Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Jack returned to the drawings. He knew their every detail. Stalks angled sharply, or leant in fluid curves. Tendrils coiled, and leaves turned back, revealing the veining on their undersides. Each plant had a ladybird perched, or a caterpillar crawling, or a moth or dragonfly passing by. Squatting by a clump of kingcups there was a tiny, gulping toad.

  Helen came in, her arms full of bundled linen.

  Jack said, ‘It was me that glued them down like that. Sorry. I thought it would make them stronger.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Helen. ‘Well, you were wrong.’

  ‘I traced them all. The drawing I showed you when I came to see you first. It was a copy of this one.’ He showed her a bee-orchid.

  He was shifty, contrite, but she just laughed. ‘Copying. Nothing wrong with that. It’s the way to learn.’ She threw the embroidered cloth over the table so that it hung down on all sides. ‘Look at this.’ Jack had never seen it before, but he understood at once. He found the drawing of the dog rose – Rosa canis, with its bronze and green leaves, tight buds, and bristling Robin’s pincushion.

  ‘It’s the same,’ he said. ‘Exactly the same. Was it the same person, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Helen, ‘but I intend to find out. And I’m sure she’s a woman, or they are. I’m going back to the Institute to work on this.’

  *

  ‘What’s Jamie up to?’ asked Francesca.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ said Nell. ‘I haven’t seen him for weeks.’

  ‘Oh? I thought you two were liés.’

  ‘Well. Perhaps we were. If that means what I think it does. I thought so for about half an hour. But it turns out not.’

  The two girls – young women – were lying in the secret garden’s ramshackle pavilion. They had each been offered jobs, Francesca in the Foreign Office, Nell in the Home Office.

  ‘Snubs to those arrogant boys,’ said Francesca, over the telephone, the day they got their letters. ‘You and I will be running the country soon.’ And then she had invited herself to stay, as though their shared career prospects had somehow made them closer friends.

  ‘So you’re going to take it?’ said Nell.

  ‘You bet I am. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s something awful about being offered a job with a pension. When do we get to be young?’

  ‘Oh, grow up, Nell.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I don’t want to do. I might just ask if I could put it off a year.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Well … I guess it depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  The thing about Francesca was that Nell could count on her not to care very much. So she was able to say, as she couldn’t have done to anyone likely to show too much concern, ‘On whether I’m pregnant.’

  Which wasn’t quite honest. To admit that she had already known for over a week, and had done nothing about it, would be too shaming.

  ‘Jesus, Nell. What are you saying?’

  And so she told her. And Francesca, as she’d foreseen, was bossy and rational. Of course Nell must ask her parents for help: she was flesh of their flesh and this was news of the flesh. And she must talk to Jamie, but not allow him to dissuade her from whatever she wanted to do. If she wanted to have the baby, well and good. It could be done. It could especially be done if she had a good steady job in the civil service. If she didn’t want it, then she must be quick, and get rid of it. ‘Your parents will pay. Of course they will,’ said Francesca. ‘They’ll be desperate to sort this out.’ And as she said it Nell knew it was true. Still she dreaded the conversation. It would be with her mother. She imagined that, whatever the outcome, Hugo would never, in all the years ahead, ever talk to her about any of this.

  ‘After the concert,’ said Nell. ‘I’ll tell them on Monday.’

  Francesca gave an irritated shrug. This conversation was taking place on a Thursday.

  ‘Fine, but ring right now and make an appointment for next week.’

  There had been a matron at school who was generally hateful and hard-mannered, barking at the whimpering homesick children that they must pull themselves together, but who, when a girl fell ill, was kind. Nell, nursed by her through chickenpox, had felt as safe as though she were being guarded by a grizzly. Francesca, competent, impatient and domineering, was as sure a refuge.

  *

  A giraffe’s head appeared, improbably high up in the arched aperture of its elegant Regency house. Still in profile, it regarded Antony serenely and at length with its one visible eye. Judging that his presence beyond the bars was acceptable, it slowly manoeuvred the rest of its fantastic body into view. The neck. How much muscle-power must it take to hold that up? The high narrow shoulders. The front legs, so long as to make it impossible to imagine the creature sitting or lying, or making itself in any way comfortable. The steeply down-sloping back. The sway. The jagged harmonies of the coat’s pattern, toffee fudge outlined in vanilla.

  The head wavered vaguely from side to side, using first one eye and then the other in observing a newcomer.

  ‘Pretty well any woman I know would kill for eyelashes like that,’ said the man.

  Antony didn’t look round. ‘The hollyhocks are particularly fine this year,’ he said. The zoo had flowerbeds, but there were no hollyhocks in sight.

  ‘I prefer Michaelmas daisies,’ said the other.

  Antony kept his eyes front, which is what surely anyone would have done. The giraffe’s calf, teetering unsteadily on its wheat-coloured pins, had shambled out into the sun in pursuit of its mother.

  ‘There are things I have to tell you,’ said Antony.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the other. ‘There are.’

  ‘Perhaps you won’t be surprised.’

  ‘That remains to be seen. But we have been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while now.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. But it’s altogether better that you came forward of your own free will.’

  ‘Better for me too?’

  ‘Yes, much better for you. We’re not vengeful. We’re pragmatic.’

  ‘Do we talk here?’

  ‘No. Somewhere more convenient. But I need to know, do your other friends know where you are?’

  ‘I haven’t told them. But sometimes I’ve been watched.’

  The young giraffe had found its mother’s udder and settled itself to suck, leaning its hinder parts against her shoulder. She dropped her head towards it. Their coats complemented each other – brown on cream, cream on brown. Madonna and child in biscuit-coloured crazy paving.

  ‘From now on we’ll be watching you as well. But if you’re as discreet as we intend to be, you’re in no particular danger. A friend you made in Munich some twenty-five years ago talks to us too and no harm has come to him.’

  Antony seemed to be about to ask a question, but thought better of it.

  The other smiled. ‘That changes things a bit, doesn’t it? We frequently make a botch of things, but we’re very, very patient.’

  He gave instructions, while Antony abstractedly watched a plane pass overhead. Then he walked off towards the house of the small nocturnal mammals. Furtive toothy things that hunted in the dark.

  Antony sat down on a bench with wrought-iron lions’ heads for armrests, brought out a sketchbook and began to draw the giraffes. A couple of hours later he climbed out of a taxi near Victoria and entered a narrow terraced house. It was past midnight by the time he went home.

  Lil

  It really shouldn’t need saying, but I’m afraid it does. If two people want to stay married to each other, they need to spend a certain amount of time in each other’s company.

  There were reasons why Christopher and I were uncomfortable together for a bit, but that was years ago. All my fault, of course. And because I was in the wrong I was defiant and scratchy about it. And I honestly had no idea what was going through his head. Reticence is an admirable quality, but it makes it ha
rd for chatterboxes like me to work out where they stand. We never talked about that sort of thing, or any sort of thing for that matter, apart from the day-to-day. So I didn’t know whether our being apart for months, or, after a while, for years, was because he had got fed up with me, and left me, or whether it was just that he was politely staying out of the way while I pursued whatever silly ends I chose. And rather than make the effort to find out, and risk the most God-almighty snubbing, I just kept on pursuing.

  India, and that phoney guru. The art world. That was fun – is still fun. Of course all it takes to be a collector is money, but I think I do have an eye. My riding holidays with the Ladbroke Grove gauchos. My little magazine. My drowning Bengalis. My illiterate prisoners. The house in Italy with all those sots pretending to write their books at my expense. And every project brought me another courtier or two.

  I do like having handsome young people about. Not always men, but mostly. Of course I know that some of them are parasites, but as long as they put themselves out to be amusing I can tolerate that. It’s not as though I can’t spare the cash. And some of them are real kind friends. But the truth is that, despite what everyone naturally thinks (and naturally they’ve been partly right some of the time – I’m not a nun), I haven’t made a complete fool of myself since that wickedness with Hugo. It was wicked. I knew it then and I don’t try to deny it now. Wicked to Hugo, first and foremost, but also wicked to Christopher, to Chloe, to those children, though I don’t think Nell ever really grasped it. I’ve talked to her about that night. Unless she’s a cooler liar than I believe, she didn’t see us as she passed by, stalking Antony as he went up to the pool.

  That was crazy. Christopher was in the garden too, with old Grampus, who was bound to come snuffling around if he scented me. That was another part of the wickedness, just not caring much about discretion. Actually wanting to flaunt it. Flaunt – odd old word, but this was a situation from a creaky old farce – people having cross-purpose trysts in a darkened garden. A Midsummer Night’s Figaro. I am a flaunter. Look at me, aren’t I a caution! But it was Hugo who might have lost his job, and his family.

  Over his shoulder, I saw Nell go by, but as far as he knew she was safe in bed. When he heard her scream he ran, dishevelled as he was. I got myself back to the house, so I was there on the terrace, all concern and sleepy puzzlement, by the time Christopher and Ant reappeared.

  Of course that was the end of it. I dropped in at Wood Manor as soon as we were back from Scotland. Elevenses time. Everyone on the estate knew Hugo went home for half an hour every morning – probably still does. So I plonked myself down in the drawing room and directed everything to Chloe, telling her how I was going to be spending far more time in London that winter because of this and that, and doing some bragging about what a lot of invitations we’d been getting so that I’d scarcely be at Wychwood again until Christmas, outside of shooting days, and after that of course we’d be going abroad. Weren’t we lucky to have friends in Barbados. Chatter, chatter, chatter. Chloe must have wondered why on earth I was telling her all of this. I think Hugo probably understood. I was taking myself off so that we could both calm down. I’d been afraid he’d think he had to leave. He really is a very honourable man.

  But Christopher is my darling, my bonny prince. It’s taken me years to arrive at the thought, but sitting in the estate office yesterday I suddenly asked myself ‘Why am I leading the life of a widow when I have a perfectly good husband?’ And I mean exactly that. Christopher is perfectly good. I don’t know what will happen when this train stops at some godforsaken early-morning hour in the middle of a purple moor, and I step off it with the taste of toothpaste and railway cake in my mouth, but I know what I’m hoping for. Perfect forgiveness. Perfect reconciliation. Perfect love. Silly old me.

  *

  Today the five musicians who call themselves Sonder arrived in this country, all the way from the black forests of Germany, and ensconced themselves in something resembling a mead-hall in England’s very own deep dark wood. Wychwood, they tell me, is as far from the sea as you can get in these islands. Put it another way, it’s the country’s centre, a place through which the umbilical fluid of myth and wilderness throb close to the surface, the navel of England. It’ll soon be pulsating to a monastic drone cut-up with the screeching of the future on its way.

  Memo from the Editor

  We don’t publish puffery, Guy. We’ll send Ray to cover your woodland knees-up but I can’t use this. It’ll be Ray’s last column (the poor sap thinks he can make a living as a novelist) which could be a lucky break for you. Come and see me when you can detach yourself from the umbilical cord of myth. N

  *

  Hugo Lane walked up the track from the top lake towards the Cider Well. His rod was over his shoulder, the index finger of his right hand was hooked through the gills of a trout. Wully sniffed at the fish repeatedly, each time backing off as though in disgust and resuming his dancing progress, describing circles through the bracken each side of the way. It was a close and humid evening with the scent of summer’s end in it. The midges were out.

  A spaniel the colour of dead beech leaves – the only male in Armstrong’s bitch’s last litter, called, inevitably, Dorian – shot out from around the bend ahead, saw the Labrador and flattened himself to the ground. Wully froze, then began to creep forward, one tiptoe at a time. ‘Evening, Goodyear,’ said Hugo. Sometimes it wasn’t necessary to see a person to know he was there.

  Goodyear had one of his under-foresters with him, and Jack Armstrong.

  ‘That’ll be the last bit of p and q you get till next week, Mr Lane,’ he said. ‘Glad they were rising for you.’

  The four men nodded to each other. Hugo laid down his rod and catch, and they all reached for cigarette packets. The smell of leaf-mould and wild peppermint was overwhelmed for a while by those of petrol (Hugo and Goodyear both had Zippos) and then of tobacco smoke.

  ‘We were thinking about these flares,’ said Goodyear.

  ‘There’s a lot to think about,’ said Jack. He’d spent all day in an argy-bargy with the German group’s lighting people. How to reconcile the requirements of the techies – amplifiers the size of motorcars, a snake-pit full of electric cable, screens and lighting towers and a lorryload of generators – with Flora’s Arcadian vision? It was going to take half a dozen tractorloads of ivy and old man’s beard to cover up that lot.

  ‘I’m properly excited,’ said Goodyear, ‘I was saying to the wife, I feel like a girl in a new dress, hoping everyone will be looking at her. You know?’

  ‘Not sure that I do, Brian,’ said the other forester. ‘That a feeling you get often, is it?’

  No one teased old Armstrong that way. None of the other men ever addressed the head keeper, in Hugo’s presence anyway, by his Christian name. Goodyear’s authority was effortless. He didn’t need formality. Hugo surprised himself by thinking, He could do my job, could do it bloody well. Next time around, it’ll be someone like him.

  He thought of the sergeant-majors he’d been bullied by in the army. Grown-up men training children (he was eighteen!) to lord it over them. Some of them were brutes. But what it must have felt like to be told you weren’t officer material, purely for reasons of class. None of the men ever talked to him about their war years.

  ‘Just you try getting up on that stage,’ Goodyear was saying. He’d be alternating with Mark Brown as master of ceremonies throughout the afternoon. There’d be half a dozen pop groups playing twenty-minute sets, most of them local lads. And some girl-singers too. Guy would take over when the sun was properly down and Sonder’s lightshow began.

  ‘Well, I need my beauty sleep,’ said Hugo, stamping on his fag. ‘We’re going to be flat-out tomorrow.’ He gave a kind of half-salute and walked off into the dusk. He hadn’t gone far when the others, still smoking, saw him lay down his rod again and fumble in his pocket.

  ‘What are those pills he’s always taking?’ asked the forester. There was a pause, as
though neither Jack nor Goodyear wanted to answer. Then Goodyear said, ‘He loves his Spangles, does Mr L. Gives them to the dog too. Astonishing they’ve got a tooth left between them.’

  *

  Jamie was in a house in North London. From the front it appeared to be built on solid ground. It rose directly from the pavement. Below – a Bengali grocer’s shop with steel shutters which never quite opened properly; above – a pebbledash façade with small horizontal windows blankly gazing at the street. Once you were inside it, though, you could see out the back windows that it was perched on a railway bridge. This gimcrack instance of modern building was actually a miraculous construction, as nearly airborne as bricks and mortar – or breezeblocks and asbestos – can ever be.

  Manny lived in the first-floor back room. He was wandering around fidgeting with things. A mug, the fleshy leaves of an enormous rubber plant, a dirk topped with a marmalade-coloured cairngorm, which some long-ago Highlander must have worn thrust into his sock. Manny was big, and his stiff hair, crinkling out around his head to a radius of a good three inches, added a lot to his presence. A white rat watched him from its cage, and so did Jamie, sitting cross-legged on the mattress beneath the window. Rat and human visitor alike seemed at once mesmerised and fed up.

  Manny was talking, as he often did, about violence. The orgasmic release of energy triggered when the taboo against bloodshed is breached. The Dionysian frenzy of a revolutionary crowd. Sacrifice as the dark heart of all the religions of the book. Orpheus dismembered by Maenads. The True Cross, an instrument of torture, encased in gold and borne aloft into battle by crusading bishops. The seraphic tranquillity of art produced by warrior nations. The one temptation to which St Anthony succumbed so absolutely the hagiographers never even mention it as a trial of his virtue – the temptation of pain.

  Jamie had heard it all before. In his first year he had lived on the same staircase in Wadham as Manny, or Emmanuel as he was now calling himself. He knew that in trying to get anything organised with him one simply had to allow him to rabbit on like this until he’d talked himself out. Dürer’s Four Horsemen bestrode the room in outsize poster-form, the black-etched figures tinted with acid colours – green, orange, purple, silver. There was a faint, incongruously old-maidish odour, as of potpourri. Sprigs of wizened herbs were strung across the windows. Manny made his own tisanes.