The stud farm was empty. That was a shame, but Lil was the only one who’d really loved the whole business of it, and you can’t let thoroughbred horses, each one worth a small fortune, get hairy-heeled in a field. So, when the prize mare, Lucy Glitters, had to be put down, Hugo sent the rest of them to Newmarket. Driving back after the sale he pulled into a lay-by and found Charlie the head groom there already, still in his old Humber, hugging the steering wheel and blubbing like a baby. Hugo got in beside him, and they passed cigarettes and hankies back and forth, and told each other stories about the mean bastards among the horses they’d known – one of them had given Charlie his lop-sided stagger – and talked about Firefly, the most beautiful filly ever bred at Wychwood, and the most promising as a two-year-old, and why it was that none of her foals ever came to much, and then they talked about old Basily and then they needed the hankies again, and then they split a tube of Polos because both of their wives would be on to the smell of Senior Service otherwise. Afterwards Hugo was able to ease Charlie into a job with a chap he knew with a stud farm in Norfolk, and Charlie’d just bred his first winner there. Hugo had a plan for the paddocks, bit of a funny one, but it might work. Alpacas. There was a demand for the wool apparently. Just a thought.
So no, Hugo hadn’t been drifting.
‘The thing is,’ said Flora, ‘I want to do something with this place. Open it up. Use it more. Not just for us. I mean I want it to have a point.’
Hugo waited to see what this was all about. Flora waved her arms as they walked, but her gestures weren’t matched by her words. She didn’t really have anything definite to say. But he felt a kind of vertigo, as though he was living through a barely perceptible earthquake. Nothing broken, but the ground on which he stood was no longer entirely to be depended upon.
*
Telex to Flora Rose, Wychwood
Flora my darling aunt, you’ve got to come to Berlin right now. I’ve got the most thrilling proposition to put to you. Can you be here by Saturday? Your adoring Guy
Benjie said no thanks, he had no desire to see leather queens juggling with chainsaws, or whatever it was Guy was getting worked up about this time. He’d got some Saudis coming for the weekend. But suit yourself, he said. So Flora went.
*
All through July Nell was waiting and praying to get the curse, and Jamie hadn’t rung. And then he did, and he was coming down on Saturday to collect stuff he’d left in college, and she went into Oxford with her mother, who had shopping to do, and she met him at his friend’s place and they had sex again on the sitting-room floor, and actually it felt wonderful, so wonderful Nell couldn’t help making noises and the sunlight transformed the dusty air into a shower of gold, but all the time the friend was in the kitchen next door, and afterwards Jamie got dressed very quickly, and she didn’t know where she could wash off the sliminess, and he said that was great thank you, as though he hardly knew her and he was thanking her politely for doing him some sort of service like cutting his hair. And then he made her tea without milk, because there wasn’t any, in the kind of rough pottery mugs which always seemed to her to be saturated with other people’s spit. And they sat at the kitchen table, and she could feel her knickers were bunched up and sticky, and she began talking about Guy’s pop-concert idea just to seem cool to Jamie and to his friend, who obviously wasn’t really much of a friend and who must have heard all the noises and thought they were ridiculous.
Then Jamie announced he’d have to go soon and said, ‘I’ll give you a shout,’ and she didn’t even know what that meant but it sounded offhand, and she went to Fullers, where her mother was eating walnut cake with the one surviving aunt, whom she still thought of as a spy, and who looked like one now, with her silver-topped walking stick perfect for concealing a sword-blade in. And as Nell sat with them the aunt reached across and touched something on her neck and laughed. Later she looked in the mirror and realised there was a red mark there. A lovebite, but it didn’t have anything to do with love. Her mother didn’t mention it.
And then Jamie did ring, once he had started his job in London, and wanted to know all about the concert, but never said anything particularly affectionate, or even keen. He said, ‘You’re great, Nell. You’re so laid-back.’ She got the point. She didn’t know him anything like well enough to tell him that she should have got the curse over three weeks ago.
Whatever was going on around her, that thought was always present in her mind. And in her stomach dread, like the feeling you get if you swallow too much cold water too quickly.
*
Flora was in a cellar in Kreuzberg that reeked of amyl nitrate.
The man with Guy was stripped to the waist. His concave chest was completely hairless and glimmered like opal in the strobe lighting. His leather trousers were held in place by a heavy belt with its full complement of what looked like real bullets, but, if his loins were militaristic, his legs, all but disabled by stiletto-heeled green snakeskin boots, would have been useless in any kind of combat. Guy – languid even amidst the shriek and gibber of Pandemonium – effected an introduction, but the name was lost as the musicians onstage fiddled with their giant machine, unleashing sounds as of a five-storey apartment building being demolished.
The next day Guy sat typing two-fingered at the marble-topped washstand in the bathroom, the only part of his apartment that got the morning sun.
Them/Us. Arthur/Martha. Yours or Mine. This is a binary world.
Berlin is binarism made concrete. Communist/Capitalist. Ossi/Wessi. There’s no emollient pussyfooting here about the mutual dependency of capital and labour. ‘That’s you,’ says the Wall, mutely but so thunderously you can hardly hear yourself think, ‘and here, on the other side, is us. In/Out. Don’t think you can fudge the difference.’ The armed men in the watchtowers are there to remind us all of the ultimate dichotomy – Alive/Dead.
Here politics is polarised – muralised, rather. But sexuality is as secretly insidious as the sewers which flow east-west west-east beneath the streets. In Paris the ’68ers wrote ‘under the paving stones, the beach’. In Berlin, beneath the walled-off sectors, there’s a freeflowing subterranean ocean of polymorphous sexual possibility. I’m not saying it’s all orgasmic fun down there. But it’s notable how blurred sexual identity is in this city.
Walled-in/Walled-out. We pity the Ossis their imprisonment, but they call it the Anti-Fascist Protective Wall, as though on this side a horde of storm-troopers might be ravening.
Let’s think of some more dualisms. Tolerance/Hostility. Curiosity/Disapproval. The sour grapes of wrath/Dubonnet on ice, very nice. Here in Berlin, where the most clunkingly literalistic metaphor of confinement ever conjured up splits a city in two, we’re all doing our best to obey Groucho Marx. ‘Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlour. Let joy be unconfined.’
‘Try to remember,’ Nicholas had written last time, ‘that this thing you’re writing for is called a “newspaper”. News, as in current events.’ Guy crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the bin and tried again.
At three o’clock in the afternoon he took Flora a cup of jasmine tea.
‘What’s that?’
‘Smells like a dowager’s bath-water, but frightfully good for you.’ He lay down beside her on the mattress. ‘I’m wildly overexcited about our little plan,’ he said. ‘We have to talk business. You’ll find beneath my effete exterior there’s a hard-boiled entrepreneur gagging to get out.’
*
Jamie was in a pub in an alleyway running from Fleet Street down towards the river. The ceilings were low, the noise level high. He was drinking shandy and talking to one of the ‘Blabbermouth’ crowd, and said, before he’d even known he was going to do so, ‘I think I’ve got an item for your Sink of Iniquity page.’ ‘Spill,’ said the man, whose sideboards met beneath his chin. Jamie spilled – Antony, the flower-arranging boyfriend, the Russian connection. ‘Great,’ said the man. ‘Which will you want? A
byline or thirty pieces of silver?’
‘The money,’ said Jamie. And so, between a semi-alcoholic drink and a blasphemous joke, Jamie blew it.
Memo
From: The Editor
To: James McAteer
Thanks for yours. Sorry, no, that job has been filled, and we won’t be able to offer you any further work after the end of this week. The ‘Blabbermouth’ editor and I talk to each other, you know. I’m sure you’ll understand.
To his horror Jamie realised he was crying. He stood up, manoeuvring to keep his back to the three other people in the bunker, surrounded by shoulder-high metal filing cabinets, which constituted the diary office, and walked as nonchalantly as he could manage across the newsroom. In the corridor he kept his eyes fixed on the scuffed cork-tile floor. Through the glass partitions on either side men in shirtsleeves glanced at him incuriously. Avoiding the lift, he went down five flights of windowless stairs, and emerged, as though from the hold into the staterooms of a pre-war ocean-going liner, into the lobby, with its brown marble and sleek art deco steel chandeliers. ‘Hay fever bad, is it, sir?’ asked the snarky porter. Jamie ignored him and barged into the revolving door and on out into Fleet Street. ‘I’ve got a job in Fleet Street’ – he’d been saying that a lot lately. Not any more.
*
Mrs Slatter was in the Old Dairy with Mark Brown. When her husband was still alive she used to spend hours in that place. It was cold then. Dairies had to be. When Mr R’s shooting stockings got holes in them – the heather-coloured or greeny-brown ones that were knitted for him in Scotland in a pattern of ribs and knots that was for him and him alone – the indoor servants passed them on to her. She’d wear four or five pairs at once, inside her father’s old sheepskin boots, and still she got chilblains, standing hours on end on those stone flags. Getting up in the dark all winter long. Her butter was famous, though. And the cream, with that yellow crust on it. No one on the estate had to worry about rationing.
The first time she wandered in and found young Brown there she was embarrassed. She wasn’t dotty. Not yet. But she’d lived at Wychwood so long she’d sometimes just land up in one of her old places without having exactly planned to go there, wherever it was. There was no need for anyone else to know that. The house she and Slatter had lived in for thirty years was their son’s now. His wife was a nice little thing. She’d stop her sewing machine (she made all the village’s curtains) and say, ‘Ready for a cup of tea then, Mother S?’
Anyway, that time, Mark Brown had looked up and said, ‘I think you knew my aunty didn’t you, Mrs Slatter?’ just as though he’d been expecting her. He said, ‘I like having someone around when I’m working.’ He’d got her sitting in a chair like a throne. They’d put glass in the roof, so that the place was sunny, and when Brown got out his drill, so it was too noisy to talk, she might have had a bit of a doze. It was peaceful. The woody smells were good. She started coming often. He liked her stories. You could never tell which of the younger ones would.
Now Goodyear came in. He had the gift, like her. She’d seen it straightaway, when he was just a waddling boy with arms like little rolling pins. He was always chattering on. Babble without sense to start with. But he was standing up on a chair at harvest suppers before he was into long trousers, spouting away, and all the grown people shutting up to listen. It was in his family. There was a Goodyear with the gift from Lord Woldingham’s time, and some old gent who kept a diary wrote one or two of his stories down.
‘Do you know the one about the two boys in the meeting-house?’ she asked Goodyear now.
‘Let’s hear it then,’ he said and settled himself on a bench. He’s getting older too, she thought. She could see the top of his head, pink through his hair.
Mark handed them mugs of tea and jam tarts. Shop-bought, and not even put out properly on a plate, but it’s hard for men. Not that young Mark was short of women to do for him. She’d seen him at the party, with that girl dressed up like a stripper. Their Holly had a crush on him. Half the grown girls in the village too. But he’d be after someone more Londony now he was in business with Mr Rose. Not that he wasn’t a sensible man. And he knew how to work.
‘There’s a picture,’ she began, ‘a picture made all of little stones.’
‘The Bacchus pavement?’ said Mark. ‘That’s in the Ashmolean now?’
She looked at him with blank eyes. You do not interrupt a storyteller with banal factual remarks.
‘There’s a picture,’ she said again firmly, ‘of two boys.
‘It’s very old, so old that the house it was part of had all crumbled away. It was once the floor of a great lady’s room, and perhaps she had twin sons, and that’s why they made her a picture like that, or perhaps she wanted a picture of two heathen gods.
‘The lady was Roman. She had come from where it is so hot in summer that the dogs lie for months on end in shady rooms with their bellies pressed to cold stone floors. Being accustomed to that heat the lady must have pined in England.
‘The Romans came here looking for pearls. Whether they found any, I can’t tell. But they liked our rain, so they stayed, and built bridges, and taught themselves how to make gardens with rose-beds and rows of lettuces and ponds full of fish. But then came other people, who chased them out, and the fighting between those other people went on and on until all that the Romans had built had been smashed to smithereens but for a few treasures, like daggers and brooches that had been buried deep, and like my lady’s floor-picture, that was hidden away under moss and bracken and mud. And the Romans were so far forgotten that people came to believe their bridges had been built by giants or fairies, because no one could imagine how mortals could raise such stones. And so a thousand years went by.’
Mrs Slatter paused and stirred her tea. Goodyear was watching her but thinking about his boy, who was sweet on her granddaughter Holly. Holly’d only just started at the grammar school in Chippy but she was a womanly little thing already. Both of them into woodworking. They’d learnt it off Mark here. It’d be a happy thing.
‘There came a time,’ Mrs S went on, ‘when there were two boys living at Wychwood. They were cousins. One had been poor, and had wandered through foreign lands as a beggar, but he had parents who loved him. The other was a child here at Wychwood, and never lacked for food or warm clothes, but his father was a cruel man and he lived in fear.
‘There was fighting again. There was a new king in London. The poor boy – we’ll call him Charles – came home with his dear father and mother. They were friends with the new King so now he was rich, and he slept on embroidered sheets beneath a canopy and he had quails to eat and silver buckles on his shoes. The other one – we’ll call him Edward – ran away from his fierce father, who was full of rage now the King was come, and dangerous.
‘Edward hid in the forest alone. He lived on nuts and mushrooms and the fish from the streams. One day he was digging for worms to bait his fish-hook. It was raining, so to be sheltered from the pelting of it he went into a building he knew, and as he scratched in the earth of its floor he came upon a bright-coloured pebble, and he scratched a little more, and he uncovered more of the pebbles, and he saw they were fixed into a pattern. For near a month he would come every day, after he had fed himself, to the meeting-house, as it was called. He dug up the weeds and moved the clods and the branches that must have been placed there on purpose by someone who wanted to hide the picture.
‘And at last he could see the pavement clear. There were wriggling lines to show the waves of the sea, and there were dolphins and mermaids and seashells arranged all around the edge so that they were like the border on a rug. And in the centre there were two children. Their hair was long, and streamed out behind them, but they were bare-naked but for their flying blue cloaks, so you could see that they were boys. Each one held onto the other’s feet, so that together they made a circle.
‘There was another person living in the forest, a witch called Meg.’
Goodyear had
been sitting arms akimbo, hands on knees, eyes to the floor. Now he lifted his head and looked carefully at Mrs Slatter. He’d never addressed her by her Christian name, but he knew it.
‘Goody Meg was no friend of the King’s. She wished that all the kings could be driven from their thrones. But she had known Edward’s father, and she didn’t like him either. She had feared for the boy, and when she saw him one evening, by the hovel he had built himself, she was glad.
‘She didn’t speak to him then, but the next day, she let him come up behind her as she walked along one of the wide rides. She walked on slow and steady. He slipped off into the brushwood. She let him go. The next day and the next she let him see her again. Once she was sitting by the lake when he came down to fish. Once she sat very still, leaning against a tree-trunk, with her head nodded down as though she was sleeping and her tangled hair hanging about her cheeks. Each time he looked at her a little longer before he dodged away. He was very quick and stealthy. She approved of that.
‘Then, on a bright morning, the boy Edward came around a corner, and there across the path was stretched a great spider-web all spangled with dew, and he stopped to marvel at it. And then there was a slight movement on the other side of that jewelled net, and he saw there was an old woman there. She said, “It is only when the little waterdrops are shining on them we even know they are there.”
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