Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In mid-afternoon someone managed to get some photographs back, and every editor in Fleet Street was scrapping for them. Women standing on their front doorsteps penned in by a tangle of wire, like the servants in Sleeping Beauty’s palace gaping at the thorns that had hedged them in overnight. Metal and concrete. Very young soldiers holding up their guns like they’d been turned to stone. Endless interviews with the people who got across just in time, and stories about the ones who had planned to go, and now never would. The War Office weren’t saying anything. Nicholas wrote a think-piece for Monday’s paper, and left the office almost exactly twenty-four hours after he’d returned to it, and walked home again.

  He kept crisscrossing the river, looping from bridge to bridge. He liked seeing that great silent muscular body of water gleaming black beneath his feet. He was too tired to do anything you could properly call thinking. He knew, though, what were some of the things he ought to have been thinking about. Helen. That he ought to make a will. That he ought to ring his mother. Helen.

  So he wasn’t party to what went on at Wychwood that Sunday, and it all seemed rather trivial to him at the time. All he could gather afterwards was that young Nell strayed out into the garden at night and had some sort of hysterical fit. Upsetting, and of course Lil and Christopher were always edgy about children in any kind of danger. And then, it was after that that they began to go their separate ways. Helen went up to Scotland with them a couple of weeks later, and she told him she never saw them exchange a word. But something happened to Antony too, something indeterminate, but which began to make a bit more sense later on.

  Helen

  Nicholas and me. Hugo and Lil. It’s so trite it’s embarrassing. Women yearn, and the men indulge us, but as soon as they have what they think are more important things to do they’re off like bloody Odysseus leaving Calypso as fast as his silly misogynist legs could carry him. Ships, not legs.

  When the telephone rang we were all out on the terrace. Nell was down on the flagstones patting the stomachs of the two Labradors and they were swooning with pleasure and then as soon as that fusspot of a butler whispered in Hugo’s ear, and he went off to take the call, the yellow one shook himself and scurried after him and Nell looked up with such a forlorn face I wanted to say, ‘Yes. You’re right. Don’t I bloody well know it. Love hurts. It’s wretched, isn’t it, but you’re going to have to get used to it. There’s only one answer. Find yourself something else to do.’ But I can’t honestly think of any work I’ve ever done that I wouldn’t have postponed for a day or two if Nicholas had wanted my attention.

  Notice I’m identifying Nicholas as my man, not Benjie, but I really don’t know why. If you tell a man you’re ready to run off with him (in writing, for Christ’s sake – what in hell came over me?), and he says he’s too busy to talk, you probably need to think about repairing your marriage, don’t you? I’d like to put it down to the onset of World War Three, and no doubt Nicholas will, but frankly it’s not a sufficient answer. If he had time to say I’m busy, he had time to say Yes.

  Pull yourself together, Helen. And remind yourself that before he’s forty he’ll be completely bald. But oh, the smoothness of him. The way he looks at me sideways when he’s brought off a bon mot. The way he gathers up my hair behind and kisses my nape. The worshipful look on his face when he takes off my shoes. The way we seem to read each other’s minds. Or did I just imagine all that?

  I glanced over at Benjie. In a couple of hours we’d be driving off together. Driving off, anyway. He was looking at Flossie and his face wasn’t just lustful, it was yearning. I thought, I’m losing him. Not leaving. Losing. Why should he put up with not being loved? Some men can. They seem to quite like being belittled by women who accept their homage as though it was the kind of shapeless sticky sweet a child might make for you. But I thought, Benjie could be so much happier without me, and as soon as I’d thought it, I knew it was true. Flossie’s very young, but she’s already a substantial person. She’s funny, and I love the fluorescent plastic pyramids dangling from her ears. Oh Helen. Oh Helen, so poised and cool. Came on a Friday with her husband and her lover: left on a Sunday all on her ownsome. Coolness and poise: I’m going to have to cling to them, but they’re not comforting companions.

  It was Hugo’s wife on the phone, the elusive Chloe. She’d met some trespassers in the forest. Hugo and Christopher got into a huddle. Christopher kept moving those beautiful long hands of his from side to side as though he was smoothing out a tablecloth, but Hugo didn’t want to be smoothed. He’d got his dander up.

  He recruited the cook and her washer-uppers as messengers and sent them zipping around on bicycles (very few of the cottages were on the telephone). ‘We should ride, Christopher,’ said Hugo. ‘I’ve told everyone to meet us by the Old Stump.’

  Christopher nodded. He waved vaguely at his guests, and laid his hand on the top of Lil’s head as he passed behind the stone bench. She didn’t look round. She was talking to Antony. But she raised an answering hand and touched his. Both gestures were extraordinarily precise and graceful. Those two are married, I thought, in a way I’ve never felt myself to be. Despite everything, I think I was right.

  *

  No one was thinking about Berlin any more. And no one was thinking about Nell. She sat dismayed on the stones, like a starfish-patterned tin bucket abandoned on the beach with the tide coming in. It wasn’t really that bad, because all the ladies were still there, and Antony and fat Benjie. But how could Daddy just have gone off without even saying anything like ‘Wait here’? It was as bad as when she’d seen him in the garden with Lil, having obviously forgotten all about his daughter. If you had children you had to look after them. You just had to. It was the grown-ups’ idea to have babies, because they wanted to, and that meant they just had to go on and on looking after her, whatever else was happening. She was obscurely aware that it was unfair to blame her mother, but she did so anyway. Had Chloe even asked whether Nell was all right?

  Lil saw her looking lost and threw her a brandy snap. ‘Catch, Nell.’ Nell couldn’t catch, and the fragile tube cracked open, smearing creamy stuff all over her shorts, and then she really felt like crying until silly old Lupin waddled over and licked the cream off and she thought she could make a friend of him at least. It was all right Daddy pretending she was a dog, but she didn’t like Mrs R tossing food at her like that. She knew perfectly well that Mrs R wasn’t interested in her. She’d probably be annoyed that she’d been left behind. So Nell had not only been abandoned by the ones who were supposed to love her, she’d been foisted onto people who didn’t even like her particularly. It was like being an orphan.

  Nell was working herself up into a state. Home felt immeasurably far away. Time slowed down. She, who was generally so self-contained and busy on her visits here, couldn’t think what to do. And so she did nothing except shake her hair forward, and listen to Mrs R and Antony rattling on, and concentrate hard on picking the scabs off her ankle-knobs and knees.

  *

  The Old Stump was an oak tree whose upper branches had all been stripped off by a storm, or a sequence of storms, and whose massive trunk, still putting out greenery, had been quartered vertically, as by some titanic meteorological axe. Its roots shouldered their way out of the ground around it making a patch, wider than its remaining canopy, full of wooden loops and knots, like the back of a piece of embroidery done by fumble-fingered giants. Here Christopher and Hugo settled down to wait for whatever reinforcements might join them.

  Mark Brown was enjoying himself tremendously. He’d been sorry to put the agent’s wife into such an awkward position. She seemed like a nice woman. After she’d left them, looking anxiously over her shoulder, he and his train of disciples had strolled easily out of the shadowy woods, where shafts of light dazzled eyes adjusted to dimness, and along a ride which led down into a sunlit valley. They’d stopped to drink from the spring, catching the water in cupped hands, being very careful not to trample the banks unduly.
No one picked any of the vivid little purple orchids that poked up from among the fine tassels of the flowering grasses. No one made undue noise. They dropped nothing – not a Kleenex or a lolly-stick would mark their passage. He’d given them all a pretty stern talking-to. He coached the cricket team for the secondary modern. He knew how to give orders without seeming to boss.

  ‘We’re the goody-goodies here,’ he said. ‘We’re smug, and we’ve got to stay that way.’ Everybody laughed, because he was known – he liked to be known – as a bit of a rebel.

  He wore polo-neck jerseys, and tennis shoes every day. His curly hair was longer than was usual, and at the Street Fair he had got up on the platform and sung some folk songs. People had been a bit embarrassed by it. He seemed to take the singing rather more seriously than it merited and a lot of people found his fake American accent ridiculous. There was a girlfriend who was only around at weekends because she had a job in London. Several of the young women of the village hoped that it might be impossible to sustain the relationship that way. Mark was well aware of this. There were two he had his eye on. He flirted with both of them – why not? But he hadn’t made a move yet, because he found it hard to choose between them, and in a village this size running two local girlfriends just wouldn’t be on.

  The furniture he made was beautiful. He knocked up country-style carvers and pine chests for the Burford shops, but for his private clients he made chaises longues and oval dining tables which were fluid continuous curves with no extraneous decoration, ghostly pale in silvery-grey limed oak. When he was asked why he’d moved back down from London he said it was because the thing he loved most in the world was wood, so it made sense to live where there were trees. People always laughed when he said it, but it wasn’t a joke.

  His knowledge of wood won him Mr Goodyear’s respect. Sometimes he almost regretted having got so involved in this rights-of-way thing, not a real regret, but a twinge or two, because he could imagine an alternative life in which he and Goodyear were partners. He wanted to plant timber, to see it grow, to make it into the chairs and sleigh-beds and rounded cabinets with which he filled his sketchbooks. He’d call the business Nutters. He was pretty sure he could make it a success. But Goodyear would not be involved. Goodyear, after today, was not going to be pleased with him.

  Antony

  Lil was a bit irritated by Hugo’s sudden swing into action, but once Benjie and Helen had driven off in what Benjie called the Toadmobile – preposterous shiny thing, but beautiful actually – she wanted to witness whatever fracas there was going to be. As usual I, dear dependable Ant, was there to be her cavalier.

  Flossie had taken pity on Nell. (Disconcerting how a girl of her age could switch so easily between childishness and adulthood; there was certainly a frisson between her and Benjie.) Now the two girls, far closer to each other in age than Flossie was to any of the rest of us, were lying on their tummies absorbed in a game involving dropping bay leaves on the goldfish. Which left me and Lil at liberty to saunter after her two men.

  A track descended the slope in a series of S-bends. There was no formal avenue here, but there were trees, and an undergrowth of brush, so that we saw the Old Stump beneath us only intermittently. Hugo and Christopher were sitting side by side on the ground, smoking, their horses cropping the grass behind them. Hugo smoked Senior Service out of the packet. Christopher’s Gitanes were transferred every morning for him, by Mr Underhill, into a flat red-gold case with his initials engraved on it in Lil’s handwriting. Together, at ease like that, they looked like two boys. For a moment I felt a kind of anguish for Lil. When we joined them we were clearly going to be de trop.

  By the time we reached the Old Stump Armstrong, the keeper, and the garrulous head forester Mr Goodyear were both there. And along the valley towards them, following the verge of the lake and therefore as close as they could get to the old road that had once passed through this valley, alongside the stream, came the ramblers. There was a good-looking curly-haired chap in front, with a map and a forked stick. Among the couple of dozen or so people behind him, most of them looking like they were on a librarians’ day out, I saw a flash of that extraordinary colour, at once orange and purple. Auburn hair. My Jack.

  Lil

  Tournaments. Men charging each other for pleasure. Iron-clad man on iron-clad horse transformed into a single missile of terrifying force and velocity. Going at each other with all the speed the human race was then capable of, each aiming a lance made from a great tree-trunk at the opponent’s weakest point. In play. There really is something pathological about masculinity.

  But that’s a Helen-thought. I don’t really think like that. ‘Lil,’ she says to me, ‘you’re a traitor to your sex.’ Watching Christopher and Hugo taking their stand now I’m moved by the romance of it, by how debonair they are, how easy and cool. I’d have been one of the women watching the jousting, with their gossamer veils and golden filigree hairnets and floating silken sleeves, light and pretty and fragile and absolutely avid for blood. I’d have tossed a glove to the boldest killer. I’d have clapped my dainty hands when his opponent fell, and never even looked to see whether he rose again, and I’d have hung a golden chain round the champion’s neck with my picture, encircled with emeralds, in a locket, and with it the key to my bedchamber. There’s something pretty reprehensible about femininity too.

  How I do embellish. But how dreary life would be if it was only what it is.

  The people walking up from the lake aren’t at all like chivalric warriors. There are some of the sort of women who turn up at the church bazaar with great boxes of stuff made out of raffia. Where does raffia come from, I wonder? I believe prisoners and lunatics make things out of it too. And there are some youngish men, wearing enormous serious boots, as though going for an afternoon walk along the lake required special equipment, like climbing Everest. The one in front looks like someone I might know. I wonder how he got into all this. Ant and I hang back, loitering by the Old Stump. I hope our being there somehow makes the whole thing less embarrassing. They’re not going to hit each other, or anything awful, with me watching, surely.

  Hugo steps forward and begins his ‘Can I help you?’ routine. The curly-haired one is all ready. He has his map, and his arguments, and he’s not going to let himself be intimidated. They talk back and forth. Curly is dogged. Hugo’s getting angry. And then at last Christopher, who’s been listening, hands in pockets, rocking a bit on his heels, takes his turn, and speaks quite curtly and waves his arm towards the home farm, as though to say, Enough of all this, party’s over, off you go. And off they go looking as pleased with themselves as though they’d been defying the Ku Klux Klan.

  *

  Christopher rode back to Wood Manor with Hugo, to give Basily some exercise, and to talk over the queer, unsettling, little incident. He wasn’t used to finding that the law was not on his side. Then he turned homeward down the lime avenue, ambling along the road sticky with fragrant gum.

  His horse’s skin twitched and rippled as the flies settled on its neck. Its ears flicked. Its tail swished. The patience of horses under the predations of flies moved Christopher. Big unhandy beasts. He wondered about their pleasures. Dogs were capable of happiness, because they loved, so the loved-one’s voice, the loved-one’s hand patting a belly, the loved-one’s shoulder to drool on, were all occasions for bliss. So much was obvious. But horses’ minds were impenetrable. One knew when they were afraid or irritable, but happy? Basily would dip his head to have his nose rubbed, but his breath was a breeze from another sphere. His eyes conveyed nothing.

  It was gloaming. Beneath the hulking trees it was already so dark that motes of blackness danced before Christopher’s eyes. A relief after all the comings and goings of the weekend to be alone for this twilit ride. Coming out into the grand vista he kicked Basily into a canter – big man, big horse, rocking together in clumsy accord.

  Flossie would be on the train by now. Antony was staying on for the night: they’d give him a
lift up to London tomorrow. Nell would stay too. Did they make too much of a favourite of her? He must see to it that Dickie got some treats when they were back from Scotland. Take the boy fishing. But even as the thought passed through his mind it snagged on something. That other boy. Of course he might not even have liked fishing. Too easy to get sentimental imagining what might have been. Fergus wasn’t perfect. Pretty slow really. Perhaps had he lived he would have been an endless worry to them.

  Must talk to Armstrong about his Jack. Not his fault the boy was there this afternoon. Just something vague. Never, never say the obvious. Nothing wrong with being a flower-arranger. But the poor old chap was breaking his heart over it, over the not wanting to be a keeper but much more over the other thing. I’ve seen Antony eyeing him. Funny how they can pick each other out. Would I, Christopher wondered, have handled it as well as Armstrong does if Fergus had been that way inclined?

  Back in the house it was the usual cold stuff for Sunday supper, with the chutney Mrs Duggary made every year from Green’s abundant surplus tomatoes, actually one of the best meals of the week. Cold consommé in the pink and gold Sèvres pots, and Mrs D had left baked potatoes in the bottom oven. They ate in the kitchen. Probably in all their lives his parents had never done that. The long washing racks still hung above the Aga: as a child he used to hide in the folds of the drying sheets until one day he got lost and tangled himself further as he wriggled for a way out. Was that where his claustrophobia came from? He couldn’t stand low ceilings. Aeroplanes were torment. Most restaurants were too pokey for him, and nowadays the very smartest seemed to be the most cramped. He liked the places his father used to go – the Ritz with its silly-sweet rococo, and Simpsons with all the hoo-ha with the trolleys.