Peculiar Ground
Peculiar Ground
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
‘One of the best novels of the year so far’ The TimesA SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Unlike anything I’ve read. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful’ Tessa Hadley‘I just enjoyed it so very much’ Philip PullmanIt is the 17th century and a wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate.Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all.Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival by the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and a Great Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall comes down, a fatwa signals a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks safety in Wychwood.From the multi-award-winning author of The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely novel about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love and the pathos of aging, and about how those who wall others out risk finding themselves walled in.
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Copyright (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright 2017 © Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Lucy Hughes-Hallett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images © plainpicture/Melanie Haberkorn
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Map drawn by John Gilkes
‘Don’t Fence Me In’ (from Hollywood Canteen), words and music by Cole Porter © 1944 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORPS. All rights reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC.
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Source ISBN: 9780008126544
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008126537
Version: 2018-01-16
Dedication (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
For my brothers,
James and Thomas,
with love
Epigraph (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
We are a garden walled around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground;
A little spot enclosed by grace
Out of the world’s wide wilderness.
ISAAC WATTS
Contents
Cover (#u03789958-48c1-58eb-bdbe-e0bbf3a795e5)
Title Page (#ua417a75c-75b9-5d22-8250-e43498fd976d)
Copyright (#u62558696-1ab3-5c79-951b-b469eb571f7c)
Dedication (#ucc868b76-4f42-5b6c-85d7-ca0597d57ef0)
Epigraph (#u195c2b43-cdfb-55f1-8251-3f92cef91a65)
Dramatis Personae (#ua8c9b23f-0475-50b5-9dc6-5ad4b879b357)
Map (#u6e5c9ccd-1dca-5b95-840e-b02127e74ae7)
1663 (#u3f9629f2-1f32-5fb1-b85e-da8ca9344ecb)
1961 (#u8d6e2dcd-ab6f-5e23-91ef-b8e0ba47d57a)
Friday (#u557e10b0-bd2f-50d3-bfb2-8a51da28d36a)
Saturday (#ucf4856e2-a080-52b8-9651-12842748bd65)
Sunday (#litres_trial_promo)
1973 (#litres_trial_promo)
June (#litres_trial_promo)
July (#litres_trial_promo)
August (#litres_trial_promo)
1989 (#litres_trial_promo)
September (#litres_trial_promo)
October (#litres_trial_promo)
November (#litres_trial_promo)
1665 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Dramatis Personae (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
1663–1665
John Norris – landscape-maker
Arthur Fortescue, the Earl of Woldingham
The Countess of Woldingham, his wife
Their children – Charles Fortescue, Arthur Fortescue and a little girl
Sir Humphrey de Boinville, brother to Lady Woldingham
Lady Harriet Rivers, Lord Woldingham’s sister
Cecily Rivers, her daughter
Edward
Pastor Rivers – brother to Lady Harriet’s late husband
Another pastor
Robert Rose – architect and comptroller
Meg Leafield
George Goodyear – head forester
Armstrong – ranger
Green – head gardener
Slatter – farm overseer
Underhill – major-domo
Lane – steward
Richardson – apothecary
Lupin, a pug-dog
1961–1989
Living at Wood Manor
Hugo Lane – land agent
Chloe Lane – his wife
Nell – their daughter, aged eight in 1961
Dickie – their son, aged five in 1961
Heather – nanny
Mrs Ferry – cook
Wully, a yellow Labrador, and later his great-nephew, another Wully
Living at Wychwood
Christopher Rossiter – proprietor
Lil Rossiter – his wife
Fergus – their son
Flossie/Flora – Christopher’s niece, aged eighteen in 1961
Underhill – butler
Mrs Duggary – cook
Lupin, a pug-dog, and later another Lupin, also a pug-dog
Grampus, a black Labrador
Visitors
Antony Briggs – art-dealer
Nicholas Fletcher – journalist
Benjie Rose – restaurateur, interior designer, entrepreneur
Helen Rose – his wife, art-historian
Guy – Benjie’s nephew, aged thirteen in 1961
On the estate
John Armstrong – head keeper
Jack Armstrong – his son, aged seventeen in 1961
Doris, Dorabella, Dorian and Dorothy – all spaniels
Green – head gardener
Young Green, his son
Brian Goodyear – head forester
Rob Goodyear, his son
Slatter – farm manager
Meg Slatter – his wife
Bill Slatter – their son
Holly Slatter – Bill’s daughter
Hutchinson – estate clerk
In the village
Mark Brown – cabinet-maker
Nell’s fellow students at Oxford in 1973
Francesca, Spiv Jenkins, Manny, Jamie McAteer, Selim Malik
In London
Roger Bates – wartime military policeman, subsequently in Special Branch
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1663 (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
It has been a grave disappointment to me to discover that his Lordship has no interest – really none whatsoever – in dendrology. I arrived here simultaneously with a pair of peafowl and a bucket full of goldfish. It is galling that my employer takes more pleasure in the creatures than he does in my designs for his grounds.
He is impatient. Perhaps it is only human to be so. He wishes to beautify his domain but he frets at slowness. When we talked in London, and I was able to fill his mind’s eye with majestic vistas, then he was satisfied. But when he sees the saplings reaching barely higher than the crown of his hat he laughs at me. ‘Avenues, Mr Norris?’ he said yesterday evening. ‘These are sticks set for a bending race.’
The idea having once occurred to him, he set himself to realising it. This morning he and another gentleman took horse and, like two shuttles drawing invisible thread, wove themselves at great speed back and forth through the lines of young beeches that now traverse the park from side to side. There was much laughter and shouting, especially as they passed the ladies assembled at the point where the avenues (I persist in so naming them) intersect, the trees forming a great cross which will be visible only to birds and to angels. I confess the gentlemen were very skilful, keeping pace like dancers until, nearing the point where the trees arrive at the perimeter, where the wall will shortly rise, they spurred on into a desperate gallop in the attempt to outdistance each other, and so raced on into a field full of turnips, to the great distress of Mr Slatter.
They are my Lord’s trees, his fields and his turnips. Like Slatter and his muddy-handed cohort, I must acknowledge the licence his proprietorship gives him, but it grieved me inordinately to find that eleven of my charges, my eight hundred carefully matched young beeches, have been damaged, five of them having the lead shoot snapped off. I attended him after dinner and informed him of the need for replacements. ‘Mr Norris, Mr Norris,’ he said. ‘It is hard for you to serve such a careless oaf, is it not?’
He authorised me to send for substitutes. He is not an oaf. Though it pained me, I took delight in the performance of this morning. He incorporated my avenue, vegetable and ponderous, into a spectacle of darting grace. But it is true that I find him careless. To him a tree is a thing, which can be replaced by another thing like it. Is it lunacy in me to feel that this is not so?
We who trade in landskips see the world not as it is but as it will be. When I walk in the park, which is not yet a park but an expanse of ground hitherto not enhanced but degraded by my work in it, I take little note of the ugly wounds where the earth has been heaved about to make banks and declivities to match those in my plan. I see only that the outline has been soundly drawn for the great picture I have designed. It is for Time to fill it with colour and to add bulk to those spare lines – Time aided by Light and Weather. I suppose I should say as well, aided by God’s will, but it seems to me that to speak of the Almighty in these days is to invoke misfortune. It is more certain and less contentious to note that Water also is essential.
*
Of the people who manage this estate my most useful ally has been Mr Armstrong, chief among my Lord’s rangers. For him, I believe, the return of the family is welcome. He is an elderly man, with the hooked nose and abundant beard of a patriarch. He remembers this house when the present owner’s father had it, and he rejoices at the thought that all might now be as it was before the first King Charles was brought down. I think he has not reflected sufficiently on how this country has changed in his lifetime, not only superficially, in that different regiments have succeeded each other, but fundamentally. It is true that there is once more a Charles Stuart enthroned in Whitehall, but the people who saw his father killed, and who lived for a score of years under the rule of his executioners, cannot forget how flimsy a king’s authority has proved.
Armstrong and Lord Woldingham talk much of pheasants – showy birds that were abundant here before the changes. Armstrong would like to see them strut again about the park. He has sent to Norfolk for a pair, and will breed from them. For him, I think, I am as the scenery painter is to the playwright. He is careful of me because I will make the stage on which his silly feathered actors can preen.
For Mr Goodyear, though, I am suspect. He is the curator of all of Wychwood’s mighty stock of timber. The trees are his precious charges. Some of them are of very great antiquity. He talks to them as familiars, and slaps their trunks affectionately when he and I stand conversing by them. I do not consider him foolish or superstitious: I do not expect to meet a dryad on my rambles, but I too love trees more than I care for most men. Goodyear is loyal to his employer, but it seems to me he thinks of those trees as belonging not to Lord Woldingham but in part to himself, his care for them having earned him a father’s rights, and in part to God. (I do not know to which sect he is devoted, but his conversation is well-larded with allusions to the deity.) He is ruddy-faced and hale and has a kind of bustling energy that is felt even when he is still. I will not enquire of him, as I do not enquire of any man, which party he favoured in the late upheavals, but I think him to have been a parliamentarian.
Today I walked with him down the old road that leads through the forest to the spring called the Cider Well. The road is still in use, but very boggy. ‘His Lordship would like to close it,’ said Goodyear. ‘I suppose he may do so if he wishes,’ I said. Goodyear made no reply. I have heard him allude to me as ‘that long lad’. I think he has judged me too young to be competent, and too pompous to be companionable.
Passing the spring, we dropped down into a valley, its mossy sides bright with primroses. The rabbits had already been at work on the new grass beneath our feet, so that the track was pleasant to walk upon.
A woman I had seen before – old but quick of step – was walking ahead of us. Goodyear called to her. She looked back over her shoulder, nodded to him, and then darted aside, taking one of the narrow paths that slant upwards, and vanished among the trees.
‘You know that person?’ I asked.
‘I’d be a poor forester if there were any soul in these woods without my knowledge.’
I ignored his pettish tone. ‘Does she live out here, then?’
‘She does.’
‘I encountered her in the park on Sunday. She made as though she wished to speak to me, but thought better of it.’
‘It’s best so. Don’t let her bother you, sir.’
I let the matter rest and began to talk to him of the plans I have discussed with Mr Rose, the architect. Rose is one of the many Englishmen of our age who, following their prince into exile, have grown to maturity among foreigners. There are constraints between such men and those of us who stayed at home and picked our way through the obstacles our times have thrown up. Rose and I deal warily with each other, but our work goes on harmoniously. In Holland Mr Rose interested himself in the Dutchmen’s ceaseless labours to preserve their country from the ocean to which it rightfully belongs. My Lord calls him his Wizard of Water.
We would build a dam where this pretty valley debouches into a morass, and thereafter a series of further dams. Thus contained and rendered docile, the errant stream will broaden into a chain of lakes. The three upper lakes will lie without the wall, as it were lost in the woods. The last watery expanse will be within the park and visible from the house, a glass to cast back the sun’s light and duplicate the images of the trees clumped about it.
It was as though Goodyear could see at once the prospect I sketched with my words, and soon we were in pleasant conversation. Willows, judiciously positioned, he rightly said, would bind the dams with their roots, and red alders might give shade. The ‘tremble-tree’, he suggested (I understood him to mean the aspen, a species of which I too am fond), ranged along the watery margins, would give a lightness to the picture, and his tremendous oaks, looming on the heights above, will take off the brashness of novelty, so that my lakes will glitter with dignity, like gaudy new-cut stones in antique settings.
How gratifying it would be to me, if I could enjoy such an exchange of ideas with his Lordship!
*
I could wish nutriment were not necessary to the human constitution, but alas, whatever else we be (and my mind swerves, like a wise horse away from a bog-hole, to avoid any thought that smacks of theology), we are indisputably animals, and animals must eat. My situation here is agreeable enough when I am in my chamber. In the drawing room – where Lord Woldingham expects me to appear from time to time – I am less easy. In the great hall where we dine I am wretched.
It is not the food that discommodes me, nor, to be just to the company, the mannerliness with which I am received. I am my own enemy. My self, of which I am pleasantly forgetful at most times, becomes an obstacle to my happiness. I do not know how to present it, or how to efface it. See how I name it ‘it’, as though my self were not myself. My Lord and his friends talk to me amiably enough. But the contrast between the laborious politeness with which they treat me, and the quickness of their wit in bantering with each other is painfully evident.
As I write this, I feel myself to be quite a master of language, so why is it that, in conversation, words fall from my lips as ponderously as dung from a cow’s posterior? I will be the happier when the guests depart, and so, I fancy, may they be. Although the old portion of the house has not yet been invaded by the joiners and masons, the shouting emanating all day long from the wing under construction is an annoyance. And now that the work on the wall has begun, the park is encumbered with wagons hauling stone to every point on its periphery. The quarrymen set to at first light. We wake to the crack of stone falling away from the little cliff, and our days’ employment has as its accompaniment the clangour of iron pick on rock.
One congenial companion I have found. She is a young lady, not staying in the house, but frequently invited to enjoy whatever entertainment is in hand. She came to me boldly outdoors today.
I had been conferring with Mr Green, who is the chief executor of my wishes for the garden. He is, I consider, as worthy of the name of artist as any of the carvers and limners at work on the house – but because he is tongue-tied, those precious gentlemen are apt to treat him as a mere digger and delver. His own men show him the utmost respect.
Those goldfish that so put me out of countenance on my arrival have proved the seeds from which a delightful scheme has sprouted. The stony paving of the terrace is to be bisected by a canal, within whose inky water the darting slivers of pearl and orange and carnation will show as brilliant as the striped petals, set off by a lustrous black background, in the flower-paintings my Lord has brought home with him from Holland.
‘I hear, Mr Norris, you are rationalising Wychwood’s enchanted spring,’ said the lady.
‘You hear correctly, madam. Some small portion of its waters will trickle beneath the very ground on which you now stand. More will feed a fountain in the valley there, if Mr Rose and I can manage it.’
‘But have you appeased the genius loci, Mr Norris? You cannot afford to make enemies in fairyland.’
I was taken aback. I could not but wonder whether she teased. Were she any other young lady I would have been sure of it. But she is as simple in her manner as she is in her dress. Her name is Cecily Rivers.
*
‘I am glad you and my cousin are friends,’ Lord Woldingham said to me this morning as I spread out my plans for him. He is my elder by a decade, and inclined to mock me as though I were a callow boy. We were in the fantastically decorated chamber he calls his office. Looking-glasses, artfully placed, reflect each other there. When I raised my eyes I could not but see the image of the two of us, framed by their gilded fronds and curlicues, repeated to a wearisome infinitude. I, Norris the landskip-maker, in a dun-coloured coat. He, who will flutter in the scene I make for him, in velvet as subtly painted as a butterfly’s wing seen under a magnifying glass.
I do not much like to contemplate my own appearance. To see it multiplied put me out of humour. My Lord’s remark was trying, too. Often when it comes to time for inspecting the plans he finds some conversational diversion. I did not know whom he meant.
‘Your cousin, sir?’
‘My cousin, sir. You can scarcely pretend not to know her. Pacing the lawn with her half the afternoon. I have my eye on you, Norris.’
He made me uneasy. He loves to throw a man off his stride. In the tennis court, which abuts the stables, I have seen the way he will tattle on – this painter is new come to court and he must have him paint a portrait of his spaniel; this philosopher has a curious theory about the magnetism of planetary bodies – until his opponent lets his racket droop and then, oh then, my Lord is suddenly all swiftness and attention and shouting out ‘Tenez garde’ while his ball whizzes from wall to wall like a furious hornet and his competitor scampers stupidly after it.
I had no reason to fumble my words but yet I did so. ‘Mistress Rivers. Your cousin. I did not know of the relationship.’
‘Why no. Why would you, unless she chose to speak of it?’
‘She lives hereby?’
‘Hereby. For most of her life she lived here.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. In this house. Cecily’s mother was not of the King’s party. She stayed and prospered under the Commonwealth while her brother, my father, wandered in exile.’
‘And now . . .’
‘And now the world has righted itself, and I am returned the heir, and my aunt is mad, and her husband is dead, and my cousin Cecily is delightful and though I do not think she can ever quite be friends with me, her usurper, she has made a playmate of you.’
‘Your aunt is . . .’
‘The quickness your mind shows when you are designing hanging gardens to rival Babylon’s, Mr Norris, is not matched by its functioning when applied to ordinary gossip. Yes. My aunt. Is mad. And lives at Wood Manor. Hereby, as you say. And Cecily, her sweet, sober daughter, comes back to the house where she grew up, in order to taste a little pleasure, and to divert her thoughts from the sadness of her mother’s plight.’
I must have looked aghast.
‘Oh, my dear Aunt Harriet is not wild-mad, not frenzied, not the kind of gibbering lunatic from whom a dutiful daughter needs protection. My aunt smiles, and babbles of green fields and is as grateful for a cup of chocolate as one of the papists, of whom she used so strictly to disapprove, might be for a dousing of holy water. I am her dear nevvie. She dotes on me. She forgets that I am her dispossessor.’
It is true that yesterday afternoon Miss Cecily and I walked and talked a considerable while on the lawns before the house. Had I known my Lord was watching us I might not have felt so much at ease.
*
It is Lord Woldingham’s fancy to enclose his park in a great ring of stone. Other potentates are content to impose their will on nature only in the immediate purlieus of their palaces. They make gardens where they may saunter, enjoying the air without fouling their shoes. But once one steps outside the garden fence one is, on most of England’s great estates, in territory where travellers may pass and animals are harassed by huntsmen, certainly, and slain for meat, but where they are free to range where they will.
Not so here at Wychwood. My task is to create an Eden encompassing the house, so that the garden will be only the innermost chamber of an enclosure so spacious that, for one living within it, the outside world, with its shocks and annoyances, will be but a memory. Other great gentlemen may have their flocks of sheep, their herds of deer, but, should they wish to control those creatures’ movements, a thorny hedge or palisade of wattle suffices. Lord Woldingham’s creatures will live confined within an impassable barricade. As for human visitors, they will come and go only through the four gates, over which the lodge-keepers will keep vigil.
Mr Rose took me today to view the first stretch of wall to have been constructed. He is justly proud of it. It rises higher than deer can leap, and is all made of new-quarried stone. When completed, it will extend for upward of five miles.
I said, ‘I wonder, are we making a second Paradise here, or a prison?’
‘Or a fortress,’ said Mr Rose. ‘Our King has had more cause than most monarchs to fear assassins. Lord Woldingham is courageous, but you will see how carefully he looks about him when he enters a room.’
‘His safety could be better preserved in a less extensive domain,’ I said.
‘He craves extension. He has spent years dangling around households in which he was a barely tolerated guest. There were times when he, with his great title and his claim on all these lands, had no door he could close against the unkindly curious, nor even a chair of his own to doze upon. He has been out, as a vagabond is out. Now, it seems, he chooses to be walled in.’
The wall is a prodigy. It will be monstrously expensive, but I am gratified to see what a handsome border it makes for the pastoral I am conjuring up.
*
This has been a happy day. It is never easy to foresee what will engage Lord Woldingham’s interest. I was as agreeably surprised by his sudden predilection for hydraulics as I had been saddened by his indifference to arboriculture. Having discovered it, I confess to having fostered his watery passion somewhat deviously, by playing upon his propensity for turning all endeavour into competitive games.
We were talking of the as-yet-imaginary lakes. I mentioned that the fall of the land just within the girdle of the projected wall was steep and long enough to allow the shaping of a fine cascade. At once he gave his crosspatch of a pug-dog a shove and dragged his chair up to the table. I swear he has never hitherto looked so carefully at my plans.
‘What are these pencilled undulations?’ he asked. I explained to him the significance of the contour lines.
‘So where they lie close together – that is where the ground is most sharply inclined?’ He was all enthusiasm. ‘So here it is a veritable cliff. Come, Norris. This you must show me.’
Half an hour later our horses were snorting and shuffling at the edge of the quagmire where the stream, having saturated the earthen escarpment in descending it, soaks into the low ground. My Lord and I, less careful of our boots than the dainty beasts were of their silken-tasselled fetlocks, were hopping from tussock to tussock. Goodyear and two of his men looked on grimly. If Lord Woldingham stumbled, it would be they who would be called upon to hoick him from the mud.
The hillside, I was explaining, would be transformed into a staircase for giants, each tremendous step lipped with stone so that the water fell clear, a descending sequence of silvery aquatic curtains.
‘And it will strike each step with great force, will it not?’
‘That will depend upon how tightly we constrain it. The narrower its passage, the more fiercely it will elbow its way through. This is a considerable height, my Lord. When the current finally thunders into the lake below it will send up a tremendous spray. Has your Lordship seen the fountain at Stancombe?’
Here is my cunning displayed. I knew perfectly well what would follow.
‘A fountain, Mr Norris! Beyond question, we must have a fountain. Not a tame dribbling thing spouting in a knot garden but a mighty column of quicksilver, dropping diamonds. I have not seen Stancombe, Norris. You forget how long I have been out. But if Huntingford has a magician capable of making water leap into the air – well then, I have you, my dear Norris, and Mr Rose, and I trust you to make it leap further.’
The Earl of Huntingford is another recently returned King’s man. Whatever he has – be it emerald, fig tree or fountain – my Lord, on hearing of it, wants one the same but bigger.
So now, of a sudden, I am his ‘dear’ Norris.
This fountain will, I foresee, cause me all manner of technical troubles, but the prospect of it may persuade my master to set apart sufficient funds to translate my sketches into living beauties. It is marvellous how little understanding the rich have of the cost of things.
‘My master,’ I wrote. How quickly, now the great levelling has been undone, we slip back into the habits of subservience.
*
This morning I walked out towards Wood Manor. I set my course as it were on a whim, but my excursion proved an illuminating one.
The road curves northward from the great house. I passed through a gateway that so far lacks its gate. Mr Rose has employed a team of smiths to realise his designs for it in wrought iron tipped with gold.
The parkland left behind, the road is flanked by paddocks where my Lord’s horses graze in good weather. It is pleasantly shaded here by a double row of limes. Their scent is as heady as the incense in a Roman church. The ground is sticky with their honeydew. The land falls away to one side, so that between the tree-trunks I could see sheep munching, and carts passing along the road wavering over the opposite hillside, and smoke rising from the village. It was the first time for several days, sequestered as I have been, that I had glimpsed such tokens of everyday life. I had not missed them, but I welcomed them like friends.
I became aware that I was followed by an old woman, the same I had now seen twice already. My neck prickled and I was hard put to it not to keep glancing around. I was glad when she overtook me and went hurriedly on down the road.
I had not intended to make this a morning for social calls, but it would have seemed strange, surely, to pass by Miss Cecily’s dwelling without paying my respects. I had told Lord Woldingham, before setting out, that I needed to acquaint myself thoroughly with the water-sources upon his estate. He seemed surprised that I might think he cared how I occupied myself. He was with his tailor, demanding a coat made of silk dyed exactly to match the depth and brilliance of the colour of a peacock’s neck. The poor man looked pinched around the mouth.
The house Lord Woldingham is creating will extend itself complacently upon the earth, its pillars serenely upright, its longer lines horizontal as the limbs of a man reclining upon a bed of flowers. Wood Manor, by contrast, is all peaks and sharp angles, as though striving for heaven. The house must be as old as the two venerable yew trees that frame its entranceway. As I passed between them I saw the sunlight flash. A curious egg-shaped window in the highest gable was swiftly closed. By the time I had arrived at the porch a serving-woman had the door ajar ready for me.
‘Is Miss Cecily at home?’ I asked.
‘You will find her out of doors, sir,’ she said, and led the way across a flagged hall too small for its immense fireplace. An arched doorway led directly onto the terrace. Cecily was there with an elder lady. Looking at the two of them, no one could have been in any doubt that this lady was her mother. The same grey eye. The same long teeth that give Cecily the look (I fear it is ungallant of me to entertain such a thought, but there it is) of an intelligent rodent. The same unusually small hands. Both pairs of which were engaged, as I stepped out to interrupt them, in the embroidery of a linen tablecloth or coverlet large enough to spread companionably across both pairs of knees, so it was as though mother and daughter sat upright together in a double bed. The mother, I noticed, was a gifted needlewoman. The flowers beneath her fingers were worked with extraordinary fineness. Cecily appeared to have been entrusted only with simpler tasks. Where her mother had already created garlands of buds and blown roses, she came along behind to colour in the leaves with silks in bronze and green.
I addressed my conversation to the matron.
‘Madam, I hope you will forgive the liberty I take in calling upon you uninvited. I am John Norris. I have had the pleasure of meeting Miss Cecily at Wychwood. I was walking this way and hoped it would not be inconvenient for you if I were to make myself known.’
She replied in equally formal vein. So I must be acquainted with her nephew. Any connection of his was welcome in her house. She hoped I enjoyed the improved weather. No questions asked. No information divulged. The maid brought us glasses of cordial while we played the conversational game as mildly and conventionally as a pair of elderly dogs, in whom lust was but a distant memory, sniffing absent-mindedly at each other’s hinder parts. But then she demonstrated that she could read my mind.
‘I suppose young Arthur has told you that I am deranged? You will be puzzled to find me so lucid.’
Cecily murmured something, but the older lady persevered. ‘He tells everyone so. He has reasons for the assertion. One is that there is some truth in it. My mind’s eye sees the world’s affairs in a manner as blurred and uncertain as that with which my corporeal eyes see that tree. Fine needlework, as you observe, I am good for, but for keeping a lookout I am useless. And although in cheerful sunlight like this I can be as bright as the day, in dark hours I grow dull.’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ I began awkwardly. She didn’t pause.
‘So you see, judging that to lie unnecessarily is to lay oneself open to exposure when one could be safely armoured in truth, he broadcasts an opinion that is not quite a falsehood, and under this cover he hides his other purposes.’ Her voice trailed away.
Cecily laid down her needle and took her mother’s hand.
‘Mr Norris cannot be as concerned with our affairs as we are, Mother,’ she said. ‘He is an artist. A maker of landscapes.’
‘A painter?’
I explained that, no, the kind of picture I make is not the representation of a scene, but the scene itself. That while God makes countryside, man refines it into landscape (an audacious joke, but one I thought I could allow myself in this secluded place). That nature and the unnatural make happy partners, and flourish when coupled. I said that those painters who depict what they call pastoral scenes seldom or never show brambles or stinging nettles or the mud churned up on a riverbank by herds of beasts. Their pastorals are all artifice, their pastures in fact gardens.
I was becoming excessively wordy. It is mortifying to know, as I do all too well, that when I talk with greatest satisfaction, expatiating on a subject that truly engages me, then I am most tedious. Becoming self-conscious, I fell quiet.
‘Mother,’ said Cecily, ‘you are tired. Mr Norris would like to see our orchard, I dare say.’
The lady appeared sprightly still, but she acquiesced. ‘Lead him to it then, and show him.’
I would truly have welcomed the opportunity to inspect the orchard, which was admirably well set out. I was struck by the fireplaces inserted into a wall, which I fancied must have been of double thickness, with a cavity which could thus be filled with heated air. So peaches and apricocks could lean against warm brick, even when the untrustworthy English sun had failed to shine upon them. This ingenious arrangement was a novelty to me. I would have liked to give it my full attention, but as soon as we were within the enclosure, Cecily turned.
‘I wonder how much Lord Woldingham has spoken to you of me.’
‘Very little, but to say that Wychwood was your home while he was abroad.’
‘Our home yes, but always his house. My parents were not his usurpers. They were his stewards while, for his safety, he could not be with us.’
My eyes, which I believed to be shaded by the brim of my hat, dwelt with pleasure on a blossoming tree. Damson, Damascenum, if I was not mistaken. This family’s divisions formed a familiar tale. Barely a household in the land has not been so cut up. I wondered why she was so eager to take me into her confidence.
‘But he spoke of my mother?’
‘He did, and forgive me for repeating what may distress you, but she is correct in supposing that he told me that her wits had failed.’
‘She is also correct in saying that his motives for so speaking of her are several. That there is a smidgeon of truth in the allegation, she openly accepts, as you have heard. Many people of her age are forgetful. She is no longer so ready as she once was to apprehend new ideas. At night she is sometimes seized by unreasonable fears, and her distress then is painful . . .’
A tiny hesitation. I thought she had meant to say ‘painful to witness’, but had silenced herself for fear of seeming to complain.
I said, ‘She seems as gracious a lady now as she ever must have been.’ I was greatly pleased to see that someone had thought to underplant the apple trees with anemones, so that the blush of the blossom’s fat petals was counterpoised by the blue fringe of the little ground-flowers’ raggedy show.
‘Lord Woldingham is not quite the person he pretends to be. He is considerate.’
I bowed my head slightly. It was not for me to discuss my employer’s qualities with a connection of his.
‘I think that when he asked my mother to remove herself and her daughter from Wychwood, he pacified his own conscience and the opinion of those around him with a pretence that she was incapable. She needed absolute tranquillity, he said, and he could grant her this old manor as a refuge. His wife did not want another mistress in the great house.’
I have so far encountered Lady Woldingham only fleetingly, in London. I would gladly have asked for Cecily’s impressions of her, but we were not under-servants to gossip about those set above us.
‘Now he sustains the myth of her incapacity for another reason. It is a shield for us.’
She had my attention. I would like to have understood her. But we were interrupted. The old woman who had seemed to follow me came through the wicket that led from the orchard out onto a paddock and thence to the woods. A boy, delicate-featured, accompanied her, carrying a basket. Cecily went to her and took her hand.
‘Meg, this is Mr Norris,’ she said. ‘It is he of whom I spoke. He who would make lakes with the well-water.’
The other spoke no word, but regarded me intently.
Soon thereafter Miss Rivers indicated that my visit should be concluded. As I walked away I saw her and Meg pacing, heads together, beneath the fruit trees. The boy was swinging by his hands from an apple bough. It pained me to observe that Cecily walked quite needlessly over a patch of grass where I had noticed the glistening spears of coming crocuses. How many purple-striped beauties must have been crushed prematurely by the wooden sole of her clog!
*
This morning I found myself, unintentionally, spectator to an affecting scene.
The room that serves me as an office overlooks the yard. In times to come, carriages will set visitors down before the new portico. That they will enter the house through an antechamber shaped like a Grecian temple is not, to my mind, Mr Rose’s happiest notion. For the present, though, they come clattering in the old way, by the stables, so that the horses’ convenience is better served, perhaps, than that of the persons they transport.
A din of wheels on cobblestones and the shouting of grooms. I went to the window. A great number of chests and bundles were being lowered from the carriage’s roof. Only the luggage, then, I thought, and made to return to my writing desk, when a man ran across the yard below in a state of undress that shocked me. A footman run amuck. But no, the shirt flapping out of his breeches was fine, its billowing sleeves trimmed four inches deep with lace. The stockings in which he darted so noiselessly over the paving were silken; the breeches, scarce buttoned, were of a lavender hue with which I was familiar, but not from seeing them on a servant’s shanks. That shaven head, that I had never before seen unwigged, bore on its front a face I knew. By the time I had identified him, Lord Woldingham was down on his knees on the cobbles and three small children were climbing him as though he was a rigged ship, and they the midshipmen. He was laughing and snatching at them and in a trice the whole party had tumbled over in a heap. Various bystanders – whom I took to include nurse and nursemaids, governor and tutors – remonstrated and smiled by turns. And all the while the grooms kept on with their work, seeing to the horses and unloading the carriage with an almighty bustle.
The children and their sire had only just righted themselves, and begun to shake off the straw tangling in their hair, when half a dozen riders trotted into the yard. Lord Woldingham turned from his little human monkeys and stood a-tiptoe, until his wife was lifted down from the back of a dappled grey. My Lady is scarce taller than the eldest boy, very pale and small-featured. He could have picked her up and swung her in the air, as he had done to the children, but he was now all decorum. He bowed so gracefully that one hardly noticed the absence of plumed hat from hand, or buckled shoe from foot. I could not see the lady’s face clear, but it seemed to me she made no reference, by smile or frown, to his scandalous appearance, but simply held out a hand, with sweet gravity, for him to kiss.
*
I walked out after breakfast with Mr Rose, at his request, to prospect for a suitable site for an ice-house. In Italy, he tells me, the nobility build such houses, in shape like a columbarium, for the preservation of food.
A broad round hole is made in the ground. It is lined with brick and mortared to make it watertight, and a dome built over it with but a narrow entranceway, so that it looks to a passerby like a stone bubble exhaled by some subterranean ogre. The chamber is filled to ground-level with blocks of ice brought from the mountains in covered carts insulated with straw. Even in the fiery Italian summers, says Rose, the ice is preserved from melting by its own coldness. So the exquisites of Tuscany can enjoy chilled syrups all summer long. Better still, shelves and niches are made all around the interior walls of the dome, and there food can be kept as fresh as in the frostiest winter.
I was inclined to scoff at the notion. We are not Italian. We have neither mountain ranges roofed with snow, nor summers so sultry that a north-facing larder will not suffice to keep our food wholesome. Mr Rose took no offence, saying jovially, ‘Come, Norris. The air is sweet and my poor lungs crave a respite from plaster-dust. You will wish to ensure my stone beehive is not so placed as to ruin one of your fine views.’
He plays me adroitly. At the mention of a vista I was all attention. My mind running away with me, as it has a propensity to do, in pursuit of a curious likeness, I was picturing his half-moon of a building, rising pleasantly from amidst shrubs as a baby’s crown emerges from the flesh of its dam. Or I would perhaps surround it with cypresses, I thought, if they could be persuaded to thrive so far north. Then this humble food-store could make a show as pleasing as the ancient tombs surviving amidst greenery upon the Roman campagna.
(I let that last sentence stand, but note here, in my own reproof, that I have not seen the campagna, or any of Italy. I must guard myself from the folly of those who seek to appear cosmopolitan by alluding to sights of which they have but second-hand knowledge. The Roman campagna is to me an engraving, seen once only, and a fine painting in the drawing room here, whose representation of the landscape is doubtless as questionable as its account of its inhabitants. If the picture were to be believed, these go naked, and many of them are hoofed like goats.)
Mr Armstrong found the two of us around midday. He rapidly grasped the little building’s usefulness for the storage of meat and, accustomed as he is to lording it over his underlings, began to give Mr Rose orders as to where he should place hooks for the suspension of deer carcasses or pairs of rabbits. ‘Once you’ve made us that round house, Mr Rose,’ he said, with the solemnity of a monarch conferring a knighthood, ‘we’ll eat hearty all year.’
He kept rubbing his hands together. It is his peculiar way of expressing pleasure. I have seen him do it when the two fowl – the Adam and Eve of his race of pheasants – arrived safely in their hamper after traversing the country on mule-back. Already his inner ear hears the rattling of wing-feathers and the crack of musket shot. He fought for the King. The scar that traces a line from near his cheekbone, over jaw and down into his neck, tells how he suffered for it. It is curious how those who have been soldiers seek out the smell of gunpowder in time of peace. Most of the keenest sportsmen I know have experience of battle.
‘Have you anything in your pocket worth the showing?’ asked Rose. The question seemed impertinent, but Armstrong gave an equine grin. His back teeth are all gone, but those in front, growing long and yellow, make his smile dramatic. He reached into the pouch, from which he had already drawn a pocket-knife and a yard-cord for measuring, and, opening his palm flat, showed three small black coins. It came to me that it was for the sake of this moment that he had sought out our company. Rose took one up daintily, holding it by its edges as though it were a drawing he feared to smudge. ‘Trajan,’ he said, ‘Traianus,’ and he sounded as happy as I might be on finding a rare orchid in the wood. ‘Silver.’ He and Armstrong beamed at each other, then both at once remembered their manners and turned to me.
‘Mr Norris,’ it was Armstrong who spoke first. ‘If you can give us more of your time, we’ll show you what lies beyond those lakes of yours.’
‘Yes, come,’ said Rose. ‘We have been much at fault in not letting you sooner into our secret. Mr Armstrong and I are by way of being antiquaries.’
The two of them led me at a spanking pace down to the marshy low ground where the last of the lakes will spread and uphill again through bushes until we were on the slope opposing the house, and standing on a curiously humped plateau raised up above the mire.
It was as though I had been given new eyes. I had been in this spot before, but had seen nothing. This mass of ivy was not the clothing of a dead tree, but of an archway, still partially erect. Those heaps of stone were not scattered by some natural upheaval. They are the remains of a kind of cloister, or courtyard. This smoothness was not created by the seeping of water. Armstrong and Rose together took hold of a mass of moss and rolled it back, as though it were a feather-bed, and there beneath was Bacchus, his leopard-skin slipping off plump effeminate shoulders, a bunch of blockish grapes grasped in hand, all done in chips of coloured stone.
We were on our hands and knees, examining the ancient marvel, when we were interrupted.
‘Oh Mr Rose, shame on you for forestalling our pleasure! I have been anticipating the moment of revelation this fortnight.’ Lord Woldingham was there, and others were riding up behind him. Servants walked alongside a cart. There were baskets, and flagons, and, perched alongside them, three boys and a little moppet of a girl – Lord Woldingham’s offspring and the boy I had seen at Wood Manor.
‘Here are ladies come to see our antiquities. And here are scholars to enlighten us as to their history.’ Lord Woldingham was darting amongst the horses. As soon as the groom had lifted one of the ladies down, he would be there to bow and flutter and lead her to the expanse of grass where I was standing, the best vantage point for viewing the mosaic. I would have withdrawn, but Cecily Rivers detained me. It is as gratifying as it is bewildering to me to note that she seeks out my company. I am accustomed to being treated here as one scarcely visible, but her eyes fly to my face.
‘So Mr Norris,’ she said, ‘you have discovered our heathen idol? I told you this valley had supernatural protection.’
‘You spoke of fairies, not of Olympians.’
‘Do you not think they might be one and the same? Our one, true and self-avowedly jealous God obliges all the other little godlings to consort together. Puck and Pan are mightily similar. And this gentleman, with his vines and his teasel, is he not an ancient rendering of Jack in the Green?’
‘The thyrsus,’ I said, ‘resembles a teasel in appearance, but the ancients tell us it was in fact made up of a stalk of fennel and a pine cone.’
She laughed. Of course she did. I was afraid of the freedom with which her mind ranged, and took refuge in pedantry. A dark-haired gentleman in a russet-coloured velvet coat came up. She turned, and I lost her to him. I believe he is my Lady’s brother.
Rose beckoned me away. ‘We’ll leave them to their fête,’ he said. Armstrong remained and I could see, glancing backwards, that he was displaying the Roman pavement as proudly as though he had made it himself.
*
This morning my Lord’s eldest son was drowned. The boy and his brother were playing around the quagmire where lately the father and I had wallowed in mud. He slipped in water barely deep enough to reach his ankle-bone, if upright. He toppled face forward, wriggled round to rise, and in so doing thrust his sky-blue-coated shoulder so deep into the slime it would not release him. He died silently, while the other child whooped and shouted. How great a change can be effected in a paltry minute. The littler boy had made a slide at the base of what will be the cataract. Governor and tutors, seeing how he might so precipitate himself into the ooze, rushed to forestall him. And so the cadet was saved, at mortal cost to the heir. He fell unwatched.
A forester, perilously perched halfway up one of the distant ring of elms, ready to hack off a branch shattered by last winter’s storms, saw him lie, and shouted down to his mate, who began to race down the slope, his arms flailing as he leapt over clumps of broom and young bracken. He was wailing like the banshee; words, in his horror, forsaking him. Desperate to save, he increased the danger. Those near enough to where the poor boy lay to have helped him, looked not towards him, but at the man hurling himself so crazily downhill. So seconds were lost, and so the mud seeped into the little fellow’s mouth and nostrils and stoppered up his breath.
When I saw them clambering over their sire two days ago I thought I was looking at happiness.
Lady Woldingham sits by her dead boy as still and quiet as though the calamity had rendered every possible action otiose. The other children are brought to her from time to time, when their nurses despair of stilling their howls. She looks at them as though glimpsing them dimly, across an immense dark moor. To what purpose speech, in the face of such grief?
I cannot bear to come anywhere near my Lord.
*
The guests have all gone. They will return for young Charles Fortescue’s funeral, but yesterday they started up and fluttered away with a unanimity to match that of a murmuration of starlings. I would that I could do the same.
Ten years ago it was a common thing to see how, when a man’s brother or father was accused, that person’s friends would seem not to notice him when he passed by in the street. One would fuss with the fastening of a glove rather than catch his eye when it came to choosing where to seat oneself in the coffeehouse. Then I thought that we were all cowards, but prudent with it. When a country has been at war with itself every citizen has a multitude of reasons to fear exposure – exposure of miscreancy, but exposure also of those actions which might at the time of their performance have seemed most honourable. Now I think that the shrinking from those marked by misfortune was not the ephemeral outcome of civil war. It was not only that we feared spies and informers. There is something appalling about misfortune itself.
The tribulations of others are our trials. By our response to them we shall be judged, and I fear that, awkward as I am, it is a trial I am bound to fail.
It is less than a week since I wrote in these pages that Lord Woldingham was careless. I thought him boisterous and gay. I made of him a benevolent despot who would fill this house with colour and bustle. I mocked him, just a little, and so timidly that even I could not hear myself do it. I was like a child who thinks his parents omnipotent, and so licenses himself to jeer at them, and then is terrified to see them cry.
There was crying aplenty yesterday, but not from him.
He had not sent for me. But I knew that, however irksome he found my attendance, to stay away from him longer would prove me inhuman.
I found black clothes. Not difficult for me – my wardrobe is sober. When I judged that Lord Woldingham would have breakfasted, and might be walking out in the garden, with his dog Lupin waddling behind, I prepared to encounter him there.
As I stepped out of my room I all but knocked down a maid whose hand was already lifted to beat upon the door. It wasn’t until I looked at the note she handed me that I knew where I had seen her before – at Wood Manor. Cecily apologised for making so peremptory a request but asked me to come at once, and discreetly. My uncertain resolution to offer my condolences to my employer was laid aside in an instant.
There is a horse provided for my use. I told the groom I might be out a considerable while. I am not a confident horseman, but I asked the cob to hurry, and, heavily built as she is, she obliged with a pace that quite alarmed me. She made her way to Wood Manor almost without my guidance. Cecily was waiting in the entrance hall, and led me at once to a small room where the woman Meg sprawled on the rushes in a corner, bundled in a cloak, her head thrown back against the distempered wall, her eyes closed.
‘She has been set upon,’ said Cecily. ‘They chased her with dogs.’
‘Is she hurt?’
‘I think only very much afraid. She is prone to fits. Perhaps she has had one. Our man found her and saw off her assailants and brought her here across his saddle.’
‘I am no physician.’
‘Mr Richardson will be here shortly. But it is not only medicine we need. My cousin’s men harass her and her companions, but I do not think he knows it.’
We stood in the centre of the room, speaking urgently and low.
‘If he is informed, he will surely discipline them.’
‘Today is not . . .’
She was right. I too shrank from the idea of pestering him in his grief. But there was a worse reason for Cecily’s hesitation.
‘They say she killed the boy.’
I began to protest at such idiocy, and then recalled that I myself have been afraid of Meg.
‘But he died surrounded by his attendants. The woodcutters, the other children. So many people were present. Not a one has said that she was there.’
‘They say she can kill with a wish.’
The woman moaned, and a little blood ran from the corner of her mouth. The room smelt of last year’s apples. The sole window was veiled with cobwebs, and kept tight shut. We were as though imprisoned.
‘My mother too. They call the two of them weird sisters.’
I am a man of reason. I live in a nation that has been riven by doctrinal disputes for more than a century. I have listened to temperate, kindly disposed people swear that they will never again feel any affection for a brother, or a friend, because that other holds an opinion they cannot share as to what precisely takes place when the priest mumbles over the wafer of a Sunday morning. I am not an atheist. I marvel, as any natural philosopher must, at the intricate and ingenious thing the world is. But I am sure that, whatever the Creator may be, no human conception of him can be incontrovertibly right. Bigotry is abhorrent to me. But worse even than the intolerance of churches (and chapels, and conventicles) is the frenzy of the weak when fear drives them to blame their fellow beings for the catastrophes which lie in wait for us all.
‘I had thought that that madness was passed by.’
Cecily seemed to be holding herself upright with a great effort. ‘Meg’s teacher was called a witch, and ducked, and died of it.’
‘Before the wars, surely.’
‘There are many who remember it.’
‘But your mother. No one would presume. Lady Harriet is not the kind to be suspected of witchcraft.’
Cecily gestured irritably, a mere twitch of her hand. ‘Witchcraft is a meaningless word. A mere pretext. This is because my mother and Meg both worship in the forest.’
I had no idea what she meant. She didn’t deign to help me.
‘We cannot wait. Go to my cousin and tell him what is being said. Say that my mother is in danger. Here is Mr Richardson. Go quickly.’
In her nature playful gentleness and a tendency to be dictatorial are most oddly combined. I bowed myself out quite sulkily, as the apothecary was ushered quickly into the little room from which I had just been summarily expelled.
My Lord received me calmly, albeit his face looked blurred, as though he had been roughly handled in the night. I delivered my condolences, to which he made only perfunctory answer, and my message, which he seemed to understand more clearly than I did. There ensued much galloping about. A carriage was sent. Lady Harriet, complaining feebly, was brought back with her daughter and ensconced in one of the recently vacated guest-chambers. Her maid came after on a cart. Meg was carried in, still as in a dead faint, with Mr Richardson attending, and laid among cushions on a settle in my Lord’s study.
Lord Woldingham gave orders that all the estate workers should be called together on the grass patch before the house. Once a sizeable crowd had gathered, he took his hat and went out to them, I following along with the people of the household. All in black, he looked oddly reduced.
‘You know that I have suffered a great loss. I speak now to all of you, to those who knew me when I was an infant in this place, and to those who have shared my exile. I have been away a long time. But do not suppose that Wychwood was ever left behind me.
‘We have all observed, from conversing with our grandparents and other elders, that the very first impressions are the most deeply inscribed. Even one who can scarce remember whether it be time to rise or to go to bed will marvel at a butterfly seen half a century ago. Another asks fondly after a dog who died before our King’s father came to the throne, even if he cannot recollect the latter end of that unhappy monarch.
‘I am not yet in my decline, but I assure you that many of the dreary days of exile have been erased from my mind, while pictures from my first three years, passed in this very house, have comforted me in my absence. Yesterday morning my boys were playing with a wooden ark they found in their nursery. I have gone so far, and my homeward course has meandered so unconscionably, it seemed a miracle to see the little dents in the rump of the wooden elephant. It is a marvel that the mind can sling a bridge across so sad a gulf of time, and yet I tell you all that as I handled the toy I could feel again the pleasure with which, as a child, I bit down on that piece of painted wood.
‘The milk-teeth that made those little wounds are shed, but the jaw in which those teeth grew is here’ (at this he tossed back the curled tresses of his long wig as though presenting his throat to be cut). ‘You have yet to know me, but I am one of you. One of the men of Wychwood.’
This was not at all what the assembled listeners had come to hear. A man loses his child, and then alludes to the boy only in passing, as an unnamed player in a scene with an inanimate toy. It seemed as though my Lord had no heart. What did they care about the vagaries of memory? They had expected him to display his mourning to them. The women, especially, appeared downright offended.
This opening, though, was but the overture. Having tuned his instrument, Lord Woldingham launched abruptly into a lament as ardent as the divine Orpheus’s. ‘I have lost a child. Not for the first time. My firstborn left this life, when he himself had barely glimpsed it, before I could ever see him, ever touch him. I was so far away. But my Charles who died yesterday was near to me. My wife brought him to me in Holland, and from thenceforward it was as though I, who had been homeless, had a home. Father and mother can build a house, but it is no more than a shelter from bad weather until a child runs through it. I used to walk by a pond near to my lodging at The Hague, and I thought it dreary. Then this boy came, and chuckled to see the geese come splashing down on the muddy water, and the unlovely mere became delightful. I am thankful that I have two babes yet. But just as a parent’s love is big enough to embrace every child that comes, so it will never shrink to cover over the wound left where one of those precious ones is missing.’
People were glancing up at the windows of my Lady’s apartments on the first floor, but there was nothing to see there.
‘I have been a child in this place, and so have many of you. I have lost a child here. Many of you will have had private cause to grieve over the clashes of our country’s unhappy recent history. You will know, as I do, how it is to mourn. Some of you have already offered me your sympathy. I thank you. Others have held back discreetly. I thank you too.’
He was speaking very smoothly and soberly. I noticed Mr Goodyear looking at him with an appraising air, but not unkindly. I have heard that Goodyear is a bard, whose storytelling has made him a known man in this region.
My Lord proceeded. ‘Some among you have said most generously that they would do anything possible to alleviate the sadness of this time. There is something I would ask of you.
‘A woman has been brought to this house today grievously ill. She has been so frightened and harassed that her mind has become a blank. I do not know whether she will ever revive from this strange vacancy. She is Meg Leafield. She has been a faithful servant of this family, and I would have had her treated with respect as one of my own. Some of you may have imagined you were performing my secret wish in troubling her. I declare most roundly that that belief was mistaken.
‘I am no sectarian. It is my wish, as it is His Majesty the King’s – and he is wise in this – that we should put aside our quarrels and strive to make this a peaceful nation, whose people are united in their desire to see their country prosper.’
The peacock was crossing the elevated lawn behind the assembled listeners. Its attention caught by the gathering beneath it, it interrupted its gawky pavane and turned in our direction. Very slowly, with a loud dry rattling of quill upon quill, it elevated its showy panoply of tail-feathers – green, bronze, purple, black and tawny, all metallic and glinting, a sumptuous medley setting off the blue of the creature’s throat as an immense brocaded skirt shows off the jewel-coloured satin of a stomacher.
Lord Woldingham has longed to see this. I have observed him with Mr Armstrong, one whole afternoon, following the bird around, attempting to interest it in its mate, or in some tidbit or other, in a vain attempt to persuade it to perform the trick for which it had been purchased. Now, as it turned itself this way and that, as though set upon compelling admiration, I wondered whether it would cheer him, or throw him from his intent.
He ignored it. He was saying, ‘I do not enquire into the niceties of your relationships with our Maker. Worship in church or chapel, with vicar or presbyter, or with a wayside preacher whose pulpit is the hedge. It is all one to me, so long as you treat each other with civility. Those of you who have been long abroad, as I have, may have a quarrel with some of our fellows who have flourished here. I say put those quarrels aside. We want no vengeance, no hunting down, no settling of scores. I have heard it said that to make peace with an opponent is shameful and unmanly. I say it is an honourable thing, a wise and benevolent thing, a thing on which God, however you may imagine him, will smile.’
‘I applaud our employer’s breadth of mind,’ murmured a voice in my ear. ‘Surely, though, to speak of “imagining” the divinity is over-bold.’ It was Mr Rose. I was surprised at his addressing me in such an insinuating tone. I dislike whisperers. I nodded, but didn’t turn my head.
Now Lord Woldingham’s rumblings gave way to a thunderclap. He strode through the crowd, and mounted the plinth I have had prepared ready for the ancient marble figure of Flora, which is making its way towards us by painfully slow degrees. My Lord’s agent in Rome purchased it there. Now it is creeping along the canals of France, drawn by huge shaggy-heeled horses. Some time this summer, it will make the dangerous crossing to these shores before being heaved aboard another barge to float upstream to us here. The stone nymph will be twice the height of Lord Woldingham, whose quickness of movement and forcefulness can lead one to forget that he is, in person, just a wisp of a man. But on the plinth, his funereal satins lustrous in the sun, he seemed as darkly substantial as the improbably gigantic bronze mastiffs recently set up as guardians of Wychwood’s new front door. The assembled people had stepped nervously aside to let him pass; now they swivelled to see him again. The sun was in their eyes; he a silhouette against a background of white sky. For the first time he raised his voice.
‘A harmless, helpless woman has been ill-treated here. Shame on you. A member of my own family, to whom you all owe deference, has been slandered. More shame upon you. There has been nonsensical babble of witchcraft. We are not savages, to give credence to such piffle. My son is dead and you foul the pure grief of his family with superstitious blatherings. Let me hear no more of this. Those of you who have frightened Meg Leafield will come to me and explain yourselves. Lady Harriet is my aunt, and my honoured guest. When she pleases to return to Wood Manor, she goes under my protection. Any man or woman who breathes a word against her makes an enemy of me.’
He stood silent for upwards of a minute. No one fidgeted or uttered a word. When he stepped down he did so deliberately, and walked back into the house with the demeanour of one following a coffin, but that his eyes were turned, not to the earth, but upwards as though defying the gloomy clouds to rain upon him.
I went to my office and occupied myself with new sketches for the parterre. Seeing my Lord so elevated had brought home to me how the proportions of the terrace will appear altered once Flora queens it over the space. The eye must be led to her, and the flowerbeds must seem to flow out from her, the bringer of flowers.
*
I am as much a fool as that ridiculous peacock. The fowl, disdaining its proper mate, has become enamoured of one of the garden boys. The display it made for us all yesterday was an attempt to catch the youth’s attention. It follows him around with pathetic constancy.
He was at work in the rose garden as I set off for my walk this afternoon. As he spread horse-dung on the beds (not all of a gardener’s tasks are fragrant), the amorous bird was on the pavement alongside him, its cumbersome fan extended, turning very slowly, first to one side and then to another, as though imploring him to notice how the vari-coloured filaments in its plumage flared and changed in the shifting light.
The boy, who is very young, is being plagued by the others’ teasing. I think he hardly understands the game of love yet.
I walked out towards Wood Manor and had a happy encounter. I have had much to think about these past hours – sad matters for the most part. Yet, as I write these words, I find myself absurdly gay.
*
I will allow yesterday’s entry to stand. At least it is evidence that I am sensible of my folly. There is no dishonour in loving an admirable woman, so long as I refrain from pestering her with my suit.
What seems to me now most reprehensible is that my pre-occupation with things private to myself makes me negligent of my employer’s grief. Lovers, it is rightly said, are solipsistic imbeciles.
Wychwood sitting nearly on the summit of a low hill, the land falls away from it on three sides. To the west, a set of ancient stone steps leads down to a sunken lawn, cupped by steep banks and floored with violets. This was a pond once, made by Romans perhaps, or by the monks who had a dwelling here after the Romans had gone. Mr Green tells me that when his men were levelling the ground they found a rubble of petrified sods within which time and decay had drawn the skeletons of ancient fishes. The tiny bones had dematerialised to leave an effigy of themselves made of nothingness, a vacuity which might, had the gardeners’ spades not chopped them up, have survived, insubstantial and indestructible as the soul is to a true believer, for ever and ever, amen.
I walked there this afternoon. Lupin the pug snuffled about me. When he saw me take my hat and open the door to the garden he came scuttling bowlegged down the corridor to join me, his claws clicking on the flagstones.
The world being full of graceful creatures, it puzzles me why the ugly should be so prized. After I had paced with Lupin half an hour, though, I found myself touched by the fortitude with which he bears the deficiencies of his bodily design. His walk is an ungainly waddle. His skin was made for a being twice his size and bunches around his neck like an ill-fixed ruff. He snorts and grunts, half suffocated. As he struggles for breath, liquid trickles from his nose, and he laps it up with a busy and repulsive action of his tongue, the only neat thing about him.
I was meditating on the capriciousness of Providence, which kills a likely boy too young, and allows the survival of another being so evidently unfit, when I was struck hard at the back of my right knee.
The blow felled me. Half recumbent on the grass, I looked around and could see no sign of my assailant. Kneeling beside me, clucking and fidgeting with my waistcoat buttons, was old Meg. I am ashamed to admit I pushed her back roughly. The pain in my knee was sharp, but I was more shaken by the force of my fall. My previous reverie continued ad absurdum. How much more stable our posture would be, I thought groggily, had we four legs. In this respect Lupin was my superior. Balancing precariously on only two vertical supports, my body – when one of those supports was knocked out from under me – had lapsed to the horizontal with a most unpleasant thump.
Two people shot out of the thicket on the far side of the lawn. One was the boy I had previously seen with Meg. The other was Mr Rose, hatless, and demonstrating that a round belly is no diminisher of agility.
Rose shouted, ‘Are you hurt, Mr Norris?’
He caught the boy and hugged him from behind. The two swayed like wrestlers, the boy’s feet kicking. Meg went to them, met Rose’s eye deliberately and spat on his shoe. He let his arms fall limp. The boy sat sullen where he had dropped.
‘He threw that stone,’ Rose said to me.
He was looking past Meg as though she were of no account. She slapped his face. I was astonished to see him flinch like a chastened scholar. When last I had heard of her, she was lying insensible. Now she was articulate.
‘One boy dead, and you bullying another,’ she said. She tied her shawl crosswise over her chest and returned to my side. She lifted from the ground, not a stone, but a sphere of solid wood, finely turned, about the bigness of an apple and painted blue.
‘The gentlemen give him farthings to find their balls for them, and fling them back,’ she said, addressing me as though we were old acquaintances. ‘That a child should have to pick up toys for grown men!’ There were iron hoops set here and there about the lawn, and mallets propped against a bench.
I sat, then stood. I said to the boy, ‘Men are not rabbits, to be shied at.’ He looked up at me through his hair and I had a shock. His face was that of Lord Woldingham’s deceased son.
Mr Rose approached, stroking the round hat he had retrieved from a bramble. He shook his head at Meg and came to inspect my injury. The damage to my stockings was greater than that to my person. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. He bent and murmured to Meg, and passed on up towards the house.
I turned to the old woman and addressed her formally. ‘Mistress Leafield,’ I said, ‘I have wondered about you. This mishap has at least had the advantage of making us known to each other.’
We hobbled together, I leaning on her shoulder, to a stone bench. There, with Lupin and the boy growling at each other on the ground beneath us, she explained herself, and other things beside.
She was playmate to Lady Harriet, and to my Lord’s father, when they were all infants, because she was their wet-nurse’s child. She stayed with Lady Harriet, studying alongside her. ‘My Lady is an artist,’ she said. ‘You have seen it. The rich don’t honour silk-workers as they do paint-workers, but artists know their own. Mr Rose has the greatest respect for her. He brings the woodcarvers and plasterers to Wood Manor, and urges them to emulate her designs. I, though, was the better scholar.’
I had thought her ignorant and mute. How often in these past few days have I had to repent of a hasty judgement.
‘I learnt mathematics indoors,’ she said, ‘of my Lady’s governor. I learnt physic in the wood, taught by fairies.’ She looked carefully at me with small lashless eyes. I betrayed no scepticism, nor any inclination to burn her alive. ‘You are phlegmatic, Mr Norris,’ she said.
‘I am readier to learn than to condemn.’
The fairies, she explained, came to her not as weird visions, but speaking across aeons of time through the stories preserved and cherished by the people of the locality. From them, and from her own experiments, she had found out ways of using plants as remedies and preservatives. She had discovered that she had the gift of calming the frantic with incantations. She knew how to alleviate pain with simples. ‘There are some agonies which are too piercing for anyone to suffer them and live,’ she said. ‘I can help the sufferer to escape the pain by trauncing, by passing over temporarily into the place of death. There are some who do not return, and I have been blamed for that, but I do not doubt they were grateful to me.’
A silence fell. Perhaps she expected remonstrance. I waited for her to continue.
‘Lady Woldingham is in a grievous state,’ she said. ‘I can help her. Or rather this boy can.’
‘He is your grandson?’ I asked.
She looked taken aback, as though I had displayed extraordinary ignorance. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, not mine.’
Mr Rose came back down the steps.
Meg called the boy to her. They went hurriedly away through the little bushes.
‘You are shaken up,’ said Rose. ‘Here, take my arm.’ I was glad to do so. It is true that I felt atremble. My face in the looking-glass was like porridge, lumpen and grey. I went to my room and slept an hour or two, as babies do when they have been dropped.
My habits are regular and somewhat ascetic. I rise early, and go punctually to my rest. It is unusual for me to be abed in daylight. Perhaps that is why I had such visions in my sleep. I seemed to be lapped around in a mist in which all colours were present, glimmeringly pale. I was swirled as in mother-of-pearl liquefied. I had no weight. Nothing grated upon me or pinched me. ‘Comfort’ is a state we do not prize enough. It is not so sharp as joy, or so exalted as rapture. But in my sleeping state I felt how delicious it is to be warm, to be wrapped in softness, to feel clean and smooth as milk, to be caressed by things silken and delicate. I rolled as in a heavenly cloud, freed of the dizziness one might feel if truly suspended in air, freed of the downward pressure that makes our flesh a burden to us. I was as jocund as the cherubs on my Lord’s painted ceilings.
The delight, intensifying, awoke me. My knee was aching. The pearly flood in which I had revelled had dwindled to a patch of slime on my sheet. My celestial tumblings had had an all-too-earthly outcome. I am glad that I had not seen Cecily as I dreamt.
I went downstairs to find a lugubrious silence. It is late. I asked for some supper to be brought to my room. I sit now to write in a state curiously suspended between contentment and anxiety.
I think about that boy. I wonder how Meg means to use him for the consolation of the bereaved mother.
*
Walking in the park, I met Cecily Rivers. I showed her the secret garden I am making in the woods for Lady Woldingham. We passed a remarkable few hours. I think it has not, to ordinary observers, been a bright day, but as I view it now, in retrospect, it dazzles me.
The mother of Ishmael told the angel that her name for the divinity was Thou-God-Seest-Me. To be seen, is that not what we crave? An infant reared by loving parents is cosseted by the vigilance of mother or nurse. Fond eyes dote upon its tiny fingernails, the gossamer wisps of its hair. Once grown, though, we fade from sight. We merge with the crowd of our fellows, all jostling for notice, all straining to catch fortune’s eye. To believe, as many do, that God has us perpetually under surveillance must be a very great consolation for our fellow-men’s neglect.
It is years, now, since I have felt myself held in the beam of a kindly gaze. Today, though, Cecily looked at me. She spoke to me. She touched my sleeve and laughed at me. She carried herself towards me not as though I was Norris the fee’d calculator of areas and angles; not as though I was the desiccated fellow politely withdrawing when the company dissolves into its pleasures; not as though I were a kind of gelding, neutered by misfortune and hard work. Thou-Cecily-Seest-Me. She sees me industrious, and full of energy. She sees me bashful, and considers it a grace. She sees that my eyes and hair are brown and my fingers long. She sees that I am a young man, and proud. She sees me not as a paving to be stepped on uncaring, but as a path to be followed joyfully. How do I know all this? Not by words.
I have been startled by her seeing. I have felt the carapace, in which I have lived like a tortoise in its shell, crack and fall away from me.
She did not have to reveal herself to me. She was already admirable in my sight.
What passed between us today is not as yet for writing down. Unshelled, I shudder with happiness, and I am afraid.
*
What I call the ‘secret’ garden is no such thing. How could it be, given that it has been dug and planted not by elves, but by men? It is, however, well secluded.
It was my Lord’s fancy to make his wife a place where she could walk unregarded. He promised it to her while they were still in London. ‘I will refrain,’ he told her, ‘even from looking at the plans. This will be as private to you as your closet. I hereby swear – with Carisbrooke and Mr Norris as my witnesses – that, except in some extraordinary emergency, I will never set foot within its bounds.’ Carisbrooke is a grey and red parrot whom my Lord’s father kept in the castle of that name, when he was there with the late King. It is much given to screeching.
Lady Woldingham, who does not share his mania for privacy, made a pretty speech as to how her husband would always be welcome, wheresoever she might be. He waved it aside. We were in the drawing room of their great house on the Strand. Through the windows we could see the sluggish river-water, the woods on the south bank and, near to, the garden through which servants were carrying barrels up from the landing stage towards the low-arched kitchen entrance.
‘See there,’ said my Lord. ‘This garden is a thoroughfare. How can you muse on the beauties of creation, when you are likely to be knocked aside by some stout fellow lugging a tub of molasses?’
He had then been only a few weeks back in his family’s home and he was full of fidgets. For many of those returned with the King, London felt full of hostile eyes. I think one of the reasons he summoned me so frequently was that it comforted him to think that as soon as his presence at court could be dispensed with he would remove to Oxfordshire; to the Eden I was to create for him there. London is too historied. The park at Wychwood seemed, in his imagination, as unsullied by humanity as the first settlers imagined the Americas to be.
The secret garden became my pet project, my hobby-horse. When the complexities of the great park bewildered me, when I could struggle no more with the awkward geometry of its slopes and hollows, with the inconvenient patches of infertile ground, whether boggy or parched, which threatened to interrupt my lines of planting, then I would pull out the portfolio in which the secret garden’s plans were stored. I have heard of an architect, who when at work on a palace, built himself a flimsy house of cards for his recreation. So I, worn out by the consideration of trenches and drains, would play at designing this sylvan enclave, barely the size of a tennis court. Surrounded by woodland trees, it would show like a fairy’s bower. There would be a pond, fed by a stream, and paved walks on which my Lady could tread with ease. The plants would be chosen for their fragrance, and for the daintiness of their blooms. My Lady is small. I had sometimes to remind myself that she is nonetheless a grown woman, as I found myself designing a garden in miniature, a plot as pretty as a Persian rug on which a child could play among tiny tufted flowers.
There I was today with Cecily. There my life swung around, as a shutter upon a hinge.
*
The boy’s funeral took place this morning. Afterwards, I was abroad until late. When I returned to the great house, I found it a peopled darkness. My Lord and Lady kept to their rooms. The paucity of candles signified mourning, but the sumptuously dressed people still thronging the state rooms talked with an animation that shocked me. I am not censorious of elegancies of appearance – such frivolities are too slight to merit moralising upon them. But there is something brazen about the contrast between the blackness of mourning garb and the vanity of adorning the dreary cloth with black lace and glinting jet, or of wearing an inky bodice cut low as that of a courtesan out to snaffle herself a king.
The funeral feast was still upon the table, and a cabal of ancient gentlemen sat over it, exchanging lugubrious reminiscences as the wine went round. I profited by the strange disruptedness of the household, to dine informally, setting myself alongside this chorus of old vultures, and accepting a dish of venison brought to me by a footman who seemed quite done in by weeping. His bleary eyes and puffed face hauled my mind back to the scenes of the morning. The children gazing at their brother’s catafalque, their faces grey as though they saw it seethe with worms. The rector, his surplice probably unworn since the late Lord Woldingham went out, fumbling with a ring that had snarled itself in the redundant flurry of lace about his wrists. My Lady swaying like an ill-propped effigy. Choirboys with censers sending up fumes of music and incense together. An awful ache in the throat, as though to draw breath in that gilded chapel were to risk suffocation.
*
I have reached the sanctuary of my room at last, much torn about and bewildered. I will not write more tonight. I have been detained by events that have so puzzled me I am not yet ready to set them down. I have been abominably ill-treated. I am half-minded to depart this place tomorrow.
*
This morning a maid brought me a letter from Cecily. She has asked me to destroy it, but first I will make a digest of it in this journal, which I believe is secure. No one in this household has any wish to delve into the secret thoughts of Norris the landskip man.
I have been culpably ignorant of the community in which I temporarily dwell.
We have all become accustomed to suppressing our curiosity. Just as among felons in a gaol it is held to be discourteous to enquire for what heinous deed one’s companion is condemned, so we citizens of this unhappy country have learnt to close our eyes and ears to the vexed histories of our fellows.
We do so at peril to our humanity. To be inquisitive may be dangerous, but to be wilfully blind is cruel. I had no inkling, before, of the consequences to humankind of the grand schemes my Lord and I have been elaborating.
Cecily’s prologue can be rendered in brief. She makes no allusion to what transpired between us in the secret garden. Instead she apologises for having involved me in matters that may prove troublesome. She regrets her failure to confide in me earlier. She explains that our fortuitous meeting yesterday, and its sequel, have taken me so far into a tangle of secrets that she feels it is her duty to help me understand them. Here I stand back. Let her continue in her own words.
‘My mother and I are of the dissenting party. There. You already deduced as much. For all that I know, you may be of our mind. Or perhaps you find us stiff-necked and perverse. I think, though, that you would not do us unnecessary harm.
‘When we encountered you yesterday we were carrying beribboned baskets, as though stepping out for our pleasure, in quest of spring flowers. We often do so. My cousin’s men are accustomed to seeing us bearing home primrose plants nestled in damp moss.
‘You, though, may have wondered what might have induced my mother to venture so far abroad. At the same hour on the previous day she had returned to Wood Manor, exhausted by the effort of sustaining her part in the funeral. Nonetheless she insisted on sallying out.
‘I had not intended to invite you to accompany us to the meeting-house, but my mother’s sudden weakness rendered your assistance most welcome.
‘I believe that you were amazed when you saw such a numerous congregation, and began to learn how such a gathering has come to be a regular occurrence in these woods.’
Here I resume the thread. Cecily is right. I was amazed.
When I awoke yesterday I had not slept easy. My night-time musings were delicious, but not restful.
The morning at my desk was unproductive. The house was sombre. Black cloth draped the looking-glasses, and hung in ugly festoons over the long windows. I continued, because I had not been ordered to desist, to plan for happier times. I was puzzling over the design for a stage al fresco.
My Lord, until fate smote him so cruelly, had been amusing himself with plans for masques and ballets to be performed on summer evenings in the fan-shaped hollow, so like an ancient amphitheatre, which closes the vista across the great lawn. He has asked me to consider it, and I took delight in the task. Narrow terraces, sustained by stone walls, will be planted in spring with rare tulips. In high summer the bulbs will be digged up, and mats laid down, with cushions upon them. My Lord’s friends, gorgeously dressed, will be ranged along the terraces like Chinese porcelain displayed upon ledges.
I was planning the pergola that will back the stage. My sketches are attractive, but I was vexed by some technical matters. More seriously, I felt uncertain for whom I laboured. Who now in this house thinks of plays and players? I asked a servant to bring me a bite to eat and, fortified with ale and cold mutton, I was glad to go forth into the park.
There I met the two ladies of Wood Manor. I cannot pretend that I had been unaware that I might intercept their walk, nor that that consideration had not been chief among my motives for walking out. (See how a lover’s bashfulness contorts my syntax.)
As I came upon them it was evident that Lady Harriet was fatigued. I took her basket from her and gave her my arm as far as a fallen oak that made an adequate, if scarcely luxurious, seat. I offered to return to the house to ask for conveyance home for them. But Lady Harriet insisted that she would soon be rested and would not disappoint ‘the brethren’.
To give the ladies time to recover themselves I explained what I have planned for the western end of the park, over which, from our makeshift seat, we enjoyed a fine prospect. I talked of groves of the balsamic poplar, whose myrrh will fill the park with celestial odours, and of the fallow deer (some dozen of whom were grazing in our eye-line) whom I would have banished for the protection of my stripling beeches, but on the retention of which Lord Woldingham has set his heart. He has even sent abroad for a pair of albinos in the hope of breeding a race of white harts. Animal, vegetable, mineral. He favours the first; I the second; Mr Rose the third. Despite his name, the architect thinks only of stone and of water.
The course of the wall (our triumvirate’s joint venture) in this quarter is now partially cleared. Where soon there will be a sturdy barrier there is now a vacancy, a strip of no-grass, no-brambles, no-bracken, no-trees. In my mind’s eye the wall is already handsomely there, its stone the colour of a breadcrust, its solidity giving definition to the park as a fine frame does to a picture. To the others, I suppose, the band of raw and rutted earth must have looked as shocking as a wound.
After some half an hour had gone by, Lady Harriet appeared restored. I offered to accompany them on their way. Cecily accepted. Despite what had passed between us, she treated me as formally as ever. When I pressed her hand, in assisting her, she turned away.
We crossed the wall’s foundations, traversed a part of the wooded periphery which the workmen have yet to reach and made our way downwards through dense, low-growing holly trees whose blackish foliage left the forest floor bare but for the skeletons of leaves, crisp and lacy as carvings done by midgets. We went silently, our feet sinking softly into mould. I had never come this way before. Of a sudden we stepped from our dim passage into brilliant light.
Across the glade rose a barn-like structure. Its roof was of thatch, its walls of wattle panels fixed to stout stone piers. Gathered before it was a company of about a hundred souls. Some I recognised. Before I could take in more of the scene my arms were grabbed and pulled behind me, and my wrists tied. I was hustled across the grass towards the great door of the building. My two companions watched this outrage serenely. I called out as I struggled, but they seemed absorbed in converse with those about them. It was as though they had led me deliberately into a trap.
My captors were middle-aged men, decently dressed. They spoke not a word to me. A boy, running backwards before me the better to jeer in my face, was as voluble as they were taciturn. The little lordling’s landskip limner. Porky pig the pug-dog. Verminous village vandal. Mr Long-nose. Mr Long-wall. Mr Long-wind. Windy wabbler.
It is true my nose is long, but not monstrously so. The allusions to pig and pug had more to do with the lad’s taste for alliteration than with my appearance.
The interior of the building was fitted up like a parliament, with benches facing each other to either side. I was led to the very centre and invited to sit on a low chest. My bindings were loosened, though not removed. I waited quietly – really I did not know how else to comport myself – while all those who had been standing about on the grass filed in. The majority of them looked like working people, some like desperate vagrants, but there were gentry as well. They seated themselves in orderly fashion, the men to one side, the women to the other. Cecily entered with Lady Harriet, and found seats on the front-most bench, so that, had I felt it fitting, I could have reached out and touched her hand. She looked steadily at me, and made a tiny shrug, as though seeing a reproach in my eye that I did indeed most heartily intend.
A gentleman passed between us, brushing awkwardly through the cramped passageway to assume a commanding position by a lectern directly in front of me. He asked me to rise, so that we two were posed like play-actors, visible to all eyes. There ensued this exchange.
He – You may be surprised, Mr Norris, to hear me say that we welcome you to our assembly. Your treatment at our hands has so far been rough. We pray you to forgive us. We have reasons to be suspicious of strangers.
I – I await your explanation, sir.
He – I must ask you first if you are one of the chosen.
I – If you mean by that, sir, am I one of those who believe God has singled them out for grace in this life and glory in the next, and who maintain – on no grounds other than their own conviction – that all others are to be damned to perpetual torment, then I must answer in the negative. I am not of that sect.
I think now it was pompous of me, and unmannerly, to reply so downrightly, but I was ruffled up by the man-handling to which I had been subjected.
He (laughing) – I thank you, sir, for your candour.
I – I am a Christian. I bear ever in mind Christ’s teaching regarding the love we owe to our neighbours. He was not particular as to the manner in which that neighbour might worship, or the minutiae of that neighbour’s conception of the Almighty. Nor am I. I have my own ideas, which I will keep private. I do my work. I make my living. I hope to be useful.
He – And virtuous, Mr Norris?
I – By my own lights. With whom do I speak?
He – We do not reveal our names here. It is a matter of courtesy as much as of security. We are under the King’s protection, as all his subjects are. Nonetheless, there are those who believe they are acting for the monarchy when they chase and torment us. Just as there are people in Lord Woldingham’s following who thought to please him by bullying one of our sisters.
I thought, Meg?
The man was suave. I supposed him to be some kind of a preacher, but nothing in his dress distinguished him as such.
He – You see that we have established a settlement here in the forest. Since the coming back of the King we have thought it prudent to remain here in seclusion. We are not hide-aways. Our presence is common knowledge in all the villages around. By keeping ourselves apart, though, we avoid provoking rancour. This hall, rough as it is, is our temple. Nature provides us with the materials for our dwellings, and with most of our food.
I – Why do you tell me all this?
He – Because you endanger our peaceable and harmless existence. I will explain. But first please join us in our worship.
My bonds were removed. I was led to a place opposite Cecily and her mother. The people rose to their feet as one. The small sounds of the forest, the rustlings and chirpings, the twitterings and flappings, came clearly to us through the open door. And then those sounds were progressively erased, rather as the goings-on of the world become muffled for one who is overcome by faintness. Something had taken over my auditory faculties. Time passed before I understood that that something was itself a sound.
A droning – wavering but insistent – not unlike that which emanates from a beehive in midsummer. Not melodious, not expressive; a kind of energy, the musical equivalent of the air that can be seen to pulse and shimmer above heated iron. I glanced to right and left. The rows of men stood intent, their lips loosely set. The sound surged and ebbed, surged and ebbed. I saw that a stocky man at the farthest end from the door was gesticulating discreetly, as though regulating its flow. I do not know exactly when I understood that the sound was human, that all the men around me were emitting sound as simply and powerfully as all day long we emit breath.
The hum became a rumble and then, as though borne on its powerful wave, an answering call, articulate this time, arose from the benches opposite as all the women lifted up their voices.
We are a garden walled around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground;
A little spot enclosed by grace
Out of the world’s wide wilderness.
Cecily and Lady Harriet were singing with the rest, though I could not distinguish their voices amidst the consort.
Like trees of myrrh and spice we stand,
Planted by God the Father’s hand;
And all His springs in Zion flow,
To make the young plantation grow.
I bowed my head. The Woldingham boy’s funeral did not touch me as I felt it ought, for all the beauty of Wychwood’s chapel with its curiously twisted ebony columns, and for all the skill of the musicians and the purity of the castrato’s voice. This woodland ceremony, though, moved me. The tears that had failed to fall before pricked at my eyelids. It was as though I grieved, not for a boy with whom I was barely acquainted, but for all that have been lost. So many, many dead in a lifetime of wars. My brother. The children that he might have begotten. The children whom I have not had.
Our Lord into His garden comes,
Well pleased to smell our poor perfumes,
And calls us to a feast divine,
Sweeter than honey, milk, or wine.
Prayers followed, which seemed to me unconscionably long, and impertinent with it. Surely the Almighty does not wish to be pestered with requests for mild weather; and to thank him for the flourishing of cress and early lettuces in the garden-plots of these particular people was to make the presumption that he thus puts himself out, not for all mankind, (and rabbit-kind for that matter), but solely for the benefit of the congregation of this chapel-in-the-woods. Perhaps I was unduly irritable, but I detected a smug suggestion that God’s great munificence could be brought forward as proof that the present company might look down in unamiable condescension on those beneath them – to wit, the rest of the human race.
There was to be no sermon. Rather, anyone who chose was invited to step forward and give an account of their spiritual progress. These recitations were tedious. Petty sins; trite regrets. I had to struggle not to fidget. When a great commotion without brought the ceremony to a sudden end I welcomed it at first as a relief.
Men with staves and swords barged into the meeting place. The preacher rose up to remonstrate, but the newcomers pushed rudely by him and began to drag out certain persons. Those who had been hearkening quietly, with bowed heads, to their brethren a moment before, now set up a great hullaballoo. Men and women alike rose from their seats to obstruct the arrest of their fellows. In the mêlée I felt myself grasped firmly by the elbows and hustled down an open pathway between the benches and out by a side door.
We were in a narrow space between the building’s side and a thicket of hawthorn. A cleft in the tight-growing bushes, like the opening of a cave, showed a passageway into the forest. The man on my left was one of those who had laid hold of me before. He said, ‘Go now with all speed. Run. Follow that path. It leads to the sawmill. Thence you can return to the great house without it seeming that you have been here.’
I was flustered and angry. ‘I cannot abandon the two ladies,’ I said.
‘It is better for them, too, that you are clear of this. Run.’
Before I could argue, he and his companion had slipped back into the ‘temple’ and closed the door. Alone, I heard the shouting grow more vehement, and the ugly clatter of falling furniture. A cat flew past me, its ears back, and vanished into the wood. I went after it.
So much for what I saw and underwent. Let Cecily’s letter explain. It is not, though I was momentarily fool enough to imagine it might be, a missive of love.
You are aware that my parents were of the Parliamentary party. My father was not one of those who signed the order for the killing of the late King Charles, but he accepted his share in responsibility for that solemn and awful deed. He himself died soon afterwards.
My Uncle Woldingham, on going abroad for his safety, wisely decided to make of the division of opinion between himself and his sister, not a crack which would ever widen until our family was riven in two, but a strength. He wrote to my mother, asking her to become the steward and, for a while, the mistress of Wychwood. And so it fell out that while my cousin – heir to a great estate – grew up as a wanderer and a mendicant, I lived like a princess, roaming through Wychwood as though it were my own domain.
I was a princess in plain worsted, though, and one who sewed and scrubbed alongside her courtiers. My mother had not estranged herself from her noble family lightly, only in order to return home to live like a lady, careless of lesser folk. She filled Wychwood with those who had been my father’s fellow-revolutionaries, and sharers in his tribulations before their party prevailed.
We were like those who first heard Christ’s calling – or so we pretended. All was shared. Food, clothing, shelter. The women cared for each other’s children. The men laboured side by side. But there were those who cried out loudly against the depravity of the wealthy and the sin of covetousness, who would yet secretly take precious volumes from the library. There were others whose indignation against the ungodly led them to the brutish destruction of things, not theirs, which had been made for God’s glory. Paintings were burnt. Tapestries were hauled down to be used as blankets, and allowed to fray and tatter.
My mother began to fear the people whom she had invited to share her home. I want you to understand, Mr Norris, lest you judge us too harshly, that this was a community founded in love. Its members were sincere. But there was too much envy and too much rancour and there were those who took an obnoxious pleasure in the chastising of the ungodly.
Two women tried to leave the community – they were dragged back and beaten and forced to beg forgiveness on their knees before us all in only their smocks. Now people like us are called dissenters, but our brethren would not tolerate dissent. My mother and I slept in the long gallery, along with all the other women, some of whom were such that my mother in her earlier life would never have sat at table with them, let alone lain down alongside them. This in the name of Christian humility, but the pastor who ordered it took the great chamber for himself. In the night he would call upon such women as he said were in need of a shriving. His chosen penitent would be ushered into his room and we would hear them from behind the two sets of oaken doors – he thundering, she crying out to him and to God for mercy – and the fearsome swishing of his staff.
My mother wrote to my father’s brother, Pastor Rivers. You met him today. He came with his friends and assumed command of the community. The other pastor left early one morning, striding down the gallery over our poor bedding, his cheeks puce above his tight white kerchief, bellowing like a bullock going to the slaughterhouse. I do not know how he was prevailed upon to go. My mother and Uncle Rivers, wishing to remove their flock from the great house which had so corrupted them, established the settlement in the woods, and there our meeting-house was built.
Cecily’s letter goes on to describe a parallel world, one which permeates the one I have inhabited so blindly, as a tincture of juniper dissolves into clear water, transforming its nature unseen. To his Lordship, surveying his domain from his new-fangled sash windows, his park seems a paradise frequented only by those who toil for his pleasure. But it is populous. People cross it on paths that thread through stands of hazel and slip behind dense-growing young ash trees. People tread sunken ways of such ancient use that they traverse the park like trenches, their banks so overgrown with flowering plants that any pedestrian’s head passing there-along would show like a bladder bobbing on a foamy green stream.
These comings and goings, furtive as those of fox or stoat, are the means by which a society maintains itself. Trade routes, the paths along which babies are carried to the grandparents who will tend them while their mothers work, the tracks down which the workers plod outward at dawn, and homeward at evening. All these scarcely visible, unsanctioned thoroughfares cross the park. All will become impassable once the wall rises, with its iron gates, its lodges like guard-houses, its rigid distinction between the privileged space within it, and the inferior world without.
I have spoken to my cousin [writes Cecily], but his misfortunes have marred him. He longs for privacy, for a place in which he can confine himself, and where he can play unrebuked. You will have noticed how childlike he is.
With his grand projects, he has thoughtlessly exposed us to the jealousy of the intolerant. Among the labourers who have come to carry out the works there are those who hate and fear people of our persuasion.
Meg was ill-treated by some of the ignorant who, having no authority, have only fists and violent words as weapons. My cousin can quell them. But those who broke in upon us, as you saw, carried the King’s warrant. Some of our friends have been carted away – to Oxford, we believe. I fear for them.
She sent me no tender glance yesterday. Nor does her letter contain any word that might not have been addressed to a formal acquaintance.
*
Mr Goodyear fell into step beside me as I walked in the park this morning. It is not only his troop of foresters who acknowledge his authority. I have noticed how the generality of my Lord’s people defer to him. I believe that he and Meg Leafield are nearly related. A great estate is like an island, a closed community whose denizens must perforce marry each other, so that it is not uncommon for all to be connected by ties of blood, but these two – an old woman, spry of intellect but creaking of body, and a thriving man who, were he but a gentleman, would be admired as a modern Hercules – have some especial bond.
‘You’d think, wouldn’t you, sir, that being as proud as he is of that coloured pavement, Lord Woldingham would wish it preserved.’ Goodyear had been an onlooker at my Lord’s fête at the house of Bacchus.
‘Most certainly.’
‘So why is he allowing you to drown it?’
I explained that no such thing was intended. The lake-waters, if my calculations prove true, will rise to approximately two feet beneath the level of the Roman villa’s floor. ‘It will be preserved most carefully. It will make a charming picture, when the undergrowth is cleared away from the ruins and the ancient archway is reflected in the water.’
Goodyear nodded. ‘There is another one, you know,’ he said.
‘Another picture in mosaic?’
‘Beneath the chapel.’
‘Chapel?’ Lord Woldingham laughs at me for being as tedious a parrot as Carisbrooke. But one can gain time, in conversation, by repetition.
‘You were there yesterday.’
At Wychwood, there are eyes in every tree.
‘Be so kind as to tell me about it.’
‘When Miss Cecily’s uncle was choosing a spot for his meeting-house, as he called it, he asked me for my opinion.’
Nearly all those who now serve their returned Lord have passed years living here without him. Only gradually will he discover what they know about his land.
‘I took him to that place because the ground is level and easily worked. There’s water. And there’s the pebble-picture. I said to him, “The two lads will bring you luck.”’
He waited. I took my cue, parrot-fashion. ‘The two lads?’
‘That’s the picture, you see. Two boys. Little ones. Lying as it were, head to tail, to make a ring. There’s a story about them.’
I had only to nod for him to proceed.
‘There was once a king’s son, and in the same city there was a wise woman, and the wise woman had a son too. And there came a great rain, and the waters rose until there was no more difference between the land and the sea. And all the animals crowded onto hilltops that stood up out of the water like islands. And the people gathered there too.’
Goodyear had adopted an incantatory style of speech, as storytellers do, but he lapsed back into his normal pitch to deliver a piece of commentary. ‘It’s much like the story of the great flood in Noah’s time, you’ll be thinking, sir?’ I nodded again. He went on.
‘The King saw that there were no fields to till, and no green stuff for the cattle to eat. And he called the wise woman. And he said to her, “How am I to save my people?” She said, “You must take the thing you love most in the world and set it in a boat and send it out onto the water, and the rains will cease.” So the King set his crown on a damask cushion, and placed it in an ivory casket, and put it in a boat, and caused that boat to be launched out onto the current. He stood on the shore, weeping and wringing his hands as the boat went swiftly towards the horizon, and he saw that it was seized by a whirlpool, and sucked down into the belly of the flood. He waited then for the rain to cease, but instead the wind grew wilder, and where the rain had fallen before like water gushing from a drainpipe, it began now to fall like cascades from heaven.
‘The King called for the wise woman and told her what he had done, and she said, “What a man feels for a circle of gold is covetousness. What a man feels for a crown is a lust for power. I spoke of love.”
‘The King had a horse. He had bought the creature from a merchant who came each year from the East with a ship laden with wonderful things. The horse was faster than any other in the country and its coat shone like quicksilver. It knew its master so well, and was so obedient to him, that when the King rode upon it it was as though he had become like the centaur, in which man and beast are as one. That horse, too, the King sent out onto the waters. That horse, too, was swallowed down by the flood. And instead of ceasing, the rain fell so thick it was as though the ocean had mounted up in one great watery mass, to fall again on earth.
‘The King called for the wise woman again. He said, “I have given the crown, which is the token of my magnificence and my power. I have given the horse, that performed my will as readily as my hand does, and that could outrun the wind, and that would take sugar from my palm with lips that were as soft as velvet and as feeling as a musician’s fingertips.” She said, “What kind of a father are you?” And he understood her, and he fell to his knees on the ground, and his gorgeous robes were sodden with the wetness that was all around, and he said, “No. Not for my kingdom. Not for all my people. Not my son.” And the wise woman said, “You must.” He said, “What you ask of me is cruel. You too have a son. Would you do so?” and she said, “I would and I will.”
‘So the young prince came out of the palace and the wise woman’s son was waiting for him by the shore. The two boys had been born on the same day, and they were as like as your left foot is to your right foot. They were both dressed in smocks of sky-blue, and they sat side by side in the boat, and none knew any more which was the prince and which was the cunning woman’s child. And the boat was launched upon the flood.
‘The whirlpool seized it, as it had seized the others, and then the two boys held out their arms to each other, and they tilted their heads back as dancers do when they dance in a ring. The boat went from under their feet and was lost to them in the depths of the ocean. The spinning water whirled them about, but, as it turned them, so they turned within it, and their circled arms were as a wheel laid flat upon the water, and that wheel turned faster and ever faster, till those whirling boys rose into the air, and the speed of their spinning was such that it carried them on upwards until all that could be seen of them was a circlet of blueness against the terrible black of the storm clouds. And the rain stopped absolutely, and the clouds were driven from the sky. The King and the wise woman stood together watching, with tears clouding their sight, but had they been as sharp-eyed as killer birds they would have seen their children no more.’
Goodyear had adopted the pose I have seen storytellers assume on fairgrounds, legs braced apart for stability, hands on hips, his face upturned as though he sought words in the air. I was greatly impressed by his tale. I was curious to know its origin. The boys on the Roman pavement, I felt certain, must be the Gemini of the zodiac, for these Roman fragments often treat astrological themes. I feared, though, to offend my companion if I made a parade of my scholarship.
He passed both hands over his head and scratched it. ‘That’s the story I have heard,’ he said.
‘I am much obliged to you for it. Is it . . .’ I hesitated. ‘Is it one you heard from your parents?’
My instinct had been correct. He acted as though enquiry was improper. ‘It is from this place,’ he said, and looked at me teasingly.
We were in the far part of the park, above the ruined villa. Beneath us we could see Lord Woldingham and his wife strolling with their attendants along the valley floor. He offered her his arm and they walked together, their companions falling back, to the boggy place where their child had died. There they stood, apparently without speaking, for a considerable time.
*
When I’d finished writing in my journal last night I fell asleep as though dropping through a trap.
A commotion awoke me before it was light. I shoved aside a pillow so that it covered over my papers. Mr Rose, who is lodged near me, was already in the open doorway. ‘Come, Norris,’ he said.
I followed him along the corridor that leads into the oldest part of the house. He ushered me into a room holding a narrow bed and a wooden bucket. A bunch of dusty lavender, curiously bound with faded blue ribbon, was suspended from a hook in the window embrasure. The sheets were smoothed.
‘This is where Meg Leafield was quartered,’ he said.
Seeing me still baffled, he went on.
‘She is gone. I heard a scuffling past my door but when I looked out there was no one there. I think, Mr Norris, that we should follow her.’
A mouthful of water, boots, coat, muffler. I was ready. A resentful lad brought out our horses. Rose set off at a canter. At the entrance to the holly grove we dismounted and left the animals to graze. In the midst of the wood we left the path and trod softly to a little hummock. Lying flat on its apex, we could peer through the topmost branches of the trees before us, and see the clearing and the meeting-house spread beneath. The sun rising behind us set a blush in the sky and flooded the scene with long shadows and caressing light.
A great concourse of women. At its centre stood Meg Leafield. And so, the only male in sight, did the boy who threw a ball at me. Meg seemed to be pulling at his clothes.
‘You’ve been here,’ said Rose.
‘I have.’
‘You recognise that boy.’
‘You know that I have seen him before. He knocked me down.’
‘But do you understand who he is?’
I stared, mute.
‘He’s Cecily’s boy,’ said Rose. ‘Edward.’
The boy Edward’s shirt was off. The women were handing garments to Meg. He stood quiescent in his breeches. Meg helped him gently into new clothes far finer than those he had shed.
A lawn shirt. Stockings and high boots. An embroidered waistcoat and a sky-blue coat. I saw what was being done. My hands were shaking.
‘His cousin, then,’ I said. ‘They seem to be of an age.’
‘We must stop this,’ said Rose.
He scrambled to his feet and ran aslant down the slope, as clumsy as a charging boar, trampling small branches and sending stones clattering. I followed.
The other women looked round startled but Meg was unperturbed. Rose leapt the last few feet, and landed amongst them, impelled forward like a falling rock by the speed of his own going. He is a stocky man, broad-beamed and short-legged. I was almost as nonplussed by his urgency now as the women were. I slipped and scrambled after him with dread shadowing my mind and chilling my limbs.
My circuitous return from this spot two days previously had allowed me to calculate its position in relation to the great house, and to the course of the stream. Not far from where we stood is a pond, much obscured by bulrushes, but nevertheless tolerably deep. This pond is the embryo from which one of my lakes will grow. From the height where we had lain in hiding I had seen it glint.
Rose had Meg by the shoulders and was shaking her. I would have restrained him, but the women were quicker. They haled him off her and wrapped themselves around him, disabling him as a great sea-monster might disable a ship by embracing it with its tentacles. I hung back. Meg stepped up to me and to my astonishment took me gently by the hand.
‘Your friend misunderstands us. We intend no harm to this boy, as we have done no harm to the other.’
‘I am at a loss,’ I said. ‘I am as puzzled by your proceedings as I am ignorant of what interpretation Mr Rose would put upon them.’
‘He thinks we are witches,’ she said, the last word uttered with derision.
Rose, still under restraint, was shaking his head vigorously.
‘I sincerely doubt it,’ I said. ‘Mr Rose is a scientist. He loves lucidity, and measures the world with set-square and rule. He is not one to babble of sorcery.’
‘Perhaps not, but he thinks that we are.’
Someone stepped out of the gaggle of onlookers and took my other arm. It was Cecily. ‘I will subdue him,’ she said to Meg.
And so she did. With her hand in the crook of my elbow I quieted. A man in love is as spiritless as a lapdog. She took me to a heap of logs, and sat upon it beside me. We watched in silence as Meg finished dressing the boy.
‘Say what you will,’ I said to Cecily sotto voce, ‘this is a kind of conjuring.’
The boy, Edward, was now the living copy of his dead cousin. He gazed steadily at Cecily, who inclined her head as though in approbation.
‘Who is his father?’ I asked. It was unmannerly. All this mystification made me tart.
‘In the community in which I was raised all children were loved by all. All the men were their fathers.’ Her voice was low and even.
‘That is not an answer.’
‘I agree with you.’
‘Then who?’
‘What is your motive for enquiring?’
‘I aspire to be your husband. I would know who you are.’
Her gaze was still fixed upon the boy.
‘Lest I shame you?’
I made no reply, but waited.
‘Mr Norris, I will not be questioned.’ Cecily stood and took young Edward by the hand. They went together in the direction of the pond. Meg led the other women after, Rose captive among them. I stayed, ignored.
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.
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.
‘You’ve met Flossie.’ That was the girl who had swum with them that morning. ‘Jolly girl. There’s two more just come off the train. Antony.’ He was another regular visitor. Nell liked him because he always spoke to her but she could never understand his jokes. ‘Nicholas. And there’s a couple Lil took to in Scotland last year. Helen and Benjie. Lovely woman. Husband runs a restaurant and wears suede shoes.’
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.
*
When Christopher sloped off, Nicholas put in an appearance in the drawing room, drank coffee and bustled about flirting so no one could say he wasn’t doing his bit socially. Then he slipped away too and set up camp in what passed in that house for a cosy study. Linen-fold panelling, a ceiling dripping plaster stalactites. The room had been deprived of one of its walls around the time of the Glorious Revolution, and now formed an L with the pilastered drawing room where Christopher and Lil hung the paintings of which they were properly proud.
He accepted a whisky and soda when Underhill appeared like a well-disciplined genie, drew the curtain across the joint of the L, and settled down in a tapestried chair beneath an upside-down pendent obelisk to try to make sense of the reports that had come in that day. Ted had rung about the Konev story. He’d heard Reuters’ man in Berlin had a hunch that the East Germans were going to do something very soon, but what it was he couldn’t guess. Not exactly what you’d call hard news.
Nicholas began to scribble out a think-piece on the limits of totalitarianism. Khrushchev being as much at the mercy of his party as Kennedy was at the mercy of the American electorate, both of them having to act tough for their respective constituencies, both of them probably clever enough to know it was a charade, the perils into which that play-acting might drag all Europe, de da de da de da de da.
Voices. Antony was showing young Flossie the pictures. The obstreperous Benjie had tagged along.
Flossie – ‘Gosh! Is it a Cimabue?’
‘Yes it is.’
Privately, as Nicholas knew, Antony had his doubts, but he was a loyal friend and a discreet dealer. So yes it unequivocally was.
‘Looks lonely. Is that a bit of his friend on the right?’ Benjie getting in on the conversation.
‘Yes, it appears to be a fragment from the right wing of an altarpiece. See how it is hinged here. There would have been another two or three angels, a heavenly chamber group.’
‘The hands are so . . .’
The hands, indeed, were ineffable.
‘Girly? Or perhaps he is a girl. Or a fag. Look how he’s leaning into the other’s shoulder.’
Was Benjie an ass, thought Nicholas, or was he just pretending to be one? Nicholas had met Helen when she came into the office with her copy – she reviewed for the arts pages occasionally. And they’d talked, and one day they’d had lunch together, and another day they’d walked along the river east from Fleet Street past the Tower and he’d shown her one of his favourite places in London, Wapping Pierhead, where the tall Georgian houses run down to the river’s edge and even the pavements still seem to reek of the cloves and nutmegs that made their first owners rich, and he thought she was beautiful in a steely-cool Celtic kind of way. Her eyes were as pale as gooseberries. There followed some very, very private afternoons in his flat. This was the first opportunity he’d had to observe her husband.
He stepped out from behind his arras. He wasn’t going to get any more work done with them prattling on the other side.
Antony was saying, ‘Either or neither. Angels, being insubstantial, are spared the indignities of sex.’
Benjie poured himself whisky and drifted about the room. He was looking at Flossie as much as at the paintings. Polite girl that she was, she kept making little nods and mmms. There’s nothing harder to sustain than an appearance of interest, even when it’s genuine. She was beginning to look a bit strained when Benjie called her over to see Christopher’s chess-set. Booty of the Raj. Ivory and ebony, laid out on a great scagliola table.
‘Do you play? I’ll give you a game.’
A murmur that was like a verbal blush. Was this rude to Antony? How to reconcile the demands of all these different grown-ups? She had put on a dramatic dress for dinner, low cut, and made of bands of stiff papery silk in clashing bright colours, but for all that, and despite her lacquered hair, she was still a child. ‘All right. You’ll easily beat me.’
‘So I hope.’
Simple words, but uttered as though they had a salacious double meaning. If Benjie wasn’t an ass, he was certainly a bit of a lecher.
The others left them to it, and went out onto the terrace where Lil and Helen were sitting. Nicholas and Lil dropped into the banter that had become their normal mode of conversation. Silly stuff, he thought, but as bracing, she’s so quick, as tennis is for those who are good at it. Christopher loomed up on the rim of the ha-ha, his rod on his shoulder like the Good Shepherd’s crook, and crossed the lawn and joined them and for a while Nicholas felt easier than he had for weeks. The distant events that would occupy him through the night gave way to the immediate. The scents of stocks and jasmine. Pale roses glimmering. The dog collapsing heavily onto the flagstones and sighing like the grampus for whom he was named. He and Helen tended to ignore each other in company, but her being there, near him in the darkness, was a plus.
There was a scraping and a clatter indoors. Flossie came out. She didn’t say anything, just sat herself down in the corner between the great magnolia and Lil, who had to shuffle along the stone bench to make room for her. She looked like a cat mutely complaining about a rainstorm. Murmuring from indoors: Underhill saying, ‘I’ll clear it up, sir.’ Helen made no move. It was pretty clear to everyone what had happened – what sort of thing anyway. Nicholas and Lil kept up their tennis game, giving the girl time to collect herself. Why? wondered Nicholas. Surely it was Helen who needed their solicitude. Ignobly, he was pleased.
Pretty soon they all went up. At midnight Nicholas called the copy-desk, and got handed on to Ted, who wanted a background piece for the Sunday paper on Soviet military capacity. At five in the morning he finally got to bed, while in East Berlin the Stasi prepared to demonstrate that the myth of German efficiency had a basis in fact.
Saturday (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
Nell walked across the cattle grid by Underhill’s lodge, her feet in her sandshoes only just making enough of a bridge from one bar to another to stop her slipping through. Hedgehogs got trapped down there sometimes. She’d been frightened once to hear a rustling, and then so amazed she could still conjure up the prickle of it, to see the dished face. Wild animals, even little funny ones, were like glimpses of another world carrying on with its business in secret, not caring at all about people. Perhaps even being enemies. Hedgehogs had fleas.
She was pushing her bicycle, and once safely over she got back on it, using the brick edge of Mrs Underhill’s delphinium-bed to help herself up. Wood Manor was separated from the park by paddocks and a belt of trees. It had its own feeling, the feeling of home. The feeling inside the park wall was different; quieter somehow, a bit gloomy, old.
Swoop down the hairpin bend, faster than you’d really want to so that you could get most of the way up the slope beyond. The Land Rover passed her, hooting, the canvas roof off and Dickie in the back, waving wildly with both arms. By the time she reached the estate office her father was already walking up the beech avenue with Mr Green the head gardener, and she had to bump and rattle over the pebbly path down the centre of it, with Dickie, because he was annoying, and Wully, because he was so pleased to see her after their half-hour separation, barging into her and making her wobble.
‘We’ll start emptying the pool Sunday, then, once they’ve all gone indoors to dinner. We’ve got all the beans to pick next week so Mrs Duggary can get them in the freezer while Mr and Mrs R are away. And the lettuces’ll be bolting.’
Nell wanted to protest about the pool, because she’d have liked a last swim on Monday morning, but she could tell her father wasn’t really listening. Mr Green liked to keep up a continuous report on his own doings but he didn’t seem to mind talking on and on without anyone saying even ‘mmm’ or ‘really?’ He was just filling the time with his warm buzz until Daddy was ready to tell him whatever needed to be told, and sure enough, after a bit Daddy came back from wherever his thoughts had been and shouted at Wully and started to tell Mr Green about how they would make a new rose garden with a sundial. Nell went ahead, freewheeling down the sloping path that slanted away from the avenue towards the narrow gate that led into the garden, and passed on through the rhododendrons and on down to the pool.
Flossie was floating on her back with her long hair mermaidy around her. Nell was so pleased to see her there she ran into the changing hut and took off her stiff canvas shorts and left them sitting on the floor as though there was a person still in them, and kicked off her sandals and took off her blouse with its Peter Pan collar (surely Peter Pan didn’t look like that) so roughly that a button came off, and ran back out in her best rose-trellised bathing dress with her inner tube and plopped straight in even before Daddy was there.
‘Hello little fish,’ said Flossie.
‘You’re the fish. I’m in my boat.’
‘So you are. Silly old me with my goggley eyes. I thought for a moment you were a totally round flatfish of a previously unknown species.’
Flossie was not a grown-up not a child but something anomalous and exciting like a centaur or a psammead. She ducked her head under the water and when she came up her mouth was an o and she was blowing a bubble like the goldfish. Daddy came through the arched gap in the hedge, hesitated, and then said hello in an odd voice.
‘I can’t speak,’ said Flossie. ‘I’m a fish.’
He laughed then. Mummy would have told Nell off for not waiting but he seemed to think it was all right.
‘Watch out that fishing boat doesn’t spot you. And Nell, if you feel seasick, ask the fish to help you – I think it’s a kind one.’
He went with Dickie into the changing room, the one for boys across the little hallway. On the doors hung girly and boyish things . . . antlers for the boys, a necklace made of nutshells for the girls. Mrs Rossiter had laughed when Green hung them there – ‘Does he suppose we can’t find our way around a hut?’ – but they had stayed, adding to the hut’s oddity. It looked, Nell thought, like a house where savages lived, all made of sticks and straw and things you pick up.
Her father dived in while Dickie lay tummy down on his coracle and flapped his hands. For a while they were all fish. Then they were all water boatmen. And then more grown-ups arrived and Flossie said she was cold, and got out and put on sunglasses, which is something no child ever did so it was as though she had swapped sides. She couldn’t have been that cold because she didn’t go and change but sat down on the low wall between Antony and Nicholas. Daddy got out too and stood in front of them, and Nell had that lonely feeling again because they were all laughing, and Nicholas was teasing Flossie and making Daddy tease her too and it was lovely for them but horrid for her because they had all completely forgotten her and she was left with just Dickie, and the fact that you happened to be in the same family with someone and both of you children absolutely did not mean that that someone was the person you wanted to be left with. Dickie splashed her on purpose, and she was angry and grabbed his coracle and tipped him into the water, which was rather awful because she knew he couldn’t really swim.
‘For goodness sake, is no one watching that child?’
Mrs Rossiter arriving with two people Nell didn’t know. The man kicked off his shoes and jumped in the water with all his clothes on and got hold of Dickie, who was all right really because he was clinging onto the inner tube, just not inside it any more, and dragged him quite roughly to the side of the pool. Dickie was crying and swimming-pool water was coming out of his mouth and nose so he was much more blubbery than the crying by itself would have made him. Nell stayed still, and everything was happening very slowly in bright light. Quiet like her nightmare. Mrs R and Daddy were staring at each other across the pool. They both looked older than usual and as though they had to cling on tight to something or they might fall.
‘So. Lane.’
She never called him Lane. She called him Hugo. Calling people by their surnames meant they were less important. In a way Daddy was less important because he worked for the Rossiters, but usually you couldn’t tell that.
‘If you can’t do your job, you could at least take care of your son. And what on earth are you all doing here in the first place? Get rid of your bloody dog.’
The strange man had climbed out of the pool and Wully was licking his wet ankles. Daddy growled at Wully, and then shouted at Nell, ‘Come on out.’ Then he walked slowly round the pool and said something very quiet to Mrs R, and took Dickie by the hand and walked with him into the changing hut. Nell got out, and ran behind them, but she could hear Nicholas talking in his joking voice again, and saying, ‘Benjie to the rescue! There you were pretending to be a lounge-lizard and all the time we had a hero in our midst.’
She could see the man called Benjie taking off his wet trousers and she could hardly believe it. Underneath he wasn’t wearing bum-bags like the ones Daddy wore but tiny knicker-shaped swimming trunks like Dickie’s, but they weren’t all woolly, they were shiny and slithery like snakeskin, and the most amazing thing was that they were patterned with green and purple scales just like a snake.
*
So what about Nell’s mother? Why was she so seldom in evidence? Because she didn’t want to be, is why.
Chloe Lane had realised that to be inconspicuous was a precious pass to freedom. Chloe’s so sweet, said Lil. Chloe, could you be an angel and . . . Chloe, I cannot think what to do about . . . Why not ask Chloe? She’d do it (open the fête, chair the WVS, judge the school’s dressing-up competition) so much better than me . . . Chloe fits in so perfectly! I don’t know why I always look like a cockatoo . . . Chloe’s so clever with flowers . . . Chloe’s so clever . . .
Every single one of Lil’s compliments was an order, or a demand, or a subtle derogation. At Wood Manor Chloe was her own and her servants’ and children’s mistress. At Wychwood she was the agent’s wife. She stayed away. Dancing attendance was Hugo’s job.
*
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.’
‘I know. I could kick myself. I was being a rotten father. And what must have gone through your mind.’
‘I saw Fergus. Just for a second. Less than a second.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘No. I’m sorry. That’s what I wanted to say. Let’s forget it now.’
A hiatus.
‘Do you want to show me where the new rose-beds are to go? Green could get started on it next week.’ Hugo’s voice was light and steady.
‘I suppose they can all amuse each other for a minute or two.’
She led him through a green arch, across a round lawn entirely encircled by blackish yew hedge, out beneath another arch, down steps foaming with alchemilla into an alleyway bounded on each side by rows of pleached limes.
‘I thought down at the bottom there, you see? This view needs an ending.’
‘A sundial’s not really big enough for the centrepiece,’ said Hugo. ‘You’d need an obelisk. Or maybe a flowering tree. A weeping pear.’
‘But if it was on a stone plinth? With a threepenny-bit-shaped arrangement of rose-beds around it, and then a wrought-iron gate beyond?’
Hugo laughed. ‘Not just a few shrub-roses then. Actually, you know, a fountain would be the thing. We could bring Norris’s Triton up from the home lake. It’s wasted there. We could pipe the water down from the canal.’
‘Boboli-under-Wychwood.’
A smile. A pause.
‘Lil.’
‘Not now, Hugo.’
Another hiatus.
‘I . . .’
‘Never when Christopher’s here.’
‘No. Of course.’
And yet they didn’t move.
The alley was open-ended. Where the proposed sundial or fountain might one day stand was now a gap in the garden’s perimeter, a hole beyond which the park shimmered, and out of which the magical seclusion of the garden leaked. Across this breach Antony and Nell were seen to walk. She was turned to him, talking earnestly, and beyond him saw, tiny at the other end of the alley, Lil’s brilliant-blue blouse, and then her father, and at once span round and ran towards them.
‘There are tiny tiny lizards in Mr Green’s watering pond.’
Both Hugo and Lil noticed the awkward way Antony checked and dithered, before waving his hat and passing on towards the house.
*
My very dear Nicholas
Lil is a monster, she really is. She makes me laugh but she is just so dangerous. Look at the way she’s luring that nice young agent into her web. Christopher sees it all, of course he does, but he’s too grown up to flap about it. Lil should be careful, though. He may not be jealous, or not very, but he is fastidious. If he gets disgusted with her he could just drift out of her reach.
She knows about us, I can tell. So that’s why we’re both here now. You must have told her. I most certainly didn’t. You must be mad. She can keep secrets all right if she chooses to, but mostly she doesn’t. She’ll have told Christopher by now.
But perhaps it doesn’t matter because last night it came to me that I don’t have to put up with Benjie’s fooling around any more. That girl is a child. I know it’s harsh. I know he needs me and I could depend on him for ever if I chose. But I know now that I no longer love him. There are no children to worry about. And there is you. So it’s your turn now to make a decision. If you don’t respond I’ll never reproach you. But here I stand.
Helen
*
Rose garden. Water garden. Moorish saucer sunk into the soil of Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire. Lil and Christopher had travelled down through Spain the first summer after the war’s end, through a landscape foul with invisible blood, so absorbed in each other they barely enquired what might have happened there. Stopping the car at midday, they had hidden from the sun, as from an armed enemy, under cork trees, eating ham that wrenched at their teeth and hard bread. In the villages men who looked old, but perhaps were no older than they were, sat on planks balanced on oil drums and stared at them as they drove by. A passing car was an event – not necessarily a welcome one. Women spat in Lil’s direction, and crossed to the other side of the street. Not hostile exactly, just avoiding the bad luck a stranger might bring.
Lil had brought pre-war dresses her mother had passed on to her – rayon in abstract geometrical prints, bias-cut Liberty lawn covered with convolvulus, silvery-green pleats like the chitons of Athenian caryatids. The dresses stayed in the suitcase, while she wore the invisibility cloak of a dusty-blue shirt-waister. Christopher drove, though she was better at it, and on mountain roads she shut her eyes so as to stop herself whimpering with fear. In Ronda they rented a room above a cheese shop and stayed there for long, long afternoons. The high hard bed. The bolsters bristling with horse-hair. The shiny pine-green satin cover. The deliquescence of two bodies. Down into the streets at twilight to join the paseo, so languid from hours of sweat/sex/sleep their legs felt tremulous as a newborn donkey’s. Sherry. Pork-fat thyme-scented. Churches decorated with effigies of tortured saints. Sleeping and waking again hours later to the sound of singers lamenting, lamenting, lamenting. Spain was all grief – its architecture grim – its people grandly dour. There they were happy.
At Wychwood, eight years later, Lil set Hugo, the new agent, to making her a garden to rival Aranjuez, and he mistranslated it into a Cotswold fantasia in pink and green.
*
Nicholas found Helen’s letter on his dressing table. Talk about madly indiscreet! He put it in his inside pocket and thought, What am I feeling? And didn’t have an answer ready. Exasperation: couldn’t she tell he was busy? Joy. A bit of each, obviously. And shame. What a contemptible cold fish he seemed to be. Through his bedroom window he could see her on a rug, propped up on her elbows, Antony cross-legged beside her, making daisy chains while they talked. She didn’t look as though she was waiting for a signal that would determine her future. She looked, as she always did, sleek as one of those fancy grey oriental cats. If I am a cold fish, he thought, she is my fair Miss Frigidaire.
They were all having tea on the terrace (iced coffee, actually) when Underhill came and murmured to Nicholas that he was wanted on the telephone again. Helen looked up sharply, but the others were laughing at Benjie. He had launched into a series of anecdotes about louche goings-on in the art world and Antony, who knew most of the people involved, was dodging his questions and getting more and more embarrassed (which was of course the point).
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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Lucy Hughes-Hallett
‘One of the best novels of the year so far’ The TimesA SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Unlike anything I’ve read. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful’ Tessa Hadley‘I just enjoyed it so very much’ Philip PullmanIt is the 17th century and a wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate.Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all.Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival by the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and a Great Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall comes down, a fatwa signals a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks safety in Wychwood.From the multi-award-winning author of The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely novel about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love and the pathos of aging, and about how those who wall others out risk finding themselves walled in.
(#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
Copyright (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright 2017 © Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Lucy Hughes-Hallett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images © plainpicture/Melanie Haberkorn
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Map drawn by John Gilkes
‘Don’t Fence Me In’ (from Hollywood Canteen), words and music by Cole Porter © 1944 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORPS. All rights reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008126544
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008126537
Version: 2018-01-16
Dedication (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
For my brothers,
James and Thomas,
with love
Epigraph (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
We are a garden walled around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground;
A little spot enclosed by grace
Out of the world’s wide wilderness.
ISAAC WATTS
Contents
Cover (#u03789958-48c1-58eb-bdbe-e0bbf3a795e5)
Title Page (#ua417a75c-75b9-5d22-8250-e43498fd976d)
Copyright (#u62558696-1ab3-5c79-951b-b469eb571f7c)
Dedication (#ucc868b76-4f42-5b6c-85d7-ca0597d57ef0)
Epigraph (#u195c2b43-cdfb-55f1-8251-3f92cef91a65)
Dramatis Personae (#ua8c9b23f-0475-50b5-9dc6-5ad4b879b357)
Map (#u6e5c9ccd-1dca-5b95-840e-b02127e74ae7)
1663 (#u3f9629f2-1f32-5fb1-b85e-da8ca9344ecb)
1961 (#u8d6e2dcd-ab6f-5e23-91ef-b8e0ba47d57a)
Friday (#u557e10b0-bd2f-50d3-bfb2-8a51da28d36a)
Saturday (#ucf4856e2-a080-52b8-9651-12842748bd65)
Sunday (#litres_trial_promo)
1973 (#litres_trial_promo)
June (#litres_trial_promo)
July (#litres_trial_promo)
August (#litres_trial_promo)
1989 (#litres_trial_promo)
September (#litres_trial_promo)
October (#litres_trial_promo)
November (#litres_trial_promo)
1665 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Dramatis Personae (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
1663–1665
John Norris – landscape-maker
Arthur Fortescue, the Earl of Woldingham
The Countess of Woldingham, his wife
Their children – Charles Fortescue, Arthur Fortescue and a little girl
Sir Humphrey de Boinville, brother to Lady Woldingham
Lady Harriet Rivers, Lord Woldingham’s sister
Cecily Rivers, her daughter
Edward
Pastor Rivers – brother to Lady Harriet’s late husband
Another pastor
Robert Rose – architect and comptroller
Meg Leafield
George Goodyear – head forester
Armstrong – ranger
Green – head gardener
Slatter – farm overseer
Underhill – major-domo
Lane – steward
Richardson – apothecary
Lupin, a pug-dog
1961–1989
Living at Wood Manor
Hugo Lane – land agent
Chloe Lane – his wife
Nell – their daughter, aged eight in 1961
Dickie – their son, aged five in 1961
Heather – nanny
Mrs Ferry – cook
Wully, a yellow Labrador, and later his great-nephew, another Wully
Living at Wychwood
Christopher Rossiter – proprietor
Lil Rossiter – his wife
Fergus – their son
Flossie/Flora – Christopher’s niece, aged eighteen in 1961
Underhill – butler
Mrs Duggary – cook
Lupin, a pug-dog, and later another Lupin, also a pug-dog
Grampus, a black Labrador
Visitors
Antony Briggs – art-dealer
Nicholas Fletcher – journalist
Benjie Rose – restaurateur, interior designer, entrepreneur
Helen Rose – his wife, art-historian
Guy – Benjie’s nephew, aged thirteen in 1961
On the estate
John Armstrong – head keeper
Jack Armstrong – his son, aged seventeen in 1961
Doris, Dorabella, Dorian and Dorothy – all spaniels
Green – head gardener
Young Green, his son
Brian Goodyear – head forester
Rob Goodyear, his son
Slatter – farm manager
Meg Slatter – his wife
Bill Slatter – their son
Holly Slatter – Bill’s daughter
Hutchinson – estate clerk
In the village
Mark Brown – cabinet-maker
Nell’s fellow students at Oxford in 1973
Francesca, Spiv Jenkins, Manny, Jamie McAteer, Selim Malik
In London
Roger Bates – wartime military policeman, subsequently in Special Branch
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1663 (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
It has been a grave disappointment to me to discover that his Lordship has no interest – really none whatsoever – in dendrology. I arrived here simultaneously with a pair of peafowl and a bucket full of goldfish. It is galling that my employer takes more pleasure in the creatures than he does in my designs for his grounds.
He is impatient. Perhaps it is only human to be so. He wishes to beautify his domain but he frets at slowness. When we talked in London, and I was able to fill his mind’s eye with majestic vistas, then he was satisfied. But when he sees the saplings reaching barely higher than the crown of his hat he laughs at me. ‘Avenues, Mr Norris?’ he said yesterday evening. ‘These are sticks set for a bending race.’
The idea having once occurred to him, he set himself to realising it. This morning he and another gentleman took horse and, like two shuttles drawing invisible thread, wove themselves at great speed back and forth through the lines of young beeches that now traverse the park from side to side. There was much laughter and shouting, especially as they passed the ladies assembled at the point where the avenues (I persist in so naming them) intersect, the trees forming a great cross which will be visible only to birds and to angels. I confess the gentlemen were very skilful, keeping pace like dancers until, nearing the point where the trees arrive at the perimeter, where the wall will shortly rise, they spurred on into a desperate gallop in the attempt to outdistance each other, and so raced on into a field full of turnips, to the great distress of Mr Slatter.
They are my Lord’s trees, his fields and his turnips. Like Slatter and his muddy-handed cohort, I must acknowledge the licence his proprietorship gives him, but it grieved me inordinately to find that eleven of my charges, my eight hundred carefully matched young beeches, have been damaged, five of them having the lead shoot snapped off. I attended him after dinner and informed him of the need for replacements. ‘Mr Norris, Mr Norris,’ he said. ‘It is hard for you to serve such a careless oaf, is it not?’
He authorised me to send for substitutes. He is not an oaf. Though it pained me, I took delight in the performance of this morning. He incorporated my avenue, vegetable and ponderous, into a spectacle of darting grace. But it is true that I find him careless. To him a tree is a thing, which can be replaced by another thing like it. Is it lunacy in me to feel that this is not so?
We who trade in landskips see the world not as it is but as it will be. When I walk in the park, which is not yet a park but an expanse of ground hitherto not enhanced but degraded by my work in it, I take little note of the ugly wounds where the earth has been heaved about to make banks and declivities to match those in my plan. I see only that the outline has been soundly drawn for the great picture I have designed. It is for Time to fill it with colour and to add bulk to those spare lines – Time aided by Light and Weather. I suppose I should say as well, aided by God’s will, but it seems to me that to speak of the Almighty in these days is to invoke misfortune. It is more certain and less contentious to note that Water also is essential.
*
Of the people who manage this estate my most useful ally has been Mr Armstrong, chief among my Lord’s rangers. For him, I believe, the return of the family is welcome. He is an elderly man, with the hooked nose and abundant beard of a patriarch. He remembers this house when the present owner’s father had it, and he rejoices at the thought that all might now be as it was before the first King Charles was brought down. I think he has not reflected sufficiently on how this country has changed in his lifetime, not only superficially, in that different regiments have succeeded each other, but fundamentally. It is true that there is once more a Charles Stuart enthroned in Whitehall, but the people who saw his father killed, and who lived for a score of years under the rule of his executioners, cannot forget how flimsy a king’s authority has proved.
Armstrong and Lord Woldingham talk much of pheasants – showy birds that were abundant here before the changes. Armstrong would like to see them strut again about the park. He has sent to Norfolk for a pair, and will breed from them. For him, I think, I am as the scenery painter is to the playwright. He is careful of me because I will make the stage on which his silly feathered actors can preen.
For Mr Goodyear, though, I am suspect. He is the curator of all of Wychwood’s mighty stock of timber. The trees are his precious charges. Some of them are of very great antiquity. He talks to them as familiars, and slaps their trunks affectionately when he and I stand conversing by them. I do not consider him foolish or superstitious: I do not expect to meet a dryad on my rambles, but I too love trees more than I care for most men. Goodyear is loyal to his employer, but it seems to me he thinks of those trees as belonging not to Lord Woldingham but in part to himself, his care for them having earned him a father’s rights, and in part to God. (I do not know to which sect he is devoted, but his conversation is well-larded with allusions to the deity.) He is ruddy-faced and hale and has a kind of bustling energy that is felt even when he is still. I will not enquire of him, as I do not enquire of any man, which party he favoured in the late upheavals, but I think him to have been a parliamentarian.
Today I walked with him down the old road that leads through the forest to the spring called the Cider Well. The road is still in use, but very boggy. ‘His Lordship would like to close it,’ said Goodyear. ‘I suppose he may do so if he wishes,’ I said. Goodyear made no reply. I have heard him allude to me as ‘that long lad’. I think he has judged me too young to be competent, and too pompous to be companionable.
Passing the spring, we dropped down into a valley, its mossy sides bright with primroses. The rabbits had already been at work on the new grass beneath our feet, so that the track was pleasant to walk upon.
A woman I had seen before – old but quick of step – was walking ahead of us. Goodyear called to her. She looked back over her shoulder, nodded to him, and then darted aside, taking one of the narrow paths that slant upwards, and vanished among the trees.
‘You know that person?’ I asked.
‘I’d be a poor forester if there were any soul in these woods without my knowledge.’
I ignored his pettish tone. ‘Does she live out here, then?’
‘She does.’
‘I encountered her in the park on Sunday. She made as though she wished to speak to me, but thought better of it.’
‘It’s best so. Don’t let her bother you, sir.’
I let the matter rest and began to talk to him of the plans I have discussed with Mr Rose, the architect. Rose is one of the many Englishmen of our age who, following their prince into exile, have grown to maturity among foreigners. There are constraints between such men and those of us who stayed at home and picked our way through the obstacles our times have thrown up. Rose and I deal warily with each other, but our work goes on harmoniously. In Holland Mr Rose interested himself in the Dutchmen’s ceaseless labours to preserve their country from the ocean to which it rightfully belongs. My Lord calls him his Wizard of Water.
We would build a dam where this pretty valley debouches into a morass, and thereafter a series of further dams. Thus contained and rendered docile, the errant stream will broaden into a chain of lakes. The three upper lakes will lie without the wall, as it were lost in the woods. The last watery expanse will be within the park and visible from the house, a glass to cast back the sun’s light and duplicate the images of the trees clumped about it.
It was as though Goodyear could see at once the prospect I sketched with my words, and soon we were in pleasant conversation. Willows, judiciously positioned, he rightly said, would bind the dams with their roots, and red alders might give shade. The ‘tremble-tree’, he suggested (I understood him to mean the aspen, a species of which I too am fond), ranged along the watery margins, would give a lightness to the picture, and his tremendous oaks, looming on the heights above, will take off the brashness of novelty, so that my lakes will glitter with dignity, like gaudy new-cut stones in antique settings.
How gratifying it would be to me, if I could enjoy such an exchange of ideas with his Lordship!
*
I could wish nutriment were not necessary to the human constitution, but alas, whatever else we be (and my mind swerves, like a wise horse away from a bog-hole, to avoid any thought that smacks of theology), we are indisputably animals, and animals must eat. My situation here is agreeable enough when I am in my chamber. In the drawing room – where Lord Woldingham expects me to appear from time to time – I am less easy. In the great hall where we dine I am wretched.
It is not the food that discommodes me, nor, to be just to the company, the mannerliness with which I am received. I am my own enemy. My self, of which I am pleasantly forgetful at most times, becomes an obstacle to my happiness. I do not know how to present it, or how to efface it. See how I name it ‘it’, as though my self were not myself. My Lord and his friends talk to me amiably enough. But the contrast between the laborious politeness with which they treat me, and the quickness of their wit in bantering with each other is painfully evident.
As I write this, I feel myself to be quite a master of language, so why is it that, in conversation, words fall from my lips as ponderously as dung from a cow’s posterior? I will be the happier when the guests depart, and so, I fancy, may they be. Although the old portion of the house has not yet been invaded by the joiners and masons, the shouting emanating all day long from the wing under construction is an annoyance. And now that the work on the wall has begun, the park is encumbered with wagons hauling stone to every point on its periphery. The quarrymen set to at first light. We wake to the crack of stone falling away from the little cliff, and our days’ employment has as its accompaniment the clangour of iron pick on rock.
One congenial companion I have found. She is a young lady, not staying in the house, but frequently invited to enjoy whatever entertainment is in hand. She came to me boldly outdoors today.
I had been conferring with Mr Green, who is the chief executor of my wishes for the garden. He is, I consider, as worthy of the name of artist as any of the carvers and limners at work on the house – but because he is tongue-tied, those precious gentlemen are apt to treat him as a mere digger and delver. His own men show him the utmost respect.
Those goldfish that so put me out of countenance on my arrival have proved the seeds from which a delightful scheme has sprouted. The stony paving of the terrace is to be bisected by a canal, within whose inky water the darting slivers of pearl and orange and carnation will show as brilliant as the striped petals, set off by a lustrous black background, in the flower-paintings my Lord has brought home with him from Holland.
‘I hear, Mr Norris, you are rationalising Wychwood’s enchanted spring,’ said the lady.
‘You hear correctly, madam. Some small portion of its waters will trickle beneath the very ground on which you now stand. More will feed a fountain in the valley there, if Mr Rose and I can manage it.’
‘But have you appeased the genius loci, Mr Norris? You cannot afford to make enemies in fairyland.’
I was taken aback. I could not but wonder whether she teased. Were she any other young lady I would have been sure of it. But she is as simple in her manner as she is in her dress. Her name is Cecily Rivers.
*
‘I am glad you and my cousin are friends,’ Lord Woldingham said to me this morning as I spread out my plans for him. He is my elder by a decade, and inclined to mock me as though I were a callow boy. We were in the fantastically decorated chamber he calls his office. Looking-glasses, artfully placed, reflect each other there. When I raised my eyes I could not but see the image of the two of us, framed by their gilded fronds and curlicues, repeated to a wearisome infinitude. I, Norris the landskip-maker, in a dun-coloured coat. He, who will flutter in the scene I make for him, in velvet as subtly painted as a butterfly’s wing seen under a magnifying glass.
I do not much like to contemplate my own appearance. To see it multiplied put me out of humour. My Lord’s remark was trying, too. Often when it comes to time for inspecting the plans he finds some conversational diversion. I did not know whom he meant.
‘Your cousin, sir?’
‘My cousin, sir. You can scarcely pretend not to know her. Pacing the lawn with her half the afternoon. I have my eye on you, Norris.’
He made me uneasy. He loves to throw a man off his stride. In the tennis court, which abuts the stables, I have seen the way he will tattle on – this painter is new come to court and he must have him paint a portrait of his spaniel; this philosopher has a curious theory about the magnetism of planetary bodies – until his opponent lets his racket droop and then, oh then, my Lord is suddenly all swiftness and attention and shouting out ‘Tenez garde’ while his ball whizzes from wall to wall like a furious hornet and his competitor scampers stupidly after it.
I had no reason to fumble my words but yet I did so. ‘Mistress Rivers. Your cousin. I did not know of the relationship.’
‘Why no. Why would you, unless she chose to speak of it?’
‘She lives hereby?’
‘Hereby. For most of her life she lived here.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. In this house. Cecily’s mother was not of the King’s party. She stayed and prospered under the Commonwealth while her brother, my father, wandered in exile.’
‘And now . . .’
‘And now the world has righted itself, and I am returned the heir, and my aunt is mad, and her husband is dead, and my cousin Cecily is delightful and though I do not think she can ever quite be friends with me, her usurper, she has made a playmate of you.’
‘Your aunt is . . .’
‘The quickness your mind shows when you are designing hanging gardens to rival Babylon’s, Mr Norris, is not matched by its functioning when applied to ordinary gossip. Yes. My aunt. Is mad. And lives at Wood Manor. Hereby, as you say. And Cecily, her sweet, sober daughter, comes back to the house where she grew up, in order to taste a little pleasure, and to divert her thoughts from the sadness of her mother’s plight.’
I must have looked aghast.
‘Oh, my dear Aunt Harriet is not wild-mad, not frenzied, not the kind of gibbering lunatic from whom a dutiful daughter needs protection. My aunt smiles, and babbles of green fields and is as grateful for a cup of chocolate as one of the papists, of whom she used so strictly to disapprove, might be for a dousing of holy water. I am her dear nevvie. She dotes on me. She forgets that I am her dispossessor.’
It is true that yesterday afternoon Miss Cecily and I walked and talked a considerable while on the lawns before the house. Had I known my Lord was watching us I might not have felt so much at ease.
*
It is Lord Woldingham’s fancy to enclose his park in a great ring of stone. Other potentates are content to impose their will on nature only in the immediate purlieus of their palaces. They make gardens where they may saunter, enjoying the air without fouling their shoes. But once one steps outside the garden fence one is, on most of England’s great estates, in territory where travellers may pass and animals are harassed by huntsmen, certainly, and slain for meat, but where they are free to range where they will.
Not so here at Wychwood. My task is to create an Eden encompassing the house, so that the garden will be only the innermost chamber of an enclosure so spacious that, for one living within it, the outside world, with its shocks and annoyances, will be but a memory. Other great gentlemen may have their flocks of sheep, their herds of deer, but, should they wish to control those creatures’ movements, a thorny hedge or palisade of wattle suffices. Lord Woldingham’s creatures will live confined within an impassable barricade. As for human visitors, they will come and go only through the four gates, over which the lodge-keepers will keep vigil.
Mr Rose took me today to view the first stretch of wall to have been constructed. He is justly proud of it. It rises higher than deer can leap, and is all made of new-quarried stone. When completed, it will extend for upward of five miles.
I said, ‘I wonder, are we making a second Paradise here, or a prison?’
‘Or a fortress,’ said Mr Rose. ‘Our King has had more cause than most monarchs to fear assassins. Lord Woldingham is courageous, but you will see how carefully he looks about him when he enters a room.’
‘His safety could be better preserved in a less extensive domain,’ I said.
‘He craves extension. He has spent years dangling around households in which he was a barely tolerated guest. There were times when he, with his great title and his claim on all these lands, had no door he could close against the unkindly curious, nor even a chair of his own to doze upon. He has been out, as a vagabond is out. Now, it seems, he chooses to be walled in.’
The wall is a prodigy. It will be monstrously expensive, but I am gratified to see what a handsome border it makes for the pastoral I am conjuring up.
*
This has been a happy day. It is never easy to foresee what will engage Lord Woldingham’s interest. I was as agreeably surprised by his sudden predilection for hydraulics as I had been saddened by his indifference to arboriculture. Having discovered it, I confess to having fostered his watery passion somewhat deviously, by playing upon his propensity for turning all endeavour into competitive games.
We were talking of the as-yet-imaginary lakes. I mentioned that the fall of the land just within the girdle of the projected wall was steep and long enough to allow the shaping of a fine cascade. At once he gave his crosspatch of a pug-dog a shove and dragged his chair up to the table. I swear he has never hitherto looked so carefully at my plans.
‘What are these pencilled undulations?’ he asked. I explained to him the significance of the contour lines.
‘So where they lie close together – that is where the ground is most sharply inclined?’ He was all enthusiasm. ‘So here it is a veritable cliff. Come, Norris. This you must show me.’
Half an hour later our horses were snorting and shuffling at the edge of the quagmire where the stream, having saturated the earthen escarpment in descending it, soaks into the low ground. My Lord and I, less careful of our boots than the dainty beasts were of their silken-tasselled fetlocks, were hopping from tussock to tussock. Goodyear and two of his men looked on grimly. If Lord Woldingham stumbled, it would be they who would be called upon to hoick him from the mud.
The hillside, I was explaining, would be transformed into a staircase for giants, each tremendous step lipped with stone so that the water fell clear, a descending sequence of silvery aquatic curtains.
‘And it will strike each step with great force, will it not?’
‘That will depend upon how tightly we constrain it. The narrower its passage, the more fiercely it will elbow its way through. This is a considerable height, my Lord. When the current finally thunders into the lake below it will send up a tremendous spray. Has your Lordship seen the fountain at Stancombe?’
Here is my cunning displayed. I knew perfectly well what would follow.
‘A fountain, Mr Norris! Beyond question, we must have a fountain. Not a tame dribbling thing spouting in a knot garden but a mighty column of quicksilver, dropping diamonds. I have not seen Stancombe, Norris. You forget how long I have been out. But if Huntingford has a magician capable of making water leap into the air – well then, I have you, my dear Norris, and Mr Rose, and I trust you to make it leap further.’
The Earl of Huntingford is another recently returned King’s man. Whatever he has – be it emerald, fig tree or fountain – my Lord, on hearing of it, wants one the same but bigger.
So now, of a sudden, I am his ‘dear’ Norris.
This fountain will, I foresee, cause me all manner of technical troubles, but the prospect of it may persuade my master to set apart sufficient funds to translate my sketches into living beauties. It is marvellous how little understanding the rich have of the cost of things.
‘My master,’ I wrote. How quickly, now the great levelling has been undone, we slip back into the habits of subservience.
*
This morning I walked out towards Wood Manor. I set my course as it were on a whim, but my excursion proved an illuminating one.
The road curves northward from the great house. I passed through a gateway that so far lacks its gate. Mr Rose has employed a team of smiths to realise his designs for it in wrought iron tipped with gold.
The parkland left behind, the road is flanked by paddocks where my Lord’s horses graze in good weather. It is pleasantly shaded here by a double row of limes. Their scent is as heady as the incense in a Roman church. The ground is sticky with their honeydew. The land falls away to one side, so that between the tree-trunks I could see sheep munching, and carts passing along the road wavering over the opposite hillside, and smoke rising from the village. It was the first time for several days, sequestered as I have been, that I had glimpsed such tokens of everyday life. I had not missed them, but I welcomed them like friends.
I became aware that I was followed by an old woman, the same I had now seen twice already. My neck prickled and I was hard put to it not to keep glancing around. I was glad when she overtook me and went hurriedly on down the road.
I had not intended to make this a morning for social calls, but it would have seemed strange, surely, to pass by Miss Cecily’s dwelling without paying my respects. I had told Lord Woldingham, before setting out, that I needed to acquaint myself thoroughly with the water-sources upon his estate. He seemed surprised that I might think he cared how I occupied myself. He was with his tailor, demanding a coat made of silk dyed exactly to match the depth and brilliance of the colour of a peacock’s neck. The poor man looked pinched around the mouth.
The house Lord Woldingham is creating will extend itself complacently upon the earth, its pillars serenely upright, its longer lines horizontal as the limbs of a man reclining upon a bed of flowers. Wood Manor, by contrast, is all peaks and sharp angles, as though striving for heaven. The house must be as old as the two venerable yew trees that frame its entranceway. As I passed between them I saw the sunlight flash. A curious egg-shaped window in the highest gable was swiftly closed. By the time I had arrived at the porch a serving-woman had the door ajar ready for me.
‘Is Miss Cecily at home?’ I asked.
‘You will find her out of doors, sir,’ she said, and led the way across a flagged hall too small for its immense fireplace. An arched doorway led directly onto the terrace. Cecily was there with an elder lady. Looking at the two of them, no one could have been in any doubt that this lady was her mother. The same grey eye. The same long teeth that give Cecily the look (I fear it is ungallant of me to entertain such a thought, but there it is) of an intelligent rodent. The same unusually small hands. Both pairs of which were engaged, as I stepped out to interrupt them, in the embroidery of a linen tablecloth or coverlet large enough to spread companionably across both pairs of knees, so it was as though mother and daughter sat upright together in a double bed. The mother, I noticed, was a gifted needlewoman. The flowers beneath her fingers were worked with extraordinary fineness. Cecily appeared to have been entrusted only with simpler tasks. Where her mother had already created garlands of buds and blown roses, she came along behind to colour in the leaves with silks in bronze and green.
I addressed my conversation to the matron.
‘Madam, I hope you will forgive the liberty I take in calling upon you uninvited. I am John Norris. I have had the pleasure of meeting Miss Cecily at Wychwood. I was walking this way and hoped it would not be inconvenient for you if I were to make myself known.’
She replied in equally formal vein. So I must be acquainted with her nephew. Any connection of his was welcome in her house. She hoped I enjoyed the improved weather. No questions asked. No information divulged. The maid brought us glasses of cordial while we played the conversational game as mildly and conventionally as a pair of elderly dogs, in whom lust was but a distant memory, sniffing absent-mindedly at each other’s hinder parts. But then she demonstrated that she could read my mind.
‘I suppose young Arthur has told you that I am deranged? You will be puzzled to find me so lucid.’
Cecily murmured something, but the older lady persevered. ‘He tells everyone so. He has reasons for the assertion. One is that there is some truth in it. My mind’s eye sees the world’s affairs in a manner as blurred and uncertain as that with which my corporeal eyes see that tree. Fine needlework, as you observe, I am good for, but for keeping a lookout I am useless. And although in cheerful sunlight like this I can be as bright as the day, in dark hours I grow dull.’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ I began awkwardly. She didn’t pause.
‘So you see, judging that to lie unnecessarily is to lay oneself open to exposure when one could be safely armoured in truth, he broadcasts an opinion that is not quite a falsehood, and under this cover he hides his other purposes.’ Her voice trailed away.
Cecily laid down her needle and took her mother’s hand.
‘Mr Norris cannot be as concerned with our affairs as we are, Mother,’ she said. ‘He is an artist. A maker of landscapes.’
‘A painter?’
I explained that, no, the kind of picture I make is not the representation of a scene, but the scene itself. That while God makes countryside, man refines it into landscape (an audacious joke, but one I thought I could allow myself in this secluded place). That nature and the unnatural make happy partners, and flourish when coupled. I said that those painters who depict what they call pastoral scenes seldom or never show brambles or stinging nettles or the mud churned up on a riverbank by herds of beasts. Their pastorals are all artifice, their pastures in fact gardens.
I was becoming excessively wordy. It is mortifying to know, as I do all too well, that when I talk with greatest satisfaction, expatiating on a subject that truly engages me, then I am most tedious. Becoming self-conscious, I fell quiet.
‘Mother,’ said Cecily, ‘you are tired. Mr Norris would like to see our orchard, I dare say.’
The lady appeared sprightly still, but she acquiesced. ‘Lead him to it then, and show him.’
I would truly have welcomed the opportunity to inspect the orchard, which was admirably well set out. I was struck by the fireplaces inserted into a wall, which I fancied must have been of double thickness, with a cavity which could thus be filled with heated air. So peaches and apricocks could lean against warm brick, even when the untrustworthy English sun had failed to shine upon them. This ingenious arrangement was a novelty to me. I would have liked to give it my full attention, but as soon as we were within the enclosure, Cecily turned.
‘I wonder how much Lord Woldingham has spoken to you of me.’
‘Very little, but to say that Wychwood was your home while he was abroad.’
‘Our home yes, but always his house. My parents were not his usurpers. They were his stewards while, for his safety, he could not be with us.’
My eyes, which I believed to be shaded by the brim of my hat, dwelt with pleasure on a blossoming tree. Damson, Damascenum, if I was not mistaken. This family’s divisions formed a familiar tale. Barely a household in the land has not been so cut up. I wondered why she was so eager to take me into her confidence.
‘But he spoke of my mother?’
‘He did, and forgive me for repeating what may distress you, but she is correct in supposing that he told me that her wits had failed.’
‘She is also correct in saying that his motives for so speaking of her are several. That there is a smidgeon of truth in the allegation, she openly accepts, as you have heard. Many people of her age are forgetful. She is no longer so ready as she once was to apprehend new ideas. At night she is sometimes seized by unreasonable fears, and her distress then is painful . . .’
A tiny hesitation. I thought she had meant to say ‘painful to witness’, but had silenced herself for fear of seeming to complain.
I said, ‘She seems as gracious a lady now as she ever must have been.’ I was greatly pleased to see that someone had thought to underplant the apple trees with anemones, so that the blush of the blossom’s fat petals was counterpoised by the blue fringe of the little ground-flowers’ raggedy show.
‘Lord Woldingham is not quite the person he pretends to be. He is considerate.’
I bowed my head slightly. It was not for me to discuss my employer’s qualities with a connection of his.
‘I think that when he asked my mother to remove herself and her daughter from Wychwood, he pacified his own conscience and the opinion of those around him with a pretence that she was incapable. She needed absolute tranquillity, he said, and he could grant her this old manor as a refuge. His wife did not want another mistress in the great house.’
I have so far encountered Lady Woldingham only fleetingly, in London. I would gladly have asked for Cecily’s impressions of her, but we were not under-servants to gossip about those set above us.
‘Now he sustains the myth of her incapacity for another reason. It is a shield for us.’
She had my attention. I would like to have understood her. But we were interrupted. The old woman who had seemed to follow me came through the wicket that led from the orchard out onto a paddock and thence to the woods. A boy, delicate-featured, accompanied her, carrying a basket. Cecily went to her and took her hand.
‘Meg, this is Mr Norris,’ she said. ‘It is he of whom I spoke. He who would make lakes with the well-water.’
The other spoke no word, but regarded me intently.
Soon thereafter Miss Rivers indicated that my visit should be concluded. As I walked away I saw her and Meg pacing, heads together, beneath the fruit trees. The boy was swinging by his hands from an apple bough. It pained me to observe that Cecily walked quite needlessly over a patch of grass where I had noticed the glistening spears of coming crocuses. How many purple-striped beauties must have been crushed prematurely by the wooden sole of her clog!
*
This morning I found myself, unintentionally, spectator to an affecting scene.
The room that serves me as an office overlooks the yard. In times to come, carriages will set visitors down before the new portico. That they will enter the house through an antechamber shaped like a Grecian temple is not, to my mind, Mr Rose’s happiest notion. For the present, though, they come clattering in the old way, by the stables, so that the horses’ convenience is better served, perhaps, than that of the persons they transport.
A din of wheels on cobblestones and the shouting of grooms. I went to the window. A great number of chests and bundles were being lowered from the carriage’s roof. Only the luggage, then, I thought, and made to return to my writing desk, when a man ran across the yard below in a state of undress that shocked me. A footman run amuck. But no, the shirt flapping out of his breeches was fine, its billowing sleeves trimmed four inches deep with lace. The stockings in which he darted so noiselessly over the paving were silken; the breeches, scarce buttoned, were of a lavender hue with which I was familiar, but not from seeing them on a servant’s shanks. That shaven head, that I had never before seen unwigged, bore on its front a face I knew. By the time I had identified him, Lord Woldingham was down on his knees on the cobbles and three small children were climbing him as though he was a rigged ship, and they the midshipmen. He was laughing and snatching at them and in a trice the whole party had tumbled over in a heap. Various bystanders – whom I took to include nurse and nursemaids, governor and tutors – remonstrated and smiled by turns. And all the while the grooms kept on with their work, seeing to the horses and unloading the carriage with an almighty bustle.
The children and their sire had only just righted themselves, and begun to shake off the straw tangling in their hair, when half a dozen riders trotted into the yard. Lord Woldingham turned from his little human monkeys and stood a-tiptoe, until his wife was lifted down from the back of a dappled grey. My Lady is scarce taller than the eldest boy, very pale and small-featured. He could have picked her up and swung her in the air, as he had done to the children, but he was now all decorum. He bowed so gracefully that one hardly noticed the absence of plumed hat from hand, or buckled shoe from foot. I could not see the lady’s face clear, but it seemed to me she made no reference, by smile or frown, to his scandalous appearance, but simply held out a hand, with sweet gravity, for him to kiss.
*
I walked out after breakfast with Mr Rose, at his request, to prospect for a suitable site for an ice-house. In Italy, he tells me, the nobility build such houses, in shape like a columbarium, for the preservation of food.
A broad round hole is made in the ground. It is lined with brick and mortared to make it watertight, and a dome built over it with but a narrow entranceway, so that it looks to a passerby like a stone bubble exhaled by some subterranean ogre. The chamber is filled to ground-level with blocks of ice brought from the mountains in covered carts insulated with straw. Even in the fiery Italian summers, says Rose, the ice is preserved from melting by its own coldness. So the exquisites of Tuscany can enjoy chilled syrups all summer long. Better still, shelves and niches are made all around the interior walls of the dome, and there food can be kept as fresh as in the frostiest winter.
I was inclined to scoff at the notion. We are not Italian. We have neither mountain ranges roofed with snow, nor summers so sultry that a north-facing larder will not suffice to keep our food wholesome. Mr Rose took no offence, saying jovially, ‘Come, Norris. The air is sweet and my poor lungs crave a respite from plaster-dust. You will wish to ensure my stone beehive is not so placed as to ruin one of your fine views.’
He plays me adroitly. At the mention of a vista I was all attention. My mind running away with me, as it has a propensity to do, in pursuit of a curious likeness, I was picturing his half-moon of a building, rising pleasantly from amidst shrubs as a baby’s crown emerges from the flesh of its dam. Or I would perhaps surround it with cypresses, I thought, if they could be persuaded to thrive so far north. Then this humble food-store could make a show as pleasing as the ancient tombs surviving amidst greenery upon the Roman campagna.
(I let that last sentence stand, but note here, in my own reproof, that I have not seen the campagna, or any of Italy. I must guard myself from the folly of those who seek to appear cosmopolitan by alluding to sights of which they have but second-hand knowledge. The Roman campagna is to me an engraving, seen once only, and a fine painting in the drawing room here, whose representation of the landscape is doubtless as questionable as its account of its inhabitants. If the picture were to be believed, these go naked, and many of them are hoofed like goats.)
Mr Armstrong found the two of us around midday. He rapidly grasped the little building’s usefulness for the storage of meat and, accustomed as he is to lording it over his underlings, began to give Mr Rose orders as to where he should place hooks for the suspension of deer carcasses or pairs of rabbits. ‘Once you’ve made us that round house, Mr Rose,’ he said, with the solemnity of a monarch conferring a knighthood, ‘we’ll eat hearty all year.’
He kept rubbing his hands together. It is his peculiar way of expressing pleasure. I have seen him do it when the two fowl – the Adam and Eve of his race of pheasants – arrived safely in their hamper after traversing the country on mule-back. Already his inner ear hears the rattling of wing-feathers and the crack of musket shot. He fought for the King. The scar that traces a line from near his cheekbone, over jaw and down into his neck, tells how he suffered for it. It is curious how those who have been soldiers seek out the smell of gunpowder in time of peace. Most of the keenest sportsmen I know have experience of battle.
‘Have you anything in your pocket worth the showing?’ asked Rose. The question seemed impertinent, but Armstrong gave an equine grin. His back teeth are all gone, but those in front, growing long and yellow, make his smile dramatic. He reached into the pouch, from which he had already drawn a pocket-knife and a yard-cord for measuring, and, opening his palm flat, showed three small black coins. It came to me that it was for the sake of this moment that he had sought out our company. Rose took one up daintily, holding it by its edges as though it were a drawing he feared to smudge. ‘Trajan,’ he said, ‘Traianus,’ and he sounded as happy as I might be on finding a rare orchid in the wood. ‘Silver.’ He and Armstrong beamed at each other, then both at once remembered their manners and turned to me.
‘Mr Norris,’ it was Armstrong who spoke first. ‘If you can give us more of your time, we’ll show you what lies beyond those lakes of yours.’
‘Yes, come,’ said Rose. ‘We have been much at fault in not letting you sooner into our secret. Mr Armstrong and I are by way of being antiquaries.’
The two of them led me at a spanking pace down to the marshy low ground where the last of the lakes will spread and uphill again through bushes until we were on the slope opposing the house, and standing on a curiously humped plateau raised up above the mire.
It was as though I had been given new eyes. I had been in this spot before, but had seen nothing. This mass of ivy was not the clothing of a dead tree, but of an archway, still partially erect. Those heaps of stone were not scattered by some natural upheaval. They are the remains of a kind of cloister, or courtyard. This smoothness was not created by the seeping of water. Armstrong and Rose together took hold of a mass of moss and rolled it back, as though it were a feather-bed, and there beneath was Bacchus, his leopard-skin slipping off plump effeminate shoulders, a bunch of blockish grapes grasped in hand, all done in chips of coloured stone.
We were on our hands and knees, examining the ancient marvel, when we were interrupted.
‘Oh Mr Rose, shame on you for forestalling our pleasure! I have been anticipating the moment of revelation this fortnight.’ Lord Woldingham was there, and others were riding up behind him. Servants walked alongside a cart. There were baskets, and flagons, and, perched alongside them, three boys and a little moppet of a girl – Lord Woldingham’s offspring and the boy I had seen at Wood Manor.
‘Here are ladies come to see our antiquities. And here are scholars to enlighten us as to their history.’ Lord Woldingham was darting amongst the horses. As soon as the groom had lifted one of the ladies down, he would be there to bow and flutter and lead her to the expanse of grass where I was standing, the best vantage point for viewing the mosaic. I would have withdrawn, but Cecily Rivers detained me. It is as gratifying as it is bewildering to me to note that she seeks out my company. I am accustomed to being treated here as one scarcely visible, but her eyes fly to my face.
‘So Mr Norris,’ she said, ‘you have discovered our heathen idol? I told you this valley had supernatural protection.’
‘You spoke of fairies, not of Olympians.’
‘Do you not think they might be one and the same? Our one, true and self-avowedly jealous God obliges all the other little godlings to consort together. Puck and Pan are mightily similar. And this gentleman, with his vines and his teasel, is he not an ancient rendering of Jack in the Green?’
‘The thyrsus,’ I said, ‘resembles a teasel in appearance, but the ancients tell us it was in fact made up of a stalk of fennel and a pine cone.’
She laughed. Of course she did. I was afraid of the freedom with which her mind ranged, and took refuge in pedantry. A dark-haired gentleman in a russet-coloured velvet coat came up. She turned, and I lost her to him. I believe he is my Lady’s brother.
Rose beckoned me away. ‘We’ll leave them to their fête,’ he said. Armstrong remained and I could see, glancing backwards, that he was displaying the Roman pavement as proudly as though he had made it himself.
*
This morning my Lord’s eldest son was drowned. The boy and his brother were playing around the quagmire where lately the father and I had wallowed in mud. He slipped in water barely deep enough to reach his ankle-bone, if upright. He toppled face forward, wriggled round to rise, and in so doing thrust his sky-blue-coated shoulder so deep into the slime it would not release him. He died silently, while the other child whooped and shouted. How great a change can be effected in a paltry minute. The littler boy had made a slide at the base of what will be the cataract. Governor and tutors, seeing how he might so precipitate himself into the ooze, rushed to forestall him. And so the cadet was saved, at mortal cost to the heir. He fell unwatched.
A forester, perilously perched halfway up one of the distant ring of elms, ready to hack off a branch shattered by last winter’s storms, saw him lie, and shouted down to his mate, who began to race down the slope, his arms flailing as he leapt over clumps of broom and young bracken. He was wailing like the banshee; words, in his horror, forsaking him. Desperate to save, he increased the danger. Those near enough to where the poor boy lay to have helped him, looked not towards him, but at the man hurling himself so crazily downhill. So seconds were lost, and so the mud seeped into the little fellow’s mouth and nostrils and stoppered up his breath.
When I saw them clambering over their sire two days ago I thought I was looking at happiness.
Lady Woldingham sits by her dead boy as still and quiet as though the calamity had rendered every possible action otiose. The other children are brought to her from time to time, when their nurses despair of stilling their howls. She looks at them as though glimpsing them dimly, across an immense dark moor. To what purpose speech, in the face of such grief?
I cannot bear to come anywhere near my Lord.
*
The guests have all gone. They will return for young Charles Fortescue’s funeral, but yesterday they started up and fluttered away with a unanimity to match that of a murmuration of starlings. I would that I could do the same.
Ten years ago it was a common thing to see how, when a man’s brother or father was accused, that person’s friends would seem not to notice him when he passed by in the street. One would fuss with the fastening of a glove rather than catch his eye when it came to choosing where to seat oneself in the coffeehouse. Then I thought that we were all cowards, but prudent with it. When a country has been at war with itself every citizen has a multitude of reasons to fear exposure – exposure of miscreancy, but exposure also of those actions which might at the time of their performance have seemed most honourable. Now I think that the shrinking from those marked by misfortune was not the ephemeral outcome of civil war. It was not only that we feared spies and informers. There is something appalling about misfortune itself.
The tribulations of others are our trials. By our response to them we shall be judged, and I fear that, awkward as I am, it is a trial I am bound to fail.
It is less than a week since I wrote in these pages that Lord Woldingham was careless. I thought him boisterous and gay. I made of him a benevolent despot who would fill this house with colour and bustle. I mocked him, just a little, and so timidly that even I could not hear myself do it. I was like a child who thinks his parents omnipotent, and so licenses himself to jeer at them, and then is terrified to see them cry.
There was crying aplenty yesterday, but not from him.
He had not sent for me. But I knew that, however irksome he found my attendance, to stay away from him longer would prove me inhuman.
I found black clothes. Not difficult for me – my wardrobe is sober. When I judged that Lord Woldingham would have breakfasted, and might be walking out in the garden, with his dog Lupin waddling behind, I prepared to encounter him there.
As I stepped out of my room I all but knocked down a maid whose hand was already lifted to beat upon the door. It wasn’t until I looked at the note she handed me that I knew where I had seen her before – at Wood Manor. Cecily apologised for making so peremptory a request but asked me to come at once, and discreetly. My uncertain resolution to offer my condolences to my employer was laid aside in an instant.
There is a horse provided for my use. I told the groom I might be out a considerable while. I am not a confident horseman, but I asked the cob to hurry, and, heavily built as she is, she obliged with a pace that quite alarmed me. She made her way to Wood Manor almost without my guidance. Cecily was waiting in the entrance hall, and led me at once to a small room where the woman Meg sprawled on the rushes in a corner, bundled in a cloak, her head thrown back against the distempered wall, her eyes closed.
‘She has been set upon,’ said Cecily. ‘They chased her with dogs.’
‘Is she hurt?’
‘I think only very much afraid. She is prone to fits. Perhaps she has had one. Our man found her and saw off her assailants and brought her here across his saddle.’
‘I am no physician.’
‘Mr Richardson will be here shortly. But it is not only medicine we need. My cousin’s men harass her and her companions, but I do not think he knows it.’
We stood in the centre of the room, speaking urgently and low.
‘If he is informed, he will surely discipline them.’
‘Today is not . . .’
She was right. I too shrank from the idea of pestering him in his grief. But there was a worse reason for Cecily’s hesitation.
‘They say she killed the boy.’
I began to protest at such idiocy, and then recalled that I myself have been afraid of Meg.
‘But he died surrounded by his attendants. The woodcutters, the other children. So many people were present. Not a one has said that she was there.’
‘They say she can kill with a wish.’
The woman moaned, and a little blood ran from the corner of her mouth. The room smelt of last year’s apples. The sole window was veiled with cobwebs, and kept tight shut. We were as though imprisoned.
‘My mother too. They call the two of them weird sisters.’
I am a man of reason. I live in a nation that has been riven by doctrinal disputes for more than a century. I have listened to temperate, kindly disposed people swear that they will never again feel any affection for a brother, or a friend, because that other holds an opinion they cannot share as to what precisely takes place when the priest mumbles over the wafer of a Sunday morning. I am not an atheist. I marvel, as any natural philosopher must, at the intricate and ingenious thing the world is. But I am sure that, whatever the Creator may be, no human conception of him can be incontrovertibly right. Bigotry is abhorrent to me. But worse even than the intolerance of churches (and chapels, and conventicles) is the frenzy of the weak when fear drives them to blame their fellow beings for the catastrophes which lie in wait for us all.
‘I had thought that that madness was passed by.’
Cecily seemed to be holding herself upright with a great effort. ‘Meg’s teacher was called a witch, and ducked, and died of it.’
‘Before the wars, surely.’
‘There are many who remember it.’
‘But your mother. No one would presume. Lady Harriet is not the kind to be suspected of witchcraft.’
Cecily gestured irritably, a mere twitch of her hand. ‘Witchcraft is a meaningless word. A mere pretext. This is because my mother and Meg both worship in the forest.’
I had no idea what she meant. She didn’t deign to help me.
‘We cannot wait. Go to my cousin and tell him what is being said. Say that my mother is in danger. Here is Mr Richardson. Go quickly.’
In her nature playful gentleness and a tendency to be dictatorial are most oddly combined. I bowed myself out quite sulkily, as the apothecary was ushered quickly into the little room from which I had just been summarily expelled.
My Lord received me calmly, albeit his face looked blurred, as though he had been roughly handled in the night. I delivered my condolences, to which he made only perfunctory answer, and my message, which he seemed to understand more clearly than I did. There ensued much galloping about. A carriage was sent. Lady Harriet, complaining feebly, was brought back with her daughter and ensconced in one of the recently vacated guest-chambers. Her maid came after on a cart. Meg was carried in, still as in a dead faint, with Mr Richardson attending, and laid among cushions on a settle in my Lord’s study.
Lord Woldingham gave orders that all the estate workers should be called together on the grass patch before the house. Once a sizeable crowd had gathered, he took his hat and went out to them, I following along with the people of the household. All in black, he looked oddly reduced.
‘You know that I have suffered a great loss. I speak now to all of you, to those who knew me when I was an infant in this place, and to those who have shared my exile. I have been away a long time. But do not suppose that Wychwood was ever left behind me.
‘We have all observed, from conversing with our grandparents and other elders, that the very first impressions are the most deeply inscribed. Even one who can scarce remember whether it be time to rise or to go to bed will marvel at a butterfly seen half a century ago. Another asks fondly after a dog who died before our King’s father came to the throne, even if he cannot recollect the latter end of that unhappy monarch.
‘I am not yet in my decline, but I assure you that many of the dreary days of exile have been erased from my mind, while pictures from my first three years, passed in this very house, have comforted me in my absence. Yesterday morning my boys were playing with a wooden ark they found in their nursery. I have gone so far, and my homeward course has meandered so unconscionably, it seemed a miracle to see the little dents in the rump of the wooden elephant. It is a marvel that the mind can sling a bridge across so sad a gulf of time, and yet I tell you all that as I handled the toy I could feel again the pleasure with which, as a child, I bit down on that piece of painted wood.
‘The milk-teeth that made those little wounds are shed, but the jaw in which those teeth grew is here’ (at this he tossed back the curled tresses of his long wig as though presenting his throat to be cut). ‘You have yet to know me, but I am one of you. One of the men of Wychwood.’
This was not at all what the assembled listeners had come to hear. A man loses his child, and then alludes to the boy only in passing, as an unnamed player in a scene with an inanimate toy. It seemed as though my Lord had no heart. What did they care about the vagaries of memory? They had expected him to display his mourning to them. The women, especially, appeared downright offended.
This opening, though, was but the overture. Having tuned his instrument, Lord Woldingham launched abruptly into a lament as ardent as the divine Orpheus’s. ‘I have lost a child. Not for the first time. My firstborn left this life, when he himself had barely glimpsed it, before I could ever see him, ever touch him. I was so far away. But my Charles who died yesterday was near to me. My wife brought him to me in Holland, and from thenceforward it was as though I, who had been homeless, had a home. Father and mother can build a house, but it is no more than a shelter from bad weather until a child runs through it. I used to walk by a pond near to my lodging at The Hague, and I thought it dreary. Then this boy came, and chuckled to see the geese come splashing down on the muddy water, and the unlovely mere became delightful. I am thankful that I have two babes yet. But just as a parent’s love is big enough to embrace every child that comes, so it will never shrink to cover over the wound left where one of those precious ones is missing.’
People were glancing up at the windows of my Lady’s apartments on the first floor, but there was nothing to see there.
‘I have been a child in this place, and so have many of you. I have lost a child here. Many of you will have had private cause to grieve over the clashes of our country’s unhappy recent history. You will know, as I do, how it is to mourn. Some of you have already offered me your sympathy. I thank you. Others have held back discreetly. I thank you too.’
He was speaking very smoothly and soberly. I noticed Mr Goodyear looking at him with an appraising air, but not unkindly. I have heard that Goodyear is a bard, whose storytelling has made him a known man in this region.
My Lord proceeded. ‘Some among you have said most generously that they would do anything possible to alleviate the sadness of this time. There is something I would ask of you.
‘A woman has been brought to this house today grievously ill. She has been so frightened and harassed that her mind has become a blank. I do not know whether she will ever revive from this strange vacancy. She is Meg Leafield. She has been a faithful servant of this family, and I would have had her treated with respect as one of my own. Some of you may have imagined you were performing my secret wish in troubling her. I declare most roundly that that belief was mistaken.
‘I am no sectarian. It is my wish, as it is His Majesty the King’s – and he is wise in this – that we should put aside our quarrels and strive to make this a peaceful nation, whose people are united in their desire to see their country prosper.’
The peacock was crossing the elevated lawn behind the assembled listeners. Its attention caught by the gathering beneath it, it interrupted its gawky pavane and turned in our direction. Very slowly, with a loud dry rattling of quill upon quill, it elevated its showy panoply of tail-feathers – green, bronze, purple, black and tawny, all metallic and glinting, a sumptuous medley setting off the blue of the creature’s throat as an immense brocaded skirt shows off the jewel-coloured satin of a stomacher.
Lord Woldingham has longed to see this. I have observed him with Mr Armstrong, one whole afternoon, following the bird around, attempting to interest it in its mate, or in some tidbit or other, in a vain attempt to persuade it to perform the trick for which it had been purchased. Now, as it turned itself this way and that, as though set upon compelling admiration, I wondered whether it would cheer him, or throw him from his intent.
He ignored it. He was saying, ‘I do not enquire into the niceties of your relationships with our Maker. Worship in church or chapel, with vicar or presbyter, or with a wayside preacher whose pulpit is the hedge. It is all one to me, so long as you treat each other with civility. Those of you who have been long abroad, as I have, may have a quarrel with some of our fellows who have flourished here. I say put those quarrels aside. We want no vengeance, no hunting down, no settling of scores. I have heard it said that to make peace with an opponent is shameful and unmanly. I say it is an honourable thing, a wise and benevolent thing, a thing on which God, however you may imagine him, will smile.’
‘I applaud our employer’s breadth of mind,’ murmured a voice in my ear. ‘Surely, though, to speak of “imagining” the divinity is over-bold.’ It was Mr Rose. I was surprised at his addressing me in such an insinuating tone. I dislike whisperers. I nodded, but didn’t turn my head.
Now Lord Woldingham’s rumblings gave way to a thunderclap. He strode through the crowd, and mounted the plinth I have had prepared ready for the ancient marble figure of Flora, which is making its way towards us by painfully slow degrees. My Lord’s agent in Rome purchased it there. Now it is creeping along the canals of France, drawn by huge shaggy-heeled horses. Some time this summer, it will make the dangerous crossing to these shores before being heaved aboard another barge to float upstream to us here. The stone nymph will be twice the height of Lord Woldingham, whose quickness of movement and forcefulness can lead one to forget that he is, in person, just a wisp of a man. But on the plinth, his funereal satins lustrous in the sun, he seemed as darkly substantial as the improbably gigantic bronze mastiffs recently set up as guardians of Wychwood’s new front door. The assembled people had stepped nervously aside to let him pass; now they swivelled to see him again. The sun was in their eyes; he a silhouette against a background of white sky. For the first time he raised his voice.
‘A harmless, helpless woman has been ill-treated here. Shame on you. A member of my own family, to whom you all owe deference, has been slandered. More shame upon you. There has been nonsensical babble of witchcraft. We are not savages, to give credence to such piffle. My son is dead and you foul the pure grief of his family with superstitious blatherings. Let me hear no more of this. Those of you who have frightened Meg Leafield will come to me and explain yourselves. Lady Harriet is my aunt, and my honoured guest. When she pleases to return to Wood Manor, she goes under my protection. Any man or woman who breathes a word against her makes an enemy of me.’
He stood silent for upwards of a minute. No one fidgeted or uttered a word. When he stepped down he did so deliberately, and walked back into the house with the demeanour of one following a coffin, but that his eyes were turned, not to the earth, but upwards as though defying the gloomy clouds to rain upon him.
I went to my office and occupied myself with new sketches for the parterre. Seeing my Lord so elevated had brought home to me how the proportions of the terrace will appear altered once Flora queens it over the space. The eye must be led to her, and the flowerbeds must seem to flow out from her, the bringer of flowers.
*
I am as much a fool as that ridiculous peacock. The fowl, disdaining its proper mate, has become enamoured of one of the garden boys. The display it made for us all yesterday was an attempt to catch the youth’s attention. It follows him around with pathetic constancy.
He was at work in the rose garden as I set off for my walk this afternoon. As he spread horse-dung on the beds (not all of a gardener’s tasks are fragrant), the amorous bird was on the pavement alongside him, its cumbersome fan extended, turning very slowly, first to one side and then to another, as though imploring him to notice how the vari-coloured filaments in its plumage flared and changed in the shifting light.
The boy, who is very young, is being plagued by the others’ teasing. I think he hardly understands the game of love yet.
I walked out towards Wood Manor and had a happy encounter. I have had much to think about these past hours – sad matters for the most part. Yet, as I write these words, I find myself absurdly gay.
*
I will allow yesterday’s entry to stand. At least it is evidence that I am sensible of my folly. There is no dishonour in loving an admirable woman, so long as I refrain from pestering her with my suit.
What seems to me now most reprehensible is that my pre-occupation with things private to myself makes me negligent of my employer’s grief. Lovers, it is rightly said, are solipsistic imbeciles.
Wychwood sitting nearly on the summit of a low hill, the land falls away from it on three sides. To the west, a set of ancient stone steps leads down to a sunken lawn, cupped by steep banks and floored with violets. This was a pond once, made by Romans perhaps, or by the monks who had a dwelling here after the Romans had gone. Mr Green tells me that when his men were levelling the ground they found a rubble of petrified sods within which time and decay had drawn the skeletons of ancient fishes. The tiny bones had dematerialised to leave an effigy of themselves made of nothingness, a vacuity which might, had the gardeners’ spades not chopped them up, have survived, insubstantial and indestructible as the soul is to a true believer, for ever and ever, amen.
I walked there this afternoon. Lupin the pug snuffled about me. When he saw me take my hat and open the door to the garden he came scuttling bowlegged down the corridor to join me, his claws clicking on the flagstones.
The world being full of graceful creatures, it puzzles me why the ugly should be so prized. After I had paced with Lupin half an hour, though, I found myself touched by the fortitude with which he bears the deficiencies of his bodily design. His walk is an ungainly waddle. His skin was made for a being twice his size and bunches around his neck like an ill-fixed ruff. He snorts and grunts, half suffocated. As he struggles for breath, liquid trickles from his nose, and he laps it up with a busy and repulsive action of his tongue, the only neat thing about him.
I was meditating on the capriciousness of Providence, which kills a likely boy too young, and allows the survival of another being so evidently unfit, when I was struck hard at the back of my right knee.
The blow felled me. Half recumbent on the grass, I looked around and could see no sign of my assailant. Kneeling beside me, clucking and fidgeting with my waistcoat buttons, was old Meg. I am ashamed to admit I pushed her back roughly. The pain in my knee was sharp, but I was more shaken by the force of my fall. My previous reverie continued ad absurdum. How much more stable our posture would be, I thought groggily, had we four legs. In this respect Lupin was my superior. Balancing precariously on only two vertical supports, my body – when one of those supports was knocked out from under me – had lapsed to the horizontal with a most unpleasant thump.
Two people shot out of the thicket on the far side of the lawn. One was the boy I had previously seen with Meg. The other was Mr Rose, hatless, and demonstrating that a round belly is no diminisher of agility.
Rose shouted, ‘Are you hurt, Mr Norris?’
He caught the boy and hugged him from behind. The two swayed like wrestlers, the boy’s feet kicking. Meg went to them, met Rose’s eye deliberately and spat on his shoe. He let his arms fall limp. The boy sat sullen where he had dropped.
‘He threw that stone,’ Rose said to me.
He was looking past Meg as though she were of no account. She slapped his face. I was astonished to see him flinch like a chastened scholar. When last I had heard of her, she was lying insensible. Now she was articulate.
‘One boy dead, and you bullying another,’ she said. She tied her shawl crosswise over her chest and returned to my side. She lifted from the ground, not a stone, but a sphere of solid wood, finely turned, about the bigness of an apple and painted blue.
‘The gentlemen give him farthings to find their balls for them, and fling them back,’ she said, addressing me as though we were old acquaintances. ‘That a child should have to pick up toys for grown men!’ There were iron hoops set here and there about the lawn, and mallets propped against a bench.
I sat, then stood. I said to the boy, ‘Men are not rabbits, to be shied at.’ He looked up at me through his hair and I had a shock. His face was that of Lord Woldingham’s deceased son.
Mr Rose approached, stroking the round hat he had retrieved from a bramble. He shook his head at Meg and came to inspect my injury. The damage to my stockings was greater than that to my person. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. He bent and murmured to Meg, and passed on up towards the house.
I turned to the old woman and addressed her formally. ‘Mistress Leafield,’ I said, ‘I have wondered about you. This mishap has at least had the advantage of making us known to each other.’
We hobbled together, I leaning on her shoulder, to a stone bench. There, with Lupin and the boy growling at each other on the ground beneath us, she explained herself, and other things beside.
She was playmate to Lady Harriet, and to my Lord’s father, when they were all infants, because she was their wet-nurse’s child. She stayed with Lady Harriet, studying alongside her. ‘My Lady is an artist,’ she said. ‘You have seen it. The rich don’t honour silk-workers as they do paint-workers, but artists know their own. Mr Rose has the greatest respect for her. He brings the woodcarvers and plasterers to Wood Manor, and urges them to emulate her designs. I, though, was the better scholar.’
I had thought her ignorant and mute. How often in these past few days have I had to repent of a hasty judgement.
‘I learnt mathematics indoors,’ she said, ‘of my Lady’s governor. I learnt physic in the wood, taught by fairies.’ She looked carefully at me with small lashless eyes. I betrayed no scepticism, nor any inclination to burn her alive. ‘You are phlegmatic, Mr Norris,’ she said.
‘I am readier to learn than to condemn.’
The fairies, she explained, came to her not as weird visions, but speaking across aeons of time through the stories preserved and cherished by the people of the locality. From them, and from her own experiments, she had found out ways of using plants as remedies and preservatives. She had discovered that she had the gift of calming the frantic with incantations. She knew how to alleviate pain with simples. ‘There are some agonies which are too piercing for anyone to suffer them and live,’ she said. ‘I can help the sufferer to escape the pain by trauncing, by passing over temporarily into the place of death. There are some who do not return, and I have been blamed for that, but I do not doubt they were grateful to me.’
A silence fell. Perhaps she expected remonstrance. I waited for her to continue.
‘Lady Woldingham is in a grievous state,’ she said. ‘I can help her. Or rather this boy can.’
‘He is your grandson?’ I asked.
She looked taken aback, as though I had displayed extraordinary ignorance. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, not mine.’
Mr Rose came back down the steps.
Meg called the boy to her. They went hurriedly away through the little bushes.
‘You are shaken up,’ said Rose. ‘Here, take my arm.’ I was glad to do so. It is true that I felt atremble. My face in the looking-glass was like porridge, lumpen and grey. I went to my room and slept an hour or two, as babies do when they have been dropped.
My habits are regular and somewhat ascetic. I rise early, and go punctually to my rest. It is unusual for me to be abed in daylight. Perhaps that is why I had such visions in my sleep. I seemed to be lapped around in a mist in which all colours were present, glimmeringly pale. I was swirled as in mother-of-pearl liquefied. I had no weight. Nothing grated upon me or pinched me. ‘Comfort’ is a state we do not prize enough. It is not so sharp as joy, or so exalted as rapture. But in my sleeping state I felt how delicious it is to be warm, to be wrapped in softness, to feel clean and smooth as milk, to be caressed by things silken and delicate. I rolled as in a heavenly cloud, freed of the dizziness one might feel if truly suspended in air, freed of the downward pressure that makes our flesh a burden to us. I was as jocund as the cherubs on my Lord’s painted ceilings.
The delight, intensifying, awoke me. My knee was aching. The pearly flood in which I had revelled had dwindled to a patch of slime on my sheet. My celestial tumblings had had an all-too-earthly outcome. I am glad that I had not seen Cecily as I dreamt.
I went downstairs to find a lugubrious silence. It is late. I asked for some supper to be brought to my room. I sit now to write in a state curiously suspended between contentment and anxiety.
I think about that boy. I wonder how Meg means to use him for the consolation of the bereaved mother.
*
Walking in the park, I met Cecily Rivers. I showed her the secret garden I am making in the woods for Lady Woldingham. We passed a remarkable few hours. I think it has not, to ordinary observers, been a bright day, but as I view it now, in retrospect, it dazzles me.
The mother of Ishmael told the angel that her name for the divinity was Thou-God-Seest-Me. To be seen, is that not what we crave? An infant reared by loving parents is cosseted by the vigilance of mother or nurse. Fond eyes dote upon its tiny fingernails, the gossamer wisps of its hair. Once grown, though, we fade from sight. We merge with the crowd of our fellows, all jostling for notice, all straining to catch fortune’s eye. To believe, as many do, that God has us perpetually under surveillance must be a very great consolation for our fellow-men’s neglect.
It is years, now, since I have felt myself held in the beam of a kindly gaze. Today, though, Cecily looked at me. She spoke to me. She touched my sleeve and laughed at me. She carried herself towards me not as though I was Norris the fee’d calculator of areas and angles; not as though I was the desiccated fellow politely withdrawing when the company dissolves into its pleasures; not as though I were a kind of gelding, neutered by misfortune and hard work. Thou-Cecily-Seest-Me. She sees me industrious, and full of energy. She sees me bashful, and considers it a grace. She sees that my eyes and hair are brown and my fingers long. She sees that I am a young man, and proud. She sees me not as a paving to be stepped on uncaring, but as a path to be followed joyfully. How do I know all this? Not by words.
I have been startled by her seeing. I have felt the carapace, in which I have lived like a tortoise in its shell, crack and fall away from me.
She did not have to reveal herself to me. She was already admirable in my sight.
What passed between us today is not as yet for writing down. Unshelled, I shudder with happiness, and I am afraid.
*
What I call the ‘secret’ garden is no such thing. How could it be, given that it has been dug and planted not by elves, but by men? It is, however, well secluded.
It was my Lord’s fancy to make his wife a place where she could walk unregarded. He promised it to her while they were still in London. ‘I will refrain,’ he told her, ‘even from looking at the plans. This will be as private to you as your closet. I hereby swear – with Carisbrooke and Mr Norris as my witnesses – that, except in some extraordinary emergency, I will never set foot within its bounds.’ Carisbrooke is a grey and red parrot whom my Lord’s father kept in the castle of that name, when he was there with the late King. It is much given to screeching.
Lady Woldingham, who does not share his mania for privacy, made a pretty speech as to how her husband would always be welcome, wheresoever she might be. He waved it aside. We were in the drawing room of their great house on the Strand. Through the windows we could see the sluggish river-water, the woods on the south bank and, near to, the garden through which servants were carrying barrels up from the landing stage towards the low-arched kitchen entrance.
‘See there,’ said my Lord. ‘This garden is a thoroughfare. How can you muse on the beauties of creation, when you are likely to be knocked aside by some stout fellow lugging a tub of molasses?’
He had then been only a few weeks back in his family’s home and he was full of fidgets. For many of those returned with the King, London felt full of hostile eyes. I think one of the reasons he summoned me so frequently was that it comforted him to think that as soon as his presence at court could be dispensed with he would remove to Oxfordshire; to the Eden I was to create for him there. London is too historied. The park at Wychwood seemed, in his imagination, as unsullied by humanity as the first settlers imagined the Americas to be.
The secret garden became my pet project, my hobby-horse. When the complexities of the great park bewildered me, when I could struggle no more with the awkward geometry of its slopes and hollows, with the inconvenient patches of infertile ground, whether boggy or parched, which threatened to interrupt my lines of planting, then I would pull out the portfolio in which the secret garden’s plans were stored. I have heard of an architect, who when at work on a palace, built himself a flimsy house of cards for his recreation. So I, worn out by the consideration of trenches and drains, would play at designing this sylvan enclave, barely the size of a tennis court. Surrounded by woodland trees, it would show like a fairy’s bower. There would be a pond, fed by a stream, and paved walks on which my Lady could tread with ease. The plants would be chosen for their fragrance, and for the daintiness of their blooms. My Lady is small. I had sometimes to remind myself that she is nonetheless a grown woman, as I found myself designing a garden in miniature, a plot as pretty as a Persian rug on which a child could play among tiny tufted flowers.
There I was today with Cecily. There my life swung around, as a shutter upon a hinge.
*
The boy’s funeral took place this morning. Afterwards, I was abroad until late. When I returned to the great house, I found it a peopled darkness. My Lord and Lady kept to their rooms. The paucity of candles signified mourning, but the sumptuously dressed people still thronging the state rooms talked with an animation that shocked me. I am not censorious of elegancies of appearance – such frivolities are too slight to merit moralising upon them. But there is something brazen about the contrast between the blackness of mourning garb and the vanity of adorning the dreary cloth with black lace and glinting jet, or of wearing an inky bodice cut low as that of a courtesan out to snaffle herself a king.
The funeral feast was still upon the table, and a cabal of ancient gentlemen sat over it, exchanging lugubrious reminiscences as the wine went round. I profited by the strange disruptedness of the household, to dine informally, setting myself alongside this chorus of old vultures, and accepting a dish of venison brought to me by a footman who seemed quite done in by weeping. His bleary eyes and puffed face hauled my mind back to the scenes of the morning. The children gazing at their brother’s catafalque, their faces grey as though they saw it seethe with worms. The rector, his surplice probably unworn since the late Lord Woldingham went out, fumbling with a ring that had snarled itself in the redundant flurry of lace about his wrists. My Lady swaying like an ill-propped effigy. Choirboys with censers sending up fumes of music and incense together. An awful ache in the throat, as though to draw breath in that gilded chapel were to risk suffocation.
*
I have reached the sanctuary of my room at last, much torn about and bewildered. I will not write more tonight. I have been detained by events that have so puzzled me I am not yet ready to set them down. I have been abominably ill-treated. I am half-minded to depart this place tomorrow.
*
This morning a maid brought me a letter from Cecily. She has asked me to destroy it, but first I will make a digest of it in this journal, which I believe is secure. No one in this household has any wish to delve into the secret thoughts of Norris the landskip man.
I have been culpably ignorant of the community in which I temporarily dwell.
We have all become accustomed to suppressing our curiosity. Just as among felons in a gaol it is held to be discourteous to enquire for what heinous deed one’s companion is condemned, so we citizens of this unhappy country have learnt to close our eyes and ears to the vexed histories of our fellows.
We do so at peril to our humanity. To be inquisitive may be dangerous, but to be wilfully blind is cruel. I had no inkling, before, of the consequences to humankind of the grand schemes my Lord and I have been elaborating.
Cecily’s prologue can be rendered in brief. She makes no allusion to what transpired between us in the secret garden. Instead she apologises for having involved me in matters that may prove troublesome. She regrets her failure to confide in me earlier. She explains that our fortuitous meeting yesterday, and its sequel, have taken me so far into a tangle of secrets that she feels it is her duty to help me understand them. Here I stand back. Let her continue in her own words.
‘My mother and I are of the dissenting party. There. You already deduced as much. For all that I know, you may be of our mind. Or perhaps you find us stiff-necked and perverse. I think, though, that you would not do us unnecessary harm.
‘When we encountered you yesterday we were carrying beribboned baskets, as though stepping out for our pleasure, in quest of spring flowers. We often do so. My cousin’s men are accustomed to seeing us bearing home primrose plants nestled in damp moss.
‘You, though, may have wondered what might have induced my mother to venture so far abroad. At the same hour on the previous day she had returned to Wood Manor, exhausted by the effort of sustaining her part in the funeral. Nonetheless she insisted on sallying out.
‘I had not intended to invite you to accompany us to the meeting-house, but my mother’s sudden weakness rendered your assistance most welcome.
‘I believe that you were amazed when you saw such a numerous congregation, and began to learn how such a gathering has come to be a regular occurrence in these woods.’
Here I resume the thread. Cecily is right. I was amazed.
When I awoke yesterday I had not slept easy. My night-time musings were delicious, but not restful.
The morning at my desk was unproductive. The house was sombre. Black cloth draped the looking-glasses, and hung in ugly festoons over the long windows. I continued, because I had not been ordered to desist, to plan for happier times. I was puzzling over the design for a stage al fresco.
My Lord, until fate smote him so cruelly, had been amusing himself with plans for masques and ballets to be performed on summer evenings in the fan-shaped hollow, so like an ancient amphitheatre, which closes the vista across the great lawn. He has asked me to consider it, and I took delight in the task. Narrow terraces, sustained by stone walls, will be planted in spring with rare tulips. In high summer the bulbs will be digged up, and mats laid down, with cushions upon them. My Lord’s friends, gorgeously dressed, will be ranged along the terraces like Chinese porcelain displayed upon ledges.
I was planning the pergola that will back the stage. My sketches are attractive, but I was vexed by some technical matters. More seriously, I felt uncertain for whom I laboured. Who now in this house thinks of plays and players? I asked a servant to bring me a bite to eat and, fortified with ale and cold mutton, I was glad to go forth into the park.
There I met the two ladies of Wood Manor. I cannot pretend that I had been unaware that I might intercept their walk, nor that that consideration had not been chief among my motives for walking out. (See how a lover’s bashfulness contorts my syntax.)
As I came upon them it was evident that Lady Harriet was fatigued. I took her basket from her and gave her my arm as far as a fallen oak that made an adequate, if scarcely luxurious, seat. I offered to return to the house to ask for conveyance home for them. But Lady Harriet insisted that she would soon be rested and would not disappoint ‘the brethren’.
To give the ladies time to recover themselves I explained what I have planned for the western end of the park, over which, from our makeshift seat, we enjoyed a fine prospect. I talked of groves of the balsamic poplar, whose myrrh will fill the park with celestial odours, and of the fallow deer (some dozen of whom were grazing in our eye-line) whom I would have banished for the protection of my stripling beeches, but on the retention of which Lord Woldingham has set his heart. He has even sent abroad for a pair of albinos in the hope of breeding a race of white harts. Animal, vegetable, mineral. He favours the first; I the second; Mr Rose the third. Despite his name, the architect thinks only of stone and of water.
The course of the wall (our triumvirate’s joint venture) in this quarter is now partially cleared. Where soon there will be a sturdy barrier there is now a vacancy, a strip of no-grass, no-brambles, no-bracken, no-trees. In my mind’s eye the wall is already handsomely there, its stone the colour of a breadcrust, its solidity giving definition to the park as a fine frame does to a picture. To the others, I suppose, the band of raw and rutted earth must have looked as shocking as a wound.
After some half an hour had gone by, Lady Harriet appeared restored. I offered to accompany them on their way. Cecily accepted. Despite what had passed between us, she treated me as formally as ever. When I pressed her hand, in assisting her, she turned away.
We crossed the wall’s foundations, traversed a part of the wooded periphery which the workmen have yet to reach and made our way downwards through dense, low-growing holly trees whose blackish foliage left the forest floor bare but for the skeletons of leaves, crisp and lacy as carvings done by midgets. We went silently, our feet sinking softly into mould. I had never come this way before. Of a sudden we stepped from our dim passage into brilliant light.
Across the glade rose a barn-like structure. Its roof was of thatch, its walls of wattle panels fixed to stout stone piers. Gathered before it was a company of about a hundred souls. Some I recognised. Before I could take in more of the scene my arms were grabbed and pulled behind me, and my wrists tied. I was hustled across the grass towards the great door of the building. My two companions watched this outrage serenely. I called out as I struggled, but they seemed absorbed in converse with those about them. It was as though they had led me deliberately into a trap.
My captors were middle-aged men, decently dressed. They spoke not a word to me. A boy, running backwards before me the better to jeer in my face, was as voluble as they were taciturn. The little lordling’s landskip limner. Porky pig the pug-dog. Verminous village vandal. Mr Long-nose. Mr Long-wall. Mr Long-wind. Windy wabbler.
It is true my nose is long, but not monstrously so. The allusions to pig and pug had more to do with the lad’s taste for alliteration than with my appearance.
The interior of the building was fitted up like a parliament, with benches facing each other to either side. I was led to the very centre and invited to sit on a low chest. My bindings were loosened, though not removed. I waited quietly – really I did not know how else to comport myself – while all those who had been standing about on the grass filed in. The majority of them looked like working people, some like desperate vagrants, but there were gentry as well. They seated themselves in orderly fashion, the men to one side, the women to the other. Cecily entered with Lady Harriet, and found seats on the front-most bench, so that, had I felt it fitting, I could have reached out and touched her hand. She looked steadily at me, and made a tiny shrug, as though seeing a reproach in my eye that I did indeed most heartily intend.
A gentleman passed between us, brushing awkwardly through the cramped passageway to assume a commanding position by a lectern directly in front of me. He asked me to rise, so that we two were posed like play-actors, visible to all eyes. There ensued this exchange.
He – You may be surprised, Mr Norris, to hear me say that we welcome you to our assembly. Your treatment at our hands has so far been rough. We pray you to forgive us. We have reasons to be suspicious of strangers.
I – I await your explanation, sir.
He – I must ask you first if you are one of the chosen.
I – If you mean by that, sir, am I one of those who believe God has singled them out for grace in this life and glory in the next, and who maintain – on no grounds other than their own conviction – that all others are to be damned to perpetual torment, then I must answer in the negative. I am not of that sect.
I think now it was pompous of me, and unmannerly, to reply so downrightly, but I was ruffled up by the man-handling to which I had been subjected.
He (laughing) – I thank you, sir, for your candour.
I – I am a Christian. I bear ever in mind Christ’s teaching regarding the love we owe to our neighbours. He was not particular as to the manner in which that neighbour might worship, or the minutiae of that neighbour’s conception of the Almighty. Nor am I. I have my own ideas, which I will keep private. I do my work. I make my living. I hope to be useful.
He – And virtuous, Mr Norris?
I – By my own lights. With whom do I speak?
He – We do not reveal our names here. It is a matter of courtesy as much as of security. We are under the King’s protection, as all his subjects are. Nonetheless, there are those who believe they are acting for the monarchy when they chase and torment us. Just as there are people in Lord Woldingham’s following who thought to please him by bullying one of our sisters.
I thought, Meg?
The man was suave. I supposed him to be some kind of a preacher, but nothing in his dress distinguished him as such.
He – You see that we have established a settlement here in the forest. Since the coming back of the King we have thought it prudent to remain here in seclusion. We are not hide-aways. Our presence is common knowledge in all the villages around. By keeping ourselves apart, though, we avoid provoking rancour. This hall, rough as it is, is our temple. Nature provides us with the materials for our dwellings, and with most of our food.
I – Why do you tell me all this?
He – Because you endanger our peaceable and harmless existence. I will explain. But first please join us in our worship.
My bonds were removed. I was led to a place opposite Cecily and her mother. The people rose to their feet as one. The small sounds of the forest, the rustlings and chirpings, the twitterings and flappings, came clearly to us through the open door. And then those sounds were progressively erased, rather as the goings-on of the world become muffled for one who is overcome by faintness. Something had taken over my auditory faculties. Time passed before I understood that that something was itself a sound.
A droning – wavering but insistent – not unlike that which emanates from a beehive in midsummer. Not melodious, not expressive; a kind of energy, the musical equivalent of the air that can be seen to pulse and shimmer above heated iron. I glanced to right and left. The rows of men stood intent, their lips loosely set. The sound surged and ebbed, surged and ebbed. I saw that a stocky man at the farthest end from the door was gesticulating discreetly, as though regulating its flow. I do not know exactly when I understood that the sound was human, that all the men around me were emitting sound as simply and powerfully as all day long we emit breath.
The hum became a rumble and then, as though borne on its powerful wave, an answering call, articulate this time, arose from the benches opposite as all the women lifted up their voices.
We are a garden walled around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground;
A little spot enclosed by grace
Out of the world’s wide wilderness.
Cecily and Lady Harriet were singing with the rest, though I could not distinguish their voices amidst the consort.
Like trees of myrrh and spice we stand,
Planted by God the Father’s hand;
And all His springs in Zion flow,
To make the young plantation grow.
I bowed my head. The Woldingham boy’s funeral did not touch me as I felt it ought, for all the beauty of Wychwood’s chapel with its curiously twisted ebony columns, and for all the skill of the musicians and the purity of the castrato’s voice. This woodland ceremony, though, moved me. The tears that had failed to fall before pricked at my eyelids. It was as though I grieved, not for a boy with whom I was barely acquainted, but for all that have been lost. So many, many dead in a lifetime of wars. My brother. The children that he might have begotten. The children whom I have not had.
Our Lord into His garden comes,
Well pleased to smell our poor perfumes,
And calls us to a feast divine,
Sweeter than honey, milk, or wine.
Prayers followed, which seemed to me unconscionably long, and impertinent with it. Surely the Almighty does not wish to be pestered with requests for mild weather; and to thank him for the flourishing of cress and early lettuces in the garden-plots of these particular people was to make the presumption that he thus puts himself out, not for all mankind, (and rabbit-kind for that matter), but solely for the benefit of the congregation of this chapel-in-the-woods. Perhaps I was unduly irritable, but I detected a smug suggestion that God’s great munificence could be brought forward as proof that the present company might look down in unamiable condescension on those beneath them – to wit, the rest of the human race.
There was to be no sermon. Rather, anyone who chose was invited to step forward and give an account of their spiritual progress. These recitations were tedious. Petty sins; trite regrets. I had to struggle not to fidget. When a great commotion without brought the ceremony to a sudden end I welcomed it at first as a relief.
Men with staves and swords barged into the meeting place. The preacher rose up to remonstrate, but the newcomers pushed rudely by him and began to drag out certain persons. Those who had been hearkening quietly, with bowed heads, to their brethren a moment before, now set up a great hullaballoo. Men and women alike rose from their seats to obstruct the arrest of their fellows. In the mêlée I felt myself grasped firmly by the elbows and hustled down an open pathway between the benches and out by a side door.
We were in a narrow space between the building’s side and a thicket of hawthorn. A cleft in the tight-growing bushes, like the opening of a cave, showed a passageway into the forest. The man on my left was one of those who had laid hold of me before. He said, ‘Go now with all speed. Run. Follow that path. It leads to the sawmill. Thence you can return to the great house without it seeming that you have been here.’
I was flustered and angry. ‘I cannot abandon the two ladies,’ I said.
‘It is better for them, too, that you are clear of this. Run.’
Before I could argue, he and his companion had slipped back into the ‘temple’ and closed the door. Alone, I heard the shouting grow more vehement, and the ugly clatter of falling furniture. A cat flew past me, its ears back, and vanished into the wood. I went after it.
So much for what I saw and underwent. Let Cecily’s letter explain. It is not, though I was momentarily fool enough to imagine it might be, a missive of love.
You are aware that my parents were of the Parliamentary party. My father was not one of those who signed the order for the killing of the late King Charles, but he accepted his share in responsibility for that solemn and awful deed. He himself died soon afterwards.
My Uncle Woldingham, on going abroad for his safety, wisely decided to make of the division of opinion between himself and his sister, not a crack which would ever widen until our family was riven in two, but a strength. He wrote to my mother, asking her to become the steward and, for a while, the mistress of Wychwood. And so it fell out that while my cousin – heir to a great estate – grew up as a wanderer and a mendicant, I lived like a princess, roaming through Wychwood as though it were my own domain.
I was a princess in plain worsted, though, and one who sewed and scrubbed alongside her courtiers. My mother had not estranged herself from her noble family lightly, only in order to return home to live like a lady, careless of lesser folk. She filled Wychwood with those who had been my father’s fellow-revolutionaries, and sharers in his tribulations before their party prevailed.
We were like those who first heard Christ’s calling – or so we pretended. All was shared. Food, clothing, shelter. The women cared for each other’s children. The men laboured side by side. But there were those who cried out loudly against the depravity of the wealthy and the sin of covetousness, who would yet secretly take precious volumes from the library. There were others whose indignation against the ungodly led them to the brutish destruction of things, not theirs, which had been made for God’s glory. Paintings were burnt. Tapestries were hauled down to be used as blankets, and allowed to fray and tatter.
My mother began to fear the people whom she had invited to share her home. I want you to understand, Mr Norris, lest you judge us too harshly, that this was a community founded in love. Its members were sincere. But there was too much envy and too much rancour and there were those who took an obnoxious pleasure in the chastising of the ungodly.
Two women tried to leave the community – they were dragged back and beaten and forced to beg forgiveness on their knees before us all in only their smocks. Now people like us are called dissenters, but our brethren would not tolerate dissent. My mother and I slept in the long gallery, along with all the other women, some of whom were such that my mother in her earlier life would never have sat at table with them, let alone lain down alongside them. This in the name of Christian humility, but the pastor who ordered it took the great chamber for himself. In the night he would call upon such women as he said were in need of a shriving. His chosen penitent would be ushered into his room and we would hear them from behind the two sets of oaken doors – he thundering, she crying out to him and to God for mercy – and the fearsome swishing of his staff.
My mother wrote to my father’s brother, Pastor Rivers. You met him today. He came with his friends and assumed command of the community. The other pastor left early one morning, striding down the gallery over our poor bedding, his cheeks puce above his tight white kerchief, bellowing like a bullock going to the slaughterhouse. I do not know how he was prevailed upon to go. My mother and Uncle Rivers, wishing to remove their flock from the great house which had so corrupted them, established the settlement in the woods, and there our meeting-house was built.
Cecily’s letter goes on to describe a parallel world, one which permeates the one I have inhabited so blindly, as a tincture of juniper dissolves into clear water, transforming its nature unseen. To his Lordship, surveying his domain from his new-fangled sash windows, his park seems a paradise frequented only by those who toil for his pleasure. But it is populous. People cross it on paths that thread through stands of hazel and slip behind dense-growing young ash trees. People tread sunken ways of such ancient use that they traverse the park like trenches, their banks so overgrown with flowering plants that any pedestrian’s head passing there-along would show like a bladder bobbing on a foamy green stream.
These comings and goings, furtive as those of fox or stoat, are the means by which a society maintains itself. Trade routes, the paths along which babies are carried to the grandparents who will tend them while their mothers work, the tracks down which the workers plod outward at dawn, and homeward at evening. All these scarcely visible, unsanctioned thoroughfares cross the park. All will become impassable once the wall rises, with its iron gates, its lodges like guard-houses, its rigid distinction between the privileged space within it, and the inferior world without.
I have spoken to my cousin [writes Cecily], but his misfortunes have marred him. He longs for privacy, for a place in which he can confine himself, and where he can play unrebuked. You will have noticed how childlike he is.
With his grand projects, he has thoughtlessly exposed us to the jealousy of the intolerant. Among the labourers who have come to carry out the works there are those who hate and fear people of our persuasion.
Meg was ill-treated by some of the ignorant who, having no authority, have only fists and violent words as weapons. My cousin can quell them. But those who broke in upon us, as you saw, carried the King’s warrant. Some of our friends have been carted away – to Oxford, we believe. I fear for them.
She sent me no tender glance yesterday. Nor does her letter contain any word that might not have been addressed to a formal acquaintance.
*
Mr Goodyear fell into step beside me as I walked in the park this morning. It is not only his troop of foresters who acknowledge his authority. I have noticed how the generality of my Lord’s people defer to him. I believe that he and Meg Leafield are nearly related. A great estate is like an island, a closed community whose denizens must perforce marry each other, so that it is not uncommon for all to be connected by ties of blood, but these two – an old woman, spry of intellect but creaking of body, and a thriving man who, were he but a gentleman, would be admired as a modern Hercules – have some especial bond.
‘You’d think, wouldn’t you, sir, that being as proud as he is of that coloured pavement, Lord Woldingham would wish it preserved.’ Goodyear had been an onlooker at my Lord’s fête at the house of Bacchus.
‘Most certainly.’
‘So why is he allowing you to drown it?’
I explained that no such thing was intended. The lake-waters, if my calculations prove true, will rise to approximately two feet beneath the level of the Roman villa’s floor. ‘It will be preserved most carefully. It will make a charming picture, when the undergrowth is cleared away from the ruins and the ancient archway is reflected in the water.’
Goodyear nodded. ‘There is another one, you know,’ he said.
‘Another picture in mosaic?’
‘Beneath the chapel.’
‘Chapel?’ Lord Woldingham laughs at me for being as tedious a parrot as Carisbrooke. But one can gain time, in conversation, by repetition.
‘You were there yesterday.’
At Wychwood, there are eyes in every tree.
‘Be so kind as to tell me about it.’
‘When Miss Cecily’s uncle was choosing a spot for his meeting-house, as he called it, he asked me for my opinion.’
Nearly all those who now serve their returned Lord have passed years living here without him. Only gradually will he discover what they know about his land.
‘I took him to that place because the ground is level and easily worked. There’s water. And there’s the pebble-picture. I said to him, “The two lads will bring you luck.”’
He waited. I took my cue, parrot-fashion. ‘The two lads?’
‘That’s the picture, you see. Two boys. Little ones. Lying as it were, head to tail, to make a ring. There’s a story about them.’
I had only to nod for him to proceed.
‘There was once a king’s son, and in the same city there was a wise woman, and the wise woman had a son too. And there came a great rain, and the waters rose until there was no more difference between the land and the sea. And all the animals crowded onto hilltops that stood up out of the water like islands. And the people gathered there too.’
Goodyear had adopted an incantatory style of speech, as storytellers do, but he lapsed back into his normal pitch to deliver a piece of commentary. ‘It’s much like the story of the great flood in Noah’s time, you’ll be thinking, sir?’ I nodded again. He went on.
‘The King saw that there were no fields to till, and no green stuff for the cattle to eat. And he called the wise woman. And he said to her, “How am I to save my people?” She said, “You must take the thing you love most in the world and set it in a boat and send it out onto the water, and the rains will cease.” So the King set his crown on a damask cushion, and placed it in an ivory casket, and put it in a boat, and caused that boat to be launched out onto the current. He stood on the shore, weeping and wringing his hands as the boat went swiftly towards the horizon, and he saw that it was seized by a whirlpool, and sucked down into the belly of the flood. He waited then for the rain to cease, but instead the wind grew wilder, and where the rain had fallen before like water gushing from a drainpipe, it began now to fall like cascades from heaven.
‘The King called for the wise woman and told her what he had done, and she said, “What a man feels for a circle of gold is covetousness. What a man feels for a crown is a lust for power. I spoke of love.”
‘The King had a horse. He had bought the creature from a merchant who came each year from the East with a ship laden with wonderful things. The horse was faster than any other in the country and its coat shone like quicksilver. It knew its master so well, and was so obedient to him, that when the King rode upon it it was as though he had become like the centaur, in which man and beast are as one. That horse, too, the King sent out onto the waters. That horse, too, was swallowed down by the flood. And instead of ceasing, the rain fell so thick it was as though the ocean had mounted up in one great watery mass, to fall again on earth.
‘The King called for the wise woman again. He said, “I have given the crown, which is the token of my magnificence and my power. I have given the horse, that performed my will as readily as my hand does, and that could outrun the wind, and that would take sugar from my palm with lips that were as soft as velvet and as feeling as a musician’s fingertips.” She said, “What kind of a father are you?” And he understood her, and he fell to his knees on the ground, and his gorgeous robes were sodden with the wetness that was all around, and he said, “No. Not for my kingdom. Not for all my people. Not my son.” And the wise woman said, “You must.” He said, “What you ask of me is cruel. You too have a son. Would you do so?” and she said, “I would and I will.”
‘So the young prince came out of the palace and the wise woman’s son was waiting for him by the shore. The two boys had been born on the same day, and they were as like as your left foot is to your right foot. They were both dressed in smocks of sky-blue, and they sat side by side in the boat, and none knew any more which was the prince and which was the cunning woman’s child. And the boat was launched upon the flood.
‘The whirlpool seized it, as it had seized the others, and then the two boys held out their arms to each other, and they tilted their heads back as dancers do when they dance in a ring. The boat went from under their feet and was lost to them in the depths of the ocean. The spinning water whirled them about, but, as it turned them, so they turned within it, and their circled arms were as a wheel laid flat upon the water, and that wheel turned faster and ever faster, till those whirling boys rose into the air, and the speed of their spinning was such that it carried them on upwards until all that could be seen of them was a circlet of blueness against the terrible black of the storm clouds. And the rain stopped absolutely, and the clouds were driven from the sky. The King and the wise woman stood together watching, with tears clouding their sight, but had they been as sharp-eyed as killer birds they would have seen their children no more.’
Goodyear had adopted the pose I have seen storytellers assume on fairgrounds, legs braced apart for stability, hands on hips, his face upturned as though he sought words in the air. I was greatly impressed by his tale. I was curious to know its origin. The boys on the Roman pavement, I felt certain, must be the Gemini of the zodiac, for these Roman fragments often treat astrological themes. I feared, though, to offend my companion if I made a parade of my scholarship.
He passed both hands over his head and scratched it. ‘That’s the story I have heard,’ he said.
‘I am much obliged to you for it. Is it . . .’ I hesitated. ‘Is it one you heard from your parents?’
My instinct had been correct. He acted as though enquiry was improper. ‘It is from this place,’ he said, and looked at me teasingly.
We were in the far part of the park, above the ruined villa. Beneath us we could see Lord Woldingham and his wife strolling with their attendants along the valley floor. He offered her his arm and they walked together, their companions falling back, to the boggy place where their child had died. There they stood, apparently without speaking, for a considerable time.
*
When I’d finished writing in my journal last night I fell asleep as though dropping through a trap.
A commotion awoke me before it was light. I shoved aside a pillow so that it covered over my papers. Mr Rose, who is lodged near me, was already in the open doorway. ‘Come, Norris,’ he said.
I followed him along the corridor that leads into the oldest part of the house. He ushered me into a room holding a narrow bed and a wooden bucket. A bunch of dusty lavender, curiously bound with faded blue ribbon, was suspended from a hook in the window embrasure. The sheets were smoothed.
‘This is where Meg Leafield was quartered,’ he said.
Seeing me still baffled, he went on.
‘She is gone. I heard a scuffling past my door but when I looked out there was no one there. I think, Mr Norris, that we should follow her.’
A mouthful of water, boots, coat, muffler. I was ready. A resentful lad brought out our horses. Rose set off at a canter. At the entrance to the holly grove we dismounted and left the animals to graze. In the midst of the wood we left the path and trod softly to a little hummock. Lying flat on its apex, we could peer through the topmost branches of the trees before us, and see the clearing and the meeting-house spread beneath. The sun rising behind us set a blush in the sky and flooded the scene with long shadows and caressing light.
A great concourse of women. At its centre stood Meg Leafield. And so, the only male in sight, did the boy who threw a ball at me. Meg seemed to be pulling at his clothes.
‘You’ve been here,’ said Rose.
‘I have.’
‘You recognise that boy.’
‘You know that I have seen him before. He knocked me down.’
‘But do you understand who he is?’
I stared, mute.
‘He’s Cecily’s boy,’ said Rose. ‘Edward.’
The boy Edward’s shirt was off. The women were handing garments to Meg. He stood quiescent in his breeches. Meg helped him gently into new clothes far finer than those he had shed.
A lawn shirt. Stockings and high boots. An embroidered waistcoat and a sky-blue coat. I saw what was being done. My hands were shaking.
‘His cousin, then,’ I said. ‘They seem to be of an age.’
‘We must stop this,’ said Rose.
He scrambled to his feet and ran aslant down the slope, as clumsy as a charging boar, trampling small branches and sending stones clattering. I followed.
The other women looked round startled but Meg was unperturbed. Rose leapt the last few feet, and landed amongst them, impelled forward like a falling rock by the speed of his own going. He is a stocky man, broad-beamed and short-legged. I was almost as nonplussed by his urgency now as the women were. I slipped and scrambled after him with dread shadowing my mind and chilling my limbs.
My circuitous return from this spot two days previously had allowed me to calculate its position in relation to the great house, and to the course of the stream. Not far from where we stood is a pond, much obscured by bulrushes, but nevertheless tolerably deep. This pond is the embryo from which one of my lakes will grow. From the height where we had lain in hiding I had seen it glint.
Rose had Meg by the shoulders and was shaking her. I would have restrained him, but the women were quicker. They haled him off her and wrapped themselves around him, disabling him as a great sea-monster might disable a ship by embracing it with its tentacles. I hung back. Meg stepped up to me and to my astonishment took me gently by the hand.
‘Your friend misunderstands us. We intend no harm to this boy, as we have done no harm to the other.’
‘I am at a loss,’ I said. ‘I am as puzzled by your proceedings as I am ignorant of what interpretation Mr Rose would put upon them.’
‘He thinks we are witches,’ she said, the last word uttered with derision.
Rose, still under restraint, was shaking his head vigorously.
‘I sincerely doubt it,’ I said. ‘Mr Rose is a scientist. He loves lucidity, and measures the world with set-square and rule. He is not one to babble of sorcery.’
‘Perhaps not, but he thinks that we are.’
Someone stepped out of the gaggle of onlookers and took my other arm. It was Cecily. ‘I will subdue him,’ she said to Meg.
And so she did. With her hand in the crook of my elbow I quieted. A man in love is as spiritless as a lapdog. She took me to a heap of logs, and sat upon it beside me. We watched in silence as Meg finished dressing the boy.
‘Say what you will,’ I said to Cecily sotto voce, ‘this is a kind of conjuring.’
The boy, Edward, was now the living copy of his dead cousin. He gazed steadily at Cecily, who inclined her head as though in approbation.
‘Who is his father?’ I asked. It was unmannerly. All this mystification made me tart.
‘In the community in which I was raised all children were loved by all. All the men were their fathers.’ Her voice was low and even.
‘That is not an answer.’
‘I agree with you.’
‘Then who?’
‘What is your motive for enquiring?’
‘I aspire to be your husband. I would know who you are.’
Her gaze was still fixed upon the boy.
‘Lest I shame you?’
I made no reply, but waited.
‘Mr Norris, I will not be questioned.’ Cecily stood and took young Edward by the hand. They went together in the direction of the pond. Meg led the other women after, Rose captive among them. I stayed, ignored.
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.
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.
‘You’ve met Flossie.’ That was the girl who had swum with them that morning. ‘Jolly girl. There’s two more just come off the train. Antony.’ He was another regular visitor. Nell liked him because he always spoke to her but she could never understand his jokes. ‘Nicholas. And there’s a couple Lil took to in Scotland last year. Helen and Benjie. Lovely woman. Husband runs a restaurant and wears suede shoes.’
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.
*
When Christopher sloped off, Nicholas put in an appearance in the drawing room, drank coffee and bustled about flirting so no one could say he wasn’t doing his bit socially. Then he slipped away too and set up camp in what passed in that house for a cosy study. Linen-fold panelling, a ceiling dripping plaster stalactites. The room had been deprived of one of its walls around the time of the Glorious Revolution, and now formed an L with the pilastered drawing room where Christopher and Lil hung the paintings of which they were properly proud.
He accepted a whisky and soda when Underhill appeared like a well-disciplined genie, drew the curtain across the joint of the L, and settled down in a tapestried chair beneath an upside-down pendent obelisk to try to make sense of the reports that had come in that day. Ted had rung about the Konev story. He’d heard Reuters’ man in Berlin had a hunch that the East Germans were going to do something very soon, but what it was he couldn’t guess. Not exactly what you’d call hard news.
Nicholas began to scribble out a think-piece on the limits of totalitarianism. Khrushchev being as much at the mercy of his party as Kennedy was at the mercy of the American electorate, both of them having to act tough for their respective constituencies, both of them probably clever enough to know it was a charade, the perils into which that play-acting might drag all Europe, de da de da de da de da.
Voices. Antony was showing young Flossie the pictures. The obstreperous Benjie had tagged along.
Flossie – ‘Gosh! Is it a Cimabue?’
‘Yes it is.’
Privately, as Nicholas knew, Antony had his doubts, but he was a loyal friend and a discreet dealer. So yes it unequivocally was.
‘Looks lonely. Is that a bit of his friend on the right?’ Benjie getting in on the conversation.
‘Yes, it appears to be a fragment from the right wing of an altarpiece. See how it is hinged here. There would have been another two or three angels, a heavenly chamber group.’
‘The hands are so . . .’
The hands, indeed, were ineffable.
‘Girly? Or perhaps he is a girl. Or a fag. Look how he’s leaning into the other’s shoulder.’
Was Benjie an ass, thought Nicholas, or was he just pretending to be one? Nicholas had met Helen when she came into the office with her copy – she reviewed for the arts pages occasionally. And they’d talked, and one day they’d had lunch together, and another day they’d walked along the river east from Fleet Street past the Tower and he’d shown her one of his favourite places in London, Wapping Pierhead, where the tall Georgian houses run down to the river’s edge and even the pavements still seem to reek of the cloves and nutmegs that made their first owners rich, and he thought she was beautiful in a steely-cool Celtic kind of way. Her eyes were as pale as gooseberries. There followed some very, very private afternoons in his flat. This was the first opportunity he’d had to observe her husband.
He stepped out from behind his arras. He wasn’t going to get any more work done with them prattling on the other side.
Antony was saying, ‘Either or neither. Angels, being insubstantial, are spared the indignities of sex.’
Benjie poured himself whisky and drifted about the room. He was looking at Flossie as much as at the paintings. Polite girl that she was, she kept making little nods and mmms. There’s nothing harder to sustain than an appearance of interest, even when it’s genuine. She was beginning to look a bit strained when Benjie called her over to see Christopher’s chess-set. Booty of the Raj. Ivory and ebony, laid out on a great scagliola table.
‘Do you play? I’ll give you a game.’
A murmur that was like a verbal blush. Was this rude to Antony? How to reconcile the demands of all these different grown-ups? She had put on a dramatic dress for dinner, low cut, and made of bands of stiff papery silk in clashing bright colours, but for all that, and despite her lacquered hair, she was still a child. ‘All right. You’ll easily beat me.’
‘So I hope.’
Simple words, but uttered as though they had a salacious double meaning. If Benjie wasn’t an ass, he was certainly a bit of a lecher.
The others left them to it, and went out onto the terrace where Lil and Helen were sitting. Nicholas and Lil dropped into the banter that had become their normal mode of conversation. Silly stuff, he thought, but as bracing, she’s so quick, as tennis is for those who are good at it. Christopher loomed up on the rim of the ha-ha, his rod on his shoulder like the Good Shepherd’s crook, and crossed the lawn and joined them and for a while Nicholas felt easier than he had for weeks. The distant events that would occupy him through the night gave way to the immediate. The scents of stocks and jasmine. Pale roses glimmering. The dog collapsing heavily onto the flagstones and sighing like the grampus for whom he was named. He and Helen tended to ignore each other in company, but her being there, near him in the darkness, was a plus.
There was a scraping and a clatter indoors. Flossie came out. She didn’t say anything, just sat herself down in the corner between the great magnolia and Lil, who had to shuffle along the stone bench to make room for her. She looked like a cat mutely complaining about a rainstorm. Murmuring from indoors: Underhill saying, ‘I’ll clear it up, sir.’ Helen made no move. It was pretty clear to everyone what had happened – what sort of thing anyway. Nicholas and Lil kept up their tennis game, giving the girl time to collect herself. Why? wondered Nicholas. Surely it was Helen who needed their solicitude. Ignobly, he was pleased.
Pretty soon they all went up. At midnight Nicholas called the copy-desk, and got handed on to Ted, who wanted a background piece for the Sunday paper on Soviet military capacity. At five in the morning he finally got to bed, while in East Berlin the Stasi prepared to demonstrate that the myth of German efficiency had a basis in fact.
Saturday (#udec14449-5df4-591d-8085-fde11b8d3813)
Nell walked across the cattle grid by Underhill’s lodge, her feet in her sandshoes only just making enough of a bridge from one bar to another to stop her slipping through. Hedgehogs got trapped down there sometimes. She’d been frightened once to hear a rustling, and then so amazed she could still conjure up the prickle of it, to see the dished face. Wild animals, even little funny ones, were like glimpses of another world carrying on with its business in secret, not caring at all about people. Perhaps even being enemies. Hedgehogs had fleas.
She was pushing her bicycle, and once safely over she got back on it, using the brick edge of Mrs Underhill’s delphinium-bed to help herself up. Wood Manor was separated from the park by paddocks and a belt of trees. It had its own feeling, the feeling of home. The feeling inside the park wall was different; quieter somehow, a bit gloomy, old.
Swoop down the hairpin bend, faster than you’d really want to so that you could get most of the way up the slope beyond. The Land Rover passed her, hooting, the canvas roof off and Dickie in the back, waving wildly with both arms. By the time she reached the estate office her father was already walking up the beech avenue with Mr Green the head gardener, and she had to bump and rattle over the pebbly path down the centre of it, with Dickie, because he was annoying, and Wully, because he was so pleased to see her after their half-hour separation, barging into her and making her wobble.
‘We’ll start emptying the pool Sunday, then, once they’ve all gone indoors to dinner. We’ve got all the beans to pick next week so Mrs Duggary can get them in the freezer while Mr and Mrs R are away. And the lettuces’ll be bolting.’
Nell wanted to protest about the pool, because she’d have liked a last swim on Monday morning, but she could tell her father wasn’t really listening. Mr Green liked to keep up a continuous report on his own doings but he didn’t seem to mind talking on and on without anyone saying even ‘mmm’ or ‘really?’ He was just filling the time with his warm buzz until Daddy was ready to tell him whatever needed to be told, and sure enough, after a bit Daddy came back from wherever his thoughts had been and shouted at Wully and started to tell Mr Green about how they would make a new rose garden with a sundial. Nell went ahead, freewheeling down the sloping path that slanted away from the avenue towards the narrow gate that led into the garden, and passed on through the rhododendrons and on down to the pool.
Flossie was floating on her back with her long hair mermaidy around her. Nell was so pleased to see her there she ran into the changing hut and took off her stiff canvas shorts and left them sitting on the floor as though there was a person still in them, and kicked off her sandals and took off her blouse with its Peter Pan collar (surely Peter Pan didn’t look like that) so roughly that a button came off, and ran back out in her best rose-trellised bathing dress with her inner tube and plopped straight in even before Daddy was there.
‘Hello little fish,’ said Flossie.
‘You’re the fish. I’m in my boat.’
‘So you are. Silly old me with my goggley eyes. I thought for a moment you were a totally round flatfish of a previously unknown species.’
Flossie was not a grown-up not a child but something anomalous and exciting like a centaur or a psammead. She ducked her head under the water and when she came up her mouth was an o and she was blowing a bubble like the goldfish. Daddy came through the arched gap in the hedge, hesitated, and then said hello in an odd voice.
‘I can’t speak,’ said Flossie. ‘I’m a fish.’
He laughed then. Mummy would have told Nell off for not waiting but he seemed to think it was all right.
‘Watch out that fishing boat doesn’t spot you. And Nell, if you feel seasick, ask the fish to help you – I think it’s a kind one.’
He went with Dickie into the changing room, the one for boys across the little hallway. On the doors hung girly and boyish things . . . antlers for the boys, a necklace made of nutshells for the girls. Mrs Rossiter had laughed when Green hung them there – ‘Does he suppose we can’t find our way around a hut?’ – but they had stayed, adding to the hut’s oddity. It looked, Nell thought, like a house where savages lived, all made of sticks and straw and things you pick up.
Her father dived in while Dickie lay tummy down on his coracle and flapped his hands. For a while they were all fish. Then they were all water boatmen. And then more grown-ups arrived and Flossie said she was cold, and got out and put on sunglasses, which is something no child ever did so it was as though she had swapped sides. She couldn’t have been that cold because she didn’t go and change but sat down on the low wall between Antony and Nicholas. Daddy got out too and stood in front of them, and Nell had that lonely feeling again because they were all laughing, and Nicholas was teasing Flossie and making Daddy tease her too and it was lovely for them but horrid for her because they had all completely forgotten her and she was left with just Dickie, and the fact that you happened to be in the same family with someone and both of you children absolutely did not mean that that someone was the person you wanted to be left with. Dickie splashed her on purpose, and she was angry and grabbed his coracle and tipped him into the water, which was rather awful because she knew he couldn’t really swim.
‘For goodness sake, is no one watching that child?’
Mrs Rossiter arriving with two people Nell didn’t know. The man kicked off his shoes and jumped in the water with all his clothes on and got hold of Dickie, who was all right really because he was clinging onto the inner tube, just not inside it any more, and dragged him quite roughly to the side of the pool. Dickie was crying and swimming-pool water was coming out of his mouth and nose so he was much more blubbery than the crying by itself would have made him. Nell stayed still, and everything was happening very slowly in bright light. Quiet like her nightmare. Mrs R and Daddy were staring at each other across the pool. They both looked older than usual and as though they had to cling on tight to something or they might fall.
‘So. Lane.’
She never called him Lane. She called him Hugo. Calling people by their surnames meant they were less important. In a way Daddy was less important because he worked for the Rossiters, but usually you couldn’t tell that.
‘If you can’t do your job, you could at least take care of your son. And what on earth are you all doing here in the first place? Get rid of your bloody dog.’
The strange man had climbed out of the pool and Wully was licking his wet ankles. Daddy growled at Wully, and then shouted at Nell, ‘Come on out.’ Then he walked slowly round the pool and said something very quiet to Mrs R, and took Dickie by the hand and walked with him into the changing hut. Nell got out, and ran behind them, but she could hear Nicholas talking in his joking voice again, and saying, ‘Benjie to the rescue! There you were pretending to be a lounge-lizard and all the time we had a hero in our midst.’
She could see the man called Benjie taking off his wet trousers and she could hardly believe it. Underneath he wasn’t wearing bum-bags like the ones Daddy wore but tiny knicker-shaped swimming trunks like Dickie’s, but they weren’t all woolly, they were shiny and slithery like snakeskin, and the most amazing thing was that they were patterned with green and purple scales just like a snake.
*
So what about Nell’s mother? Why was she so seldom in evidence? Because she didn’t want to be, is why.
Chloe Lane had realised that to be inconspicuous was a precious pass to freedom. Chloe’s so sweet, said Lil. Chloe, could you be an angel and . . . Chloe, I cannot think what to do about . . . Why not ask Chloe? She’d do it (open the fête, chair the WVS, judge the school’s dressing-up competition) so much better than me . . . Chloe fits in so perfectly! I don’t know why I always look like a cockatoo . . . Chloe’s so clever with flowers . . . Chloe’s so clever . . .
Every single one of Lil’s compliments was an order, or a demand, or a subtle derogation. At Wood Manor Chloe was her own and her servants’ and children’s mistress. At Wychwood she was the agent’s wife. She stayed away. Dancing attendance was Hugo’s job.
*
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.’
‘I know. I could kick myself. I was being a rotten father. And what must have gone through your mind.’
‘I saw Fergus. Just for a second. Less than a second.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘No. I’m sorry. That’s what I wanted to say. Let’s forget it now.’
A hiatus.
‘Do you want to show me where the new rose-beds are to go? Green could get started on it next week.’ Hugo’s voice was light and steady.
‘I suppose they can all amuse each other for a minute or two.’
She led him through a green arch, across a round lawn entirely encircled by blackish yew hedge, out beneath another arch, down steps foaming with alchemilla into an alleyway bounded on each side by rows of pleached limes.
‘I thought down at the bottom there, you see? This view needs an ending.’
‘A sundial’s not really big enough for the centrepiece,’ said Hugo. ‘You’d need an obelisk. Or maybe a flowering tree. A weeping pear.’
‘But if it was on a stone plinth? With a threepenny-bit-shaped arrangement of rose-beds around it, and then a wrought-iron gate beyond?’
Hugo laughed. ‘Not just a few shrub-roses then. Actually, you know, a fountain would be the thing. We could bring Norris’s Triton up from the home lake. It’s wasted there. We could pipe the water down from the canal.’
‘Boboli-under-Wychwood.’
A smile. A pause.
‘Lil.’
‘Not now, Hugo.’
Another hiatus.
‘I . . .’
‘Never when Christopher’s here.’
‘No. Of course.’
And yet they didn’t move.
The alley was open-ended. Where the proposed sundial or fountain might one day stand was now a gap in the garden’s perimeter, a hole beyond which the park shimmered, and out of which the magical seclusion of the garden leaked. Across this breach Antony and Nell were seen to walk. She was turned to him, talking earnestly, and beyond him saw, tiny at the other end of the alley, Lil’s brilliant-blue blouse, and then her father, and at once span round and ran towards them.
‘There are tiny tiny lizards in Mr Green’s watering pond.’
Both Hugo and Lil noticed the awkward way Antony checked and dithered, before waving his hat and passing on towards the house.
*
My very dear Nicholas
Lil is a monster, she really is. She makes me laugh but she is just so dangerous. Look at the way she’s luring that nice young agent into her web. Christopher sees it all, of course he does, but he’s too grown up to flap about it. Lil should be careful, though. He may not be jealous, or not very, but he is fastidious. If he gets disgusted with her he could just drift out of her reach.
She knows about us, I can tell. So that’s why we’re both here now. You must have told her. I most certainly didn’t. You must be mad. She can keep secrets all right if she chooses to, but mostly she doesn’t. She’ll have told Christopher by now.
But perhaps it doesn’t matter because last night it came to me that I don’t have to put up with Benjie’s fooling around any more. That girl is a child. I know it’s harsh. I know he needs me and I could depend on him for ever if I chose. But I know now that I no longer love him. There are no children to worry about. And there is you. So it’s your turn now to make a decision. If you don’t respond I’ll never reproach you. But here I stand.
Helen
*
Rose garden. Water garden. Moorish saucer sunk into the soil of Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire. Lil and Christopher had travelled down through Spain the first summer after the war’s end, through a landscape foul with invisible blood, so absorbed in each other they barely enquired what might have happened there. Stopping the car at midday, they had hidden from the sun, as from an armed enemy, under cork trees, eating ham that wrenched at their teeth and hard bread. In the villages men who looked old, but perhaps were no older than they were, sat on planks balanced on oil drums and stared at them as they drove by. A passing car was an event – not necessarily a welcome one. Women spat in Lil’s direction, and crossed to the other side of the street. Not hostile exactly, just avoiding the bad luck a stranger might bring.
Lil had brought pre-war dresses her mother had passed on to her – rayon in abstract geometrical prints, bias-cut Liberty lawn covered with convolvulus, silvery-green pleats like the chitons of Athenian caryatids. The dresses stayed in the suitcase, while she wore the invisibility cloak of a dusty-blue shirt-waister. Christopher drove, though she was better at it, and on mountain roads she shut her eyes so as to stop herself whimpering with fear. In Ronda they rented a room above a cheese shop and stayed there for long, long afternoons. The high hard bed. The bolsters bristling with horse-hair. The shiny pine-green satin cover. The deliquescence of two bodies. Down into the streets at twilight to join the paseo, so languid from hours of sweat/sex/sleep their legs felt tremulous as a newborn donkey’s. Sherry. Pork-fat thyme-scented. Churches decorated with effigies of tortured saints. Sleeping and waking again hours later to the sound of singers lamenting, lamenting, lamenting. Spain was all grief – its architecture grim – its people grandly dour. There they were happy.
At Wychwood, eight years later, Lil set Hugo, the new agent, to making her a garden to rival Aranjuez, and he mistranslated it into a Cotswold fantasia in pink and green.
*
Nicholas found Helen’s letter on his dressing table. Talk about madly indiscreet! He put it in his inside pocket and thought, What am I feeling? And didn’t have an answer ready. Exasperation: couldn’t she tell he was busy? Joy. A bit of each, obviously. And shame. What a contemptible cold fish he seemed to be. Through his bedroom window he could see her on a rug, propped up on her elbows, Antony cross-legged beside her, making daisy chains while they talked. She didn’t look as though she was waiting for a signal that would determine her future. She looked, as she always did, sleek as one of those fancy grey oriental cats. If I am a cold fish, he thought, she is my fair Miss Frigidaire.
They were all having tea on the terrace (iced coffee, actually) when Underhill came and murmured to Nicholas that he was wanted on the telephone again. Helen looked up sharply, but the others were laughing at Benjie. He had launched into a series of anecdotes about louche goings-on in the art world and Antony, who knew most of the people involved, was dodging his questions and getting more and more embarrassed (which was of course the point).
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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Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘One of the best novels of the year so far’ The TimesA SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Unlike anything I’ve read. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful’ Tessa Hadley‘I just enjoyed it so very much’ Philip PullmanIt is the 17th century and a wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate.Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all.Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival by the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and a Great Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall comes down, a fatwa signals a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks safety in Wychwood.From the multi-award-winning author of The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely novel about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love and the pathos of aging, and about how those who wall others out risk finding themselves walled in.