Daisy: March 2020

I crash through the door of the ladies’ loo, startling a woman in a burqa who’s washing her hands very, very thoroughly, carefully following the instructions on the laminated notices posted above the basins. Her eyes watch me, warily, from the mirror. I dive into one of the cubicles, where I flip the lock and collapse on to the seat with my head in my hands.

The scent of the perfume that I sprayed on my wrists just a few minutes ago in the duty-free shop engulfs me, sickening me. How could I have done something so frivolous? I’d put the sample bottle back on the counter to rummage in my bag for my phone, answering the call from Mum. I thought she’d be telling me her flight had just landed, that she’d be meeting me in the transit lounge in a few minutes. But instead of joyful excitement, her voice was tight with anxiety as she told me she hadn’t been allowed on the plane, just before the battery in my phone went dead.

I know that from this moment on, whenever I catch a whiff of this scent I’ll remember these queasy, panicked moments, locked in the toilets in the transit area of a shiny Middle Eastern airport, feeling utterly alone.

I shed a few tears of self-pity, then tear off a length of loo paper and blow my nose loudly. Taking a deep breath, I unlock the door and emerge to wash my hands over and over again at one of the basins. Never mind the warning signs about the spreading of the virus, I’m just trying to erase every last drop of the perfume. I catch sight of the reflection of a forty-something-year-old woman in the mirror, and for a second I think how frazzled she looks, her skin stark and pale, lit by the unforgiving overhead lights, before realising she’s me. It’s something that’s been happening all too often lately. I hardly recognise myself these days.

I splash a little water on my face and scrape my hair back into a ponytail, composing myself. My body clock tells me it’s some ungodly hour of the morning, whatever time it may be here, and there are dark circles under my eyes. I’ve already been travelling for more than six hours and have the same again ahead of me to endure.

You could go back , my image in the mirror tells me. Then deep frown lines crease its brow. But of course, that would mean giving up on the trip of your lifetime. You won’t get your money back, because the insurance won’t cover Wimping Out. It’s far too late to cancel now – you’re already halfway there.

I stare back at myself blankly, knowing turning round and going home is not an option. I’ve maxed out my credit cards paying for this trip, so I’m not even sure I could afford the cost of a last-minute ticket back the way I’ve come.

‘You’ll just have to go on alone then, won’t you,’ the woman in the mirror tells me. She glares at me, angry and afraid. I square my shoulders, pick up my backpack and, without a backward glance at my frightened reflection, go out into the terminal to find the departure gate for my onward flight to Nepal.

When I finally reach Kathmandu and my hotel, feeling more than a little disorientated after the long flights and the terrifying chaos of the traffic on the taxi ride into the city from the airport, I fling down my bags on one of the beds – the one that should have been Mum’s – and try to work out what time it is in Scotland. Nepal has its own time zone, a rather strange five hours and forty-five minutes ahead of the UK, so it must be about seven in the morning there. Mum’s an early riser, so I reckon I can call her. It takes a while for my phone to charge enough, and to work out how to connect to the Wi-Fi, and then my call cuts out the first few times I ring her mobile. But at last it rings through, and relief floods through me as I hear her voice.

‘Daisy? Where are you? Are you in Kathmandu?’ she says at the same time as I say, ‘Mum! How are you feeling? Are you at home?’ My eyes fill with tears at the sound of her voice, so familiar but so far away.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she replies. ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine. So much fuss over this dratted virus. I thought it was just a wee bit of a cold, but then they were checking everyone’s temperature at the airport and they pulled me aside. Told me I wasn’t allowed on the plane. Davy hadn’t even got out of the car park, so he came back and scooped me up, once I’d managed to retrieve my luggage, and we’re back home at Ardtuath now.’ She coughs – a tight, harsh-sounding hacking noise – and then continues. ‘Anyway, don’t you mind about me. You’re the one we’re all worried about, on your own out there. How is it?’

I look around the hotel bedroom with its embroidered wall hangings and gleaming en-suite bathroom. We’d decided to book ourselves a little bit of relative luxury for our first few days in Kathmandu, before setting off on the more challenging part of the trip. ‘It’s lovely, Mum. But it would be a whole lot better if you were here too.’

She sighs, then stifles another cough. ‘I’m sorry. I was so looking forward to it, after all these years of planning! But you can do this, Daisy. And you’ll have the guide with you for the trek, so you won’t be on your own. Don’t worry about us, we’re honestly fine. I’m sure all the fuss about this coronavirus thing is a storm in a teacup. Stick to the plans we made. And send me lots of photos so I can imagine I’m there with you. It’s going to be a fantastic trek. Remember, you’re walking in Violet’s footsteps, and if she could do it in the 1930s then you can do it now. Do it for us both.’

‘I know, Mum. It’s going to be great. I’ll keep you posted ...’ Then I realise the connection has dropped and I’m talking to thin air, my words of reassurance hanging there in the emptiness. I try to call again, but without success. After a few minutes I give up and plug my phone in to charge again before busying myself with unpacking my rucksack. It doesn’t take long to put my leggings and tops into the wardrobe that sits against one wall of the room, its carved panelling smelling faintly of dusty spices.

I feel drained and my brain seems to think it’s the middle of the night, despite the glare of the sun and the bustle of the city outside my window. I lie on the bed, stretching out my legs and back, which ache after all those cramped hours on the plane, but I’m too wired to sleep. So I reach for the zip-lock bag containing the notebooks and letters that have brought me here. Their familiarity gives me a little reassurance as memories of my childhood come flooding in.

I found Violet’s letters and journals many years ago at the bottom of an old cedarwood chest in the library at Ardtuath House. I must have been about twelve years old, I suppose. I loved spending hours playing among the leather-bound books and the botanic prints that lined the walls. We lived in a cottage on the estate in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, but spent much of our time in the big house, which my mum, Lexie, had inherited from the better-off side of the family. Sadly, though, that inheritance didn’t include enough money to cover the maintenance of the house with its leaking roofs and draughty windows. To make it pay, she and my stepdad, Davy, run it as a music school, covering everything from classical to contemporary but with a particular focus on keeping alive the traditional music of the Highlands. So I grew up on the side of a wild sea loch surrounded by hills, to the accompaniment of an ever-present soundtrack of fiddle music and flute scales, as well as the occasional distant wail of a lone piper who’d been sent out into the grounds to spare everyone else’s ears from the worst squawks and squeals of bagpipe practice.

There was quite a gang of us local kids in the village and we ran wild much of the time, taking for granted a freedom where we could poke in the rock pools along the shore and make dens in the pine woods on the estate to our hearts’ content, largely untroubled by any interference from our parents.

I suppose we’d all taken that childhood wilderness for granted when we were wee. And then I missed it like mad when I went away.

As well as growing up surrounded by hills and sea, the famous gardens at Inverewe were just a few miles away across the loch, and as children we visited them often when Davy drove the boat across to pick up tourists from the pier there and take them out on trips. While we waited for the visitors to wend their way through the gardens to the departure point, I would often clamber ashore and play hide-and-seek among the rhododendrons and tree ferns. Those gardens are a magical place, full of surprisingly exotic plants that thrive in the mild dampness of the Gulf Stream, which kisses those far north-western shores. I suppose that’s where my fascination with Violet’s story began, making fairy teacups from fallen rhododendron flowers and gathering the cones from the pine-needle carpet covering the peat-sprung ground. Finding that my great-great-aunt had also been a keen plantswoman only served to inspire me further, and I credit that inspiration with kindling my ambition to become a gardener myself.

Violet’s journals captured my imagination and I’d pore over them for hours, seeing her story unfold in my mind’s eye. Until, that is, they came to an abrupt end. At various times Mum and I have tried to find out what happened to her, but all our efforts have come to nothing. She just seemed to disappear. Life’s journey took her to a remote village in the Himalaya, where she apparently vanished into thin air, leaving us with many questions, as well as the desire to make the trip of a lifetime some day and come to Nepal to try to find out more.

The day I found Violet’s papers, I was supposed to be minding my wee brother, Stu, in the library at the big house while Mum and Davy were busy teaching. Stu was in a crotchety mood, it having rained solidly for the past week, leaving us stuck inside for much of the time. I’d peeked into the cedarwood chest before and seen that it apparently contained nothing more interesting than a pile of old blankets; and that day it struck me we could put them to good use in making a den, which would keep Stu busy for a while. So I raised the heavy lid and hauled them out. At the bottom, hidden beneath the layers of dry, dusty wool, were two large, flat cardboard boxes marked with the name of an Edinburgh dressmaker, which Mum later told me would have probably once contained ballgowns or pieces of fine tailoring. When I looked inside them, I found a small treasure trove.

Stu’s pestering was insistent, though, so I had to set my newly discovered cache aside while we built the den and played a game of pirates in it until he was worn out. We wrapped ourselves in the blankets and I read him a story for a while, until his eyelids drooped and he fell asleep, lulled by the distant sound of a single fiddle playing ‘The Skye Boat Song’.

Then I reached for the first of the boxes and discovered it contained the story of a whole intriguing life. That life belonged to my great-great-aunt, Violet Mackenzie-Grant, and she lived it far beyond the austere walls of Ardtuath House and the persistent Scottish rain, beneath breathtaking mountain peaks and a soaring Himalayan sky. Intriguingly, there was also a tiny leather shoe stitched from soft calfskin, just the one, missing its partner.

In the second box, there were other items – watercolour paintings of exotic botanical specimens, some folded pieces of card enclosing tissue-paper-thin pressed flowers, and dozens of little brown envelopes of seeds. But it was her letters to her sister and her journals that drew me in.

It’s taken me more than thirty years, but I’m finally here to walk in Violet’s footsteps. She left a trail to follow, not of breadcrumbs but of paintings and seeds and dried botanical specimens. I’m here to piece it together, to try to fit the pieces of this jigsaw in place and make sense of her life. And to try to find out what happened to her in the end, once the letters and the journals stopped.

But the beginning of Violet’s story – once Mum and I had pored over the contents of the boxes and sorted the muddle of letters and notebooks into some sort of order – was a lot closer to home.