Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  ‘Now this is one you’ll have already heard,’ he said. He’d turned his back to the bar, his elbows propped comfortably on its rim behind him as he spoke. He didn’t raise his voice. It was as though he was talking solely to the two or three men nearest to him. There was a general shuffling, though, and a falling silent. The old men by the wall leant forward, contorted hands on smooth corduroy knees. The younger ones planted their legs wide and crossed their arms, ready for a good long one.

  ‘It’s about a lord and lady,’ said Goodyear, ‘and they lived in a great house. They had a hundred rooms crammed with silver folderols and tiger-skin rugs. In winter they had fires blazing in every room. In summer they had a fountain playing in the hall to keep them cool, and gardens full of roses. Every time one of their horses ran, it would win a socking great gold cup, and they’d put that cup on the shelf with all the dozens of others they’d got. Their pheasants were the size of turkeys and their lakes were full of thirty-five-pound trout. That’s three times the size of the one Bill over there caught last week.’

  A smirk from Bill, a narrow-shouldered man with a livid scar down the left side of his face, who was a labourer on the home farm and spent his summer evenings by the river.

  ‘Their trees were the tallest and stoutest in the county, and their woods were so excellently maintained the nettles and brambles had all dwindled away for shame, and rare orchids grew there and the birds flocked to make their nests there because word had spread across the land, and the sky as well, that their forest was the finest ever seen.’

  Whoop-whoop for Goodyear the forester.

  ‘They had it made, those two, but were they happy? No they were not. There’s probably some fool in this room who thinks that a pot of money, and all that luck, might solve all his problems.’ Noisy assent. ‘But that lord and lady were lonely. They’d have hunting parties and dancing parties. In summer there’d be picnics in the park and shows on a stage in the topiary garden with little boys singing like God’s angels and young women dancing like temptresses sent by the Devil. But when the guests went home the old sadness would settle on the house. The lord was a good, kind man but he was getting wrinkled and his hair was falling out. She was younger, and when she dressed up smart, with shiny red fingernails and patent-leather shoes, she was still as sleek as a three-year-old on the way down to the paddock, but she had a worried look to her. The trouble was, they had no children.’

  Mr Armstrong sat by the chimney. The fire wasn’t lit on this August night, but, fire or no fire, the Windsor chair by the hearth was the place of honour, and Armstrong occupied it. On the other side of the chimneybreast sat his uncle and predecessor in the head-keeper’s job, another Mr Armstrong, hands shaken by a perpetual tremor, blue eyes faded to a rainy grey. The elder Armstrong’s hearing, after a lifetime around guns (in Wychwood as a child, beating and picking up; on the Western Front as a teenaged soldier; Wychwood again for decades of keepering), was shot to pieces. But he liked the conviviality of the pub. He’d had some fifteen years of grouchiness, angry at being old, angry at being deaf, angry at being superseded by the boys he used to thunder at when he caught them stealing pheasants’ eggs. Now, though, he’d forgotten his grievances, along with much else besides. Curious and a bit timid, he looked across at his brother’s son and thought, without being certain that he knew him, That’s a proper-looking man.

  The younger Armstrong was not so happy. He didn’t like the tenor of this story.

  Perhaps Goodyear, too, saw dodgy matter coming up. He swerved off into fantasy. ‘The lady went walking in the woods and met a fox in a trap. She pitied it and set it free.’ Goodyear met Armstrong’s eye here and winked. Armstrong shook his head. Pretty well everyone in the room was aware that Armstrong was widely suspected of trapping foxes. Those who joined his army of beaters thought, Fair enough, he’s got a job to do. Those who spent their winter Saturdays following the hunt thought, That’ll make the old bugger squirm.

  ‘That fox,’ said Goodyear, ‘was a fairy. As soon as it was freed it licked its mangled foot and the lady was amazed to see that the wound healed in a trice. And she was even more amazed when the creature sat back on its haunches and spoke to her, and its eyes looked as clever as any human’s.’

  The lady’s disinterested kindness had earned her the fairy’s goodwill. Her dearest wish would be granted. She wished, naturally, for a child. In Goodyear’s version the longed-for baby was a boy, there was no christening, and there was no spindle.

  ‘The fox had told the lady that the little fellow was to eat no mushrooms. Everyone in those days gathered mushrooms in September. And most of them stuck to the usual ones, with their pink gills, and very good suppers they had. But some clever-clogs know-it-alls said they could eat the yellow-frilled toadstools, and the mauvey-grey ones that looked like umbrellas, and the ruddy-coloured ones that looked like babies’ ears. And every year they’d be smacking their lips and saying “Exquisite! Exquisite!” and for every dozen of them there’d be one who made a mistake, and died of it. So when the fox said “No mushrooms”, the lady just thought that was wise advice.’

  So, no mushrooms anywhere on the lord and lady’s land. The sale of fungi declared a punishable offence. Traders searched at the boundaries of the estate, and not only mushrooms confiscated but anything, from dried apricots to vanilla pods to sticks of liquorice, that might be preserved mushrooms in disguise, taken away and burnt and so prevented from coming anywhere near our lord and lady’s darling boy.

  The cricketers around Mark Brown were muttering to him – requesting their favourite songs. Goodyear knew his audience. He speeded up.

  ‘It was the fox, of course – trust a fox to make the mischief’ (a little wave to Armstrong, who vouchsafed a nod) ‘who sneaked in with the spore of a mushroom on its paws. And come autumn, that mushroom grew up as plump and pink-and-white and pretty as the boy’s prettiest nursemaid. And he was out walking one day with his pug-dog, a little black one with a terrific snore to it, and he saw the mushroom and put it in his mouth.’

  With some regret, Goodyear decided to leave the near-death, the weeping and wailing, and the fox-spirit’s last-minute intervention, until he resumed the story the following week. For now, he’d climax with the thorny hedge.

  ‘Just as soon as that mushroom settled on the boy’s tongue he fell down as though struck by lightning, and that dog of his was quiet for the first time in its life, and all around him the earth began to heave and split.’

  This was one of Goodyear’s great set pieces. His repertoire was large, but not inexhaustible, and his listeners liked it that stories came round again pretty often. The thorny hedge was a favourite. The first tendrils writhing up through the earth like beseeching fingers. The bramble stems snapping like whips as they sprung from the ground and reached for each other, tangling together to form a barrier barbed with a million thorns, thorns which rapidly hardened into weapon-grade metal.

  ‘Tiger’s claws were nothing on these hooks, which grew and grew until they could have ploughed deep ridges into a man’s back. The house, the garden, the park were encircled. No one could enter or leave.

  ‘The boy, with his big round eyes and chubby hands, lay there like a dead mouse laid as bait in the middle of a great trap – the kind of steel trap the fox had been caught in.

  ‘The people couldn’t go anywhere. They didn’t fall into an enchanted sleep. They kept on with their work, but the fox’s curse didn’t allow them to take any benefit from it. They ploughed and harrowed and planted, but they couldn’t carry their crops to market, and eating the food they raised was mere dull chomping, without pleasure because they couldn’t go out to buy salt. The fish escaped downriver from the lakes, and no more came. The horses grew fat and lame from lack of exercise. Everyone knew that they would have to wait until the boy grew up before the curse was lifted, so they tended him carefully as he lay unconscious. And as though to mock them the turf of the park was covered now, not only in the proper season, but all ye
ar round, with toadstools that stank, and oozed purple. And the thorny hedge grew so high they could no longer see the sky, and the peacocks dragged their tails gloomily around the garden, where it was now always as dark as night, screaming out their sadness, and all night long the people lay awake, listening to the thorns of the hedge clashing against each other with a horrible noise like the gnashing of tremendous teeth.’

  Goodyear caught the baker’s eye, and raised his right hand and beat time as he said it again. The Gnashing of Tremendous Teeth. And as he did so the accordion let out a crashing chord and everyone that end of the room jumped and the accordion jangled on and the baker and Mark Brown locked eyes and stamped their feet and soon everyone was stamping and hollering, and then Brown was clambering onto a bench, and his powerful bass voice was mastering the chaotic music and they were all belting out ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, while Goodyear sat down, he who had been playing on them so confidently, and every muscle in his body was leaping and twitching as the adrenalin that had fuelled his invention released itself like poison into his veins.

  *

  At four o’clock on Saturday the 13th of August, 1961, Walter Ulbricht’s guests began to arrive at the House of the Birches. While they strolled by the lake, or settled indoors to watch a comic film, their host was signing an order authorising his lieutenant and Politburo chief, Erich Honecker, to implement the plan code-named Operation Rose. Over two thousand East Germans had crossed into West Berlin since morning, more than had ever previously done so on a single day.

  At ten Ulbricht called together his guests, tired and tipsy after six hours of partying, and announced that he was taking action that very night to bring ‘the still-open border between socialist and capitalist Europe’ under ‘proper control’. Having given them this dangerous information, he told them that there was still plenty to eat and drink and that they should set to again, and enjoy themselves as well as they could. Until the operation was successfully concluded they would not be permitted to leave his house.

  They were captives, and so were all their compatriots. From that night onward, East Germans would not be permitted to leave their country.

  *

  What a change a day can work. On Friday night almost everyone in the house had Benjie down for a crass groper. But in any community, a person’s perceived character is subject to fluctuations as mysterious in their coherence as the wheeling of a school of fish. In a classroom, an office, a cabinet, a house-party, the grey man can stand forth astonishingly, revealed as the next leader by a barely perceptible alteration of the light. A change of temperature, and the buffoon becomes the wit.

  As they were going to bed on Friday Lil told Christopher a bit about Benjie, and in the morning Christopher, meeting Nicholas pacing – uncharacteristically dishevelled – down the Grand Vista before anyone else was up, passed the information on, and when at breakfast Nicholas, by this time shaven and suave again, began questioning Benjie about the operations of the Allied military police it transpired that Antony had known Benjie in Germany and knew more about him than either of them was letting on, and thought he was considerable, and by the time Benjie and Lil were strolling up to the pool, from which Nell’s laughter rose bubbling, no one was wondering any more how he had impressed himself on the queenly Helen, and the previous night’s episode, which had left a glass broken and Flossie huffy and shaken, had faded to just that – an episode.

  All day Saturday Lil had reason to be grateful for the ebullience with which he supported her as she shepherded everyone away from anything conducive to unease. And all day Flossie was being reassured by his delicacy. For a fat man, he was a surprisingly nimble dancer. For a comical-looking fellow, he was a surprisingly subtle flirt.

  By nightfall the metamorphosis was complete. He was re-clad in his disguise of jolly uncle. In that persona, softly, softly, he was re-approaching her. She was too young to know, yet, that the physically comic are as racked by desire as the desirable, and that they must be inexhaustibly patient and devious if they are not to be forever left out.

  ‘Dull for you that Lil hasn’t laid on any other young things. Not like her to miss an opportunity for filling the place with golden-haired youth.’

  They were side by side on the sofa – the one behind which Nell liked to lurk, the one whose sides were damasked walls strapped together at the corners with heavy silk ropes and whose seat was so deep that there was nothing for it but to lie back, comfortable but disabled. Benjie’s shirt front was spotted with drips. Impossible to drink from a brandy glass while nearly supine.

  ‘Lil’s introducing me to grown-up society. She once told me you had to have at least one pretty girl in every house-party and then the interesting men will come. She likes giving me that sort of advice.’

  ‘Well you’re certainly pretty.’ A leer, but too perfunctory to be annoying, or to make Flossie feel she should sit up.

  ‘I didn’t …’ She broke off. She’d given him his cue. Pointless to act self-deprecating. Actually Flossie thought herself very pretty indeed. Not that she was vain, or even all that self-confident, but gazing into the mirror sometimes, at night, she so adored her looks it seemed quite incomprehensible that no one (no one who counted) had yet fallen for her. Benjie, of course, didn’t count. Nor, she now thought, had he fallen. The pass he’d made over the chessboard was the tribute obligatory from a man who affected to be a bit of a roué to a girl with whom he happened to find himself alone.

  ‘Why are you here?’ They were by this time so relaxed her rude question seemed perfectly permissible.

  ‘Because we were invited.’

  ‘No, but I mean are you old friends with Lil or something?’

  ‘Or something.’

  Flossie gave up.

  ‘I suppose we should go to bed.’

  ‘Hang on a bit. There’s something I want to ask you.’

  She turned towards him, and found he was kissing her, and found to her surprise that what she felt was delight.

  Lil

  Go to sleep. Wrong word. Going is willed. Going is active. But you don’t go to sleep: sleep comes to you and bashes you around the head. Sleepers are felled. Sprawled. Stunned. They snore and sweat and mutter. All day I’m Lil, smart and taut, juggling with knives, bright and hard and essential as the diamond in a watch’s works. They spin around me. They love me for it. Control is my gift to them. But then, come night and sleeping pills, a trapdoor opens and I drop.

  Fall asleep is better. Fall, that’s closer to what we do. We fall down a rabbithole, down a helter-skelter. Sometimes the shock is extreme enough to wake us, to jerk us back up onto solid ground. But mostly we’re gone, feet waving silly in mid-air, hurtling helpless towards whatever our minds, guards dropped, have unleashed.

  Wychwood is around me. As I fall it rocks and spins, but only in the worst times does it vanish and leave me unhoused. Unhouseled means unsanctified. House is holiness. I am the genius loci, the lady of the lake, lady of the drawing room, lady of the croquet lawn, lady of …

  In the walled garden the unicorn lays down clumsily, encumbered by its horn, and the apples fall from the blossoming trees. Flossie swims underwater with the goldfish, her long hair streaming the length of the canal, enveloping the lily pads in swirls of golden wire. Gold on black water, lacquer-dark, flecks of light in the resin, layer upon layer, the Japanese screen, the cormorants, the ladies’ hair which trails so far beyond their kimonos’ hems it tangles through the puffs of gilded cloud and there’s a kitten playing and a tiny boy. Tiny boy. Fergus’s round face beneath the peat-brown water. Rembrandt’s brown varnish lapping Saskia’s thighs. Painted water is solid, real varnish is transparent, skin becomes pearly. I am a drowned sailor, I lie on my pillows as flaccid as jelly. I dissolve.

  *

  Helen – You didn’t reply.

  Nicholas – This thing that’s happening, it’s really quite significant.

  Helen – It’s really quite significant that I’m offering to leave my husband t
o be with you.

  Nicholas – Is it an offer? It feels like a demand.

  Helen – So you only wanted me part-time. You said you loved me.

  Nicholas – I do love you.

  Helen – But what?

  (Male voice, inaudible, apparently interrupting Nicholas.)

  Nicholas – Helen, my dearest, I really can’t talk now.

  Helen – (hangs up)

  Dodging the stuffed bear, Helen glanced into the dimly lit drawing room and saw with a rippling series of emotions that her husband and Flossie were still lolling there together. Flossie was definitely a bit drunk. Benjie probably not. Helen passed on, her bare feet silent on the stairs. Helen: so intelligent, so self-possessed, but now all her fine mind could tell her was ‘Nobody loves me’ – that desolate childish plaint. Back in their room she sat at the dressing table for a long time, staring at herself in the mirror, silently mouthing words. When she heard Benjie coming down the corridor she snapped the light off and slipped into bed. She was still awake when the birds started up their racket.

  *

  Eight hours after his party had started, Ulbricht’s guests were tottering. Those fortunate enough to have found seats to stretch out upon were asleep. Most of the men were drunk: most of the women querulous. In the salon the band still played.

  At midnight sirens wakened nearly thirty thousand East German servicemen. Officers opened envelopes marked ‘Top Secret’ and read out the night’s astonishing orders. Many of the listeners immediately concluded that this would be the beginning of a war with the West. They were all, of course, socialist materialists. Nonetheless, some of them prayed.

  At one a.m. on the morning of Sunday the 14th of August every streetlight in East Berlin went out. Finding their way by moonlight, units of the army, of the police and of the ‘combat groups of the working class’, moved into position. They formed a human fence (one man per metre) along the 27-mile-long border that cut through the city. All public transport on the Eastern side came to a halt. Passengers arriving from the West at Friedrichstrasse station were prevented from leaving their trains.