Peculiar Ground

Nell was interested in Mrs Rossiter, in the leopard-spotted chiffon scarf she wore round her neck, and the way her voice came grating, not flowing, from her mouth. She had no children. Her pug-dog was called Lupin. She knew how to drive an aeroplane.

That Friday it was not Mrs Rossiter, but her husband’s niece, who came through the arch in the yew hedge that led onto the winding path through shrubberies, down to the croquet lawn, and beyond that to the stony terrace with the huge magnolia tree where they sometimes had tea. She was as tall as a grown-up but she wasn’t one quite. She pulled her dress over her head and there was her bathing dress already on and she held her nose with one hand and stuck the other straight up in the air as though to make a pole she could slide down and jumped straight in.

The waves made Nell’s tyre rock and slurped over the sides of the pool. The girl came up and with her hair wet she looked like a child (ladies wore bathing caps). She bounced a little in the water and said, ‘I’m a dolphin,’ and began circling the tyres doing funny little dives which made her bottom stick up into the air each time her head disappeared. Dickie giggled. Nell was too frightened to begin with, but then she began to laugh too and the girl seemed to like that and she dived more and more and sometimes she’d shoot up so that she was standing up into the air as far as her waist and she blew out water like a whale. Nell laughed so much a warm gurgling feeling filled her up and her throat ached. Everything seemed very bright and noisy. All that flying water catching the sun like mirrored ribbons. All that splashing and laughter in that hedged-in space in which her mother was always anxious that they shouldn’t shriek. It was as though the girl didn’t know and wouldn’t care how polite they always had to be when they came up to Wychwood.

Nell didn’t entirely like it. It was as though the pool garden, an enclosure so rich in significance she would dream of it for the rest of her life, was just water, the topiary just bushes. But the girl, who was called Flossie, seemed to her wonderful.

Antony

There was always something a mite humiliating about the way Lil Rossiter used to whistle me up for a weekend. It wasn’t the last-minute invitations I minded. I’ve never really understood why it should be considered a slight to be treated as a reliable substitute for a defaulting guest. What rankled, however often I was subjected to it, was the lack of a greeting.

Of course I was always expected. The car waiting to meet me at the station, and the suavity with which Underhill dispatched me to my room, testified each time to the fact that I was at Wychwood because my hostess had wished that I should be. But you would never have known it from her vague ‘Ah, Antony . . .’ as she saw me coming into the marble hall at drinks time.

It wasn’t only me. I saw her being equally offhand with others. But for them there would be a compensating moment later, when she turned on them with a quick smile and did that startling thing of leaning over and talking right into the other’s ear as though what she was saying – usually quite banal in fact – was so intimate and risqué it must be treated as entirely confidential. With me she tended to remain, right through until Monday morning, as nonchalant as she was with the servants or the boring wives.

I suppose it sounds as though I didn’t really like Lil, and perhaps that was true then, but I always welcomed her call. We were connected in a tenuous way – step-relatives rather than blood ones. She was three years older, and she’d made a fuss of me at family weddings and so on when I was a child. Grown up, she still took me for granted as one might a sibling (neither of us had any real ones). I was more than presentable (I’m still pretty good-looking for my age). I was a useful companion for her outings. We gossiped. She’d insist I go with her (usually at very short notice and with no consideration for the fact I had a job to do) to give an opinion on any picture she was buying. On slow mornings in the gallery I would ring her, getting a brusque brush-off one time in three, but on other occasions long, satirical accounts of her last night’s doings at Quaglino’s. In company she virtually ignored me. I was like one of Racine’s confidantes, a person of negligible interest per se, who was party to some conversations that were very interesting indeed.

I don’t think she ever for a moment realised back then that – begrudgingly enthralled by her as I was – it was someone else whose presence gave those weekends, for me, their marvellous bouquet.

For the last few years I have been subjected to repeated questioning. I have been asked to recreate in meticulous detail encounters that were furtive and disappointing at the time and look shabby in retrospect. That sounds sexual, but I’m talking here not about my incompetent attempts to gratify desires I’d scarcely acknowledged to myself then, but about my even less successful go at making the world a better place. The sessions are frightening, but also – to my surprise – almost unbearably tedious. There is, though, an unlooked-for benefit. Sullenly obedient, hauling up memories, I find, trapped in the net with all the slimy stuff, pearls and bright fish. My interrogators (absurdly overdramatic word for these human clipboards) get banal information. But I find lost time, transformed into treasure trove.

They’re making their record of me. This – fragmentary and self-indulgent – is mine. I’m not particularly keen on examining my life. Sorry Socrates: but surely we should all be licensed to consign our past silliness to oblivion. Sorry Freud: repression seems to me a jolly useful thing. But I like taking out little bits of my life, and looking at them. I kept a sketchy kind of diary (some of it encrypted of course) and now I’m patching the gaps with memories I’ve netted. People have photograph albums, don’t they? Same kind of thing.

The weekend I’m remembering was the last of the summer, not because summer was over but because the grouse season had begun and the Rossiters would be going north. They both shot. I don’t think Christopher did so with much enthusiasm away from home. Presiding over days when his estate was laid out in all its mellow loveliness for guests come to kill his pheasants was gratifying, but he was really more of a fishing man. He was self-contained, dreamy even. But he could strike a salmon with a swiftness that was matched by the unexpectedly sharp humour with which he responded to any misguided smart-alec’s attempt to underestimate him. Lil, on the other hand, loved everything about shooting. It was very unusual in those days for a woman to join the guns and she knew what a piquant figure she cut – dainty and lethal in pleated skirts and tight-waisted tweed jackets. She was a genuinely good shot, and it amused her to see how that affronted some men.

So that August weekend at Wychwood had the kind of languor to it of a siesta before a taxing evening. Soon there would be sleeper-cars and sport and then – for some of the house-party – the brisk back-to-work of September. But we were still in the season of moving like somnolent dogs from one patch of shade to another. Iced coffee under the cedar tree. Picnic tea down by the upper lake in the hideous pagoda of which Christopher’s father had been so proud. Long afternoon hours when it seemed as though everyone had vanished, when the only living beings announcing their presence were the peacocks with their yearning cries.

*

The estate office. A long room by the stables. Plentiful windows, but set high in the walls, so that although the low, late sunlight comes in, the men indoors can’t see into the yard. Whitewashed walls. Shiny oilcloth maps. A brick floor worn down in the middle like an aged bed.

At a green-baize-covered table, Wychwood’s cabinet is in session.

Christopher Rossiter (head of state, or rather, proprietor) is at the centre of one side of the table. Hugo Lane (Nell’s father and Rossiter’s prime minister, or land agent) is on his left. Across the table, with the sun in their eyes, sit Mr Armstrong (minister for pheasants) and Mr Goodyear (minister for trees).

Armstrong is tall and gaunt, with the curt manner of a military leader. On shooting days, when he is marshalling his small army of under-keepers and beaters, he asserts his authority with the cock of a tufted silver eyebrow or, to a beater who strays out of line, a guttural roar. Mr Goodyear is a generation younger and physically his opposite – stout of body, florid of face. Both grew up within a mile of where they are sitting. Both spend hours and hours of every day alone in the woods. Both are greatly respected by their men, but Goodyear, who drinks in the Plough and is celebrated county-wide as a storyteller, is the more loved. They have first names of course, but neither Christopher nor Hugo would dream of using them. None of those present have ever wondered whether this formality is courteous or insulting. Hugo calls Christopher ‘Christopher’ when they’re alone together. Christopher sometimes responds in kind, and sometimes calls him ‘Lane’. This use of the surname is socially neutral: it means only that they have reverted for a while to the manners of their schooldays. In referring to each other in the presence of the other men, they use the Mr.

Mr Hutchinson, clerk to the assembly (and to the estate), sits at the end of the table to keep the minutes, holding the fat blue-marbled fountain pen his wife gave him for their wedding anniversary. The matching propelling pencil is still, and will for years remain, nestling unused in its white-satin-lined presentation box. Christopher, just back, with huge relief, from London, is in a grey suit. Hugo is in jodhpurs. All the men wear ties.

Hugo – This won’t take long. You’ll be busy getting Doris ready for her triumph next week, Armstrong.

Armstrong’s nervy little spaniel always wins the canine beauty contest at the village fête. Now he turns aside the implied compliment gracefully.

Armstrong – I gather Mr Green’s going to give us quite a surprise.

Goodyear – Giant figs, is it?

Christopher – Any figs at all are a miracle in Oxfordshire. I hope he gets the Cup. But now, Mr Lane thought . . . (tails off).

Hugo – Yes, let’s rough out the drives for the first three shooting days. If we know what needs doing before Mr Rossiter goes to Scotland, we can get cracking on it while he’s away. Armstrong, how’s Church Break looking?

Armstrong – Crawling. Crawling with them it is. You better get your eye in, Mr Lane. Time to get the clay pigeons out, I reckon.

Mr Hutchinson sniggers. Hugo Lane is an outstandingly good shot, and proud of it. Armstrong is teasing him.

Goodyear – You’re going to have to be careful not to shoot these ramblers, though.

The others are taken aback.

Christopher – Ramblers?

Goodyear – There’s a fellow down in the pub pretty well every night now banging on about rights of way. He’s got this idea there’s an old, old road went along Leafield Ride to the Cider Well, and all the way on alongside the lakes, through the park and home farm to meet the Oxford road. He’s going to walk it, he says, and no one can stop him, he says, because it’s a public highway. And I’ve heard he’s going to do it on Saturdays.

Christopher (to Hugo) – Do you know about this?

Hugo – No. Who is this chap?

Goodyear – He makes furniture. Bashes the chairs around to make them look old and sells them to those mugginses in Burford. Good-looking boy. Just moved into the village a month or two back, but he’s nephew to the groom at Lea Place. The thing is, he’s got other people worked up about it. Says there’ll be a hundred of them soon, and they’ll just walk wherever there’s an old green road, and if you try to stop them they’ll take you to court.

Christopher – Can they do that?

Hugo – Not if I have anything to do with it.

Christopher – But really. Legally?

Goodyear – He says you can’t keep people out. Not if there’s a right of way.

Hugo and Armstrong exchange glances.

Hugo (to Christopher) – Bunny had some of these chaps marching through the home farm at Swinbrooke, day after day, and the police wouldn’t lift a finger.

Armstrong – If these jokers are running around on a shooting day . . .

He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. All five men present can imagine the consequences. Pheasants disturbed before the drive, or flying back during it. Dogs all confused. One of these rambler-types stepping out in front of the guns, playing silly buggers. And then, oh Christ, if one of them got shot.

Goodyear – They’re going to ruin the countryside, that’s what they’re going to do. Someone lit a fire by the Cider Well three weeks back, left a patch of black earth as big as a bicycle wheel.

Hugo – Actually, that would have been me. Dickie’s birthday. We were cooking sausages.

Christopher winks at Goodyear, who grins. The way Hugo indulges his children is a running joke. Armstrong remains stony-faced. He once found Nell and Dickie digging a tunnel under the fence around one of his breeding pens. They wanted to help the baby pheasants escape.

Hugo (bracing himself) – I’ll go and see this fellow. What’s his name, Goodyear?

Goodyear – Mark Brown.

Christopher (who has stayed calm through this exchange) – What about the hellebore?

The forest is home to a rare strain of hellebore. It’s an unlovely plant with black antennae sprouting from the centre of its greeny-yellow bracts, of interest only to botanists, but to them a treasure. It grows nowhere else in the British Isles. Hugo looks at Christopher, as he frequently does, with the startled expression of one hearing excellent good sense spoken by a cat. Christopher is so gentle and so disinclined to project his own personality that it is easy to forget, not only that he is lord of this domain, but also that he is very acute.

Hugo – Yes! We can get those Nature Conservancy bores back.

Everyone is cheered. The Nature Conservancy people tried, two years ago, to declare Wychwood a precious relic of England’s primaeval forest, to be protected in all ways possible from change and development. They made quite a to-do about the hellebore. Then Christopher and Hugo between them managed, by polite unhelpfulness, to make what they saw as this unwarrantable bit of bossiness go away. Now their old adversaries are possible allies.

Goodyear also gets the point. If he’s not going to be allowed to scythe the hellebores, controlling the undergrowth the way he and his father before him have been doing for over forty years, well, perhaps that’s a small price to pay for having his woods declared out of bounds for towny interlopers. To Goodyear, whose house is three-quarters of a mile from the nearest tarmacked road, even the villagers are townies.

Hugo – I’ll go and have a word with this fellow Brown – see where that gets us. Okey-doke. So. Armstrong. We start with Church Break, and then?

And so the rambler question is put out of mind. Half an hour later, their heads full of autumnal images, the men disperse, Armstrong to put his pretty bitch through her paces yet again, Goodyear to walk the track which leads through the forest to his cottage, Christopher to play the host, Hugo to retrieve his horse from the stables, submit silently to the groom’s loquacious judgement on her unfitness and ride her home, cantering down the avenue muffled with dark late-summer leaves, Wully scampering along behind.

*

Nicholas was sleek, talkative and busy. Seeing him at Paddington, Antony had a momentary desire to dodge behind a pillar. This impulse overcame Antony on any chance meeting, a shaming residual trace of the gauche boy he had almost succeeded in overpainting with his adult persona: Antony the effortless conversationalist, Antony who was so adroit in embarrassing situations, Antony who could charm clients into believing that a meeting resulting in a transaction immensely profitable to himself was an engagement he had set up purely so that they could delight in each other’s company. It was that Antony who took over now (he really liked Nicholas), and waved and strode forward, throttling, without fuss, regret for the novel he could otherwise have been reading on the train.

‘I suppose we’re going to the same place?’

‘Ant. Good. Good. I want you to tell me everything there is to know about Germany.’

‘I can only tell you what I know, which is mostly about Altdorfer. I take it that’s not what you want.’

‘It’ll do to start with. Are you going First? Do you think we could get teacakes?’

Antony, who had a second-class ticket, didn’t answer the former question. They climbed into the dining-car, and settled in. Dull-metal pots of tea and hot water. White damask tablecloths and napkins. Heavy knives. Seats upholstered in dense stuff like brutally shaved carpeting, prickly as burrs. Tiny dishes of raspberry jam.

‘I’ve got to do something on Berlin.’ Nicholas wrote for a newspaper. He liked to present himself as an amateur whose accurate summations of complex political situations were all the more wonderful for the fact that he brought so little prior knowledge to them. He did not expect anyone to believe in this act: he would have been affronted if they did. It made for good conversation, though. Even off-duty, at Lil’s house-party, he would be drawing everyone out, and giving pleasure as he did so. There is nothing so flattering as being treated as though you might have something useful to say.

Nicholas himself was not to be drawn. His bonhomie was a blackout blind. Gratified by his questioning, acquaintances forgot to question him in turn.

‘I won’t be much help to you. It was over five years ago now, and I was in Munich.’

‘Ah yes. Art and naked gymnasts in the Englischer Garten.’ Each of these men – both bachelors in their thirties – had wondered, without pressing curiosity, about the other’s sexual orientation.

‘Yes, and Bavaria isn’t very German – it’s full of ochre Italianate palaces. Actually, I don’t know really where Germany is.’

‘That’s been the trouble, hasn’t it? Trying to cobble together a fatherland out of a lot of squabbling siblings. Attempting the impossible puts people into a bad temper. And then they lash out.’

‘We do it too, of course. Inventing our nation.’

‘Yes.’

Both at once looked out of the window. The Thames Valley cradled the railway line as it skirted water meadows in which black and white cows plodded. Willows marked out the curves of the invisible river. Hanging beechwoods curtained the horizon. Low sun on a square church tower. They both laughed, catching each other’s thought.

‘Perhaps we really are living in the place you see on tourist-board posters,’ said Antony.

‘Yes, and look,’ rapping a pot-lid, ‘there’s honey still for tea. But I’m not letting you off. How much did your Bavarian friends care about their Prussian brothers? What would they sacrifice to hang on to Berlin?’

‘I never had that sort of conversation. I was there to see the Alte Pinakothek, which our side had smashed to smithereens.’

‘Twelve years before.’

‘Nicholas, twelve years is nothing. The place was wrecked. The house I stayed in was the only one in the street left standing. The family had lost two sons. I was sleeping in the younger one’s room, and for all they knew he could have been killed by an elder brother of mine. I was very polite and so were they. We didn’t talk about the war. We didn’t talk about the occupation, or about bombing, or about my hostess’s nervous tic. We talked a little bit about politics, but only as if it was an entirely theoretical subject on which none of us could possibly hold a personal opinion. We certainly certainly certainly weren’t going to talk about German nationhood.’

Nicholas looked quizzical. ‘Conversation must have been a little bloodless.’

Antony laughed. ‘It’s unbelievable, isn’t it. Already we’re so bored of peace that “bloodless” is a pejorative term. Of course it was bloodless. That was the point.’

‘But seriously, you’re such a flâneur. Whatever you did or didn’t talk about over the dumplings at home, you went out. I know you. You must have met people.’

‘No. Sorry. Up early for a walk. The Pinakothek every morning. Library every afternoon. No dumplings, but an awful lot of pork and mushrooms. Then evenings writing my paper on Altdorfer. To which I owe the job that allows me, as you say, to gad about now.’

A pause. Nicholas, thwarted, casting around for a more promising approach. Antony – smooth, obliging, emollient Antony – opaque.

Ticket collector. Antony’s second-class ticket. Embarrassment masked by jollity. And, soon, the car awaiting them at Finstock Halt.

*

Nell and her father went up to the big house after tea. Daddy drove the Land Rover, with Wully’s chin resting on his left shoulder. Nell was on the bonnet, sitting in the spare wheel, her small hands scrabbling for a purchase on the rubber, her hair tangling in front of her eyes. Her mother didn’t know she did this. Nell, constantly aware of how she might be jolted out and tumble under the front wheels and be squashed, was terrified, but she never said so. Fear was the price she gladly paid for the privilege of being her father’s fellow-conspirator.

Summer after tea was the best time. As the sun descended the flowers turned luminous. And the grown-ups grew brighter and strange too, changing into their evening clothes. Mr Rossiter met them on the steps, already dressed in a silk smoking jacket patterned with twisty petal shapes. Paisley – a new word for Nell.

They looked to see, as they always did, whether the giant brown dog-statues flanking the door had a present for Wully. There was a sugar lump between the left-hand one’s front paws. Then they went through the house, and out onto the terrace that overlooked the part of the park where the land swept down to the lake and up again to the double row of conker trees screening the village nearly a mile away. This was the Rossiters’ special bit of park, where ancient oaks stood isolated in deer-nibbled grass and where any rider was exposed to the stare of all the house’s high sash windows. It was grander and plainer than the expanse behind, where Nell’s family picnicked between the avenues and played kick-the-can around stands of bracken, or where she could ride her pony through the copses alongside her father, hidden from anyone who might laugh at her still needing the leading-rein.

‘They need feeding, Nell,’ said Mr Rossiter. Down the middle of the terrace ran a canal, where giant goldfish lurked. They were immeasurably old, their shell-like pallor uncanny. Nell suspected them of cannibalism – why else would the little red and orange fish flashing above them never get a chance to become as gross and slow as they? She had a recurring dream, from which she would wake screaming, in which someone she couldn’t see would say, in a gentle, insinuating voice, something she could never afterwards remember. These bloated fish, glimmering in murky water, were ominous in the same kind of whispering way.

She went to the little building at the end of the canal, where the fish food, smelling of cowpats, was kept in an enamel bin. With its frilly arched windows and stone pinnacles, this pavilion was Nell’s architectural ideal. Wychwood itself, its garden front a pilastered cliff of grey-tawny stone, was too grand for her to comprehend it. In all her daydreams the princess with waist-length golden hair and the ever-sympathetic identical twin sister lived in a palace that was the fish-food house built large.

‘Who’ve we got so far?’ her father was saying. He knew, and so did Nell, that house-parties were Mrs Rossiter’s treat, and that Mr Rossiter was apt to slip away from them after dinner to go fishing. Nell’s father was Mr Rossiter’s agent but also his ally in wife-teasing, guest-dodging and – up to a carefully judged point – making fun of the people Mrs R asked down from London.