My father in turn had done his duty and married the daughter of a frightfully correct English earl. She gave birth to my brother, looked around at her utterly bleak Highland surroundings, and promptly died. Having secured an heir, my father then did the unthinkable and married an actress—my mother. Young men like his uncle Bertie, later King Edward VII, were allowed, even encouraged, to have dalliances with actresses, but never to marry them. However, since Mother was Church of England and came from a respectable, if humble, British family at a time when the storm clouds of the Great War were brewing in Europe, the marriage was accepted. Mother was presented to Queen Mary, who declared her remarkably civilized for someone from Essex.

The marriage didn’t last, however. Even those with less zip and zest than my mother could not tolerate Castle Rannoch for long. The moan of the wind through the vast chimneys, coupled with the tartan wallpaper in the loo, had the effect of producing almost instant depression or even insanity. It’s amazing, really, that she stuck it out for as long as she did. I think the idea of being a duchess appealed to her in principle. It was only when she realized that being married to a duke meant spending half the year in Scotland that she decided to bolt. I was two at the time. Her first bolt was with an Argentinian polo player. Many more bolts have followed, of course. The French racing driver, so tragically killed in Monte Carlo, the American film producer, the dashing explorer, and most recently, I understand, a German industrialist. I see her from time to time, when she flits through London. Each time there is more makeup and more exotic and expensive hats as she tries desperately to cling on to those youthful looks that made men fight over her. We kiss, cheek to cheek, and talk about the weather, clothing, and my marriage prospects. It’s like having tea with a stranger.

Luckily I had a kind nanny, so my upbringing at Castle Rannoch was lonely but not too terrible. Occasionally I was whisked away to stay with my mother, when she was married to someone suitable in a healthy part of the world, but she wasn’t really cut out for motherhood and rarely stayed in one place for long, so that Castle Rannoch became my anchor, known and trusted, even if it was gloomy and lonely. My half brother, Hamish (usually known as Binky), was sent away to the sort of boarding school where cold showers and runs at dawn are the norm, designed to mold future leaders of the empire, so I hardly knew him either. Nor my father, really. After my mother’s much publicized bolt he sort of lost heart and wafted around the watering holes of Europe, losing more and more money at the tables in Nice and Monte Carlo until the infamous stock market crash of ’29. When he learned that he’d lost what remained of his fortune, he went up onto the moors and shot himself with his grouse gun, although how he managed to do it has always been the object of speculation, my father never having been a particularly good shot.