Imagined Corners. Willa Muir

she seems to relish the challenge and due balance is kept without violence being done to a realistic view of people. If the book lacks tension it is because Willa is too detached to ‘let herself go’. This is at once a virtue and a limitation. On the whole Edwin’s words – written about Neil Gunn’s The Serpent – apply equally well to Imagined Corners: ‘The effect of imaginative maturity is to make you feel that everything you are shown is in its proper place and on its true scale.’

      We may regret that Willa did not write more – only the sociological Mrs Grundy in Scotland, the grim and powerful Mrs Ritchie, and after Edwin’s death Belonging, Living with Ballads, and a slim book of genuinely amateurish poems. But Willa herself regretted nothing. She concluded Belonging with an expression of faith:

      That was the end of our Story. It was not the end of the Fable, which never stops, so it was not the end of Edwin’s poetry, or of my belief in true love.

      It was not the end of Willa’s novels, either. Imagined Corners is the work of a mind of high quality which is at home in the world. And that is rare.

      J.B. Pick

      

      

Calderwick 1912

      ONE

      I

      That obliquity of the earth with reference to the sun which makes twilight linger both at dawn and dusk in northern latitudes prolongs summer and winter with the same uncertainty in a dawdling autumn and a tardy spring. Indeed, the arguable uncertainty of the sun’s gradual approach and withdrawal in these regions may have first sharpened the discrimination of the natives to that acuteness for which they are renowned, so that it would be a keen-minded Scot who could, without fear of contradiction, say to his fellows: ‘the day has now fully dawned,’ or ‘the summer has now definitely departed.’ Early one September there was a day in Calderwick on which the hardiest Scot would not have ventured so positive a statement, for it could still have passed for what the inhabitants of Calderwick take to be summer. Over the links and sandy dunes stretching between the town and the sea larks were rising from every tussock of grass, twitching up into the air as if depending from invisible strings, followed more slowly by the heavy, oily fragrance of gorse blossom and the occasional sharpness of thyme bruised by a golfer’s heel. The warmth of the sea-water was well over sixty degrees and the half-dozen bathing coaches had not yet been drawn creaking into retirement by a municipal carthorse.

      All this late summer peace and fragrance belonged to the municipality. The burgh of Calderwick owned its golf and its bathing, its sand and its gorse. The larks nested in municipal grass, the crows waddled on municipal turf. But few of the citizens of Calderwick followed their example. The season for summer visitors was over, although summer still lingered, and the burgh of Calderwick was busy about its jute mills, its grain mills, its shipping, schools, shops, offices and dwelling-houses. The larks, the crows and the gulls, after all, were not ratepayers. It is doubtful whether they even knew that they were domiciled in Scotland.

      The town of Calderwick turned its back on the sea and the links, clinging, with that instinct for the highest which distinguishes so many ancient burghs, to a ridge well above sea-level along the back of which the High Street lay like a spine, with ribs running down on either side. It was not a large enough town to have trams, and at this time, the Motor Age being comparatively infantile, there was not even a bus connecting it with outlying villages: but the main railway line from Edinburgh to Aberdeen ran through it, and it had an extra branch line of its own. In short, Calderwick was an important, self-respecting trading community, with a fair harbour and fertile agricultural land behind it.

      On this clear, sunny day in early September – a good day on which to become acquainted with Calderwick – a bride and a bridegroom were due to arrive in the town, the bridgroom a native, born and brought up in Calderwick, the bride a stranger. Human life is so intricate in its relationships that newcomers, whether native or not, cannot be dropped into a town like glass balls into plain water; there are too many elements already suspended in the liquid, and newcomers are at least partly soluble. What they may precipitate remains to be seen.

      II

      Of the various people who were to be affected by the precipitation, Sarah Murray was one of the most unconscious. She had her own problems, but these did not include any reference to the newly married couple. At half-past six she was still asleep, but the alarm clock beside her bed was set for a quarter to seven.

      She woke up five minutes before the alarm clock was due to go off, and stretched out her hand to put on the silencer, as she did every morning. By a quarter past seven she was on her way downstairs to the kitchen, stepping softly to avoid disturbing the minister, whose door she had to pass. If a celestial journalist, notebook in hand, had asked her what kind of a woman she was she would have replied, with some surprise, that she was a minister’s sister. Throughout the week she was mistress of his house, and on Sundays, sitting in the manse pew, she was haunted by a sense of being mistress of the House of God as well.

      She found Teenie, the maid, watching a tiny kettle set on the newly lit kitchen range.

      ‘Put that damper in a bit, Teenie,’ she said, ‘you’ll have us burnt out of coal.’

      Teenie turned round and burst into tears.

      ‘I canna thole it, Miss Murray,’ she sobbed, smudging her face with a black-leaded hand. ‘I’ll have to give notice. Tramp, tramp, tramp half the night, up and down, up and down, and him roaring and speaking to himself; I havena sleepit a wink. I canna thole it.’

      Sarah lit the gas-ring and transferred the kettle to it.

      ‘You’re needing a cup of tea, and so am I. Whisht now, Teenie; whisht, lassie. You must have slept a wee bit, for he was quiet by half-past three.’

      ‘It’s no’ just the sleeping, Miss Murray, it’s the feel of it. I canna thole it any longer; I just canna thole it.’

      Teenie’s voice wavered and the sobs rose again in her throat. Her eyes had deep black rings under them.

      ‘The kettle’s boiling. Get down the cups, Teenie.’

      Sarah’s voice was firm. They sat down on either side of the table and drank the tea in silence. Together they lifted their cups and set them down, and whether it was the sympathy arising from common action that brought Teenie more into line with her mistress, or whether the strong warm tea comforted her, she was much calmer when the teapot was empty.

      ‘Don’t give me notice this morning, Teenie,’ said Sarah abruptly. ‘It’s not easy, I know, but if we can hold out a bit longer…. And I don’t want a strange lassie in the house while he’s like that. He knows you, Teenie, and you get on well enough with him, don’t you?’

      ‘Oh ay,’ said Teenie. ‘When he’s himsel’. But whenever it begins to grow dark, Miss Murray, I canna explain it, but it just comes over me, and I’m feared to go upstairs when he’s in his room. And his feet go ding-ding-dinging right through me. And it’s the whole night through, every night the same, and I canna sleep a wink, not even after he’s quiet.’

      ‘You’ll go to your bed this very afternoon…. I’ll see to that…. I’ll get the minister to take him out. And, shall we say, try it for another week and see what you think? I don’t want to lose you, Teenie, after two years.’

      Teenie flushed.

      ‘I ken you have it worse than me. But I canna thole it for much longer.’

      ‘Another week?’

      ‘We’ll try it,’ said Teenie, getting up.

      ‘We’ll try it,’ echoed in Sarah’s mind. She had never yet admitted that there was anything she could not stand up to; she believed