Peculiar Ground

A gang of masons was coming along the track from the quarry. Great blocks of stone, granular like gigantic sugar lumps, rocked on makeshift carts – tree-trunks laid over the axles of solid wooden wheels. Men stood on or by them, watching the ropes, ready to holler out if one of these man-made boulders showed a tendency to shift. The six horses were as heavy-built as bulldogs and twelve times as tall and long. The strength and sweat being expended on giving Lord Woldingham his privacy would serve to construct a sizeable town.

Saplings of hazel and elder screened the one group from the other. Only from my standpoint was it possible to see men and women both. A man rocking atop a boulder, like a seaman balancing on a spar, gave a shout. The women startled and froze, only Cecily and young Edward walking on oblivious.

The men moved into action with awful slowness. The horses were halted; wooden chocks were wedged behind the wheels to stop the cart and its load rolling backwards. The men, whose legs and arms were already sheathed in leather (quarrying is dangerous work), shrugged their jerkins on, despite the warmth of the day. Deliberately, they picked up clubs or knotted ropes. Cecily and the boy had crossed the track now, and were silhouetted against the green water.

The men barged through the undergrowth. The group of women tightened. I saw Rose shake himself free and step forward, a silly little tub of a man. These men were his team. He raised both arms, as though surrendering to them, or inviting an embrace. They divided, and passed him by, as stream-water passes by a saturated log. As they approached the women they were wagging the tongues in their mouths in a song that was no song. Dig a dig a dig a dig a dig a dig. Guttural. The human voice used not to communicate, but to terrorise.

I knew that to intervene would be useless, but I ran forward yelling with all the breath in me and waving my arms as though to fight off a swarm of wasps. I had not breakfasted. Tiny coloured sparks seemed to obscure my vision. As the clubs began to pound and the ropes to whack, I saw Cecily and Edward, his coat as brilliant as speedwells in the grass, step from the verge into the pond. They neither paused nor looked back. The water was still. Clear of the shadowy wood, their figures were brightly illuminated. I could see them plain, from the paired chestnut heads to the wooden heels of their sturdy shoes. Beneath, their reflections hung from them, suspended upside down, foot-sole from foot-sole. They stepped on the surface of the water as easily as though it were clear green glass.

1961 (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)

Friday (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)

All the smells in the changing hut were peculiar. Indoor smells were warm – floor-wax, ironed sheets, toast. Outdoor ones were fresh and wet. These fell into neither category. There was the urinous whiff from the rush matting. The tang of creosote. Rubbery smells from bathing caps and the thick soles of sandals. The dusty breath of the high yew hedges, the aura of the overhanging pine trees, which smelt nothing like her father’s pine shaving soap and whose needles covered the ground behind the hut with a carpet which was at once prickly, if an upturned needle spiked your foot, and as silky as vegetable fur.

Nell and her brother came almost every morning. It had to be mornings because by the time they’d digested their lunch the tall trees’ shade had made the unheated pool a rectangle of green-black chill. The pool wasn’t designed for children. There was a coir-sleeved diving board, springy as a catapult, but there was no shallow end. They had to climb in down the metal ladder, goose-bumps rising as the water reached the ruching of Nell’s bathing dress, or Dickie’s matted wool trunks. A clumsy turn and a plop backwards into the inner tubes of car tyres that served them as coracles. Her mother swam up-down, up-down, up-down, but Nell and Dickie just drifted, jack-knifed as though in hammocks, their lips gradually turning blue as their noses burnt pink.

It was quite different when other grown-ups came. Her mother was no distraction. You only noticed your mother when she went away. But when Mrs Rossiter came and sat down beside Mummy on another of the wicker chairs, and got Mr Underhill to bring a tray, and started being amusing (all the grown-ups agreed Mrs Rossiter was amusing), the drift of Nell’s thoughts between the blank sky and the shivering water was obstructed. It was Mrs Rossiter’s pool. It was so kind of her to let them use it. But Nell was beginning to understand, from the way her mother’s voice changed, and from the shoulders-back propriety with which she sat to drink her lemon barley water, that people being kind could make you feel worse rather than better.

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.