the association of Elspeth with Protestantism or rather Presbyterianism – is found in the story ‘Choirmaster’. It was, interestingly, the only story she ever wrote which she talked about with some satisfaction in her writing, calling it her ‘story about God’. It hasn’t been much liked by Catholics, they tend to be shocked by her treatment of Jesus whose high point to them seems to be the crucified Christ, perhaps the bleeding heart. This was very far from Elspeth’s tastes and one might venture the idea that she would be much nearer to what MacDiarmid calls ‘the saying of Christ long kept dim, that who so follows me, things of like nature will do, and greater’.
Elspeth Davie is a Scottish writer of universality and high aspiration. Unlike so many of her contemporaries and successors, she believed, albeit perhaps with a certain trepidation, that art – literature – might usefully be ‘difficult’. Yet she wrote less about the anxieties of the individual than of the ways by which everyday life conspires against the individual’s modest ambitions, hopes and obsessions, and her stories remain entirely grounded in what she called ‘this day-to-day business of living, its mysteriousness and its absurdity’.
Giles Gordon
NOTES
1 Thus the always modest Elspeth Davie in a note opposite a photograph of her in Angela Catlin, Natural Light: Portraits of Scottish Writers (Paul Harris Publishing, 1985).
2Elspeth Davie in Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction edited by Giles Gordon (Hutchinson, 1975).
ANYONE VISITING THIS house for the first time found himself unexpectedly and uncomfortably exposed before going a step from the iron gates. Tough soles and a thick skin were needed from the moment when, turning in from a soft, country road, he would find the thickly-sown, cutting little stones of the drive working their way over the tops of his shoes and through his shoelaces. And if, while removing them, he were to raise his eyes, he would meet the unbroken, aggressive glare of rows of unscreened windows. For there was no hiding from this place. The gravel was not only harsh but also noisy underfoot. There were no soft bushes to screen the visitor while he made his way to the front door, and nothing about the place made a concession to nerves, withdrawals or second thoughts of any kind. It was a large house – not distinguished by age or design, but formidably plain and square, built in a smooth, grey stone which had begun to take on the polish of marble simply through the care spent on it since it was first built. No one, after meeting the people who lived in it, could think of it again as a house which was owned. It was not owned, but painfully served. It existed not for shelter or comfort, but to announce its own immense gravity and the fact that it was packed from top to bottom with a massive deposit of possessions. The foundations of any ordinary house would have sunk askew, the walls and roof, long before this, have bulged and cracked under the strain.
A family of five lived there – two sisters and three brothers who had been together since they were children. Although the men went back and forth to offices in the city and the women went down to the village with shopping-bags like other housewives, they had no real communication with anyone else, but remained in their tight group – all five of them – thin, anxious people who, like their parents, uncles and aunts before them, had hurried up and down in service to the house. The brothers – Joseph, James and Edgar Findlay, seemed to have effaced themselves so completely in the world that they had become almost indistinguishable to outsiders. They were tall, gaunt men – dark without being interesting, and with a melancholy so grey and unromantic that people did not in the least wish to enquire what might be behind it. There were a few years between them in age, Joseph, who was fifty-nine, being the eldest, but they might have been triplets for all the interest that was taken in them as separate individuals. They were seldom described by name or profession, and any epithet, good or bad, which came their way, did for the three of them and sometimes for all five. The women were never apart and were not expected to need the luxury of their Christian names, Edith and Clara, to distinguish them. They were conveniently known as the Findlay sisters and could be told apart, when necessary, by the fact that Edith, who was oldest of the family, had grey hair, streaked with black, and Clara, who was the youngest, had fairish hair, going grey.
But the house was never spoken of except by name. It had a definite position on the map and in guidebooks; it stood high up and could be seen from a long distance, and the paths, the lines of trees and hedges, the position of the long, wedge-shaped flower-beds surrounding it had all been designed, from the beginning, to point out the house dramatically and give it an importance which it might well have lost as time went on. For the family who made their pilgrimage daily up and down over the thick layer of sharp-edged stones had never asked why this house and everything in it must be cherished long after it had ceased to provide any comfort for themselves. Habits laid down long before they were born had become laws for them, and because a time was coming when there would be no one left to whom this special care could be handed on, the house exacted from them – the last of the family – a greater effort than had ever been made before. As it grew older it was merciless in its demands. Year after year it was buttressed and strengthened. Ladders were never away from the walls while it was painted, pointed and chiselled. There was a continual scraping, hammering and screwing going on inside and out. Yet underneath it all remained the gnawing anxiety that some day something would begin to crumble or rot, that something absolutely essential to the safety of the house would start to rattle or swing suddenly loose. Ivy, too eager to hide the sharpness of its staring eyes, was torn from around the windows. Hedges were continually being cut back so that its view should be unimpeded, and the branches of old trees, dripping too near the roof, were lopped back to raw stumps at the first patch of damp which appeared on the ceilings.
The family who lived in the house made no demands for themselves. In their own eyes they had very little importance at all, and compared to the house and the heavy accumulation of stuff which it contained, they felt themselves to be lightweights. Their modesty was unnatural; they had never been noticed and did not wish to be, and most of their leisure time was spent inside the house, as though, if they were seen too often, their peculiar lack of distinction might take something from the importance of the place, and let down those people who stared confidently at them from their frames on mantelpieces and the tops of writing-desks. Yet inside the house there was little room for the five of them. It was not so large, after all, and every room was crammed with the possessions of those ancestors and relations who had been a great deal wealthier, more popular, generous, artistic, more widely travelled and more extraordinary in every way than themselves. People had obviously strewn gifts on them wherever they went, had photographed them leaning against giant tree-trunks in California, holding their hats on the decks of Atlantic liners, sitting at the centre of intimate picnic parties on the banks of unknown rivers, or smiling and waving from the windows of train carriages. If they had also sacrificed themselves to a house, then the service had taken the form of a perpetual treasure-hunt and they showed no signs of the strain, except for a wanness under tropical skies, or a certain puffiness about the eyes owing to the difficulties and uncertainties of getting the kind of food they were accustomed to. Most of the time, however, they had been flamboyant creatures, always on the move; and as though to carry on this tradition in the only way possible, the two sisters kept the treasures which had belonged to them always in motion so that, with constant shifting and rearranging, the objects might still seem to have a restless life of their own.
So they polished and dusted, and carried the fragile tables, jingling with curios, from one corner to the other; or placed some ornament nearer the window at a certain time of day so that the sunlight might, for an hour or two, strike the rare metal or glass; or turned some piece of china round into the shadow so that a chip or crack might be hidden. They knelt, side by side, both straining at the handles of huge bottom drawers which held leaden wads of white linen, yards of lace and silk, and the caps and aprons, tunics, collars, petticoats and stockings of national costumes from all over the world. These they were constantly folding and
