Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  ‘The boy had heard many sermons in his time and he was sick of them. He thought she would say the beauty of the web was like the beauty of humility, which hides itself away, or that webs, being everywhere, were like the holy spirit which is in all things, or some such holy twaddle, and he thought of his father and got ready to back off. But Meg laughed, and lifted her stick, and slashed through the web, and whirled its tatters around her stick, as he had seen the sweetmeat-maker twirl an apple in boiling sugar. “Remember me, Edward?” she said.

  ‘She hunkered down, there in the middle of the path, and felt in her pouch, and brought out a loaf and a bottle and began to eat and drink. Edward stood stock still. She passed him up a morsel of cheese. It was savoury and rich. He crouched down, still a little way off from her. She put the leather bottle on the mossy ground between them and showed it to him. To pick it up he had to shuffle a little nearer. She laughed at him then, and said, “My hedgehog feeds from my hand. I hope you can be as bold as he is.”

  ‘So they became friends, the lonely boy and the witch.’

  Mrs Slatter sat back in her chair and sighed a little. Mark Brown brought her another jam tart. He waited this time, before he spoke, but when he saw she was not ready to continue he said, ‘I’m interested that you talk about witches.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ she asked. Goodyear shook his head and gave a kind of snort. Mrs Slatter ate her tart and sipped her tea until she felt inclined to go on.

  ‘Time passed. One day Charles, the boy who had been a wanderer but then came home, was drowned. Goody Meg came to Edward and she said to him, “Every night since that other boy died, I have dreamed of him and of you.” Edward knew who she was talking about. He was often near to the great house, among the trees or down by the water.

  ‘Meg said, “You are two sides of the same medal. You are cousins, but you are more than cousins. One out one in. One home one far away. One fed one famished. One alive one dead. You are the fortunate one now, but you must be joined to him again, so that he can be alive in you.”

  ‘Edward did not understand. He thought she was crazed. She led him down to the building where he had found the picture of the Roman twins in their blue cloaks made from precious stones which had come, Meg told him, from the highest mountains in the world. Mountains so far away that the camels died of old age on the journey, and their little calves were old, too, before they finally arrived with their bundles full of blueness at the point where the great desert that covered the eastern part of the world touched the sea the Romans knew.

  ‘Meg had blue to wrap him in too, a fine blue coat with silver buttons, and when he saw it he was afraid, because he knew it had belonged to the other boy who was dead.

  ‘She dressed him in it, and around the meeting-house there was a congregation gathered. And a lady who had been kind to him, and called him brother sometimes, took his hand. She was called Cecily, and Meg told him to go with her. Cecily led him down to the pond that was said to be bottomless. As they walked through all those people she was talking quietly to him. She was telling him to be brave. She said, “We will step out onto the water, and we will walk across it, as our Lord walked across the lake at Galilee.”

  ‘Edward flinched then. Meg never talked of our Lord, or of bible stories, and a horror came up in him, the horror of his father. The lady Cecily saw it, and she said, “But, Edward, this is not a godly miracle, but one of mankind’s. Beneath the water, there is a hidden road.”

  ‘They walked out across the lake, and there was some kind of a tussle going on behind them but they never looked round. Edward was laughing for the sheer joyful surprise of it. He had sturdy shoes, with square toes and good wooden soles. He put them down firm and straight on the water, and something he couldn’t see held him up. “Is it like this to fly, do you think?” he asked Cecily. She looked at him seriously and said, “Very like.”’

  Mark Brown had been sitting quite still, his awl lolling in his open hands. Mrs Slatter paused again. The evening sun was coming in the window behind her now, so that she was a black shape and the light was dazzling in Brown’s eyes. Goodyear had leant back against the wall and crossed his arms and spread his legs out before him. Brown said very softly, ‘I’ve heard of something like this. At the middle lake, after young Charles Fortescue died. It’s in Norris’s journal.’ Nobody answered him.

  Mrs Slatter ate another jam tart. There was something about shop-food. It didn’t taste good, not at all, it was like chewing rubber. But she liked the thought that no one had had to spend time in a kitchen to make it. Mrs Slatter had made thousands and thousands of meals in her life.

  She saw the two men, both waiting for her to go on, and she thought of the soppy way her husband’s dog used to stare at them both while they were eating their tea. She felt suddenly impatient with them. She said, just to tease as much as anything, ‘This won’t buy the baby a new pair of shoes. I have to go and help our Holly with her knitting.’

  Goodyear and Brown both got that dazed look. She remembered it well. When you had been kissing and all that, and you thought you’d better not go too far, and pulled away and started to button up the front of your dress. The young men would get that look. You’d be sorry for them. You were feeling a bit of the same, your lips all puffed up and pouty and wanting to go on with it, but in those days you had to watch out.

  ‘The fable of the two blue boys,’ said Mark. He had a thing about what he called folklore. ‘I don’t quite grasp its significance.’

  Meg said, ‘Stories aren’t puzzles, you know. Solving them isn’t the point.’ She wanted to be off now. She said, ‘I’ll tell you the rest another day,’ and she buttoned up her cardigan and picked up her string bag with the Thermos flask and her folding plastic rain hat in it, and she walked out to where her bicycle stood propped, and hung the bag over the handlebars and got on with small, precise, carefully calculated movements and mounted, and wobbled away.

  *

  In an Italian restaurant between Charing Cross and the river Nell was having lunch with Jamie. The table tops were Formica, the flowers plastic, the food heavily coated in cheese sauce (Cheddar cheese, that is). Nell was in her interview dress, bought in a second-hand shop in Oxford. Cream and navy silk, high-necked, front-buttoning, prim little sleeves, probably 1940s, a faint, quite pleasant smell of talcum powder. She had come from the office in the Admiralty to which she was summoned by letter a week ago. So she’d won the approval of the Whitehall examiners.

  In the great room, wood panelled, overlooking the Mall, she had faced a row of grey-haired people of both sexes, all apparently au fait with her written answers. She’d had to lay by at once her assumption that civil servants were robotic administrators, with no imagination, no culture. One of them started talking about Satan’s expulsion from Heaven. She’d proposed a bit wildly in her test paper that Milton’s Paradise was a kind of penal colony. Now she had to defend her argument.

  The interviewers’ questions were searching. Was she in favour of open government? No, she thought free and radical discussion was only possible if the participants knew they could say whatever came into their heads without fear of public opprobrium. (This question was in the news. She had her answer prepared.) What would she do if she was ordered to implement a policy of which she disapproved? She would make the case for her point of view, but if she failed to persuade her superiors, she would do as she was told. (What, she thought, as these platitudes tripped off her tongue, could they tell about her from any of this? Surely everyone gave the same answers?) If she were to learn that a poet whose writing she admired held political views that were obnoxious to her, how would that affect her estimate of his or her work? Not at all, she said, artists should be judged by their artistry, not by their opinions or their personal morality. (She hadn’t stuttered yet, but the armpits of the interview dress were wet.) In which government department would she most like to work? The Home Office. Why? Immigration, prison reform – she’d mugged up on the issues. She said, ‘
Prisons are communities. Pathological communities for the most part. They have hierarchies and conventions. They suit some people. Some prisoners – just a few – dread their release. Inside, those ones are dominant. We need to understand prisons better. We have to make them less violent. I’d like to work on that.’

  Then. Thank you very much for coming. You’ll hear from us shortly. Absurdly, childhood habit took over and she shifted one foot behind the other and her hands went down as though to lift the sides of her straight skirt and before she could stop herself she’d dropped a curtsey. Thinking of it, she was mortified all over again.

  ‘A civil servant,’ said Jamie. ‘Is that what you want to be? A faceless bureaucrat.’

  ‘They take on girls,’ she said, ‘and give them proper jobs. How many girls are there in your office? Not counting secretaries and receptionists.’

  ‘Yeah. Not many. Actually, I haven’t got an office. I’ve been thrown out.’

  Nell thought, Then I can’t tell him. And the dread she felt at all times nowadays intensified.

  She asked the expected questions. He told her a story in which he had stood up heroically to corrupt authority, and lost his own chance of advancement. She listened and thought, He’s so bogus.

  Across the street, in a different kind of Italian restaurant, where the tables were covered with white damask cloths, and there were posies of sweet peas, and most of the pasta sauces included either fresh basil or pine nuts, Nicholas and Antony sat at a corner table.

  They ate vitello tonnato and talked about the tape recorders in the White House office, and the Salvator Rosa exhibition for which Antony had written a catalogue essay.

  Pause.

  The zabaglione arrived.

  ‘Remember the first time we ate this?’

  ‘There was only one good cook in England then, and that was Mrs Duggary.’

  Another pause.

  ‘So you say that there’s something I need to be worrying about?’ said Antony.

  Nicholas looked at him levelly. Antony saw resolution, then a momentary wavering, then a what-the-hell-let’s-get-it-over-with. Nicholas embarked upon a serpentine sentence, the kind people employ when it feels dangerous to be direct. ‘There’s something I know about you that you don’t know I know, but I expect you suspect I might know because you know that it’s known to a number of people, and you know that I usually end up knowing what there is to be known.’

  Antony, who sat with his back to the room, glanced around deliberately, rearranged the salt cellar and pepper pot, and said, ‘Once upon a time this might have been about sex. But probably not any more.’

  ‘No,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Then it’s the other thing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ve known for a while.’

  ‘I wondered. When you kept going back to Berlin. And all that guff about the Transylvanian painted churches.’

  ‘It wasn’t guff. They’re ravishing, and no one had written about them before. That’s one of the reasons I got my job.’

  ‘Well, all right. I thought you might have been playing carrier pigeon while you were there. But anyway, someone I talk to in the Foreign Office spelt it out nine years ago.’

  Antony did the arithmetic. ‘When my distinguished namesake and fellow art-historian made his secret confession. He must have named me. I suppose I should thank you for not following it up.’

  ‘I was asked not to. Asked quite firmly. And frankly, I’ll never be a really great editor because I don’t believe in ruining the lives of people I’m fond of.’

  ‘So now … Have you changed your mind about that?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. But someone came to me recently with a spy-story. I shut him up. But it was about you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A young chap who was at that party at Wychwood. Now he’s by way of becoming a reporter.’

  Antony looked down and realigned a knife.

  ‘McAteer,’ said Nicholas. ‘He was one of your protégés, wasn’t he? You brought him there.’

  Antony said, very quietly, ‘If he’s said anything to the Rossiters …’

  ‘Wake up, Ant. Christopher knows people. He used to refer to you as Ivan. There’s no such thing as a secret.’

  Antony looked out of the window. He had believed in secrets. He thought what he was engaged in was serious. Seriously dangerous for him, and undertaken because of his seriously held convictions. And probably seriously disgraceful in others’ eyes. He had imagined discovery would make him a pariah. So none of those people, his friends whom he had so greatly dreaded losing, actually cared either way. He was shocked. He was also afraid.

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘You know better than I do. I’m just telling you to watch out. McAteer was working on the diary for a bit. I wanted to keep an eye on him. I told him to kill his spy-story but he offered it to “Blabbermouth”. Luckily they had more sense than to use it, and my buddy there told me where it came from. I didn’t like that – I can’t have someone on the staff I can’t trust. So I haven’t given him a job he was hoping for and he’s probably sore against the whole lot of us.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  Nicholas was taken aback to see how shaken Antony looked. Surely he must have been expecting this for years?

  ‘I don’t know, old man. I don’t know where you stand with all this stuff now. And I don’t want to know. But if you’re not active any more I’d have thought you should sit tight until you’re asked. Then if you’re asked, and you might never be, say, yes, but it’s long ago now, and the world has changed, so what?’

  A great weariness settled on Antony. He looked askance out of the window, his eyeline skimming past Nicholas’s left shoulder. He saw Nell Lane, looking dressed-up, stepping out of the greasy-spoon opposite. She was always such a funny little shrimp, he thought, and now look, she’s got breasts. Behind her came Jamie. Antony suppressed an urge to flinch back.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ he said.

  Out in the street Jamie said, ‘Shall we go back to the flat? They’ll all be out.’

  Nell was speechless. Nothing he’d said so far had been remotely romantic. Or lustful. None of this was the way having a boyfriend was supposed to be. She couldn’t presume anything in relation to Jamie. They were barely friends. And yet having sex with someone, she’d discovered, did make you want to do it again. Jamie’s seal-like body wasn’t anything like the gangly androgynous ones she found beautiful, but it was a body she knew.

  He said, ‘But it’s cool if you don’t want to. I don’t really know, Nell. I don’t know what you want.’

  She was shaking.

  ‘Hey man, you look awful. Come.’

  He took her by the arm and led her into Embankment Gardens. Leaning on him, she smelt him. At least he didn’t wear aftershave. Perhaps knowing a person’s smell was the most profound way of being intimate. Perhaps all those couples who seemed so harmonious were as tongue-tied and awkward when they were alone together as she felt now. Jamie was looking for a bench, but she just had to say it. She couldn’t wait to get it over with. She didn’t even know the words to use. It wasn’t done any more to say ‘curse’ but she’d never said ‘period’, in that sense, out loud. Nobody did. So she just said, standing still in the middle of the path with strangers passing on either side, ‘Jamie, I think I might be pregnant.’ And as she said it she felt a huge relief.

  He said, ‘Oh shit. I mean … wow.’ And he did a little happy hop and flung his arms around her as he’d never done before. ‘Nell, that is amazing!’ And she thought, Oh God. Oh no. He wants it. That she’d never expected. Now what was she to do?

  August

  The Wychwood cabinet is in session again. Present, as before, Hugo Lane, Mr Armstrong, Mr Goodyear and Mr Hutchinson. Absent, Christopher. In the role of proprietor – Flora and Lil, with Benjie, affable and unobtrusive, chair pushed slightly away from the table as though to signal that he’s there only as an observer. In the
role of petitioners – Guy and, rather surprised to find herself in her father’s work-world, Nell.

  Hugo – So what happens at a pop concert?

  Lil – Hugo my darling, don’t pretend to be a fogey. Dickie will tell you. He’s probably played at one.

  Goodyear – No need to bother him … Mr Armstrong here’s a bit of a one for that sort of thing.

  Lil – Armstrong!

  Armstrong (The twelve years since the last session we witnessed have left him reduced, both physically smaller and less domineering. It is high time he handed his job over to one of the younger keepers, but no one knows how to persuade him to retire.) – Well it was my Dora who went. I was just her chauffeur.

  Everyone looks to Goodyear for an explanation.

  Goodyear (relishing the surprise) – It was around Easter. They had what they called a festival on that bit of heath outside of Witney. Come night there were pop groups playing, but the farmer who got it up, he knew that if he was going to get the families in there’d have to be more to it than that, so in the afternoon there was a children’s fancy dress, and bowling and a dog show, and I’ll give you all three guesses who won that.

  All – Dorabella!

  Armstrong (unbending to show his triumph) – She did. She won it. And there were dogs come from near Cheltenham. There was one come from Northampton. Dorabella’s a smart little bitch. Not quite as clever as Doris yet, but she’ll get there. And if she doesn’t win at the fête this year I’ll buy you all a drink.

  Everyone from Wychwood applauds. Guy looks blank.

  Lil – Dorabella is a spaniel, my darling. Doris was her grandmother.

  Guy (He is thinking about the spaniel who licked his face with such heart-melting gentleness while he lay on the yellow grass in the Garten waiting for that horrible trip to be over. He couldn’t tell whether or not the dog’s warm tongue was part of his own body, but he concentrated all his crazed mental energies on its motherly lapping while the branches above his head kept rearranging themselves in fussy repeated patterns like a piece of rubbery crochet. He was afraid of the three emaciated young rent-boys who’d brought him there, and he couldn’t tell if the people with him in the Garten were them, or a trio of Eumenides. He had felt very very thin, as though he might slip down a crack in the parched earth.) – I’m extremely fond of spaniels. King Charleses especially.