Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Armstrong looks suspiciously at him. The old man’s ability to guess a young one’s sexual orientation is considerably more acute, for family reasons, than that of most of those in the room. And he doesn’t like being teased. But the skinny fellow seems to mean it. They exchange slow nods.

  Lil – Darlings, we all know how brilliant Flora is at putting on a show, don’t we?

  Flora – And Seb. But, well, I think it’s different if the public are coming. You have to have loos and stuff.

  Goodyear – Young Slatter and Mr Green did a lot of the work when the point-to-point was at Leafield. They’ll know all about toilets and beer tents and what have you.

  Nell is bristling with irritation. She’s feeling usurped. When Guy rang her up from Berlin proposing a concert at Wychwood she felt important. She would be the mediator who would make this thing happen. She had an ill-defined vision of something dark and splendid. Guy began to write her long letters, and sent her records asking, flatteringly, for her opinion. But when he came back to England to get things organised he seemed to be someone she’d never met before, brisk and practical. This is surreal, she thinks. I thought I was getting under the skin of the counterculture. And here we are talking about loos and point-to-points.

  Hugo is enjoying himself. To Nell’s surprise he has taken to Guy. Guy’s late mother had been a keen gardener. Guy picked up enough from her to be able to say, ‘I adore the way you use alchemilla. Green froth! … Is that rose Penelope? Oh but it’s stupendous! I’ve never seen one that height … And I just love the way you’ve kept this upper lawn so frightfully severe. Flowers and topiary just Do Not Go, do they?’

  Hugo knows the boy is taking the mickey, but is pleased all the same. He hasn’t seen a fellow in dungarees since he left the army, not outside of a garage anyway, and never that tight, and certainly not that colour, but the recent comings and goings at Wychwood have left him inured to the bizarreries of male fashion. He was angry when Dickie snitched the bum-freezer jacket of his dress uniform, and he still thinks they ought to wash their hair more if they’re going to grow it like that. But just so long as they’re polite.

  Hugo – So, Guy. Fill us in.

  Guy begins. So he simply adored the music of a Berlin band, Sonder, and he’d got them to play at one of the Oxford commems last year. When he got to Berlin he turned up at the studio they used and hung around. And they wanted to come to England because they were into all that Glastonbury hocus-pocus, and he’d written a long narrative song for them, and they adored it – all about Green Men and the massacre of Germanicus in the depths of the forest, and ghostly hunters, and they wanted to perform it under the greenwood tree and he’d thought of Wychwood. And they really were brilliant.

  Flora – He’s right, you know. He took us to this grotty little place to hear them and it was just so thrilling. You just knew this was the centre of the universe for that night. (Flora has adopted some of Guy’s vocal mannerisms, as well as his musical tastes.)

  Benjie (aside, sotto voce, to Lil) – The Jugendstil apartment buildings in the East are simply scrumptious. If private property ever makes a comeback we should be there the very next day with our chequebooks.

  Lil – Concentrate, Benj!

  And so they concentrate. And decide on the August bank holiday.

  Armstrong shakes his head and looks beseechingly at Hugo.

  Hugo – I’m sorry, old man, the pheasants aren’t going to like it. But it’s not up to them.

  Goodyear (smiling broadly) – Well this is a turn-up for the books. A load of hippies traipsing into the forest after all these years of working to keep them out.

  Armstrong (rising to his feet and fumbling with the lapels of his jacket) – Well if nobody gives a toss about the shoot I don’t know what I’m doing here.

  The door is just behind his chair. He is out of it, slamming it behind him, before anyone can react.

  Lil and Hugo both push their chairs back. She holds up a hand – leave it to me – and follows Armstrong out. Ten minutes go by, during which Flora takes Hugo into a corner, and whispers to him, while the others doodle on the blotters before them. Lil comes back in.

  Lil – He’s going to talk to Mr Aubrey at Blenheim. They had one of these things there last year, and they still got a record bag on the first day.

  Flora – Darling Lil. You’re a genius!

  Lil – Well it wasn’t really for me to interfere. Sorry. She doesn’t sound in the least contrite.

  There is a moment of embarrassment.

  Flora – Oh Lil. Goodness. Interfere …

  Benjie (cutting in smoothly) – It’s quite a business putting on a pop concert, you know. Can we do it?

  Flora – There are, well, how many? I mean dozens of people working on this estate, aren’t there?

  Hutchinson (speaking for the first time) – There are forty-eight, Mrs Rose, if you count in the men on the home farm.

  Nell – And it’s not like we’re selling tickets, or wanting publicity or anything.

  Hugo – All the same, we’ve got less than a month, and it’s going to cost a bomb. What does Christopher say about it?’

  Pause.

  Lil and Flora each appear to be about to speak, but fail to do so.

  Hugo – You haven’t asked him?

  Pause.

  Hugo – I really think we can’t do this without him knowing.

  Flora – I’ll ring him.

  Lil – Or … I’m going to Morayshire soon to do a little gadabout before the twelfth. I could go a bit early and hop off the train at Pitlochry and have a talk with him.

  Around the table there is a marked non-meeting of eyes. As far as anyone knows, this will be the first time Lil and Christopher have seen each other for over a year.

  *

  There was a place near Victoria Station, in a street of blank walls. On one side the boundary of a school, from behind which grunts arose, and the thwack of a leather ball. On the other the low concrete building, with its horizontal windows and flat roof. Nell hadn’t made an appointment. She’d felt superstitious about giving her name. So she had to wait nearly all morning. No one knew she was there.

  An abortion cost nearly two hundred pounds. Her parents were always going on about how they could barely afford anything. And anyway they would be so shocked. She couldn’t tell them. But she couldn’t get the money from Jamie. Why not? Because he didn’t have any money, for one thing, and because he had never said he loved her.

  The day she told him, he had acted like he had received a kind of atavistic fillip to his male ego. I’m a father, therefore I’m a man and it’s a man’s man’s world. They’d gone back to his flat in Gloucester Road. They’d taken a taxi, something neither of them had ever done before, and he’d kissed her all the way, working his plump hands over her breasts. When they had to separate to get out and pay the driver she felt an ache like homesickness. The flatmates were out, and they tumbled each other on top of the stripy Indian bedspread on someone’s double bed. It had been sweaty and noisy and ecstatic and out of a kind of tiredness Nell had surrendered to it completely and thought yes. Perhaps he loved her. Perhaps in that case she could love him. And anyway perhaps this pleasure that he could give her was all one could really ask for. Perhaps this was what people meant by the word love. She really didn’t know.

  Then they slept, and woke and went to the pub hand in hand, and got a bit drunk and there was a jukebox, and they danced to Martha and the Vandellas, and went back and made love again (she was beginning to use those words in her mind), this time on the single bed in his tiny room. In the morning he went to work: he’d got a temporary job in a second-hand record shop. She was woken by the phone ringing, and a stranger, looking sheepishly round the bedroom door and saying, ‘It’s Jamie, for you.’ She wrapped herself in another bedspread (block print, tree of life) and squatted in the hallway (the telephone was on the floor) and he said, ‘Come and meet me when I finish,’ and she thought, I’m not alone any more.
r />   But when they met that evening in Notting Hill he took her out into the park and they walked beneath an avenue of lime trees – the scent was piercingly sweet – and Jamie told her, very seriously, that there was a girl he loved back in Scotland. Nell didn’t know whether to believe in this girl, but she had to believe the message the illusion of the girl conveyed. And somehow, since they weren’t going to be together after all, the baby that might be coming was no longer anything to do with him. Irrational, but there it was. Obviously he wouldn’t want to go ahead with it now, any more than she did, and he didn’t even want to think about it. Didn’t want to talk about it. Seemed to think that to show an interest would make a trap snap shut on him.

  She’d got a train back down to Wood Manor that night, passing through the dried-out countryside in her rumpled interview dress. She’d loved and lost, and all between one clean pair of knickers and the next.

  So that’s why she couldn’t look to him for help.

  The examination. How many exams that summer had held. Peeing into a tiny plastic cup. It felt warm as it spilt over her hand. Strange warmth because not strange, because actually the warmth of her own body.

  The doctor told her to bend her knees and she misunderstood and bent them upwards rather than sideways and he said crossly, ‘Do try to relax, can’t you.’ How could anyone here be relaxed? Why on earth didn’t they get a woman doctor for this job? The coldness of the jelly as he poked his metal thing up her. It looked exactly like her curling tongs. Did some people use curling tongs as sex toys? It would be so dangerous if they were switched on by mistake.

  Once she was dressed again the doctor was scrupulously polite. ‘Please sit down. How are you feeling? The result is positive.’ She must have looked blank. ‘That means that you are.’

  Nell sat very still. The narrow chair felt precarious. How embarrassing if she fell off it.

  ‘You’ll need time to think about this. Talk to your family. Talk to the father. If you decide you want a termination, come back here. We’ll see to it that you’re properly taken care of. Don’t for goodness sake go to one of those quacks who offer terminations cheap. They’re killers.’

  Nell didn’t need time. There was no one she could talk to. She hadn’t heard a thing from Jamie. She could say right away, please get rid of it. Never for one moment in the last weeks, when she had been constantly thinking about it, had she yearningly pictured a baby. This was what ought to be called the curse. The other thing, if it ever happened again, would be a blessing. But she had no money whatsoever.

  She took all the leaflets they gave her and found her way down to the river. It was a muggy day, very hot. The tide was low. On the grey concrete rampart below the railing on which she leant a very thin young man was crushing a broken bottle beneath his heel, over and over again, the glass turning to powder under his boot.

  *

  ‘So how did you get onto me?’ asked Mark Brown. He and Jamie were in the Plough. Jamie had hitched out from Oxford: he was crashing on the sofa in the Banbury Road flat. So Jamie began the whole humiliating story, about how he’d walked out, and then had to walk back into the office to get his bag. He was fond of the bag (appliqué, from Gujarat via Kensington Market, with tassels). But the point was, he’d left it behind thinking if he took it with him someone would say ‘Where are you off to?’ and luckily he had his wallet and keys in his pocket. So he’d just thought, OK I’ll get another one. But once he was out on the street he had remembered with an awful sinking feeling that there was a little bag of grass in it, plus the giveaway Rizlas. No job. And busted. That would be just the sodding end. So he’d lurked about in the alley opposite the office all afternoon until he saw the diary editor leave and then he went back in and grabbed it just as a cleaner was about to chuck it out. And then one of the reporters had said, ‘Working late?’ and he’d said, ‘There’s something I need to check,’ and gone into the cuttings library to look busy, and for no particular reason pulled out the file on Christopher and Lil and read the old story about the reopening of the way through to the Cider Well.

  Mark laughed. ‘And saw the picture of me on the barricades? But that was years ago. There’s only one right of way through Wychwood, and they let people use it half the year. Good enough for me. I’m into furniture now.’

  ‘There’s going to be a music festival at Wychwood soon,’ said Jamie. ‘I’m going to write a big piece about it.’

  ‘Who for? I thought you just lost your job.’

  ‘Anyone who’ll take it.’

  Mark looked sceptical. ‘Well, good luck with that. Anyway, where do I fit in?’

  ‘The festival at Wychwood isn’t open to the public. The estate workers get to hear it by kind permission of their lords and masters. And so do some invited nobs who probably think Muddy Waters is something to do with fishing. They’re not letting the people in.’

  ‘Why should they?’

  ‘A private pop concert. The idea is a travesty. A betrayal of the music.’

  Mark Brown glanced over Jamie’s shoulder. Brian Goodyear had come in.

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘The stage is going to be on the lake alongside the right of way. No one can stop people just walking in up the path.’

  ‘So you’re going to gatecrash. Why are you telling me?’

  ‘Me and a whole lot of other people. It’s not gatecrashing. It’s a matter of principle.’

  Mark looked at him. ‘What’s your beef with these people? Nell Lane not interested any more?’

  Jamie was so angry that for a moment he couldn’t speak. Only a moment, though, and then he was off on the speech he’d been rehearsing, developing arguments with the liggers who hung about the record shop all day, and with his flatmates night after night. Pop music as the first truly popular medium … Slavery and soul music … music hall … marching songs … lonesome hobos wailing out the blues. Mass production of the means of production … the tuppenny mouth organ, the factory-made guitar …

  ‘It’s a business too, though,’ said Mark.

  ‘Yeah, but think of the difference between the price of an opera ticket, and a single for six and eight.’

  ‘Look, you’re making a mistake here,’ said Mark. ‘I’m not on your side.’

  ‘Even the people who live here in the village won’t be let in.’

  Mark raised his eyebrows. ‘Really? That’s not clever. I’ll talk to Goodyear about that. He’s a pretty remarkable chap.’

  Goodyear? The name meant nothing to Jamie.

  *

  Helen and Jack were in the library at Wychwood. The two of them had been having lunch with Flora, and together they’d arrived at a visual scheme for the concert.

  ‘It’ll have to be pastoral,’ said Flora. ‘I just can’t imagine how you could come up with the floral counterparts of Moog synthesisers and boiler-suits.’ Now, through the library windows, she could be seen out on the lawn trying to teach the new Lupin how to stand on his hind legs. She was tempting him with tiny biscuits topped with swirls of pastel-coloured icing sugar. He sat gazing hopefully up at them (he had successfully learnt ‘Sit!’) but he showed no inclination to prance up.

  ‘Here,’ said Jack. He pulled a portfolio out of one of the low shelves and laid it on the big leather-topped table by the window and Helen untied the ribbon around it. Some of the binding crumbled to dust. Softly softly. Easy does it. Within were Norris’s drawings. There were words, place names and instructions and comments, all in a script so meticulous and minute it seemed that he must have written, not with a quill, but with a needle.

  It took them over an hour to look through the first three folders, walking round and round the table to view the maps from different angles. ‘Mr Green showed them to me first,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Rossiter let me climb up onto the table. I was that small. I thought it was magic that you could put a real place onto a piece of paper.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Helen. ‘It is.’

  The plans
were exquisite. Each copse and grove was represented by a tiny tree. The forest was a wash of darkness, but veined by streams and rivulets done in a darker ink. Sinuous contour lines framed each hillock, each dip.

  ‘He was a stickler for accuracy,’ said Helen, straightening up at last. She put her hands on her hips and rolled her shoulders. ‘It’s a selfless art, planting trees. But at least his scheme is still visible. No one’s messed with it yet.’

  Flora was waving at them through the window and miming ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Help,’ said Helen. ‘We haven’t even begun on the drawings.’

  Jack pulled out another folder. Beneath a sheet of tissue paper were blotched and yellowed drawings, each no bigger than a postcard. They were laid out neatly, gummed to brown parcel-paper in sets of eight.

  ‘Who the hell glued them like this?’ said Helen.

  She rootled in her bag and brought out a magnifying glass. She peered for a while, then handed Jack the glass. She said, ‘These are absolutely amazing.’

  ‘The handwriting is quite different,’ said Jack. The drawings were each captioned. The letters were much rounder than Norris’s, the lines thicker.

  They had tea under the cedar tree, but all the time Helen was distracted. Suddenly she said – she was interrupting Flora – ‘That bedspread that was in Norris’s room. Where is it now?’

  ‘The flowery one? Still there, I think,’ said Flora. She was rocking gently in the swing-seat, ignoring Lupin, who whined to be lifted up.

  ‘Right. I’ll just …’ Helen went.