Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Goodyear reported back to Benjie. ‘The wall was put there to spite the chapel folk. They were dissenters. Lord Woldingham wanted rid of them.’

  ‘I thought Woldingham was all for laughter and forgetting.’

  ‘It’s to do with his son, the one who drowned.’

  Benjie wasn’t curious enough to pursue the story. To him old buildings weren’t memory-hoards. They were opportunities. Once Christopher was dead, he had a breach made in the park wall, leaving the edges a bit rough, and filled it with a panel of reinforced glass, so that after centuries of darkness the morning sun could shine into the chapel again. The shell of the old building, partially rebuilt, became a walled garden. Jack planted herbs in a wave pattern – the last of his designs he lived to see realised. There was a counter where one could buy ice-creams and cakes. It made a popular excursion. The little train that ran around the estate stopped there and discharged its elderly passengers. Children came with wet hair, after a dousing in the ‘lily-pad paddling pool’. Joggers paused to swig from their water bottles, clasping their feet to their buttocks or rolling their shoulders before starting off on the three-lake circuit.

  Selim didn’t go there. Like the deer, he preferred to avoid the paths humans used. He had taken to wandering through the park at day’s end. At home the sunsets charged the dust-haze with lurid colour for minutes only, and then the sky went dark. Here the light faded so gradually that he was repeatedly caught out by it, and blinked and peered about as though what was happening to him was not nightfall but blindness. In the avenues, where the beeches held their brown leaves all winter, there was a ceaseless soft rustling, while at the end of the long lines of trees a paleness like an open door showed that the sky was still alight.

  Antony

  It turned out that Mr Giraffe did have another use for me after all. Someone I’d known as Oleg was coming out. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years, but no one else in this country had seen him ever.

  ‘Go,’ said Mr G. ‘You have friends in Berlin, don’t you? You’ll have fun. It’ll be the biggest street party in history. If it happens.’

  I said, ‘I don’t dance in the streets. Never did, and I’m certainly not going to be doing so now.’ I almost said, ‘I don’t want to leave Jack.’ Absurd. But also, absurdly, true. When he was alive and needy there were times when I longed for a pretext to be off and away. Sickrooms are exhausting. But now, oddly enough, I find that all I want to do is linger about the places we were together.

  Mr G said, ‘We need you to identify him.’

  I said, ‘Can’t you just take a photograph?’

  What made me so recalcitrant was what Giraffe wasn’t telling me. If Oleg was coming West now he must have been working for this lot all along. By how many people, how many interests, was I duped? I loathe politics now. I don’t even vote.

  *

  The wildlife park was Wychwood’s biggest money-maker. The numbers of animals that died there, unable to acclimatise to Cotswold winters, was carefully kept from visitors, who enjoyed walking through what had once been the stud-farm’s paddocks, getting up close to the yaks and alpacas, or marvelling at the destruction wrought by the rootling of wild boar in the pinewood.

  Its gate had been commissioned from a local artist. Nobody liked it. Nobody could bear to admit what a mistake it had been and pull it down. Made of painted aluminium, it showed two giraffes, their long necks crisscrossed near the apex to form an arch. Flora drove through it, in a phaeton pulled by two zebras. The zebras could never be counted on, but this time they trotted far enough to give the camera crew a clear shot before skittering to a halt. Flora waited motionless, smile fixed, until she got the signal, then scrambled out. She carried a silver-topped cane and a pair of kid gloves, all found in Christopher’s mother’s wardrobe (still unsorted, nearly four decades after her death). Her riding habit was dashing, but uncomfortably tight.

  The crew were packing up. She blew kisses to the cameraman. The director appeared just behind her left shoulder.

  ‘It didn’t really bite you, did it?’

  ‘Yes it bloody well did. If I get rabies your insurers are going to be wishing they worked for Lloyd’s.’

  ‘Or yours will. The proprietor is liable. Anyway – it’s a great shot. A live mink around the shoulders is so much more becoming than a dead one.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ said Flora. She turned her back, took a breath, deliberately dropped her shoulders, and said, ‘Thursday.’ A model who used to come to the restaurant had once told her the three magic words with which to tame a camera – ‘boy’ for a pout, ‘sex’ for cheekbones, ‘Thursday’ for a winning smile.

  Emmanuel Joseph stepped out of his car and spread his arms wide. ‘Manny,’ said Flora. ‘Let’s walk, shall we?’ They went up the tarmacked front drive. When Christopher first saw it, its inorganic slickness so ugly in comparison with the hay-coloured grit it replaced, he had clenched his fists in his pockets. No point shouting when the deed was done.

  ‘It’s looking good for the third series,’ said Manny.

  ‘What? How much more can we get out of this? I’m having to share the screen with wild animals already in order to keep the excitement up.’

  ‘I’ve been talking to people. The channel like the idea of a rethink.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Getting you out and about more. Other locations.’

  ‘But then you lose the whole point. The whole point is me in this place. Take me somewhere else and I’m just a television presenter.’

  It was not lost on Emmanuel that being a television presenter, a job that most of the people he represented longed for, seemed to Flora to be infra dig. He was proud of what he’d made of her, but sometimes he found her maddening.

  ‘So what are you now? Get real, Flora,’ he said.

  ‘Oh Lordy,’ said Flora, who had heard the irritation in his voice, and resumed her public persona in self-defence. ‘Whatever made you think I could do that? Reality is so depressing.’

  A short pause while they both controlled their tempers.

  ‘Well,’ said Flora. ‘So Selim was a friend of yours?’

  ‘Kind of. Same year at Oxford. I thought he might like to see a familiar face. So where is he?’

  ‘Here.’

  They left the main drive to continue its pompous way to the grand portico and took the track that led past the old stable yard. A man, one of young Green’s boys, stood by the Tudor archway in doublet and hose, ready to direct visitors to the knot garden. They passed on to where a yew tree, its poisonous berries fleshy as swollen lips, overhung the gate into the rhododendron grove.

  ‘Rhodos are so gloomy, aren’t they?’ said Flora. No reply. It’s unlikely Manny would have known what she was talking about.

  A tall mesh fence, like that around a tennis court, or a prison yard. Flora unlocked the gate, tugging the bell pull beside it. A few more paces through dense shrubbery and there, in the pool garden, Selim was waiting. For the first time in his life he had put on weight and his skin was greenish. Manny pulled him into a hug which involved almost no bodily contact. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Flora. ‘I need to get all this clobber off. Come down to the house for a drink later, Manny. Upstairs. Just ask anyone who’s around to show you. And you, Selim. Guy was asking about you. You haven’t been down all week.’

  Selim

  I dislike that man intensely. I know that he’s made Flora his property, but he doesn’t own me. When he was sitting here, stroking his own thighs and tousling his own hair as though his body was some boisterous animal that needed to be placated, I felt angry, and pleased to be angry. It was a good feeling. I indulged it.

  Emmanuel he calls himself now. Manny the drug-dealer is now Emmanuel, the show-offs’ agent, the impresario, the procurer. Still messing with people’s minds, still peddling oblivion or ecstasy or torpor. That’s how he makes his living.

  He suggested that I exploit myself as a commodity. He wanted to have me intervi
ewed. To sell me. After-dinner speaking, he said, is a growing market. Am I then to be taken to market, like a case of mangoes? He wants me posturing on TV, displaying my anxieties like the beggars at home waving their stumps. He doesn’t understand me. He’s not interested in me in the least. He doesn’t understand any of these things either – decorum, loyalty, reticence. How I dislike that man.

  Antony

  We’re a barren lot, we Wychwood stalwarts. Me, for obvious reasons, but Benjie and Flora, too, and Nicholas, Christopher and Lil.

  I don’t know about the others, but I used to enjoy our childlessness. No one had to set a good example or say ‘pas devant les enfants’ or hurry home because little so-and-so would get grouchy if he didn’t get his milk and biscuits on time. Or her. But perhaps the others all grieve over it more than I’ve known. Nell and Dickie were the only children around in the old days, and now Nell comes here with her baby and it’s as though a lack we never acknowledged has been supplied.

  There’ve been ghosts about the place, not of dead children but of children unborn. Pink unmarked feet on the stairs at evening. Eyes that don’t yet know it’s rude to stare, taking us all in. Falstaffian farts and belches emanating from a creature whose skin is pearly-pure. The weight of a baby, which leaves a bright red patch on her cheek when she wakes, so heavily has her head lain. The smallness of babies is astonishing. That a person, and Jemima is unmistakably a person, with desire and will, can be so miniaturised.

  Child-yearning – I bet there’s a compound German word for it. I thought that we queens were immune from Kindersucht, or whatever it’s called, but I know now that I was wrong. I wonder, was it a son I looked for in Jack? No. No. That was a completely different emotion. Although perhaps when he was dying. Caring for someone is a great provoker of love.

  I remember when Fergus first went to that prep school. Hair slicked down beneath his cap. Face rigid and pale. His legs so fragile beneath grey flannel. Lil had insisted I go with her to the railway station. When the train pulled out she took my arm and said, ‘Now, Ant, you’ve got to keep me amused all day.’ And I tried. We had milkshakes in Fortnum’s – a little-boy’s treat because we were thinking all the time about a little boy. And then, feeling sick, we took a taxi to Little Venice, and paced up and down the towpaths along the canals. They were foul-smelling then, and full of abandoned prams. Not the most cheerful place to take a mother suffering from Kindertrauer.

  He ran away three times. Each time the games master, his tormentor, tracked him down and brought him back. ‘He didn’t talk to me,’ Fergus said to me once, ‘he just picked me up like a parcel and put me in the dog-boot of his car.’ He was beaten. Each time. In the dining hall the entire school sat in order of seniority. Runaways – regardless of age – had to go to the bottom of the lowest table. Relegated. Relegated. Relegated. Each time the parents were told. Each time, though they never mentioned it to me, Lil and Christopher must have talked it over. Each time they concluded he had to stay. It cost a lot, that penal colony, in money and in grief.

  When he died she never called on me. There are some things beyond the reach of a Fortnum’s strawberry float.

  Now I am supplanted. I see how Guy has taken my place in her life. I used to find him maddening. I don’t like camp, and I don’t like precocious know-it-alls. Now he’s got a good reason for histrionic posturing, though, he’s dignified. The dandy will keep smiling, like the Spartan under the bite of the fox.

  *

  Once the clocks went back Brian Goodyear took to visiting old John Armstrong, not in the evenings, as he’d done at least once a week through the summer, but early. He knew the old man woke before first light, as he had all his life, and that as soon as he was awake he wanted to be up and dressed, however inflexible his joints might be. There were kindly women, daughters and granddaughters of men he’d known, and tyrannised over, and pursued as poachers in his days of power, who would come up from the village in turn to get his breakfast ready, and to ready him for breakfast. It gave him a lot of satisfaction to let them find him in his chair, fully dressed except for his shoes, with his Puffed Wheat already half-eaten. It was partly his old bloody-mindedness. He liked to put them at a disadvantage. And partly something composed equally of self-respect and terror. The day some fat young woman with too little to do had to put his trousers on for him would be the day he knew he was done for.

  He didn’t mind Brian Goodyear, though. He was a good chap. Brian always brought Dorothy with him, and the clever little spaniel would sniff around Armstrong’s feet and then scratch herself a nest in the folded rug her grandmother and great-grandmother had slept on before her. Brian was allowed to take both Armstrong’s hands and haul him upright, and then while he was in the bathroom, with its astringent smells of Vim and carbolic soap, with its pile of neatly torn squares of newspaper (no point wasting good money on something to wipe your backside with), Brian would dig out a presentable shirt for him.

  While Armstrong dressed Brian would stand by the window, looking out mostly, but keeping an eye, ready to deal with the cardigan’s leather buttons and finally to kneel and help with shoelaces. When one of the interfering women came later she would remove those shoes and bring the slippers. Armstrong pretended to be annoyed, but God Almighty it was a relief to take his suffering, knobby feet out of those torturing leather cases. With Brian, though, it felt good, just for a bit, to be got up like a man again, shod for outdoor work.

  They talked fitfully, easily, with long ruminative pauses. Brian always knew what the bag had been the previous Saturday’s shooting day.

  ‘That pop-singer chappie out, was he?’

  ‘He was. Wearing a boiler-suit. Quilted.’

  Armstrong snorted. He liked to hear how outlandish the world had become since he withdrew from it.

  ‘You can’t fault his shooting, though. Got a right and left. And never forgets the beaters.’

  Armstrong nodded with approval. It was a scandal how many people omitted to tip. Stinking rich some of them, too. Rolling in it. Perhaps that’s how they got their cash together, though. They say millionaires are all stingy as a witch’s tit.

  There were a dozen-odd stems of chrysanthemums on the table, colours of damson and custard, stuck into an enamel jug. Their scent filled the room, intimations of luxury and winter.

  ‘I see young Green’s been visiting,’ said Brian.

  ‘Eh? Eh?’ It took Armstrong a while to twig. Brian wagged his head towards the flowers.

  ‘Oh. Oh. No. That was Mrs R brought those. Brought me the picture too.’

  A photograph in a brown leather frame, gold-tooled, was propped on the ledge above the iron stove, next to one of the late Mrs Armstrong and several certificates commemorating Doris’s dog-show wins and adorned with red rosettes. The photograph showed Christopher Rossiter, aged ten or thereabouts but instantly recognisable to anyone who had known him later in life, in tweed knickerbockers and belted tweed jacket, holding a dead cock pheasant up by its feet. He wore round tortoiseshell spectacles and stood very straight. His hair looked at once mussed and smoothed, as though the photographer had hastily oiled it down. Behind him, much more at ease, stood an extraordinarily handsome young man, tall, legs confidently spread so that the amplitude of his plus fours was displayed, gun on his arm, face turned down at the boy but startling pale eyes glancing up at the lens so that they met the viewers with conspiratorial amusement.

  Brian whistled. ‘Well, I’ve always known you were a looker, but this is something else.’

  Armstrong chuckled. ‘It was his first pheasant. And my first year in the job. He called us the “new bugs”, the two of us. I always picked up for him. That’s my Wully there. I wasn’t yet a spaniel man back then.’

  ‘Wully? So Mr Lane’s dogs …’

  ‘Were Wully the fourth and Wully the fifth. He was a splendid boy, Master Christopher. And he was a jolly good boss too.’

  Armstrong began to fumble in his trouser pocket. Brian waited. He knew better
than to offer to help. Out came the spotted handkerchief. Armstrong wept a bit, then blew his nose with a noise like the last trump. This tended to happen. The passage of time has an added poignancy for those who have been especially beautiful when young. Brian acted as though the whole process had been invisible to him. When the handkerchief was stowed again he said, ‘I expect you’ve been following this German hoo-ha.’

  Armstrong loved the television. His family was the first on the estate to get one. Nell and Dickie used to go to the Armstrongs’ cottage to watch Bill and Ben, and once long ago Mr and Mrs R had come down from the big house for Panorama. That they enjoyed it enough to buy their own set before the following Monday was, Armstrong had always felt, a compliment to his up-to-dateness. Played ruddy havoc with their dinnertime, though. Mrs Duggary said it’d be his fault if they got indigestion, eating food off their laps like that when they weren’t used it. Not that anyone else had a dining room, or even – most families – enough chairs to sit down altogether.

  He dragged his mind back to now, and Leipzig. He said, ‘I saw young Nell’s Jamie.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Brian. ‘Looked a right ’nana, didn’t he, trying to talk to the Krauts.’ Brian had never forgiven Jamie for the burning of the chapel. And, having done his national service in the Rhineland, he, unlike Jamie, spoke German very well.

  ‘Antony’s gone out there too,’ said Armstrong. ‘It’s going to be a bit of a turnaround for him, all this.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s a Russian spy.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Jack told me. He told Jack. And I asked him lately and he said yes. It was all a long time ago, mind.’

  Brian sat back, and gripped the arms of his chair, and whistled, and shook his head, and acted out astonishment. Armstrong waited with a tight smug smile. He said eventually, ‘You didn’t expect that, did you?’

  There was a great deal about the relations between the senior John Armstrong and Antony Briggs that no one would have expected. That the latter was now effectively the former’s widowed son-in-law was part of it. But perhaps more remarkable was the staunch friendship between the two. ‘You think you’ve got an opinion on something you don’t know much about,’ the old man said to Antony after Jack’s funeral. ‘And then it crops up in your own family and you realise your opinion isn’t worth diddly-squat.’ They’d taken to going for walks together, slow but long. They talked about the emancipation of the working class. They surprised each other.