of trees. Leaving the main road we travelled along a narrow bumpy road that at some indecipherable point became a private drive, reaching the entrance to the house as we rounded a hairpin turn at the top of a steep rise. At least twice as big as the Guynd, Blair Adam was also a great deal more eccentric. ‘It’s been added on to at various stages,’ John explained at our approach. And propped up at various others, I judged from the row of buttresses flanking the east wall.
Keith welcomed us into a small front hall at the east end of the house, then on through to an enormous room—as big as a ballroom—which connects the two wings of the house and which they call, with typical Scottish understatement, ‘the corridor’. Yet the scale of this room was made comfortable by the presence of large sofas and armchairs, antique tables and faded Oriental carpets; it had that layered, cluttered, tea-stained effect—what the French call le désordre britannique, and which somehow the Guynd had managed to get wrong. John remembered visiting Blair Adam as a child when on a rainy afternoon buckets were dotted here and there on the floor catching leaks from the roof, and on one occasion when a piece of the dining room ceiling fell into somebody’s soup plate. The roof actually caved in over a section of the house when Keith was about three years old, and eventually it succumbed to ruin. At that point in the century, when the idea of living in a grand house became synonymous with roughing it, and frugality with good breeding, a generation was born that took such mishaps for granted, and their mission was clear. Slowly but surely Keith and Elizabeth would recapture whatever they could of the place for the next generation of Adams.
In the corridor that night all was dark except for the light from a huge crackling fire. Katherine and Louisa, the Adams’ twin twelve-year-old daughters, were hosting a Halloween party. About eight or ten girls sat in a circle in the glow of the fire playing word games, anticipating the terrors to come. Suddenly two figures (the twins’ older brother and cousin) emerged through a far door in the shadows, hunched over in overcoats and cackling like ghouls. One by one the girls were plucked out of the circle, blindfolded and led through the ‘chamber of horrors’ (the larger of the two dining rooms), where the boys, holding each one firmly to their delighted screams, directed their feet over broken skeletons (croquet mallets), dipped their hands in raw intestines (cold spaghetti) and witch’s blood (tepid soup) and finally hustled them outside and into the haymow for ghost stories and pizza.
Keith’s twin sister, Rita, was also there that evening. An old girlfriend of John’s, she was frankly fascinated to meet me, wondering, I supposed, if I was some airheaded American with stars in her eyes or whether I really had any idea what I was in for. She sat in a generous armchair with her ageing English pointer, Jonah, dozing in her lap, fixed me with her mischievous sharp hazel eyes and started to test me for reactions. ‘Awfully gloomy house, the Guynd, isn’t it?’ I answered her with my eyes and she let loose a laugh like a machine gun, and we began then and there to bond in sympathy for living with John, the one having given up (why had Rita given up, I wondered, when clearly she and John had so much in common?), the other fresh to the task. ‘Tell me,’ she asked in a loud whisper, ‘is there still an egg timer by the telephone?’
Rita and her family reminded me of families I knew back home—history-minded, humorous and unaffected, relaxed amid their inherited surroundings. Like good old Bostonians they were obviously concerned but not anxious about the imperfect state of Blair Adam. Furthermore, for me there was an added connection to the Adam family. My own great-great-great grandfather Bonomi (the one whose drawing hung in our dining room) had begun his architectural career as a draughtsman for Robert Adam.
‘What did you say his name was? Bonomi?’ asked Keith. ‘No, I’ve never heard of him. I wonder if we could find his name in one of these volumes,’ and he began searching the library shelves.
‘Robert Adam met my ancestor in Rome,’ I explained. ‘Apparently he was impressed with Bonomi’s draughtsmanship and his intimate knowledge of classical Rome, so he imported him to London, I think about 1760-something.’
‘Of course there were a great many draughtsmen, or decorators, in the firm,’ Keith said in defence of his ignorance, leafing through a large leather volume.
‘Bonomi,’ I felt I had to say, ‘went on to establish his own practice as an architect. Have you ever heard of Rosneath Castle? He designed it for the Duke of Argyll.’ (Unfortunately, Rosneath also happened to be one of the doomed piles in Roy Strong’s catalogue of destroyed country houses.)
What would the architect and his draughtsman think of us now, of their various descendants meeting by sheer coincidence, caught by surprise in a transatlantic alliance of country house maintenance in the late twentieth century? And had we met in London, say, or New York, would the meeting have anything like the same resonance, the same tangibility for that historic connection, that it had in the architect’s library in the kingdom of Fife?
BACK AT THE GUYND the autumn sunlight slanted across the rooms, raising the spectre of dust on every surface, illuminating the chipped cornice or cracks in the wall paint. The ironwork of the banister cast a sharp-focus shadow on the wall, crisp as the echo of a voice across a frozen field. Then the sun disappeared suddenly behind a cloud, the light was too dim to remember where to dust, and it didn’t matter anyway.
The long days of a northern summer were now traded in for the short days of a northern winter, and I wondered if we had invested heavily enough in the daylight hours that were once abundant and now so scarce. Some mornings we would wake to see a coat of hoarfrost over the green fields. Matted brown leaves, their veins painted silver, sparkled and crunched under my wellington boots as Foxy led me along the open roads. The ‘beasts’ were still in the fields, but soon would be moved to their farmers’ sheds for the winter. From across the field the house stood starkly; the windows like sheets of silver winked back at me as the sun hit them sideways. The strange thing was that the frost would still be there just the same in the afternoon; the sun never rose high enough to burn it off. It just hung there, at half-mast, and then went down. This was a twilight world.
There were various residential tenants in place, which helped to tone down the effect of gathering winter isolation. Stephen, the artist, lived downstairs in the West flat. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Stephen painted dark, foreboding landscapes in a style that John facetiously called the Scottish School of Gloom, and which clearly drew much of their inspiration from the Guynd. He lived with his German girlfriend, Ilka, and their one-year-old daughter, Gwen. Stephen was frankly delighted to find in me someone with whom he could talk seriously about Max Beckmann. As for me, the idea of making a studio visit under our very own roof was well beyond my expectations.
‘Stephen prices his paintings by the yard,’ explained John, rather derisively, I thought, even if it was true. Paintings weren’t the same as cornices, please.
‘A large painting is a more ambitious undertaking than a small one,’ I told him, a mite stiffly.
In the East flat lived another young couple. David had a second-hand furniture business in Dundee, and his wife, Jill, was a vet. The entrance lodge at the front gate was occupied by a young bachelor named Robert, who worked for the telephone company. Living alone at the edge of the estate, he hardly ever crossed our path. There was a complex of farm buildings half a mile down the East drive at the back gate, which included an L-shaped steading, a U-shaped piggery and a row of three attached cottages, at the time empty but one, which housed an old widower named Fayerweather. A passionate gardener, Fayerweather single-handedly managed a large vegetable patch behind the old piggery. We’d encounter him, a stooped white-haired man, harvesting the last of the summer crop, and he would invite us to help ourselves to the Brussels sprouts, whenever. And he told me where to look for the ‘wee wild orchid’ that grew near the dam. Finally there was a mysterious old couple, the Fishers, living in a grim little house near the farm, which used to be the residence of the overseer. We could tell that the Fishers were home from the coal smoke curling out of their chimney, but we hardly ever saw a figure emerge from that house to find his or her way through the thicket of weeds and past the graveyard of half a dozen or so dead automobiles that surrounded it.
Upstairs in my study John inserted a stainless steel coil of chimney liner through the opening in the fireplace to the roof and hooked