Peculiar Ground

‘You’ve met Flossie.’ That was the girl who had swum with them that morning. ‘Jolly girl. There’s two more just come off the train. Antony.’ He was another regular visitor. Nell liked him because he always spoke to her but she could never understand his jokes. ‘Nicholas. And there’s a couple Lil took to in Scotland last year. Helen and Benjie. Lovely woman. Husband runs a restaurant and wears suede shoes.’

Nell’s attention was on the fish. The faded monsters lay still while the brilliant tiddlers snapped at the smelly flakes. The insects, called water boatmen although the whole point of them was that they didn’t need boats, skated over the meniscus, as confident as Jesus. So that story might be ordinary-true as well as deep-down-true. (Nell’s mother had explained the difference, but only the Bible was allowed the latter. If Nell said anything that wasn’t ordinary-true, then it was a lie.) Perhaps Jesus had the same kind of special feet. She stared as hard as she could at the insects, but even when she opened her eyes so wide they felt they might pop out she couldn’t see their feet at all. Looked at under a microscope, might they be like tiny canoes?

‘We won’t use the pool after this weekend,’ said Mr Rossiter. ‘Get them to empty it on Monday, will you, Hugo, and refill it ready for when we get back? It’s turning into weed soup, isn’t it, Nell?’

Her father was nodding, but Nell couldn’t say a word. It was true that the walls of the pool were coated with green slime, and the pine needles floating on it clustered into fairy log-jams, but wouldn’t it be rude to admit it? And anyway she was dismayed. She knew that refilling the pool took two whole days, and afterwards the water was much, much colder. ‘Oh can we swim tomorrow, then?’ she said.

‘No, Nell,’ said her father, quick-sharp. They never came up to the pool when there were weekend guests. But ‘Yes,’ said Mr Rossiter, and when her father looked awkward he went on, ‘just this time. Flossie said she had fun with the children this morning.’

Helen

When people first meet us they think, what can Helen see in that buffoon. And then after a while, not long at all usually, they think, how can he stand her. She’s so dull. Next they’re inviting us to stay. And then they’re never going to invite us to stay again because Benj has made a pass. At the hostess, or the host. Or the dog, for goodness sake. When he became besotted with that absurd white fluffy thing of Cressida’s. Wouldn’t leave it alone all weekend. But more likely the teenage daughter, or the au pair. And then they begin to think, she’s so dignified. And clever. And you don’t notice it at once, but isn’t she beautiful. What can she see in that clown.

Lil understands, I think. She and Christopher aren’t an obvious pair either. I like coming here. I’m glad she took me up, as one might take up petit point, or the clarinet, or a pretty orphan. Relationships based on caprice suit me. I take what comes my way. Benj floated in and scooped me up as though I was a small hairy dog. No one had ever treated me with such disrespect, and I found it restful. I don’t suppose we’ll be together for ever, even though he depends on me more than he knows. In bed, we are harmonious.

He drove down today, with Guy in the front, so they could talk, he said. He likes being the raffish uncle. He offers the boy cigarettes, which he refuses, and takes him out to Muriel’s or the French Club. Showing off. Benj isn’t really a bohemian. He likes to lunch at the Ritz. But he knows the young are impressed by that kind of thing. Guy is nothing like as snubbing as most teenagers but this afternoon he barely spoke – he gets car-sick. Benj rambled on. His ridiculous car is another thing I like about my husband. I made a nest on the backseat, with the fur rug full of zipped-up pockets for your Thermos or your knitting. Of course Benj doesn’t knit but he likes ingenious contraptions. That thing like a fire extinguisher which supposedly creates soda water.

I read through my bit on mazes. If I can have a draft ready this week the typist at the Institute will make sense of it before term begins. Another thing that others might resent, but I find a relief, is that nobody ever asks about my work. Nicholas did as soon as he met me, because he’s inquisitive, but that’s different from being interested. I think it helped him bring me into focus (serious, unworldly, perhaps a bit of a crank) but he didn’t actually want to know about it. I’ve liked all the journalists I’ve met, but they don’t have much range.

After we dropped Guy with his friend – that drowning look he gave, the ordeal of a whole weekend’s politeness – I got in the front and Benj fiddled with the radio and we sang along together. Everything about Frank Sinatra is abhorrent to me: the cockiness, the smug voice, the assumed sophistication. All polish, no patina. But, for better or worse, I sing along.

We’ve been given the tapestry room. North-facing. That must be a lucky coincidence; no one here would give a toss about the way sunlight fades vegetable dyes. But our window, mullioned and small-paned, is in the centre of Wychwood’s axis. Sitting here at the tiny writing table (the bigger one, as usual, is cluttered with useless stuff – three-panelled mirror and silver brushes and crystal caskets full of cotton-wool balls), I’m looking straight, or nearly straight, down the beech avenue to a church tower. So arrogant. So grand. Before the other wing was built, in the days when this must have been the best bedroom, people were being killed for entertaining the wrong kind of religious faith. Here, though, a church tower is a gazebo, just something to close the view.

I’ll wear my grey dress with tight sleeves tonight, and amethyst beads. No point trying to out-sparkle Lil. I’m the serious one. A bit fierce. What can she see in that buffoon?

*

At drinks time Benjie was not wearing suede shoes, but a smoking jacket of patchwork silk in purple and pink, and he and Lil were both so animated that between them they created an uproar. At Wood Manor, though, it was so still you could feel the night falling as stealthily as dropping eyelids. Nell, bathed and in her nightie, looked out of her bedroom window, the one shaped like an egg, and saw her mother walking between the herbaceous borders towards the summerhouse where her father was clattering the ice in the martini jug. He wore a smoking jacket like Mr Rossiter’s and his velvet slippers with gold letters on the toes. Her mother was in Nell’s favourite dress. Blue and silver stripes, the stripes turning the long skirt into a ribbed bell, and arranged diagonally around the top to make a lovely symmetrical puzzle of her chest and arms. Pale dress and pale tobacco plants glimmered in the warm dark. It was a lonely thing to see her mother so unaware of her. When Nell got into bed her parents’ voices came up to her still, until they went indoors and all she knew of them were the rectangles of light the dining-room windows threw on the lawn, the brilliant negatives of shadows cast by adulthood into the dreamy cave of childhood and sleep.

Antony

Not Lil’s most brilliant assembly, but I was lucky to be seated next to Christopher’s niece Flossie. Barely eighteen, and not the least bit awed by the set-up. Her father is in Persia, something to do with oil. With her parents abroad, Wychwood is her weekend home. She was funny about her London life: the publisher’s typing-pool full of women looking forward all morning to unpacking their fussy little greaseproof-paper parcels full of lunch; the debs’ hostel in Belgravia; the landlady who sits all day in her room off the hall ready to pounce on anyone breaking the rules and receiving a male visitor. ‘We all loll about in our pink quilted dressing gowns eating Rice Krispies for breakfast and pretending not to be competitive about where we’ve been the night before.’ She made the vision of these frowsy human rosebuds at once erotically suggestive and ridiculous. She’s a racy, ebullient girl. I can see why Lil makes a pet of her.

On the other side Helen, who’s doing something at the Warburg, so we could talk shop. She invited me to come and see some Mughal miniatures. Claims that one shows a knot garden identical with the one at Montacute. Sounds improbable to me, but I’ll go along politely. Benjie’s always been a shameless show-off and he’s adopted a new persona since I knew him in Berlin. Now he’s a fat Flash Harry – ye gods, that smoking jacket!

We didn’t linger long after the women had gone out. Cole Porter impersonations round the piano afterwards. I don’t blame Christopher for slinking away.

*

Christopher walks down Tower Light. No forebear of his planted this avenue. Its beeches are older by several human generations than his traceable family tree, as old as the house his grandfather bought largely for the pleasure of possessing them. He is digesting his dinner and planning to smoke a cigarette. To any observer it would appear that he was alone, but alongside him, stealthy as the small creatures coming out now for their night’s hunting, walks his ghostly son. Christopher cannot see his child, but he has a sense of him, like the flicker of a dim light just out of his line of vision.

He doesn’t know whether the boy – he was called Fergus – ever comes in the same way to Lil. He’s never asked her. Nor does he know whether the visitation is a consolation or an aggravation of grief, but he deliberately makes times, like this one, in which it can occur.

The boy whom he sees but doesn’t see is not as tall as he would have been now. All the details of his appearance are those of the child he was when he died. The knob of his ankle-bone rubbed red by the upper rim of his sturdy buckled sandals. The delicacy of the tendons at the back of his neck. The sharp wings of his shoulder blades beneath his Aertex shirt. His solemnity, which hasn’t yet been varied in these séances – as it was in life – by wild giggles.

Down and up again. The avenue runs for four miles, rising and falling as it traverses the forest between the two villages which abut Christopher’s estate, running from church tower to church tower, cutting a passage from one public building to another through a great expanse of woodland sequestered and private.

Christopher arrives at the wall and passes through the iron gates. Twice as tall as he is, they are awkward to manoeuvre. Inside the wall the park stretches palely away between the massive trunks. Beyond the wall the beeches are backed by dense woodland. Turn off down a smaller ride, then onto a rutted track to the sawmill, always going down now, into gloom, and there, at the lowest point, abruptly the trees retreat, and the mauve sky reveals itself, reflected in water. Across the dam to the spot where the bank curves outwards to make a platform and the trees lean obligingly aslant as though to avoid the backward flick of his line. The smell of water-mint enfolds Christopher. This muddle of trampled grass has been crushed by his own feet. This is where he likes to come, night after summer night, making a hide for himself – a confined vantage point from which, instead of moving lordly though the land he owns, he can retreat and watch it being itself, unmastered.

For the next two days, he will be on parade. He likes house-parties more than most of his guests probably imagine. Lil plans them and invites the guests, and shepherds them from room to room, from game to picnic to tête-à-tête. Christopher remains aloof, but – as Lil is consciously aware and as he perhaps intuits – he is an essential part of the entertainment. Tall, gentle Christopher, with his scrupulous courtesy that fails to mask his indifference to most of his visitors, is of a piece with his setting. He completes the picture. And they in turn complete, for him, the thing he has constructed here, and which needs their eyes.

*

The paper’s Berlin stringer was filing down the line.

Today quote Hero of the Soviet Union close quote Marshal Konev arrived in Berlin as commander of all Soviet forces in Germany period

In May comma 1945 comma Konev led the Red Army in the Battle of Berlin period

It has been reported that his Cossack troops butchered an entire defeated German division comma using their sabres to cut off arms raised in surrender period

Konev’s appointment signals a hardening of the Soviet line on German affairs period

At a factory in East Berlin yesterday comma East German Chancellor Ulbricht was heckled by a worker calling for free elections period

Ulbricht responded by saying free elections had brought the Nazis to power period

Quote Whoever supports free elections supports Hitler’s generals exclamation mark close quote

New paragraph

West Berlin continues to be inundated with refugees from the East period

The twenty-nine camps set up to receive them are all now full period Twenty-one aeroplanes comma chartered for the purpose comma took off from Berlin today loaded with refugees en route to cities in the West period

An official said today quote if it goes on like this comma East Berlin will be a ghost town close quote period

The copy-taker said to his neighbour on the desk, ‘I was in Berlin in ’49 – national service – what a dog’s dinner!’ and passed the typed-up report with its four carbons to the runner, who carried it to the night editor on the foreign desk, who took it to the editor, who said, ‘Has Nick seen this?’

‘I’ll be reading it to him.’

‘This Konev. What do we know?’

‘A very big potato. Just setting him out on the board is aggressive.’

The editor was known to love chess. It irritated him the way his subordinates played up to him by using board-game terminology.

‘So the Soviets are huffing and puffing.’

‘Mmm. Shall I call Nick back in?’

‘Where the hell is he?’

‘Some fancy-pants weekend in the country.’

‘Leave him there for now. As long as you’ve got the number.’

That evening, a few miles east of Berlin, domestic staff at the House of the Birches, which had once been Hermann Goering’s hunting lodge, were preparing to entertain. East German premier Walter Ulbricht had invited most of his senior officials and their wives to visit him there at four o’clock the following afternoon. It was hot. A lovely weekend for a garden party.

*

When Christopher sloped off, Nicholas put in an appearance in the drawing room, drank coffee and bustled about flirting so no one could say he wasn’t doing his bit socially. Then he slipped away too and set up camp in what passed in that house for a cosy study. Linen-fold panelling, a ceiling dripping plaster stalactites. The room had been deprived of one of its walls around the time of the Glorious Revolution, and now formed an L with the pilastered drawing room where Christopher and Lil hung the paintings of which they were properly proud.

He accepted a whisky and soda when Underhill appeared like a well-disciplined genie, drew the curtain across the joint of the L, and settled down in a tapestried chair beneath an upside-down pendent obelisk to try to make sense of the reports that had come in that day. Ted had rung about the Konev story. He’d heard Reuters’ man in Berlin had a hunch that the East Germans were going to do something very soon, but what it was he couldn’t guess. Not exactly what you’d call hard news.

Nicholas began to scribble out a think-piece on the limits of totalitarianism. Khrushchev being as much at the mercy of his party as Kennedy was at the mercy of the American electorate, both of them having to act tough for their respective constituencies, both of them probably clever enough to know it was a charade, the perils into which that play-acting might drag all Europe, de da de da de da de da.

Voices. Antony was showing young Flossie the pictures. The obstreperous Benjie had tagged along.

Flossie – ‘Gosh! Is it a Cimabue?’

‘Yes it is.’

Privately, as Nicholas knew, Antony had his doubts, but he was a loyal friend and a discreet dealer. So yes it unequivocally was.

‘Looks lonely. Is that a bit of his friend on the right?’ Benjie getting in on the conversation.

‘Yes, it appears to be a fragment from the right wing of an altarpiece. See how it is hinged here. There would have been another two or three angels, a heavenly chamber group.’

‘The hands are so . . .’

The hands, indeed, were ineffable.

‘Girly? Or perhaps he is a girl. Or a fag. Look how he’s leaning into the other’s shoulder.’

Was Benjie an ass, thought Nicholas, or was he just pretending to be one? Nicholas had met Helen when she came into the office with her copy – she reviewed for the arts pages occasionally. And they’d talked, and one day they’d had lunch together, and another day they’d walked along the river east from Fleet Street past the Tower and he’d shown her one of his favourite places in London, Wapping Pierhead, where the tall Georgian houses run down to the river’s edge and even the pavements still seem to reek of the cloves and nutmegs that made their first owners rich, and he thought she was beautiful in a steely-cool Celtic kind of way. Her eyes were as pale as gooseberries. There followed some very, very private afternoons in his flat. This was the first opportunity he’d had to observe her husband.

He stepped out from behind his arras. He wasn’t going to get any more work done with them prattling on the other side.

Antony was saying, ‘Either or neither. Angels, being insubstantial, are spared the indignities of sex.’

Benjie poured himself whisky and drifted about the room. He was looking at Flossie as much as at the paintings. Polite girl that she was, she kept making little nods and mmms. There’s nothing harder to sustain than an appearance of interest, even when it’s genuine. She was beginning to look a bit strained when Benjie called her over to see Christopher’s chess-set. Booty of the Raj. Ivory and ebony, laid out on a great scagliola table.

‘Do you play? I’ll give you a game.’

A murmur that was like a verbal blush. Was this rude to Antony? How to reconcile the demands of all these different grown-ups? She had put on a dramatic dress for dinner, low cut, and made of bands of stiff papery silk in clashing bright colours, but for all that, and despite her lacquered hair, she was still a child. ‘All right. You’ll easily beat me.’

‘So I hope.’

Simple words, but uttered as though they had a salacious double meaning. If Benjie wasn’t an ass, he was certainly a bit of a lecher.

The others left them to it, and went out onto the terrace where Lil and Helen were sitting. Nicholas and Lil dropped into the banter that had become their normal mode of conversation. Silly stuff, he thought, but as bracing, she’s so quick, as tennis is for those who are good at it. Christopher loomed up on the rim of the ha-ha, his rod on his shoulder like the Good Shepherd’s crook, and crossed the lawn and joined them and for a while Nicholas felt easier than he had for weeks. The distant events that would occupy him through the night gave way to the immediate. The scents of stocks and jasmine. Pale roses glimmering. The dog collapsing heavily onto the flagstones and sighing like the grampus for whom he was named. He and Helen tended to ignore each other in company, but her being there, near him in the darkness, was a plus.

There was a scraping and a clatter indoors. Flossie came out. She didn’t say anything, just sat herself down in the corner between the great magnolia and Lil, who had to shuffle along the stone bench to make room for her. She looked like a cat mutely complaining about a rainstorm. Murmuring from indoors: Underhill saying, ‘I’ll clear it up, sir.’ Helen made no move. It was pretty clear to everyone what had happened – what sort of thing anyway. Nicholas and Lil kept up their tennis game, giving the girl time to collect herself. Why? wondered Nicholas. Surely it was Helen who needed their solicitude. Ignobly, he was pleased.

Pretty soon they all went up. At midnight Nicholas called the copy-desk, and got handed on to Ted, who wanted a background piece for the Sunday paper on Soviet military capacity. At five in the morning he finally got to bed, while in East Berlin the Stasi prepared to demonstrate that the myth of German efficiency had a basis in fact.

Saturday

Nell walked across the cattle grid by Underhill’s lodge, her feet in her sandshoes only just making enough of a bridge from one bar to another to stop her slipping through. Hedgehogs got trapped down there sometimes. She’d been frightened once to hear a rustling, and then so amazed she could still conjure up the prickle of it, to see the dished face. Wild animals, even little funny ones, were like glimpses of another world carrying on with its business in secret, not caring at all about people. Perhaps even being enemies. Hedgehogs had fleas.

She was pushing her bicycle, and once safely over she got back on it, using the brick edge of Mrs Underhill’s delphinium-bed to help herself up. Wood Manor was separated from the park by paddocks and a belt of trees. It had its own feeling, the feeling of home. The feeling inside the park wall was different; quieter somehow, a bit gloomy, old.

Swoop down the hairpin bend, faster than you’d really want to so that you could get most of the way up the slope beyond. The Land Rover passed her, hooting, the canvas roof off and Dickie in the back, waving wildly with both arms. By the time she reached the estate office her father was already walking up the beech avenue with Mr Green the head gardener, and she had to bump and rattle over the pebbly path down the centre of it, with Dickie, because he was annoying, and Wully, because he was so pleased to see her after their half-hour separation, barging into her and making her wobble.

‘We’ll start emptying the pool Sunday, then, once they’ve all gone indoors to dinner. We’ve got all the beans to pick next week so Mrs Duggary can get them in the freezer while Mr and Mrs R are away. And the lettuces’ll be bolting.’

Nell wanted to protest about the pool, because she’d have liked a last swim on Monday morning, but she could tell her father wasn’t really listening. Mr Green liked to keep up a continuous report on his own doings but he didn’t seem to mind talking on and on without anyone saying even ‘mmm’ or ‘really?’ He was just filling the time with his warm buzz until Daddy was ready to tell him whatever needed to be told, and sure enough, after a bit Daddy came back from wherever his thoughts had been and shouted at Wully and started to tell Mr Green about how they would make a new rose garden with a sundial. Nell went ahead, freewheeling down the sloping path that slanted away from the avenue towards the narrow gate that led into the garden, and passed on through the rhododendrons and on down to the pool.

Flossie was floating on her back with her long hair mermaidy around her. Nell was so pleased to see her there she ran into the changing hut and took off her stiff canvas shorts and left them sitting on the floor as though there was a person still in them, and kicked off her sandals and took off her blouse with its Peter Pan collar (surely Peter Pan didn’t look like that) so roughly that a button came off, and ran back out in her best rose-trellised bathing dress with her inner tube and plopped straight in even before Daddy was there.

‘Hello little fish,’ said Flossie.

‘You’re the fish. I’m in my boat.’

‘So you are. Silly old me with my goggley eyes. I thought for a moment you were a totally round flatfish of a previously unknown species.’

Flossie was not a grown-up not a child but something anomalous and exciting like a centaur or a psammead. She ducked her head under the water and when she came up her mouth was an o and she was blowing a bubble like the goldfish. Daddy came through the arched gap in the hedge, hesitated, and then said hello in an odd voice.

‘I can’t speak,’ said Flossie. ‘I’m a fish.’

He laughed then. Mummy would have told Nell off for not waiting but he seemed to think it was all right.