The Cottage by the Loch by Kennedy Kerr

Author:Kennedy Kerr [Kerr, Kennedy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781837900084
Published: 2023-01-23T18:30:00+00:00

A CASTLE, A LOCH AND ABSOLUTELY NO ROMANCE

By Zelda Hicks for The New Yorker

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Daphne du Maurier’s opening line in her most famous novel, Rebecca, opens with her narrator describing a dream of the hero’s manor house, Manderley.

Like the unnamed heroine of the book, I too have found myself in an unfamiliar landscape, and discovered a local, pretty grumpy Lord (Laird, in Scotland) with a huge castle. However, his housekeeper is a delight, and none of us have fallen in love with each other.

Why am I here, you might ask? Well, I’ve temporarily found myself stranded here after a sudden change of job, and The New Yorker, in all its wisdom, saw my online posting about this tiny little Scottish loch-side community and thought you’d all be interested to know what life’s like here. So, I’m going to do my best to paint as vivid and true a picture as I can for you from over here in bonny Scotland, home of haggis, thistles and an unreasonable amount of rain.

By the way, the very fact that anyone lives in a castle in the present day and is a real person, not a fictional paramour or a Disney prince/ss, blows my mind. I’m from the Bronx. Castles are not part of my mental landscape.

Sure, people have housekeepers. I’ve interviewed some pretty high-net-worth individuals in my time, so I know how these things roll. Lots of people have staff. Private chefs. Private security. Personal assistants. But pretty much none of the super-rich I’ve met are living in the castle that their ancestors have lived in for five hundred years, hung with portraits of their great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers and decorated with the swords, claymores (look it up) and daggers that their ancestors fought wars with other clans with.

Hal Cameron, the current Laird of Loch Cameron, tells me that he has one housekeeper, a staff of about five cleaners and a team of groundspeople. Other than that, he does everything alone, which is quite the flex for a visiting American journalist to get her head around. Wait, no below-stairs hordes of maids in white ‘pinnies’ whispering behind doors? No butlers?

I feel betrayed.

It’s weird, being in Scotland for the first time. It’s bringing up some stuff about family that I didn’t know was simmering away in me, and it’s also making me miss my mom a whole lot. She passed over a few months back, and I think this is the first time I’ve actually given myself time to take a breath and grieve for her properly. She wasn’t from here: she was born and bred in the Bronx. But she was my rock, and I’ve felt unmoored from the real world since I lost her. If you’re reading this and you’ve lost someone, then you know how it is.

It sucks.

However, there’s something about being in this tiny Scottish village that’s kinda… wholesome. Maybe it’s the food (I’ve put on six pounds already; I actually don’t hate it) or maybe it’s living in a literal picture postcard with views to die for.

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