Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

‘Do you want to show me where the new rose-beds are to go? Green could get started on it next week.’ Hugo’s voice was light and steady.

  ‘I suppose they can all amuse each other for a minute or two.’

  She led him through a green arch, across a round lawn entirely encircled by blackish yew hedge, out beneath another arch, down steps foaming with alchemilla into an alleyway bounded on each side by rows of pleached limes.

  ‘I thought down at the bottom there, you see? This view needs an ending.’

  ‘A sundial’s not really big enough for the centrepiece,’ said Hugo. ‘You’d need an obelisk. Or maybe a flowering tree. A weeping pear.’

  ‘But if it was on a stone plinth? With a threepenny-bit-shaped arrangement of rose-beds around it, and then a wrought-iron gate beyond?’

  Hugo laughed. ‘Not just a few shrub-roses then. Actually, you know, a fountain would be the thing. We could bring Norris’s Triton up from the home lake. It’s wasted there. We could pipe the water down from the canal.’

  ‘Boboli-under-Wychwood.’

  A smile. A pause.

  ‘Lil.’

  ‘Not now, Hugo.’

  Another hiatus.

  ‘I …’

  ‘Never when Christopher’s here.’

  ‘No. Of course.’

  And yet they didn’t move.

  The alley was open-ended. Where the proposed sundial or fountain might one day stand was now a gap in the garden’s perimeter, a hole beyond which the park shimmered, and out of which the magical seclusion of the garden leaked. Across this breach Antony and Nell were seen to walk. She was turned to him, talking earnestly, and beyond him saw, tiny at the other end of the alley, Lil’s brilliant-blue blouse, and then her father, and at once span round and ran towards them.

  ‘There are tiny tiny lizards in Mr Green’s watering pond.’

  Both Hugo and Lil noticed the awkward way Antony checked and dithered, before waving his hat and passing on towards the house.

  *

  My very dear Nicholas

  Lil is a monster, she really is. She makes me laugh but she is just so dangerous. Look at the way she’s luring that nice young agent into her web. Christopher sees it all, of course he does, but he’s too grown up to flap about it. Lil should be careful, though. He may not be jealous, or not very, but he is fastidious. If he gets disgusted with her he could just drift out of her reach.

  She knows about us, I can tell. So that’s why we’re both here now. You must have told her. I most certainly didn’t. You must be mad. She can keep secrets all right if she chooses to, but mostly she doesn’t. She’ll have told Christopher by now.

  But perhaps it doesn’t matter because last night it came to me that I don’t have to put up with Benjie’s fooling around any more. That girl is a child. I know it’s harsh. I know he needs me and I could depend on him for ever if I chose. But I know now that I no longer love him. There are no children to worry about. And there is you. So it’s your turn now to make a decision. If you don’t respond I’ll never reproach you. But here I stand.

  Helen

  *

  Rose garden. Water garden. Moorish saucer sunk into the soil of Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire. Lil and Christopher had travelled down through Spain the first summer after the war’s end, through a landscape foul with invisible blood, so absorbed in each other they barely enquired what might have happened there. Stopping the car at midday, they had hidden from the sun, as from an armed enemy, under cork trees, eating ham that wrenched at their teeth and hard bread. In the villages men who looked old, but perhaps were no older than they were, sat on planks balanced on oil drums and stared at them as they drove by. A passing car was an event – not necessarily a welcome one. Women spat in Lil’s direction, and crossed to the other side of the street. Not hostile exactly, just avoiding the bad luck a stranger might bring.

  Lil had brought pre-war dresses her mother had passed on to her – rayon in abstract geometrical prints, bias-cut Liberty lawn covered with convolvulus, silvery-green pleats like the chitons of Athenian caryatids. The dresses stayed in the suitcase, while she wore the invisibility cloak of a dusty-blue shirt-waister. Christopher drove, though she was better at it, and on mountain roads she shut her eyes so as to stop herself whimpering with fear. In Ronda they rented a room above a cheese shop and stayed there for long, long afternoons. The high hard bed. The bolsters bristling with horse-hair. The shiny pine-green satin cover. The deliquescence of two bodies. Down into the streets at twilight to join the paseo, so languid from hours of sweat/sex/sleep their legs felt tremulous as a newborn donkey’s. Sherry. Pork-fat thyme-scented. Churches decorated with effigies of tortured saints. Sleeping and waking again hours later to the sound of singers lamenting, lamenting, lamenting. Spain was all grief – its architecture grim – its people grandly dour. There they were happy.

  At Wychwood, eight years later, Lil set Hugo, the new agent, to making her a garden to rival Aranjuez, and he mistranslated it into a Cotswold fantasia in pink and green.

  *

  Nicholas found Helen’s letter on his dressing table. Talk about madly indiscreet! He put it in his inside pocket and thought, What am I feeling? And didn’t have an answer ready. Exasperation: couldn’t she tell he was busy? Joy. A bit of each, obviously. And shame. What a contemptible cold fish he seemed to be. Through his bedroom window he could see her on a rug, propped up on her elbows, Antony cross-legged beside her, making daisy chains while they talked. She didn’t look as though she was waiting for a signal that would determine her future. She looked, as she always did, sleek as one of those fancy grey oriental cats. If I am a cold fish, he thought, she is my fair Miss Frigidaire.

  They were all having tea on the terrace (iced coffee, actually) when Underhill came and murmured to Nicholas that he was wanted on the telephone again. Helen looked up sharply, but the others were laughing at Benjie. He had launched into a series of anecdotes about louche goings-on in the art world and Antony, who knew most of the people involved, was dodging his questions and getting more and more embarrassed (which was of course the point).

  The telephone was in a sort of mahogany sentry box in the marble hall. While he talked, Nicholas was being eyed by the stuffed bear, rampant, from whose outstretched and fearsomely clawed forearms the dinner gong depended. It was the foreign editor. One of the stringers had a source in East Berlin, who had been told by an old schoolfriend that if he was still keen to move his mother to the West he should drive her over instanter, that very afternoon. The old schoolfriend was in a position to know whatever was up in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

  ‘So you’d better get back here, just in case.’

  ‘Does it stand up? Anyone corroborating?’

  ‘I’ve got half the desk working on it, but nothing solid yet. The entire Foreign Office knows there’s something in the offing, but the Americans aren’t sharing information, and there’s nothing coming in from the East. Or that’s their story. You heard what that senator said in Ohio?’

  ‘About a wall? You think he might have known something? It sounded to me like wish-fulfilment fantasy. Please, somebody, put up a barrier so we don’t have to think about these commies any more. You can’t enclose a country.’

  ‘Tell that to Hadrian. Tell that to the Chinese emperors.’

  ‘How could they do it?’

  ‘Our man says his driver says someone who drinks in the same bar claims to have seen eighteen lorries loaded with barbed wire parked on the site of a bombed-out factory in the Soviet sector.’

  Lorries and wire are solid things. Nicholas felt an eerie shuddering as the membrane dividing speculation from the real was breached.

  ‘They could do it. They just about could. Walls apart, they could close the frontier. And they most certainly would like to.’

  ‘So say goodbye to Lord and Lady Muck and get on down here.’

  ‘For goodness sake, old man, you’ve got half a dozen writers there already.’

  ‘I want you
here talking to your friends in high places. And if something happens tonight we’ll be scrambling to keep up.’

  Needed or not, Nicholas wanted to be there. Packing took no time. He ran Underhill to ground in the dining room, where he was upbraiding a maid for using lilies in the flower arrangements (it was his rule that flowers for the dining room must be scentless), and asked him for train times, a man to bring his suitcase down, and a car to the station, all before he’d announced his departure to his hosts.

  Christopher went white. Lil, apparently incurious as to what kind of crisis it was that was calling him back, acquiesced in his change of plan with an ease which would have been hurtful if she hadn’t hung onto his arm and followed him out to the front steps. (No chance of a private word with Helen.) There, beneath the portico, which was that patchwork of a house’s only chill and pompous part, she looked him seriously in the eye and said, ‘Dear Nicholas, you know, you’re a very good friend.’ And then there was a jump in time, like a gramophone needle leaping a groove, as they both thought that what was happening was, beneath all the enjoyable bustle, perhaps deathly.

  The next train wasn’t for three-quarters of an hour. Time for Nicholas to walk to the station, and get a bit of mind-settling peace. Armstrong’s son Jack had brought the Bentley round. Ridiculous for such a routine errand, but the boy loved the enormous green car. Nicholas gave him his bag, and said, ‘Thanks, but I’m walking. I’ll see you on the platform.’

  *

  Avenues radiated out from the house. Horse-chestnut trees, heavy graduated layers of dense green, darkened the drive which led downhill. Beyond the twin lodges – stocky little Doric temples with incongruous back gardens full of hollyhocks and beanpoles – the drive crossed the river on a stone-parapeted bridge, and, leaving the beautiful artifice of the park, re-entered the world of cowpats and thistles and telegraph poles, rising again towards the village between the fields of the home farm. The car went that way with his luggage, but Nicholas veered off to the left, following a path trodden by deer.

  Approaching him aslant came Hugo Lane. Still invisible to each other, the two men were following lines that would intersect near the end of Tower Light. Wully’s progress – pale hay-coloured against pale hay, snuffling, chasing what, chasing nothing, chasing anything – was the embroidery looping across the steady weft of the men’s progress and the warp of the marching trees. Each was startled by their meeting.

  ‘Going back to the Great Wen?’ Already Nicholas had a whiff of the city about him.

  ‘Have to, alas.’

  Hugo had gone home for picnic tea under the copper beech with Chloe and the children. Milk and jam doughnuts. Who can eat half a doughnut without once licking the sugar off their lips? Dickie had laughed so hard at Nell’s sugar moustache he had snorted into his milk, splattering it all over the tartan rug and getting some of it the wrong way down inside himself as well, leading to gurgling and back-slapping and eventually tears. When Heather appeared to begin bathtime rituals, Hugo whistled up Wully, took a twelve-bore from the gun cupboard, filled his pockets with cartridges and walked back into the park.

  Nicholas eyed the gun. ‘Pigeons?’

  ‘Yes. Fun for me, and a bit of a help for Slatter.’ (Slatter was the farm manager.) ‘They’re demolishing his peas.’

  ‘Do you eat them?’

  ‘Used to when I was a soldier. My batman skinned them and made them into stew. Not now, though. Chloe doesn’t like them. Too fiddly, she says, and she thinks they’re dirty. She grew up in London.’

  ‘Ah. And she imagines the lovely plump pigeons that live off the fat of the land hereabouts are as pestiferous as those horrid things in Trafalgar Square.’

  ‘Quite. That’s part of it. But then she’s fond of them too. Loves the call. “Take two cows, Taffy.” She and the children answer it back. One of their favourite games. I’m glad, you know, we’ve bumped into each other.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You and Lil. You’re very old friends.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nicholas watched Hugo’s face and saw his trouble. Whatever it was he wanted to say must not, most emphatically must not, be said. Nicholas opened a way out for him.

  ‘Of course you realise her little fury this morning was about Fergus.’

  ‘Yes – I was an ass. I’ve apologised. And so’s she. But it was idiotic of me.’

  ‘The not having more children. I don’t know whether that was a decision, or just bad luck.’

  ‘It’s a shame,’ said Hugo. ‘She and Christopher are so kind to our two.’ He seemed distracted now. ‘But look here, is there something up?’

  ‘That’s what I’m off to find out. There are rumours from Berlin.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do, is there, to keep people safe?’

  Chloe, Nell, Dickie, Wully, poor old Silver (already doleful enough with his laminitis). Heather even, Lil and Christopher. Actually everyone on the estate. The roll-call of those beings for whom he was responsible sounded in Hugo’s head, but his manner was insouciant. Nicholas had seen how, when a horse fell at a point-to-point, the crowd alongside the fence moaned and dithered but Hugo had vaulted one-handed over the rail, and sat on its head until the vet arrived. Even with Armageddon in prospect he acted as though he didn’t believe it was anything he couldn’t handle.

  ‘Well, not if the worst comes to the worst,’ said Nicholas. ‘Nobody wants it to. Of course. Not on either side. The difficulty is that the military chaps have to do their job, and their job is to get ready to fight, and go into it unflinching. And they’re awfully impressive, most of them. The top men have all fought a war already. The politicians have to have a very strong nerve to stand up to them.’

  Nicholas had been making phrases as he walked, drafting a think-piece which would almost certainly be obsolete before he could get it on paper.

  Hugo said, ‘Scotland will be safer, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, cities will be the main targets. But naval bases. Railways. And if anything happens it’s likely to be sudden. Not much chance of putting together an evacuation plan.’

  ‘If you had children …’

  ‘I’d keep them with me.’

  They looked at each other. Among the things that lay between them, too perilous to discuss in any voice other than the clipped, offhand tone they’d been using, were the extermination of the human race and an improper flirtation. Piquant, thought Nicholas, that it was the latter about which he felt most curious. Limitless, the frivolity of the human mind. Or was he just speaking for himself?

  He said, ‘I’m catching the six-twenty,’ and Hugo called Wully to heel and they walked together down a line of oaks, as ugly and splendid as rhinoceri, to the iron filigree of the gates. Fifteen foot high, and too heavy for the rusted brackets on which they should have swung, this pair were never opened. Hugo showed Nicholas the place, some twenty feet along, where the wall had collapsed. Mending it would be another job to be done before winter, and the installation of a smaller, more serviceable gate, but for now there was only a panel of larch-lap fencing to keep the deer in and trespassers out, with a swing door next to it improvised from a couple of hurdles. Through the ramshackle portal, Nicholas strode out into the world.

  Leaving Wychwood gave him, as it did each time, the mingled anxiety and exhilaration of a rebirth. Womb-warm and sequestered, it was at once a sanctuary and a place of internment.

  *

  The Plough, Saturday night. The first drinkers were quiet. Each man (they were all men) nodded to the landlord as he entered. His usual drink would be poured. He would carry it over to his usual seat. The evening sun shone horizontally through a back window, glaring into the eyes of the men on the bench alongside the door. They didn’t mind. They knew almost to the minute how soon it would drop behind the publican’s row of currant bushes, and cease to bother them. They drank very slowly, a sip at a time with long, long intervals between.

  After a while the beer did its work, and they began to talk, no
t addressing anyone in particular but speaking in a low rumble out into the room. It was as though they were returning to an exchange which had been going on for years in this place. They were the old men of the village, though most of them still did a bit of work.

  The younger ones would be in later, and tonight they would be boisterous. The village eleven had won its match against Shipton. There would be toasts and celebrations and, very likely, singing.

  The old men looked forward to it. They liked a bit of jollity. They weren’t comfortable exactly. The benches were narrow and hard. The pub’s distinctive and ineradicable smell, of ashtrays and stale beer and dirty hair and bodies, was displeasing to men who spent their days out of doors and relished freshness. But they were at rest. Someone made a joke, and chuckled a bit. The joke, which was scurrilous and not new, was picked up and passed around, repeated in half a dozen different voices with minute variations. Appreciation was shown. Not loud laughter, but one man patted a table top as though to mime applause. Another nodded repeatedly. Another lit a pipe, in celebration of the wit.

  By the time Goodyear arrived a couple of hours later the place was crowded. The cricketers, some still in their white flannels, stood in a tight phalanx in the centre of the room. The unshaded lightbulb dangling from the ceiling was reflected in sweaty red faces and oiled hair. There were still no women present.

  Mark Brown, who was the wicket-keeper, saw Goodyear and waved him over. These two were the Plough’s acknowledged entertainers. Outside, they liked each other well enough, but their interests conflicted. Here, they treated each other with scrupulous respect.

  ‘I’d best go first,’ said Goodyear. ‘These here victorious heroes are going to want to end up with a singsong.’

  ‘I reckon you’re right there.’

  ‘Got your guitar with you?’

  ‘I’ve got better than that. I’ve got the organist.’

  A lean gangly man blushed as Brown pointed a thumb at him. The big hands which hung, so awkward-looking, from his too-short shirtsleeves, were actually wonderfully deft. With them he could knead dough (he was the baker), he could take catches no other man on the village side could have reached, and on Sundays he made the church organ roar its way through hymns ancient and modern. Saturday nights, his instrument was the accordion. Goodyear gave him a nod and went to pick up the pint the landlord had already poured for him.