Chapter 4: ‘Know Yourself’

The mention of Phil’s name reminded me of how selfish I had been since I arrived at the retreat. I told Anya what I had observed, giving details of his urge to touch Kate and her tactics for remaining out of reach. I went on to describe my unease at Phil’s determination to manage the singing career of the orphans. Perhaps I was becoming fanciful, but I kept thinking of Trilby.

She was the heroine of a Victorian melodramatic novel written be Gerald, the father of the famous author Daphne du Maurier. When under the control of Svengali, the girl sang beautifully winning fame and fortune but, in the process, she lost the warmth and gaiety of her early years when she cheerfully modelled for a group of penniless art students.

The novel was popularly believed to be a dramatic exaggeration of real events, and it certainly was the only literary success of its author. He had shared an atelier at one time with James McNeill Whistler, so he certainly moved in the right circles. Svengali became a by-word for manipulative impresarios. Trilby gave her name to a soft hat very fashionable with young men in the years either side of the Great War.

Of course, it could not happen in this Year of Grace 2024, I mused, but I certainly considered Phil capable of manipulating Kate and Jon for his own purposes. Anya listened intently when I admitted that I was worried; I even went so far as to describe him as ‘dangerous’, although I am not sure whether I meant physically or emotionally.

Anya was looking very thoughtful when I finished but there was a clatter from inside the house before she could reply. She rose at once, giving me a wry smile.

“Dad’s awake and accidently on purpose knocked his stick over. He does it to get my attention.”

Then she came to stand close to where I was still sitting in the deck chair and put her hands on my shoulders, leaning forward until our faces were only inches apart.

“We need to thrash this out, Fergus. When I get Dad to bed after dinner we’ll continue this discussion.”

She went into the house, and I wandered off to try my luck again at fishing. I had no success either because the fish had learned quickly or because I had already caught all the stupid ones; I do not know. Hector said that it was because I should have changed all the flies after the rain. Perhaps I should have taken the hint and stayed with the prosaic instead of drifting off into fanciful thoughts, as I now did.

Anya had enough to cope with, looking after her dying Father in this remote spot and Kate certainly had more than enough to deal with, but I had added to their burdens by telling them of my problems. Jon and Kate had their childhoods destroyed by a road accident, but I sought her help in dealing with my children who have enjoyed a settled youth in a loving home; Anya must be short of money, so it can be no surprise that she initially showed little interest in my problem with substantial wealth.

Like the Ancient Greeks, I had brought my problems to the priestesses in the oracle for their opinion. The shrine at Delphi was dedicated to Apollo for almost a thousand years and may have existed in the same spot for another thousand years before that. Most of the leading figures in the ancient world consulted the oracle.

They were practical, worldly men who presented their most difficult problems before women with little knowledge of affairs. In the earliest days, the priestesses were young girls and even when older women were introduced, they dressed in the costume of maidens. The implication was that they were innocent of guile and responded only to the promptings of the god.

Did these antiques leaders truly believe that the messages delivered by the women were inspired by a god? I doubt that.

On the entrance to the shrine, two phrases were inscribed. The inscription on the left translates as ‘Know Yourself’ while the one on the right is usually rendered as ‘Nothing in Excess’. What we know for certain is that the prophecies were frequently obscure and open to interpretation; Solon of Athens, one of the smartest of the ancients, asked the same question on three separate occasions because he was struggling to understand the meaning of the prophecies given by the oracle.

My discussions both with Kate and Anya were inconclusive in the sense that neither woman offered a solution to my problems. The discipline I had to apply to frame the question, however, led to a much greater understanding of the essence of my dilemmas. I certainly know myself better after talking to them. Their main contribution was to calm me, dampening my wilder notions: they convinced me to avoid doing anything in excess. Perhaps that is the way the oracle always worked.

The priestesses at Delphi were given a life of ease and privileges denied other Greek women; Kate and Anya have derived no benefit from prophesying on my behalf. I feel the urge to give something in return for the service they did me. I cannot ignore the possibility that my interest is less than altruistic. Kate is a lively and very pretty youngster, and it is easy to understand Phil’s feelings for her; I may be a year or two older than him but she showed a markedly greater interest in me than in him. Anya is an attractive woman, closer to my age, with a background of loving and supportive care for an older man.

I am sure in my own mind that my interest in them is primarily as people rather than as women. Over the years since Rachel left, I have had girlfriends from time to time and I do not feel about Kate or Anya as I did about the women who became my temporary partners.

Without any warning, the thought came into my head that I had unfinished business with Rachel. I do not know what that means. Do I want to win back her love, or do I want to draw a firm line under our relationship so I can move on?

The decision to sell the business has opened up a part of my mind I hardly knew existed. At a level just on the edge of consciousness, I have been planning the details of the sale. I have considered what I must have from the purchasers so that my family and I benefit, but so also do my twenty-three employees. My intentions are laid out in my mind with the clarity and precision of a spreadsheet.

It is not perhaps surprising that I understand the needs of my workers, better than the needs of my children; I plan to reach a settlement that will make the futures of all of them secure.

At some slightly higher level, I have discovered a new interest in others; for the first time in years, I care what people like Jenny and Elaine think of me. I do not mean that I will change my nature to win their approval, but I will certainly pause before I say something that will gratuitously offend them. I am now enjoying the company of others for no particular reason. For too long, I have had to guard my business, holding aloof from strangers until I was certain that they could do me no harm.

At the highest level in my mind, my imagination has begun to run free. Since I was an undergraduate, I have concentrated my inventiveness on the development of software. As I told Anya, I am afraid that that particular well has run dry, but I realise that I do not care. The fanciful part of my nature is available from now on to supply the plots for the novels I intend to write. If some of my friends consider that I have lost my mind, my response is: best thing that ever happened to me.

It was a new man in my aging body that strode up to join Hector and his daughter for dinner. He was a little less lively than on the previous two nights, being content to listen while Anya told me more about life behind the Dochard Trio. Her Mother left her with Hector before her second birthday, exchanging her for practically every penny he had. Two stepmothers, quickly acquired and as quickly discarded, took the last of the money including residual royalties.

Hector kept Anya with him wherever possible and she was the favourite of Rob and Olaf, her courtesy uncles. As she grew to womanhood, she realised that young men held no attraction. At sixteen she became unofficially engaged to Rob the youngest of the trio, although fully thirty years her senior.

“We had an understanding,” she told me, blushing furiously. “Dad made him promise to wait until I was eighteen.”

“Didn’t you say you married Olaf?”

“He didn’t promise anything, so he eloped with me when I was seventeen. Dad was furious and Rob didn’t speak to me until we met at Olaf’s funeral.”

“Why didn’t you take in Jon and Kate after the accident?”

“Straight for the jugular, Fergus,” Anya laughed. “I’ll just make the tea and then I’ll tell all. By the way, have you been in touch with Kate?”

It is a thing I have noticed before about women: if you say something that makes them feel guilty, they will come straight back at you with some flaw in you they have noted. My daughter Ali had mastered the technique before her sixth birthday. Anya was sensitive about the kids so she hit back at what she hoped would be a sore spot for me.

“I haven’t been in touch,” I huffily replied. “In the first place, I don’t suppose there’s a signal out here in the wilds.”

“We’re less than ten miles from civilisation,” she shouted from the kitchen. “If you’re a crow or a radio signal.”

“In the second place there’s no electricity to charge my phone.”

Anya was standing in the kitchen door when I delivered this killer blow. Without a word, she put her hand inside the frame and switched off the electric light!

There were excuses, I suppose, for my failure to notice the obvious. While father and daughter chortled, I blustered my way into even more bother.

While the Retreat was being built, Olaf had updated the amenities at Loch Dochard. A couple of hundred metres north of the cabin there is a hut with an electricity generator that could be driven by a wind vane on the hill or from a sluice beside the river feeding the loch. Rob is a qualified engineer, and he services the installation every year before winter sets in. The power is stored in batteries and is sufficient to run the lighting, a refrigerator and a washing machine. It was also more than adequate to charge a mobile phone.

“I thought that building was your lavatory,” I blundered on.

“Do we look like bears?” Hector wanted to know.

Anya explained that he had learned in the United States that the proper response to a question with an obvious answer was to ask: ‘Do bears shit in the woods’; in Glasgow, they will ask if the Pope is Catholic. The cabin not only has indoor plumbing, but the waste is biologically treated in a special pond in a little dip at the back of the property. It looks like a water garden, and it smells rather better than most stagnant pools, as I discovered for myself the next morning.

Hector laughed so much that he had to retire, exhausted. The rain had started again so Anya and I huddled around the fire when she had settled her dad.

“I still feel guilty about the kids,” she began, giving a big sigh. “I knew Olaf had an eye for the ladies, but I was young and thought that he would reform. When it became clear after three months of marriage that he was back to philandering, I walked to Tyndrum, got a lift on a lorry going south and became a nurse.”

She neither got in touch with any of the trio nor did she bother to divorce Olaf. She was on the fringes of a war zone working for Medecins Sans Frontieres when Luke and Penny died.

“I was spending my days treating kids mutilated by war and I decided, rightly or wrongly, that I could do more good where I was than running home to care for Jon and Kate. If you’re not careful, you become really hard as a nurse.

“Witnessing too much suffering kills something inside you.”

We sat in silence for some minutes watching the flames from the peat fire. Finally, she rose, muttered to herself and went into the kitchen returning with a full bottle of malt whisky and two glasses.

“Your compassion may have been numbed by what you witnessed but it wasn’t killed,” I told her, as she handed me a very full glass.

“That was then, and this is now,” she replied, with an attempt at a grin. “This court is now in session to consider the case of Philip Struthers versus the people – the people being Kate and Jon.”

I raised my glass to her, and she clinked hers in a silent toast.

“I suppose I should declare my interest,” she continued. “Olaf appointed me executor of his will so I’m the administrator of the Retreat. I’m kind of sworn to secrecy but you can take my word for it that I can sack Phil tomorrow.”

I may have been slow to notice the electric light in the kitchen, but I could see the spotlight glaring on the flaws in Anya’s story.

“Let me see if I have this right. You are Olaf’s widow and, therefore, the stepmother of Kate and her brother. I can understand why you decided not to take them in when they were orphaned but why are they struggling on minimum wage on their grandfather’s property?”

“I can’t tell you. I love those children as if they were my own and I do all I can for them, but I made promises that I must keep. I have no right to ask you to trust me, I know.”

I wanted to shake her, tell her that there was no promise that should be kept at the price of harm to people she claimed to love, but my training in computing came to my aid. Digital computers have only one active part where the work is done; the rest is storage that sends the appropriate information to this gate when it is demanded. Much of my success in business has been built on applying the same principle to life. Faced with a problem, I assemble all the information and then solve the equation one step at a time.

“First things first; let’s put everything out of our minds but the question of what to do about Phil.”

We spent the next hour discussing the situation. I was an eyewitness but only for a very brief period while Anya had not seen Kate and Phil together, knowing only what the girl said in her frequent phone calls. It was as if she showed a grainy, black and white movie while I added a sharply focused, coloured snapshot.

We explored the possibility that I had read more into what I had seen than was justified and we discussed at length the likelihood that Kate was misjudging the situation because of her youth and inexperience.

Neither of us liked Phil very much and I am sure that we let that colour our final decision. We agreed that there was too little evidence to reach a reasoned conclusion but that the safest thing to do was to dismiss him, sending him back to Merseyside where he had his roots.

“Kate and Jon are flying in with Rob in the morning,” she told me. “I’ll get them to stay for a couple of days to look after Dad while I go and see the lawyer in Glasgow. I’ll have Phil on his way by the weekend.”

With that, she picked up the whisky bottle, still half full, and filled our glasses.

“Hardly worth saving!” she commented, holding the bottle up to the fire to gauge the contents. “You’ll be looking forward to seeing Kate again, I dare say.”

“I’m afraid I upset her the last time we spoke.”

I explained about recognising Kate as one of the kids so tragically orphaned when I noticed the golden letter ‘E’ on her necklace. Anya told me that Kate had not sounded upset when they spoke on the phone and she and Jon were both looking forward to seeing me the next day. We sat quietly drinking the whisky in a companionable silence for several minutes.

“How come you remembered their proper names after all this time?” she asked, eventually. “You were in London and an accident in Rosneath, however horrific, must have been as remote as an earthquake in Outer Mongolia.”