Peculiar Ground

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.

*