Peculiar Ground

*

The park was blond. Dry grass, exhausted by summer, lay aslant all one way, like the hair on an animal’s back. At midday the horse-chestnut trees were dark to blackness, the beeches purple. Bleached, the landscape became mineral – shining in shades of jet and copper and silver-gilt. Even the sun was sombre: light this bright and desiccating carried its antithesis within it. Only in the evening, the hour of Christopher’s liberation, would the light soften and waver, as the deer swam silently across the broad rides and the midges trod air above the lakes.

Antony left the noisy group by the pool and walked down, across the terrace, past the canal and on into the severe corridor of the double yew hedge. Halfway along was a trellised arbour with a stone bench and an unsteady wooden table. He sat. Directly opposite him was a gap in the hedge, framing a view of the park. Antony knew what would shortly appear there. He had seen it approaching. And there, sure enough, tightrope walking along the ha-ha’s stone lip, came Jack Armstrong.

This wasn’t a coincidence. He had seen, as he was seen. Seventeen years old, self-absorbed. Thin, slightly round-shouldered, long neck, vulnerable Adam’s apple, copper-coloured hair. He knew Antony was there. He didn’t look round, just paced past heel to toe, slow, arms outstretched for balance, back-lit. There’s a damp look to very young skin, a clamminess which is faintly repellent to all but those who lust after it, and for them, as marvellous as mother-of-pearl. Antony didn’t move. Jack crossed the gap. An interval. Deer fidgeted beneath the horse-chestnut trees in the middle distance. A Land Rover crossed towards the home farm. Antony remained still. Then Jack reappeared, upside down, walking on his hands, almost made it across the gap, arms visibly trembling, tumbled, attempted a somersault, botched it and rolled out of sight with a snort.

Between the cliff of the hedge and the precipice of the ha-ha was a strip of grass, walled with yew on one hand, with nothing but air on the other. Open to the park, concealed from the garden. Antony stood up and walked through the gap: found him.

Helen, walking wet-haired and barefoot along the green corridor, saw Antony go. Inquisitive, she followed onto the grassy ledge. Seeing what had drawn him, she stepped quickly back.

*

After lunch the grown-ups went quiet. Most of them were under the cedar tree, Helen and Antony on rugs, Benjie hogging the swing-seat. In the drawing room Christopher was dozing. Nell came in, silent in her sandshoes, took two pearl-grey damask cushions, and carried them off, as hasty and triumphant as a dog with a stolen cutlet, to the wedge of space between a high-backed sofa and the wall. Stillness. Nell’s small shuffling noises as she made her nest. A book sliding out of Christopher’s hand and down the slope of his thigh. Voices from the tennis court, as inconsequential and tinny as the chattering of mechanical toys. Nearer at hand the peacocks’ screaming, so eerie and yet so familiar to everyone in the household that they heard it not as sound, only as an intensification of atmosphere. In came Nicholas.

‘What’s going to happen?’ asked Christopher, opening his eyes, the rest of him still unmoved.

‘I don’t believe anyone, the main actors included, could tell you.’ Nicholas was leaning against a column, silhouetted against the French window and the deserted lawn. ‘Not a single one of them fully comprehends the possible options.’

‘Do you?’

‘No. But the ones I can think of scare me rigid.’

Like a nanny going off-duty, Nicholas had laid aside his teasing, bustling manner. He talked to Christopher as though continuing a long and searching conversation, even though this was the first time the two of them had spoken to each other directly that weekend.

‘But the bomb?’

‘It’s the tiger at the bottom of the garden and everyone knows the wise course is to leave it be, but everyone is itching to prod it with a stick just to see what happens. And at every point along the way towards whatever kind of climax we’re heading for, it’s possible to say, well, look, it’s all right so far. Until you reach the point where it really isn’t all right. But no one will know where that point is until they’ve passed it.’

‘Kennedy will want to prove how good his nerve is.’

‘Unfortunately.’

‘But what does Khrushchev want?’

‘Dear Christopher, if we knew that . . . Berlin is maddening for the Russians. It’s maddening for everyone. It’s geographical nonsense. For Khrushchev this rush for the exit is a humiliation. It shames him internationally. It weakens him with his own people.’

‘But no one, surely, is going to start chucking atom bombs about because a few thousand Germans want to live in a different part of Germany?’

‘I don’t think the Russians would. Not deliberately. But for most Americans Berlin is just a battlefield in a foreign war they thought they’d won. For them unleashing mayhem there is conceivable precisely because they can’t conceive of its reality.’

Nell lay, arms curled around her knees, imagining herself as round as a snail. In this very room, hiding behind this very sofa, she had heard her mother and Mrs Rossiter talk about atom bombs. Everyone, everyone, everyone in the whole world would die. And all the animals. And no one would ever be born again. Or if they were they’d be peculiar shapes and be so ill they’d just die almost at once. The only thing alive would be grasshoppers. She’d seen a grasshopper in Cornwall. Perhaps the whole world would be like a beach, dead sand and big green things that leapt, and had hard bodies, and horrid tickly legs. She couldn’t believe it. If it was true then why weren’t Mummy and Mrs R crying? She sometimes thought about old people and wondered why they weren’t all crying all the time because they must know they were going to die quite soon. But if everyone . . . The thought was too laborious to complete.

And now Mr Rossiter and Nicholas. They were so quiet and serious. Mr R was often like that, but he always smiled when he talked to her which made him not frightening. But Nicholas frightened her now because it was as though he had been in fancy dress and now he was his real self and all the pretending had been to cover up the awful thing. And they were talking so quietly. She knew she wasn’t supposed to have heard any of this. It was like when she found her uncle dressed as a pirate in Daddy’s dressing room, before her birthday party, and she had spoiled the surprise of the treasure hunt, and he was as embarrassed as she was and she had to go away quickly and pretend she hadn’t seen. Now she had to be not there. She fixed her eyes on the dark-haired angel hanging in the patch of the opposite wall that was all she could see past the sofa’s arm, and lay snail-still.

Christopher was talking now, his voice gentle, as though he was stalking a thought that would bolt if startled.

‘When I was a boy here, my parents used to talk about the invasion. Germans would arrive in the village dressed as nuns, they were saying. Can you imagine how exotic that was? I’d never seen a nun. They were going to drop out of aeroplanes. The Blitz had taught us that anything could fall out of the sky. There was no limit to the ways in which normality could be exploded. I was very much afraid, and at the same time I couldn’t take it seriously. We kept knapsacks packed with clean vests and chocolate, so we could take to the hills. What hills? What were we going to do in them? Our nanny had told us over and over again that you couldn’t live on chocolate.’

‘American schoolchildren are being taught, now, to hide under their desks when the warning comes. Is it kind to suggest there’s any chance of survival, or is it just dishonest?’

A pause.

‘Macmillan believes Khrushchev can be talked down, and Jack and Mac are close,’ said Nicholas.

‘Those Kennedys put ambition before the clan. Remember Joe losing at tennis here? Perfect manners, of course. But he cared dreadfully.’

Of course Nicholas didn’t remember. He would have been a child when Kennedy père was en poste in London, but he refrained from saying so. He liked Christopher’s benign assumption that each one of his acquaintances was acquainted with all the others.

‘Khrushchev is wily. So is Brandt and he thinks he can ride on Kennedy’s coat-tails.’

More names of people she didn’t know. Snail-Nell became a dog and – as dogs do – she slept.

Antony

It transpired that Christopher had expressly invited the Lanes to swim that morning, and Lil rang up and apologised very graciously, and explained that she had been so shaken by seeing the boy in trouble that she had lost her head. I think she really was mortified. She can be spiteful, but humiliating the man in public like that wasn’t her usual style.

By late afternoon everything was affable again. Hugo Lane, with what degree of soreness I couldn’t determine, had returned to the house to make up a tennis four. I met his little girl on the terrace trailing after Mr Green (they seemed to be good companions) as he set off to pick vegetables for dinner. I was curious to see a part of the domain I didn’t know, so I joined their expedition. Green wore corduroys gartered with raffia below the knee but, for all that he looked like an illustration from an Edwardian children’s book, he liked talking motorbikes. I egged him on to expatiate on the rival merits of the Triumph and the BSA (Beezer, he called it) while Nell walked, humming to herself, behind.

The walled garden is a good quarter of a mile from the house. The entrance is all but choked by a fig tree. Green, who likes his peach trees splayed against the walls as though crucified and his strawberry-beds neatly tucked in under veils of tarred netting, is uncharacteristically lax in his treatment of this tree. Figs aren’t easily come by in Oxfordshire: he’s inordinately proud of, and indulgent towards, his enormous green pet. We had to duck under its lowest branches, Nell grabbing a great stubby-fingered hand of a leaf as we passed. Beyond were rows, racks, bamboo canes tied into tepees, pergolas – all sharply angled contraptions, framed by exactly squared-off box hedges at shin-height – all striving ineffectually to contain the voluptuous lollings of vegetation.

Within the high brick walls it was intensely still and hot. There was no view out except upwards to the white sky. The scents were of stagnant water and dried hay and lightly rotted compost. Nell and I stopped by a sprawl of tomato vines and began to pop tiny red fruit into our mouths, where they felt warm, and lightly furred, and autonomously alive. Green’s pain at seeing his babies so devoured was writ large on his face, but so was his awareness that I was privileged and that Nell – at whom he might otherwise have growled – came under the aegis of my guestly protection.

‘Does your father let you wander just anywhere?’ I asked her. I wasn’t looking for information, just filling a pause.

‘I’m with Mr Green. I must always make sure there’s a grown-up who knows where I am. And I mustn’t go swimming on my own. And I mustn’t go upstairs unless Mrs Rossiter asks me to.’

‘And is it lovely coming over to Wychwood?’

The question didn’t seem to mean much. To her, Wood Manor and Wychwood were continuous, the whole domain her home. I wasn’t really paying her much attention, when she said something that compelled it.

‘Daddy and Mrs Rossiter like to talk about grown-up stuff sometimes so it’s good for me to be with Mr Green.’

‘And what about Mr Rossiter and your father?’

‘Um. Well they talk about things I like.’

Hugo Lane was a very good-looking man. I hustled Nell towards some gooseberry bushes and set her to picking me a handful. Hairy semi-transparent jade-green globes full of viscous fluid and little black pips, the germs of life. The hortus conclusus was suffused with carnality now; not pretty fertility symbolism but gross reminders of sex. Was I jealous, and if so, of whom? I didn’t like what I was imagining.

*

The ghostly boy did come to Lil too. She saw Fergus flailing in the pool, and although he resolved himself all but instantaneously into Hugo’s little Dickie, the glimpse opened an oubliette down which she dropped into the blackness of the night he drowned. Hours later, bored on the tennis court, she was still dazed.

She hated playing doubles with an overactive partner. Benjie, pink-faced and surprisingly adroit in his absurd flowery shirt, was leaping about at the net, intercepting the balls that should have given her a chance to demonstrate the elegance of her long passes. Annoying, but useful in that the game granted her a respite from conversation. Lashing out at Hugo like that had been unforgivable. As Flossie’s tennis partner he seemed at ease, gently teasing the girl as she missed one backhand after another, but watchfully helping her out as well. But he was under an obligation to behave, which made it all the worse that Lil had abused her freedom to misbehave with impunity.

Walking back up the avenue, she slowed down to talk to him. Benjie, abandoned mid-anecdote, latched unperturbed onto the only other available audience and went ahead with Flossie.

‘You gave me a fright this morning.’