending her away to private school from a young age. The circumstances in which the decision was initially made seemed to be the best for both Virginia and his wife. He explained why and explained, too, why Jonathan and I were sent to a comprehensive school and could, from another perspective, regard ourselves as the unfortunate ones. That is the point, he insisted, so many of these are just that — matters of perspective, and Virginia has never seen things differently. He said it with the firmness of a man who expected himself to be ejected from this family home, and sure enough, my sister said it was probably best if he and mum were to leave. They were gone ten minutes later, and the rest of us were unsure what to do. When my sister went with them to the door, my brother and I knew that any decision we made would be deemed one of solidarity either way. We were planning to stay the night, in a couple of the empty chalets, and earlier my sister had said to our parents that they should stay as well — the storm outside made travelling hazardous. They had originally planned to go back to Pitlochry and return for the Boxing Day meal.  

      Later we discovered mum and dad would be staying in a chalet too — that at the door, Jason had insisted they couldn’t travel in the present conditions; my father took a pair of keys with a chalet number and said they would go to the pub for a couple of hours and if the weather didn’t improve he promised they would stay there. We were relieved when Jason told us this, partly because it meant our parents weren’t travelling in terrible weather, as the storm continued. But it also diluted the complicity with our sister. We would at least be staying the night in the same place as our parents, even if half of Christmas Day would be without them.   

7

    I expected the rest of the day and the evening to be no more than tolerable but, especially after Jason made clear our parents would be okay, that they needn’t go any further south than the pub and the chalet, we relaxed into the late afternoon and found ourselves under the auspices of a newcomer, talking of family issues that we wouldn’t have been inclined to discuss ourselves. I realised that most of the familial discussions were instigated either by my sister or my mother, and in the absence of one of them, we wouldn’t usually talk about the family at all. Yet as we all retreated to the sitting room, to the open fire and later to a supper of cheese and biscuits, mince pies and Christmas cake, Alexa managed to bring out of my sister her grievances without eliciting her anger. Virginia found herself saying what her parents had done for her, many children would have wished their parents had done for them. But it was as if she sensed they had made a sacrifice sending her to private school, without acknowledging enough the child sacrifices things too. 

      I didn’t believe this was so: I could never recall either my mother or father saying that it was a sacrifice to send her to private school, nor in keeping her there. But I suppose I was being too literal, and thought that evening about how my sister might have felt both guilty and excluded. She knew they couldn’t easily afford to send all three of us, and that she continued to be privately educated while we went without. Equally, we lived at home and she went without living with the rest of her family. I’d never thought about my sister’s sense of guilt before; only her feelings of betrayal, seeing that evening it wasn’t unreasonable to assume much of the anger she expressed was guilt she was suppressing. She so insistently presented Jonathan and I as the lucky ones, as though unwilling to acknowledge her good fortune lest it reveal our relative misfortune.  

         I don’t think Jonathan and I ever felt this sense of inferiority, nor that we missed out on educational experiences that would have been better for our lives. This may have been partly because Virginia railing against her schooling made us all the more appreciative of ours, and might too have been because nothing in our careers would have been very different with a private school education. He taught sociology at a central belt university; I was finishing a PhD in art history in a redbrick institution that I chose quite deliberately: I wanted a particular PhD supervisor. To propose I might have done my dissertation at an ancient university if I’d been educated privately would have been to miss the point, and I think Jonathan likewise was pleased with his department colleagues, as he might not have been were he teaching at a more esteemed institution. This could have been our naivety, of course — that the very comprehensive schooling we received lowered our expectations and made us feel more comfortable in the places we found ourselves. Perhaps. Our decisions, however, hadn’t made us unhappy, and we felt like ours to have been made. Our sister believed it was more the reverse. But this could have been about this guilt she felt that I’d never before noticed - and that she may never have properly confronted. 

            As Alexa talked more about the children where she worked, she said the younger ones often felt abandoned, and the older ones rejected. A child’s earlier years in the centre would be one of bewilderment and the later ones of resentment. Of course, every child was different, and some young children were in the centre for a shorter period and then were back at home or with adopted parents; some older children had lived initially at home but, for whatever reason, found themselves as teenagers in social care. What she wanted to say was that she often saw two states across different ages. The younger children didn’t quite know what was happening to them, and the older kids knew all too well. These older children could see that they would be perceived by many as society’s rejects — who would want to employ someone brought up in a home? As Alexa reiterated, the statistics proved they were right.  

8

      Over the following eight months, I didn’t go as far as Aviemore, though I visited my parents in late spring. Mum and dad hadn’t seen Virginia at all, even if they accepted that it was probably best they disappeared to the pub that evening and admitted they had a good time speaking about how they made a bit of a mess of their kids’ schooling and the tensions arising out of it. After that, more than a little drunk, they found themselves sitting with a table of visitors to the area and engaging in various discussions that were heated or funny but always engaging. I saw them the next morning. While Jonathan and Alexa carried on down the road, I joined them for breakfast before they went on to Pitlochry, and I returned to stay another night at my sister’s. 

             The reason my parents saw so little of Virginia in those months after Christmas was that she was busy: she discovered in February that a site thirty yards off the main road in Aviemore had become available. For five years, it had been a restaurant with rooms above it that was popular without being successful, serving standard food without much quality control and an attitude suggesting if you could find anywhere better nearby then best of luck with that. There were better places to eat around Aviemore but this was one of the easiest to find, and my sister had always said if the restaurant closed she would be tempted to take it over, showing you could serve food with more than a dollop of cynicism. She said this aware that the owner would tell locals that if visitors were stupid enough to pay for average food at above-average prices, who was he to deny them? It closed after New Year’s Eve, at first saying it was temporary, and then in February announced it was permanent. The owner disappeared to South East Asia and wasn’t keen to come back, though there was nothing untoward: all the staff had been paid, there was no money to pay on the lease, and no apparent scandal. Virginia enquired and secured it almost instantly. Over the next couple of months, she renovated the place, redid the kitchen and was not a little astonished that she would open by Easter. I was only occasionally in email contact with my sister between then and late summer and didn’t have the time to see her when I visited Pitlochry. She was so busy anyway that my visit might have passed for a nuisance. 

        What I knew was that the restaurant was promptly successful. Within weeks, reviews appeared in the main Scottish newspapers, and there were also two reviews in London-based ones, proposing people could do worse than take a holiday around Aviemore; there was more to the Highlands than Loch Ness and Ben Nevis. I knew my sister’s food was very good, but how that news had travelled so quickly to London was an initial mystery, and it was only half-revealed when I spoke to my brother after I saw him in October and we discussed Christmas plans. Virginia wanted everybody together again, but reckoned it might be best if, rather than doing it at either her place or our mother’s, we should all eat in the restaurant. He reckoned that while perhaps the restaurant wasn’t quite neutral, it might seem much more so than either Virginia’s or our mother’s. I asked if Virginia had mentioned it to Mum and Dad, and supposedly they agreed — they’d eaten at the restaurant twice already themselves. I was relieved that there appeared to be no more tension between Virginian and my mother, or at least no more than would generally be expected. I asked him if Alexa would join us. He said she wouldn’t, laughed and said it had nothing to do with any acrimoniousness the previous year. She wanted to spend it with the kids at the centre: it was talking about it last Christmas that convinced her she should do so, over any trouble in our family that she wished to avoid. Jonathan said he would be going up north for a few days, and spend time at both our sister’s and at our mother’s. He liked the Highlands more than I did, or rather liked the outdoors more, and the Highlands had plenty of that. He would walk for as many miles as the wintry daylight allowed him, and any sense of obligation he may have felt was well-matched by the freedom he found in the hills. I asked him not so much about the good reviews, which was only to be expected, but the range of them — she didn’t have only local newspapers reporting on her but ones from Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. He said that it seemed she had friends in the right places.  

9

      When it was under the previous ownership, I’d never visited the restaurant. Why would I, when for years my sister and others had been saying it was best avoided? Better to go further afield or lower one’s expectations: travel a few miles to find a better place or settle for a sandwich from the supermarket. It was an old house that had been lucky enough to be a few metres along the road from where the new supermarket was built, and so survived demolition. It was one of the oldest houses in the town, built during the Victorian era and managed to combine the homely with the expansive. The driveway was long enough to retreat from the main road but short enough for the restaurant to be seen from it, and while the foyer wasn’t large, neither was it cramped. There were two dining rooms, a lounge area, and also five bedrooms upstairs that were of course rented out as my sister and her husband added to their expanding empire. Maybe with some restaurants sleeping above them wouldn’t be appealing, but nothing on the menu was deep fried and who wouldn’t want to wake in the morning to freshly baked scones, sourdough and various cakes? She decided to keep the rooms free over the Christmas week. My parents took one of the rooms for the two nights they stayed, and I stayed in one of the others. The five members of staff were given the period off, and the only person she kept on was the cleaner, who could come in whenever she had a moment during the holidays.  

           I was surprised by what seemed my sister’s more relaxed attitude, thinking that, as she could be controlling with people who weren’t on her payroll (as in her family), how much more bossy would she be with those she was paying? But during my three days and two night,s my sister displayed no signs of tension, was relaxing into her new role as a restaurateur, and when she asked for anybody’s help did so without a hectoring tone that often in the past had accompanied the request. It was a point I made to Jonathan after the Christmas meal, as we sat in the lounge, drinking a whisky that we served ourselves at the small bar. It was an odd feeling, sitting in what amounted to somebody’s business but also finding it more hospitable than our sister’s house happened to be the previous year, and generally the alternate years before that. I asked Jonathan what he thought changed; was it that my sister needed her own business, needed people generally to see what we all already well knew—that she was such a marvellous cook? He took a small sip of his whisky and said that it was maybe more than that — she’d finally cashed in on her education. I looked bemused, perhaps baffled. He said that those reviews from the newspapers hadn't come from nowhere; they came from somewhere, and that place was the school where she made contacts she may never before have put to good use before. She contacted a couple of friends in journalism; they contacted others, and when three old friends who were now writing for newspapers came up around Easter, there was a mini-reunion and some very handy reviews. Jonathan supposed it wouldn’t have been impossible for her to have found some useful contacts if she’d attended Pitlochry High, and the food was good enough to build its own reputation. But Virginia couldn’t help but admit in this instance, her private school education was serving her well. It was even as if Virginia could see the merits of leaving home at so early an age.   

   That acknowledgement he supposed came a couple of days earlier, when he was staying at Virginia’s and mum came round with the Christmas presents. He was in the kitchen, Mum was in the dining room, and Virginia was in the lounge, wrapping presents. He was speaking to mum through the kitchen door, and just as he poured sugar into her mug, he noticed it was the one saying the best mum in the world, and at the same moment, mum appeared at the kitchen doorway, asking if he needed any help. He wondered what to do: give our mother the mug and take Virginia her tea, hoping she wouldn’t come through and see our mother drinking out of her mug, drink the one with sugar himself and then add some to his mother’s, leaving his mum asking why he’d suddenly started taking sugar in his tea while he pretended to drink it, or pour the one he’d made for his mother down the sink and start again with another mug. The latter seemed too strong a gesture, and he knew his mother would surely comment on sugaring his tea, and so he gave her the one with the best mum on it, carried on through to the lounge and gave his sister her tea. He hoped she would take long enough over the presents to come through after he’d retrieved the mug from our mother, washed it and put it away. But no — my sister was going to take a break from all her wrapping and asked me to leave her tea on the dining room table — she would be through in a minute. My mother seemed not to have noticed the mug she was drinking from and he could only hope the same obliviousness would be evident in his sister. 

10

       Virginia came through, took a seat between Jonathan and my mother at the head of the table, and the three of them discussed for fifteen minutes, mainly the restaurant. Virginia was saying that they wanted to put a few tables out the back, and also find a way of taking advantage of the space at the front. She was thinking of building a small adventure playground so children could play and leave the adults to eat in peace. She seemed so excited about the project, and my mother was happy to engage with her ideas, that it did appear they didn’t notice the mug Mum was drinking from. 

         I said I found this hard to believe; surely one of them must have noticed it, and even suspected that both of them did and chose not to say anything about it. What mattered, Jonathan and I agreed, was that whether mum or Virginia noticed, or both of them did or didn’t, no argument ensued. Yet we both also accepted that, ideally, my sister did see that our mother was drinking out of the best mum in the world mug and didn’t see it as reason enough to start an argument. 

       Shortly after Jonathan told me this, my sister came through and asked if we wanted to join everyone for a walk. The kids were getting restless, were pumped up with the sugar from their selection boxes, and even our parents admitted they needed to walk off the heavy lunch. We’d eaten earlier than usual, and it was now three, with almost an hour left of daylight. We would still need to take the head torches if we wanted to burn off even a small number of those excess calories, Jason said, as he wondered if we would need to pass by the house. We agreed it wouldn’t be much of a detour and that a longer walk would be ideal, and during the walk, Jason popped into the house and grabbed some torches. We returned to Grampian Road and turned down onto the narrow Dalfaber road, crossing a small bridge and continued walking in the direction of the large hotel that would have taken us out onto Loch Morloch and further onto the Cairngorm mountains. We turned off not long before the hotel, and by now it was dark and there were no street lights. We occasionally passed others whose stride was reflected in the bobbing head torches we too were now wearing, and when we nodded to each other, it was as if the complicity was between one light and another. 

       I fell into step with my father, the twins were running back and forth, still full of useless energy, and Jonathan was behind us, talking, I assumed to Alexa on the phone. In front were my sister and mother, engaged in a conversation that showed no sign of animosity. While I would probably be lying, or at least misremembering, if I said they had never before walked adjacent, I didn’t doubt that far more often they would be seated or standing opposite each other in disputation. Yet I didn’t doubt either that something had changed, though I believed it would be too easy to say that this was my sister’s shift in attitude. I suppose when my mother could see Virginia no longer showed signs of resentment, Mum no longer registered frustration and irritation. How long would this truce last, and what was it most especially predicated upon? We could all see the success of her business, and Jonathan believed Virginia could no longer attack our mother for sending her off to private school when those contacts had come good the first time my sister showed she needed them. It may have been partly based on the realisation both my sister and my mother had that, the previous Christmas, the usual tensions had escalated enough for my parents to leave early. But if realisations are feelings as readily as thoughts, if hopes are equal to cynicism, I believed it was to do too, perhaps especially with Alexa’s visit. The children she talked about had no homes to go to and only a care home to reside in, reliant often on the kindness of strangers who were paid to look after them after their parents couldn’t or wouldn’t. It must have made an impact. As these thoughts came to me, Jonathan was no longer on the phone, had himself fallen into step with my father, and I’d fallen a couple of metres behind them. I watched my family in front of me, figures I couldn’t easily make out while I watched bobs of light, illuminating trees and bushes in front of their stride. In time, I supposed Jonathan and Alexa would have children, even I thought I might not, and it may have been with this notion, intermingling with thoughts and feelings about those in Alexa’s care, that led me to fall even further behind. The others were far ahead before my sister’s head torch turned in my direction and she shouted out, wondering if everything was ok.   

© Tony McKibbin