Peculiar Ground

The telephone was in a sort of mahogany sentry box in the marble hall. While he talked, Nicholas was being eyed by the stuffed bear, rampant, from whose outstretched and fearsomely clawed forearms the dinner gong depended. It was the foreign editor. One of the stringers had a source in East Berlin, who had been told by an old schoolfriend that if he was still keen to move his mother to the West he should drive her over instanter, that very afternoon. The old schoolfriend was in a position to know whatever was up in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

‘So you’d better get back here, just in case.’

‘Does it stand up? Anyone corroborating?’

‘I’ve got half the desk working on it, but nothing solid yet. The entire Foreign Office knows there’s something in the offing, but the Americans aren’t sharing information, and there’s nothing coming in from the East. Or that’s their story. You heard what that senator said in Ohio?’

‘About a wall? You think he might have known something? It sounded to me like wish-fulfilment fantasy. Please, somebody, put up a barrier so we don’t have to think about these commies any more. You can’t enclose a country.’

‘Tell that to Hadrian. Tell that to the Chinese emperors.’

‘How could they do it?’

‘Our man says his driver says someone who drinks in the same bar claims to have seen eighteen lorries loaded with barbed wire parked on the site of a bombed-out factory in the Soviet sector.’

Lorries and wire are solid things. Nicholas felt an eerie shuddering as the membrane dividing speculation from the real was breached.

‘They could do it. They just about could. Walls apart, they could close the frontier. And they most certainly would like to.’

‘So say goodbye to Lord and Lady Muck and get on down here.’

‘For goodness sake, old man, you’ve got half a dozen writers there already.’

‘I want you here talking to your friends in high places. And if something happens tonight we’ll be scrambling to keep up.’

Needed or not, Nicholas wanted to be there. Packing took no time. He ran Underhill to ground in the dining room, where he was upbraiding a maid for using lilies in the flower arrangements (it was his rule that flowers for the dining room must be scentless), and asked him for train times, a man to bring his suitcase down, and a car to the station, all before he’d announced his departure to his hosts.

Christopher went white. Lil, apparently incurious as to what kind of crisis it was that was calling him back, acquiesced in his change of plan with an ease which would have been hurtful if she hadn’t hung onto his arm and followed him out to the front steps. (No chance of a private word with Helen.) There, beneath the portico, which was that patchwork of a house’s only chill and pompous part, she looked him seriously in the eye and said, ‘Dear Nicholas, you know, you’re a very good friend.’ And then there was a jump in time, like a gramophone needle leaping a groove, as they both thought that what was happening was, beneath all the enjoyable bustle, perhaps deathly.

The next train wasn’t for three-quarters of an hour. Time for Nicholas to walk to the station, and get a bit of mind-settling peace. Armstrong’s son Jack had brought the Bentley round. Ridiculous for such a routine errand, but the boy loved the enormous green car. Nicholas gave him his bag, and said, ‘Thanks, but I’m walking. I’ll see you on the platform.’

*

Avenues radiated out from the house. Horse-chestnut trees, heavy graduated layers of dense green, darkened the drive which led downhill. Beyond the twin lodges – stocky little Doric temples with incongruous back gardens full of hollyhocks and beanpoles – the drive crossed the river on a stone-parapeted bridge, and, leaving the beautiful artifice of the park, re-entered the world of cowpats and thistles and telegraph poles, rising again towards the village between the fields of the home farm. The car went that way with his luggage, but Nicholas veered off to the left, following a path trodden by deer.

Approaching him aslant came Hugo Lane. Still invisible to each other, the two men were following lines that would intersect near the end of Tower Light. Wully’s progress – pale hay-coloured against pale hay, snuffling, chasing what, chasing nothing, chasing anything – was the embroidery looping across the steady weft of the men’s progress and the warp of the marching trees. Each was startled by their meeting.

‘Going back to the Great Wen?’ Already Nicholas had a whiff of the city about him.

‘Have to, alas.’

Hugo had gone home for picnic tea under the copper beech with Chloe and the children. Milk and jam doughnuts. Who can eat half a doughnut without once licking the sugar off their lips? Dickie had laughed so hard at Nell’s sugar moustache he had snorted into his milk, splattering it all over the tartan rug and getting some of it the wrong way down inside himself as well, leading to gurgling and back-slapping and eventually tears. When Heather appeared to begin bathtime rituals, Hugo whistled up Wully, took a twelve-bore from the gun cupboard, filled his pockets with cartridges and walked back into the park.

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