Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Dinner was soon over. They were all tired. Nell begged to stay, so Lil took her up to bed. They listened to the news but seemed to learn nothing from it. The notion of the division of a city hung inert in their minds. Coiled barbed wire, tanks marshalling, politicians making threats. There was the before-thunder feeling of something momentous and awful beginning but something to which it was so far impossible to put a name. Was this a calamity, or did it really hardly matter at all? As soon as the news ended Nicholas rang. He’d been listening too, still in his office. He seemed barely more comprehending than they were. They said ‘surreal’, ‘sneaky’, ‘aggressive’, but the words fell flat.

  Afterwards Christopher stalked off into the garden, muttering ‘cento passi’: his Italian governess had taught him one should always take a stroll between dinner and bed.

  ‘I’ll have a midnight swim, I think,’ said Antony. ‘How about you, Lil?’

  ‘No. Early bed for me. Sleep tight. Underhill will get someone to call you at six, you poor thing. Tea? I’ll leave a note.’

  ‘Please.’

  And so they parted.

  Nell

  The dreams I have about that house. Sometimes it grows and ramifies until it spreads in a stony tangle across all of the park, and I wake struggling, pinned down by its multiplying stable yards and greenhouses and endlessly self-duplicating pilastered facades. I’ve been trapped on ever-diminishing corkscrew staircases in gothic towers, which had no correspondence whatsoever to anything in the stately architecture of Wychwood by daylight. In my dreams I’ve been old there, and ill there, and sexually enraptured in rooms which never really existed there but which carried Wychwood’s atmosphere of grandeur and – in retrospect I can feel it, though then I could not – of beleagurement and of grief.

  It was the house of my childhood – much more so than Wood Manor, the house in which I actually lived, perhaps precisely because I didn’t live in it. It was my enormous doll’s house, the setting of my daydreams and my adventures. My imaginary friends and imaginary pets (the lion, the nest of dragon-pups, my witchy green-eyed godmother) lived there. It was – is – a majestic house. Of course that was part of it. Young as I was, I could feel the force of prestige acquired over centuries, and of those superb lichened walls. But there was also a magic it wrought especially for me. At home I was an ordinary little girl, part of a family, but at Wychwood I was singular, a kind of mascot, spoken to, singled out, allowed, even, on the night after the wall went up, when I’d insisted on sleeping there because it was the end of things and the Rossiters were going away, to stay up for dinner.

  Actually dinner was rather dull. Lil had had a bath and changed into a kind of silk housecoat, and the men had put on smoking jackets, but there were no candles on the table, no flowers, no wine. Christopher was kind, telling me how he and his sisters used to eat their supper at that very table while the cooks bustled about, making their parents’ dinner – croquettes and vol-au-vents and soufflés – all those fiddly, labour-intensive foods people used to contrive before simplicity became the thing.

  On that Sunday evening, though, we ate the same sort of food we had at home, and the grown-ups were all tired. This listless kitchen supper was not at all what I’d expected my first grown-up dinner to be like. What I’d heard about Antony made me awkward with him. I couldn’t look at him, or make the kind of impudent jokes he usually liked.

  When Lil said she’d take me up to bed, I was happy to go. She smoothed down the bedspread I loved, the one covered with wild roses. It was made, she said, by an old woman who was mad but kind and who had lived in our house, in Wood Manor. The knots that marked the roses’ stamens were so fine I imagined the fingers that stitched them must have been as delicate as the tines of silver forks. She said she’d read me a chapter of The Princess and the Goblins, but I was asleep before she’d turned a page.

  Then the nightmares. I was in the room I’d had before, with the four-poster bed, and the silk-roped bell pull with its ivory handle that I was to tug if I was afraid, but the fear of being in the wrong if I did so had always been greater than simple night-terrors. So when I woke again, hearing the gruff voice of the wireless, I lay still for a while, counting the peacocks on the damask canopy, trying to stifle the horror of that dream. The image of my father and Lil in the archway wouldn’t leave me. Sunlit but dreadful in an uncomprehended way. Words clanged in my mind and half-sleep made me defenceless against them. Atomic. Spy. Unwept. Antony.

  The need to be with people became very strong. Out into the corridor. Through the creaking door that led into the gallery around the marble hall. They were in the little sitting room where the wireless was kept, beneath rows of antlers. There were only two comfortable chairs in there. I imagined Antony perched on the fender. Then the hoarse voice stopped. Christopher passed across the hall and I dropped to the top step, and hugged the grey wood of the banister.

  Antony and Lil appeared beneath me, then parted. She to bed. He to swim. The pool. I remembered and was aghast. Why not call out? Because it was naughty to get out of bed after bedtime. Not that I’d have expected them to scold me, but I was panicky, so instinct took over, and by instinct I was furtive. Lil went by so close I might have tripped her up, but her eyes must have been dazzled as she passed into the shadowy upper gallery from the bright hall. Antony took the other branch of the double staircase. When he came out of his room again, in a dressing gown and sandshoes, I followed him, barefoot, silent. Antony. Spy. Unwept. Unwarned.

  My pyjamas were mauve and flowery – dim. If I’d been in my white nightie he would surely have seen me and spoken to me and I would have had to say. The pool was empty. Mr Green had said he’d empty it. No one else knew. Even my father hadn’t been listening. Antony would do a running dive off the springy board. He always did. Deep breath, eyes shut, waiting for the splash and rush and gurgle up his nose and past his ears. But there’d be no freshness. No water. The bottom of the pool in winter was furred with brown pine needles, but when it was first emptied it was green, with a sludge of dead insects and rotted leaves, which Mr Green’s boy would shovel up and put on the hydrangea beds. And this time, Antony’s brains.

  He walked slowly. The tobacco plants alongside the path were ghostly white, their scent voluptuous. I’d never been out so late. I’d never smelt them before. This man had always been kind to me. Men went to war, where they did things they didn’t want to talk to girls about. This sort of thing. Killing people. Killing enemies. Killing spies. I didn’t wish him any harm but I wanted him not to exist any more because to think of him now was so awkward. He dropped his dressing gown on the paving. He was naked, and that terrified me.

  The trees kept off the sky. The yew hedges made a rectangular block of even blacker night that fitted like a lid above where the pool should have been shimmering. I could still have spoken. I was by the hut. I could have called and he would have heard me but I was shaking and I felt sick and my forehead was wet, and anyway how could I speak to a naked man. He stood on his toes and ran onto the board, light as a ballet dancer, and threw his arms up and bounced and flew.

  *

  Christopher heard the splash and the scream together, threw away his cigarette and ran, Grampus hurtling with him, jostling and impeding him. By the time he reached the pool Antony was crouched, dripping wet, over Nell’s small body. And from the other direction came Hugo. Christopher would never ask him or anyone else why he was there, prowling the garden after dark. Hugo reached for his daughter, and when she began to whimper, he said quietly, ‘That’s the end of that, then. I’ll take her home.’ And he stalked off, carrying her. It was the first time, Christopher thought, he’d ever seen him without his dog.

  1973

  June

  Jamie McAteer was built like a seal. An unwaisted torso packed with muscle. ‘I’ve got arms and legs,’ he said to the woman, a friend’s aunt, who pointed out the resemblance on a nippy summer’s day by the Moray Firth. ‘Seals don’t.’ He was pleased, though. He was
eight years old when the comparison was made, and twelve years later, although he hardly ever recalled it directly, it still affected the way he thought about himself. Someone who swam in his own element, inscrutable, coolly appraising from a distance. Like a seal lifting his head above the water and staring intently at picnickers on the shore. Harmless-looking, comical even, but with power hidden beneath the waterline. It would have surprised most of the people Jamie met at Oxford to know what a very high opinion he had of himself.

  Nell Lane knew. Barrel-chested and pink-cheeked, Jamie looked cherubic, but also brutal, like a film-noir gangster with a moniker like Baby-Face or Little Joe. Someone to be afraid of. Nell had never seen a seal.

  *

  The first time they had sex, the first time Nell had sex at all, was towards the end of the midsummer night’s party at Wychwood. They’d arrived together in Selim’s car. Selim was slight, but his car was massive. Both were famous for their beauty. The car was a green Bentley on whose hashish-scented leather backseat Selim had often slept when he hadn’t enough petrol for the drive out to the unheated farmhouse where he lived with five others, way off towards Blenheim. Its engine was a masterpiece of early-twentieth-century engineering: its starting mechanism was a mess. Anyone getting a lift with Selim had to be ready to jump out and push the temperamental juggernaut while he delicately toyed with its choke.

  The two boys and Nell knew each other because they all attended a weekly seminar in New College, and because they had all, by diverse routes, come to know Antony Briggs. Jamie had interviewed Antony for Cherwell when the latter – home after nearly a decade in Berlin and elsewhere – arrived in Oxford as the new curator of the Ashmolean’s Renaissance collection. Selim had been given an introduction to him by an England-returned uncle who – for reasons none of the family back in Lahore chose to investigate – knew people all over the place. When Flora Rose asked Antony to invite any bright young things he thought would be an adornment to her party he had judged each of them interesting enough to qualify. So now – like Nell – they were on their way to Wychwood.

  Nell found Selim unnervingly attractive. She was glumly certain that the feeling was not mutual. Not the slightest tremor of erotic interest reached her from him, despite the way he had of lightly laying hold of her wrist when speaking to her. An irrational dread possessed her that he could somehow read her mind. (Not that he’d have been interested in doing so, probably.) Just as she was always anxious whether people at the telephone exchange were listening in to her conversations, so she would have liked some definitive reassurance as to the absolute privacy of unvoiced thought. In Selim’s presence tiny muscles in her upper lip convulsed, making her embarrassingly conscious that she had a mouth. A mouth could kiss, should anyone care to take advantage of the fact.

  *

  Flora Rose stood plumb in the centre of Wychwood’s marble hall murmuring to a maharajah whom she kept beside her because his gold brocade coat so nicely set off the deep red of her own dress. Hostess and potentate each wore a quantity of diamonds on their heads – he, in a brooch fronting his turban; she, on two fern-shaped clips holding back her hair.

  There was a Mr Rose. He was older, genial, a nifty dancer and much shrewder than he seemed. What people asked each other, though, on the nights on which the couple gave a party at Wychwood, was ‘Are you going to Flora’s this time?’

  ‘Flora darling, you look like the scarlet whore of Babylon, just not quite so frightening.’ Her husband’s nephew Guy drawling down at her from his great height. Actually, in his coat of many colours, bought in Tangier, he was the one looking biblical. Flora smiled but reached past him for Nell, whose ideal of an elder sister she had been for years, and who hugged her now saying, as no one else any longer did, ‘Flossie!’

  *

  When Flora found herself, at the age of thirty, de facto chatelaine of Wychwood, a number of rather shaming questions occurred to her. Had Benjie foreseen this? Not likely. When he made his pounce, in this very house, Lil and Christopher were still very much together, still securely ensconced. And if he had, did that make him hateful, or was he just worldly-wise? And wasn’t she being a tad disingenuous? Hadn’t she too, often daydreamed that Christopher might hand the house over to her? (Not that she was his natural-born heir – there were some equally eligible cousins who were probably furious.) When he and Lil withdrew from each other – he to Scotland, Lil to London – had not she, Flora, come here month after month with their permission, camping out in the smallest spare room at first, but little by little making the whole place her playground, until Christopher finally acknowledged the fait accompli, made over enough money for the house’s maintenance and asked her to treat it as her own?

  She removed the white panelling masking the gilded Cordoba leather on the smoking-room walls (Lil liked rooms pale and clean). She got rid of the savage antlers Christopher’s father had been so proud of. Underhill packed them in sawdust and dispatched them back up to the glen from whence they had come. Flora doubted they were ever unpacked. Christopher didn’t shoot any more, didn’t even eat meat.

  She saw herself as patron and muse. She would make the marvellous old house the setting for better things than quarrelsome charades and shooting weekends. She would create a court. She would gather together artists and performers: she would give phantasmagorical parties that would be talked about for a lifetime, for centuries perhaps.

  She invited Seb, a film-maker Antony knew (it was a mystery how Antony knew all these people), to move into a pavilion in the garden, and encouraged him to use Wychwood as a set. His staging of one of Ben Jonson’s masques – a recreation of Inigo Jones’s designs backed by psychedelic film-projection – was the first of the shows to which she was impresario. His film ran for weeks, to audiences of people who all seemed to know each other, at a grubby cinema in the Fulham Road. Flora was there every night, and every night Seb brought a dozen friends – boys trailing Indian silk scarves, garrulous older women – back to the Roses’ flat on Chelsea Embankment where they smoked dope and ate quantities of kedgeree.

  At Wychwood Flora kept on the staff who’d known her as a girl, but upset Underhill by insisting the silver be allowed to tarnish to the yellow sheen of a snail-shell, and that the chandeliers in the drawing room (Lil had had them wired for electricity) be furnished again with real candles, to the great detriment of the paintwork. Lil’s constructivists were confined to the long gallery. Elsewhere the house was swaddled, as it had been for centuries, in velvet and brocade, and tapestry forests once more hid the walls, creating a continuity between the woodsmoke-scented rooms, and the woods which girdled the park.

  *

  Up for anything, impressed by nothing – that was Jamie’s idea of the right approach to the diverse opportunities Oxford presented. It wasn’t always easy to sustain.

  Take drugs, for instance, or rather, don’t take them. His first trip was disastrous. Never drop acid on your own, everyone said, but they didn’t tell you how – once you and your friends were all completely out of it – you could stop the others wandering off. Finding himself alone at dawn in the covered market, which had somehow transformed itself into a labyrinthine prison peopled by vicious troglodytes, he’d tried to fight his way out, then spent what seemed like a decade explaining to the stallholders, who were trying to get some breakfast inside themselves before business began, why they really had to help him find a motorbike. Why? He’d never ridden a motorbike in his life. The café-woman knew him. She brought him egg and chips, which usually quietened down the drunks, but the Formica-topped table was rippling so alarmingly he thought he might drown in it. He was far too spaced-out for food.

  The next day, with fireworks still going off spasmodically behind his eyes, he had to apologise to pretty well everyone. Mortifying. He’d made such a point of laughing along when the market people were telling stories about silly-arse students getting off their trolleys. So he wasn’t up for acid. Never again. Grass was OK.

  He was all r
ight when he was working. His tutor – an old-fashioned right-wing libertarian – was as truculent as he was but much more intellectually rigorous. Arguing with him, out loud in tutorials, on paper in essays, felt strenuous and invigorating. When he wasn’t nursing a hangover, Jamie studied diligently.

  Social life was harder. No one he’d known at school had come to Oxford. He had to start from scratch. After spending his teens wondering how on earth you met girls, he now found they were the only people he could meet. The boys clung together in packs. Perhaps they were snooty: perhaps they were just as socially inept as he was. Girls, though, were approachable. Towards the end of his first term Spiv Jenkins singled him out – he was still amazed at the luck of it – at a party where everyone was drinking a foul liquor brewed from potatoes. The still was a bathtub. Having picked him up, Spiv put him down again pretty quickly, but they kept on seeing each other in the library – she was as ambitious as he was – and she’d take him around with her. And so he met her friends Francesca, who clearly considered him impossibly uncouth, and the quieter Nell.

  Writing for Cherwell, he became someone. It was a sudden and absolute change. He could go into the King’s Arms and instead of having to worm his way to the bar through groups of people with their backs turned – excuse me, sorry, excuse me – he was greeted, and waved over. But, apart from Manny, who had the room downstairs from him, he didn’t exactly have any male friends. Nor, he noticed, did Selim, but that was different. Selim kept himself aloof. He, Jamie, thought of himself as being open-armed, open-minded and open-hearted. Though you wouldn’t have guessed it from his demeanour at Wychwood. He had a way of hunching his shoulders against an uncongenial social atmosphere as though against the cold. He was doing it now.

  *