Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The table was made of frosted glass, which didn’t help the acoustics. There was so much olive oil on the mimsy-pimsy portions of cold food we ate that I could feel my scalp becoming greasy. I’ve never liked capers.

  He saw, perhaps with satisfaction, how prickly I was getting. He soothed me.

  ‘You realise, don’t you, that there’s a chance everything we’ve been doing may be about to become redundant?’

  ‘“We” including me?’

  ‘Yes, including you.’

  ‘Suppose my other friends don’t think so.’

  ‘Then you and I will continue to meet. I’d rather like it if that’s the way things turn out. I’ve enjoyed our talks. I don’t flatter myself that you feel the same way. But however frequent or infrequent these occasions will be in the future we will keep your secrets, as we trust you to keep ours.’

  By giving me lunch in about the least private place I know? I could see Helen across the room. And I recognised the man she was with. That senior policeman with a spurious air of distinction, the one who came to see Selim. She once said to me, when I questioned the company she kept, ‘You know, Antony, choosing a lover is not the same thing as hiring a nanny. Kind and dependable doesn’t really cut it for me.’ Which made me wonder about my good friend Benjie, my good friend Nicholas. What did she see in them, that I have been spared seeing?

  ‘Call it normalising our relationship,’ Giraffe was saying. ‘Remember I’m your old friend from Munich. Students together. We drifted apart as one does. Look at you in the art world, so glossy and cultured. Look at me – a dull stick of a civil servant.’ His ostensible job was in Ag and Fish. He was sometimes to be heard on the wireless talking about foot and mouth disease. ‘But we meet every now and then for old times’ sake.’ This was the story we had agreed sixteen years earlier. ‘We can dispense with the St James’s Park palaver now. I might even invite you to dinner. My wife is a great one for art.’ He must have read in my face how little I looked forward to such an evening.

  The world owes a great deal to Mr Gorbachev, but few people in my circle probably feel as grateful to him as I do. I no longer feel quite so despairing about the creed I used to adhere to. Perhaps socialism can be enlightened and humane. Perhaps I haven’t been as much of a fool as I’ve thought in my gloomiest moments.

  Back at Wychwood, though, there is Selim, a piece of jetsam from an entirely different world-historical upheaval, and, increasingly, a worry. ‘He’s been here over a month,’ said Flora yesterday. ‘Do you think he’s having a breakdown sort of thing?’

  Lil

  Flora’s producer prevailed upon me to talk to him, or rather to the camera. It is terrifying how easily I was seduced. I wore tweed. That was the first self-betrayal. Lil Rossiter, famously stylish, out shooting in her tailored coats and skirts: I used to love that role, but there’s no substance to it now and to pretend otherwise was to make myself into a fake. The shooting’s all taken by the syndicate. Perfectly nice young men, but it’s not the same. They work in the City, mostly. One of them is a pop-singer. Very polite and gentle, and far and away the best shot among the guns. He explained, ‘In my line of work you have to be good with your hands, and fit. I work out every day.’ How dismal the phrase ‘working out’ sounds. Dancing used to be something one did for fun.

  So – the tweed, and the ostentatious brooch and then the ridiculous pronunciations. I heard myself but couldn’t stop. Orf and lorst. Laandry and gels and ‘this house remained unchanged for yaaars and yaaars’. I sounded like a toff in a television fantasy, which is exactly what I was. Before it was over, even, I knew I’d made a fool of myself. If only Christopher had been here. He’d have known at once to say no. Only housemaids talk to newspaper people, his mother told me. Flora was impatient. ‘This is the modern age,’ she said. ‘If we don’t use television, it’ll use us up.’ But Guy knew what I was talking about. ‘The simulacrum is a parasite on reality,’ he said. ‘It devours it. From now on everyone who meets you will be seeing Lil the Sim.’ I hadn’t really wanted him to agree so promptly. I wanted reassurance. I’m not used to feeling I’ve made myself cheap.

  I grow old. I do it surreptitiously. People tell me frequently that I haven’t aged a bit, and I’m shamefully pleased. I have young friends. I buy large pieces of metal sculpture from the Lisson Gallery. I dress like Cruella de Vil for parties, and by day like Cherubino in snazzy breeches – a wizened boy in lipstick and a jaunty hat. No need to be a bore, or dowdy, just because one’s birthdate is receding into the distant past. But you can’t fool your body. When I climb out of a car I’m a tin woman badly in need of an oilcan. I feel the cold. I don’t recall ever, in the first half-century of my life, really caring much about wrapping up. No wonder the young are driven mad by old ladies fussing about shawls and cardigans. Now I’ve discovered how pleasing it is just to be comfortable – warm enough, a stool on which to put one’s feet up, a cushion the right size for the small of one’s back.

  How considerate of nature to make us so appreciative of little pleasures when the big ones wear out. The other sort of volupté is over for me. But again there is a mitigating kindness. The sorrow of knowing that those astonishing sensations can no longer be summoned up by a little pressure on one or other body part – and it is a sorrow, I’m not belittling it – is matched by the immense relief of being liberated from desire. How I used to yearn and crave. How exasperated I got with men who weren’t in the mood. How jealous. How humiliating the whole business could be. There is really nothing one can do to set a man who doesn’t admire one in that way alight with passion. You can seduce him, at least you can if you’ve got the knack, and I had it. You can lure and pester and coax him into bed, but where’s the fun in that? Being in love is the thing. When Christopher first touched me, he began to stammer, as he hadn’t since his childhood. Once he kissed the top of my head as he passed behind my chair at a party where we’d been seated at different tables. Extase! I was lucky then.

  On the day after Hugo’s funeral I went to see Chloe, and as we sat in her kitchen we could hear Nell and her Jamie upstairs. We both pretended for a bit not to notice, and then – an upward glance, the slightest of smiles. Two widows content to let the next generation take over the generation business.

  Chloe is admirable. She knows, she must, that there was a tendresse between me and Hugo, but I feel absolutely certain she will never mention it, let alone ask to know more. What actually did or didn’t happen between us no longer seems to matter a jot. At one of Nicholas’s big dinners last month I was sitting next to a man who was once my beau. Handsome, a chatterbox. All evening I was asking myself – did we go to bed? I really couldn’t remember. Still can’t.

  *

  Francesca was reading Nell’s draft report aloud.

  ‘People removed from society at large are driven to replicate its structures in miniature. They have their own hierarchies and heroes. St Benedict foresaw that monasteries could become dictatorships, and prescribed rigorous spiritual exercises for abbots, all designed to throttle the will to power. Blah di Blah’s study of Tasmanian convict settlements gives us a persuasive account of the rapidity with which a group, of which each member begins equal to all the rest, sorts itself into dominators and dominated …

  ‘Who’s Blah di Blah?’ asked Francesca.

  ‘Oh I don’t know yet,’ said Nell. ‘I’ll find someone who said something of the sort. It might not be Tasmanian convicts. Marooned sailors, public schoolboys, those cannibal footballers. Any group that’s properly cut off will do. And that’s been studied by an anthropologist. We like an academic study in my department.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘Keep reading.’

  ‘A prison is a community of a more complex nature than any of the above groups, in that it contains two separate orders – the inmates and the staff.’

  ‘Inmates?’

  ‘We don’t say “prisoners” much these days.’

  ‘So you’re happy to deprive t
hem of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but you protect their delicate sensibility by refraining from telling it like it is?’

  ‘It’s not their sensibilities we’re worried about. It’s our own. It doesn’t feel good to be an imprisoner.’

  The two women were in the pagoda again. Or rather in the pagoda’s replacement, built by Holly Goodyear from iroko-wood and coloured in sugary shades copied from traces of the original paint. The secret garden was now The Secret Garden (open to Wychwood visitors, on payment of £1.50 extra, and wheelchair-accessible by a paved walkway from the Leafield gate). Francesca reclined on the rococo daybed, Nell’s paper in hand. Nell lay flat on her back on the floor, her hands clasped over Jemima’s bottom. Visitors, mostly retired locals at this time of year – the coach-tour season petered out at the end of August – peered in at them, looked affronted at finding the space occupied, and then, seeing the baby snoring between her mother’s breasts, smiled and passed on.

  ‘Like ancient Sparta, a prison is a two-tier community in which one group is vastly better off than the other, but in which no one is free. The relations between the two orders create a complex pattern of mutual dependency and mutual fear. The resulting tensions afford numerous opportunities for a determined individual to create a special status for himself …

  ‘Who will read this?’ asked Francesca.

  ‘My boss. And if he approves it’ll be circulated. If he really, really approves it might be published.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  Nell was hurt. ‘This is what I do.’

  ‘I mean – what are you hoping to achieve here?’

  Nell screwed up her eyes. Francesca thought, She used to do that before she spoke in seminars. Our minds may mature, but our bodies never really change their little tricks.

  ‘Well basically,’ said Nell, ‘I want to question the value of confinement. An enclosed community is toxic. It festers. It stagnates. The wrong people thrive there. The sort of people who actually like being walled in.’

  Selim

  Brian Goodyear comes to see me pretty well every day. He is a storyteller. He sees me as subject matter. The secular hermit, the prisoner in the palace, the madman in the changing hut. I lend myself handily to mythic stereotyping.

  Now Nell’s father is gone, Brian is running the estate, though no one in the big house thanks him for it, or even seems to notice he is doing it.

  The British newspapers are full of indignant letters protesting at the author’s treatment. Each of these letters is signed by dozens of other writers. One of the covert messages I hear in them, inscribed in invisible ink behind the mostly banal content, is the repeated refrain ‘Look over here! Look at us! We matter! He matters, so we must matter too!’ My ‘hut’ is equipped with a television, as well as a microwave and a bulky electrical contraption for making coffee that burps and dribbles all morning long. People appear on the television saying things like, ‘I feel I must speak out.’ Why must they? Why should we care what any of them think?

  I am repelled by their pompous self-regard because it is a mirror of my own. I wish most sincerely that I had never left the police force. At least in those days I never doubted that my work was useful.

  Sunita and the boy are with her parents, safe and comfortable enough. I dream of her. I dream of him. The gentleness of her hands as she dresses him. The way he likes to pull the spectacles off my nose.

  November

  Guy and Flora were in bed together. Over their heads the sun-god’s frescoed steeds whinnied silently. Behind their backs a dozen pillows propped them up. Before them, so arranged as to block the view through the three arched windows, stood a television, the only unlovely thing in the room but the one on which their eyes were trained. Guy was immaculate in a freshly ironed kurta. He kept pulling the sleeves down. He no longer liked the look of his own arms. Flora was frowsty in one of Christopher’s old paisley silk dressing gowns, her hair coming out of its plait. Each cupped hands around a mug. It was past six o’clock in the evening and neither had been up and dressed that day.

  They cried out simultaneously.

  Flora –‘Look! Look! Look!’

  Guy – ‘Well, did you ever?’

  On the screen, looking older and more burly than in life, Jamie was to be seen in conversation with a young couple, identically dressed in pale blue denim, who were attempting to get on a bus. It was evident from the way their eyes slid past him, and their anxious clutching of their rucksacks’ straps, that they were unhappy to be so detained.

  He turned to the camera and said, ‘Though the people of East Germany have been forbidden to travel to the West, there have been few restrictions on their movements behind the so-called Iron Curtain. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary – all these were approved destinations. Now, though, each of these Eastern-bloc countries has sprung a leak.’

  Benjie came in, and dumped his briefcase. ‘Budge up,’ he said, and lay on top of the quilt next to Flora, his small feet, in their polished oxblood brogues, neatly crossed. Flora didn’t budge. Guy mustn’t be jostled, now his frangible bones had so little flesh to swaddle them.

  ‘Five planes took off from Prague today, carrying East Germans who had forced their way into the grounds of the West German embassy there, and demanded asylum. They are now en route for Bonn.’

  The camera peered through high wrought-iron gates at a mass of nylon tents, pitched hugger-mugger on a lawn. Three women lined up and waved through the iron curlicues at the camera, their children jumping up and down on the gravel around them. ‘Meanwhile thousands of East German citizens are travelling to Hungary, and thence across the recently opened border into Austria.’

  ‘Potter says Warsaw’s crawling with Huns,’ said Benjie, ‘and it’s not exactly as though the Poles are fond of them.’ Potter was Benjie’s business partner. He had been christened Piotr, but gave up, early on, the attempt to teach the English how to pronounce his name.

  Onscreen now was the familiar image – sheer concrete, wire, a kind of waterless moat, men in helmets, very tiny and far away, standing on wooden platforms. Cut to a city street blocked at one end by a blank barrier. Cut to an expanse of wall covered with garish purple and silver graffiti. Zoom in on an image of a skeleton whose gun spewed roses.

  Another voice, not Jamie’s, said, in the portentous tone people who don’t much like poetry adopt when called upon to recite the stuff, ‘“Stone walls do not a prison make,/nor iron bars a cage.” For over twenty-eight years, though, the people of East Germany have been immured in their own country. How much longer before this wall comes tumbling down?’

  ‘Bathtime,’ said Benjie. ‘I’ll leave the water in, shall I?’

  He turned at the door. ‘Selim been about today?’

  ‘He’s never about,’ said Flora. ‘Not since Nell went back to work. He’s as skittish as Lupin.’ The pug was so inbred it was close to madness, and lived most of its life in the long corridor by the kitchen. There was no risk of it biting the trippers. It cowered. Even old Underhill, the only person who felt any affection for it, couldn’t coax it out for a walk.

  ‘Poor sod,’ said Benjie.

  Guy looked at him quizzically. ‘You’re going to have to watch your language,’ he said. ‘We sods are frightfully quick to take offence these days.’

  ‘Bugger that,’ said Benjie and went out singing.

  *

  The wall ran in an immense and gradual curve all around the park, but at one point, not far from where paired wrought-iron gates stood across Tower Light, it swerved inwards so as to leave the remains of the meeting-house outside. The fire and flood at the concert had swept away a lot of the accretions that had disfigured the building – the half-roof of corrugated iron, the bodged-together partitions made of hurdles and chicken wire. There was a fine arched window set, oddly, into the side next to the park wall. If the building was really some kind of a place of worship, this window should have been open to the east, to sunrise and resurrection. As it was, when Be
njie first turned his attention to it, it looked out on a stone barrier.

  Goodyear pointed out the obvious. ‘The wall wasn’t there when the chapel, or whatever it is, was built.’

  ‘But how could anyone be so perverse?’ asked Benjie. ‘The wall could have jinked around to give it a bit of room.’

  ‘I’ll ask Meg Slatter,’ said Goodyear.

  Going on for ninety now, Mrs Slatter had shrunk to a wisp, but she was still formidable. Seated, mumbling, in the front window of the house on Church Street from which Holly and her husband ran their joinery business, she had become a curiosity.

  The people who rented the holiday homes came to see her. They conversed with her nervously, and bought her spells. (The spells consisted of seeds and tiny bones packaged in scented handmade paper with woodchips in it. Holly bought them in bulk from an Indian supplier in Southall.) There were postcards on sale, too, showing her a few years back, standing by the Cider Well in a wide-brimmed black hat, a basket full of dried herbs on her arm. Holly sold tiny coloured bottles of Cider Well water, too.

  The old woman made no objection to being faked-up and marketed. ‘It’s better than being ducked,’ she said. The spells she used for her own family didn’t take tangible form. She worked with a casual touch or a slanted look. Warts peeled away. Migraines were relieved. Her grandson, Holly’s anxious small nephew, sat with her to do his homework. Once his mother found him weeping at bedtime. ‘If Grammer dies,’ he said, ‘how will I get the magic?’ ‘What magic?’ ‘The magic that makes my head feel peaceful.’ ‘You don’t have to believe in things exactly,’ his mother said to Holly afterwards, ‘to know that they work.’