For all that he abjured alcohol, though, he had a healthy appetite for food. When he seemed to be moving towards a pause in his oration, Jamie said, ‘There’s something I want to ask you about. Let’s go to the Taj. On me.’
Manny never spoke much while he was eating. Once the poppadums were on the table the flow of his talk stilled, giving Jamie the chance to outline his plan. Manny interjected only brief exclamations.
‘Tomorrow! Christ!’
‘You want two hundred? Shit!’
‘Two miles from the station? There isn’t a bus or something?’ Manny, who’d grown up in Hampstead, had seldom seen a road without pavements.
By the time they’d reached the kulfi stage, though, his reservations had all been countered. He sat back, and raked his thick curls with long fingers.
‘So I do it, driven by my disinterested passion for making mayhem. But what’s your motive, exactly? I don’t get it.’
This was a question Jamie had been dodging whenever it crossed his own mind. He had several answers ready, but none of them were all that creditable.
He felt guilty about Nell, and angry with her for making him feel bad. After that time in the swimming-pool hut he thought he could be in love with her. But he wanted to use the story about Antony, and that complicated things. So he just put her out of his mind. He couldn’t take another person on: he wasn’t secure enough himself. Finals, and he was desperate to get a job. And actually there had been a girl in Scotland – that was true. They’d met on an archaeological dig the previous summer, both of them hunched all day over a chunk of Hadrian’s Wall, brushing mud off Roman-cut stones with glorified paintbrushes. They sang each other their favourite songs. Her Joan Baez impersonation was feeble, but he felt the fonder of her for that. And then at night they persuaded the people they were supposed to be sharing tents with to swap, and woke up the next morning inside a single sleeping bag, as tangled together as the hawthorn roots that drove themselves down the cracks in the ancient masonry.
But it hadn’t come to much, really. Not as far as he was concerned. At the end of the final summer term he went home, and saw the girl, and quite brusquely told her he was staying down south, and no, she shouldn’t look for work in London, not on his account anyway. If she was heartbroken she was too proud to show it. And then he’d seen Nell again and thought, What have I been missing? There was something about her that tugged at him. He didn’t know how to respond to it. His dithering over her pregnancy was reprehensible, he knew that. He assumed she’d got rid of it by now.
That was one thing. Nicholas’s dropping him was another. Guy’s getting ahead faster. All of these were irritants.
That was all personal, though. There was a principle. Behind all the jingles and the posturing, popular music meant something. Something massive. Times a-changing. It moved him, the idea of it did.
He left Manny propped up on cushions, the rat nestled into the soft hairless space under his chin, telephone receiver in one hand, sweat-stained leather-bound address book in the other, rallying his band of acolytes. Tomorrow looked like being exciting.
*
In Wood Manor Nell was mussing Dickie’s hair.
‘You’ve got to let it get tousled. You look like such a twit when you smarm it back like that.’
‘I know,’ said Dickie. ‘But I just don’t know I’m doing it. It’s a nervous habit.’
They both contemplated his face, reflected from different angles in the triple looking-glass Chloe had thoughtfully provided when Nell entered her teens, and which was usually folded up and propped against the wall. Nell didn’t want to see herself three times over. She’d never asked for her homework table to be given a skirt (nylon net over pink) and turned into a dressing table. She wanted a desk.
Dickie looked good. Tight purple satin trousers with a chiffon scarf (harlequin patterned in jade-green and black, formerly belonged to one of the aunts) threaded through the belt loops. Leather jacket spray-painted silver. Nell thought, Why is the best-looking boy I know my baby brother?
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’ll be fine and messy once you start drumming.’
‘So how do you do eyeliner?’ he asked.
*
‘Fabulous,’ said Jack repeatedly. The broken colonnade that was the tallest remaining part of the Roman villa had become the backdrop, and the stage jutted forward over the water so that the lights would be reflected and multiplied. Green was directing two under-gardeners as they trundled young trees around the stage, planted for the purpose in wheeled wooden troughs.
Jack’s father stood on the house-side bank, where in a few hours, Guy hoped, hundreds of people would be dancing, and exchanged sardonic comments with Hugo. He and the other keepers would be in charge of car-parking. Most of them had done the same job at the Game Fair a year before.
‘A different kind of crowd I’m thinking, today, though,’ he said. ‘Not so many Land Rovers.’
Hugo laughed. ‘You just don’t know, do you? I wonder whether they even have cars.’
‘By the end of today,’ said Armstrong, ‘there won’t be a bird or beast for miles, what with all this racket.’
Hugo looked at him cautiously. ‘I know. I know. But with the Rossiters away so much …’
‘No one cares about the shooting, you’re saying. So I’m on the scrapheap.’
‘That you’re not. I’ve got big plans for the shoot.’ Hugo hesitated, then went on. ‘Don’t bet on it, but I think Mr Rossiter’s going to be here soon. Coming today possibly.’
Armstrong’s deeply wrinkled face blushed. ‘That’s the best news. That’s the best news I’ve heard for weeks. What’s he going to say about all this malarkey?’
‘We’ll see.’
Armstrong held up crossed fingers. Benjie’s red MG could be seen across the lake, wending its way up the front drive. The generator began to chug, and an electric guitar gave out a screech. The caterers were setting up out in the forest, near the second lake. A tractor pulling a cart laden with gas cylinders went by in that direction. Eight men were struggling to get the beer tent up, while half a dozen more lugged straw bales out of the back of a clapped-out horsebox. ‘Good morning, officer,’ said Hugo to a policeman who was picking his way over the tussocky grass in shoes meant for pavements. Armstrong shrugged and strode off towards the west gate.
Antony
I really hadn’t been looking forward to Guy’s jamboree very much. My encounter in the zoo, and its aftermath, had left me rattled. I felt I was picking my way through an unlit chateau whose every corridor contained a loose flagstone that would give way if stepped on and tumble me into an oubliette. Everything was just as it had been – my secure and prestigious job, my severe and tranquil flat (‘You know, colour isn’t criminal, Ant,’ said Flora, ‘I like grey too, but let me at least buy you some cushions’), my tolerant friends. But frequently and without warning my frightfully civilised life would be interrupted by summonses to meet people whose names I didn’t know, people who had the power to disgrace me, and perhaps do much, much worse. The exquisite manners with which those encounters were conducted made them all the more unnerving. These people didn’t have to yell ‘Chop off his head’. If they chose to do it (do what? my mind carefully skirted around the question) it would be done neatly, without sound or fury. Over the years I grew accustomed to the situation, but thank the Lord for Mogadon. Without it I wouldn’t have had much sleep since that summer.
I should perhaps explain that my secret work was pretty trivial stuff. I’m not a double agent. I’ve worked only for what Mr Giraffe calls the enemy, never for the British secret services, unless these little chats I’m having now count as working. I – I who adore the creations of the unfairly gifted, I who make my living by selling treasures to aristos and plutocrats, I whose daily work is converting things rendered precious by religious devotion or by beauty into commodities to be marketed – I worked only for communism.
People I’d known at Cambridge sometimes as
ked me to pass on messages to contacts in Eastern Europe. I knew they were Comintern. They knew that I sympathised with them in a wishy-washy kind of way. I think they thought my sexual proclivities made me a misfit and therefore susceptible. But that’s not true. I’m not disaffected. In the world where I found my friends, discreet queens like me fit right in. So why did I do it?
It’s partly a matter of aesthetics. I respect socialism, as I respect Piero della Francesca and Johann Sebastian Bach. A certain purity. A certain grandeur. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that a Poussin expert should have gone the same way: neoclassicism is revolutionary. And then there are lower motives. Curiosity. The lure of the undercover world – I certainly found that titillating. To begin with I was flattered. Later I was somehow tangled up in good manners and fear. It’s always hard to say no to something once you’re even a little way in. And beyond all that, I meant it. I still mean it. Not that any currently existing communist regime is worth supporting – I lost that faith a long time ago. But though I’ve lived very well under this ramshackle hodgepodge of a political system of ours, I’m still affronted by its injustice. You don’t have to be hungry to deplore a famine.
So. To the point. What? Where? When? In Berlin at the end of the war, mostly, but sometimes after that. In Prague. In Poland. In Romania. I’ve lived abroad quite a bit off and on. My German is decent, my Russian not bad. My work gave me a pretext for poking around in parts of Eastern Europe to which British tourists couldn’t apply for visas without setting alarm bells ringing in the FO and MI6. Sometimes it was a matter of spouting some encrypted gobbledygook to a stranger in a café. Sometimes there was an envelope to deliver. There. That’s really about it. That what I did may have had lethal consequences is something I prefer not to think about. As I say, thank God for sleeping pills.
Anyway – back to ’73, which for me was the year of the giraffe, but which for most of the Wychwood habitués was the year of the pop concert. If Guy had imagined he could recreate the atmosphere of a Berlin cellar he would have been sorely disappointed, but he knew that perfectly well. He was a very sophisticated young man. Much missed now. Krautrock and an Oxfordshire deer-park don’t make an obvious pairing, but he saw the possibilities, and he was determined and manipulative enough to grab them.
I don’t mean that he was cynical. I think he was a true friend to Flora. Her marriage worked fine, as far as I could tell, but somehow there was always space in it, indeed a vacancy, for another man or two. I’m not talking about sex. That Benjie came with an amusing nephew as a free extra was definitely a plus.
*
Oh the fun of giving a party! Everyone else involved in the concert would have put it differently. Jack was a designer creating an enchanted space. Guy was the impresario, the Diaghilev de nos jours, bringing the intoxications of new music to an astonished old world. Hugo and his henchmen were doing a job, running the show as they ran the hunter trials that, each spring, filled the park with horseboxes and loudspeakers and women with headscarves drinking leftovers soup out of Thermos flasks. The musicians, from Dickie Lane, debutant drummer with the Pale Young Gentlemen, to Sonder, phlegmatic veterans of a hundred underground all-nighters, were out to blow people’s minds with the energy of their music. Jamie and Emmanuel, well, we’ll see what they were aiming to do. But Flora – Flora was giving a party.
The concert was by invitation only, but that didn’t mean the audience would be small. All the musicians had been urging their fans to come along. Mark Brown had had a word with Goodyear, who’d had a word with Flora, as a result of which everyone from the three villages abutting the estate was included, plus friends and relations. The last big party Lil and Christopher had given had been for her fortieth birthday – thirteen years ago now. Flora had dug out the list and invited everyone on it, with their children. The hostesses of the county were giving house-parties for the occasion, just as they did for deb dances (fewer of those nowadays), so that meant lots of Londoners. Guy had mobilised the Oxford mob. They would dance for hours and hours and hours.
Flora adored dancing. And adored the way the old anxiety about partners melted away at concerts where everyone joined the mêlée, dancing with the music, a universal partner.
Nell was with her. From her dressing room they could see all the scurrying activity down by the lake. Nell was on the bed, rumpling the beautiful cover with its boldly stitched foliage, its tiny silken rosebuds. Flora was trying on outfits in front of the cheval-glass. Clothes were heaped around her. ‘You’re so skinny. It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘I’m just going to have to be earth-motherly.’
‘I love that one,’ said Nell. It was a gauzy orange kaftan over which Flora’s hennaed and ringletted hair spread clashingly. There was a portrait by Lely, downstairs, of a plump woman in tawny satin. ‘You look like Lady Woldingham in it.’
‘The big mamma in the dining room? That’s not Lady Woldingham, it’s his mistress. The wife was pearly-pale and prim.’
‘All the same. Wear your emeralds.’
‘They’re Lil’s emeralds. And she would not want them trampled into the forest floor. Is Jamie coming?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is that over then?’
‘I’m not sure it ever even started.’
Flora looked at her carefully. ‘Well, you could probably find someone a bit merrier?’
Nell met her eye and they both giggled. Nell thought, By this time next week, but the thought was desolating.
‘Why don’t you cradle-snatch Dickie’s bass guitarist?’ said Flora, applying kohl and loading her forearms with bangles. ‘He’s gorgeous. OK, then. On y va!’
*
‘If we can get through this without starting a fire I’ll be jiggered,’ said one forester to another. It hadn’t rained for over a month. Goodyear was right behind them. ‘That’s what this baby is here for,’ he said, cocking his head towards a trailer loaded with milk churns. ‘That’s why we’re doing it by the lake. Keep an eye, won’t you. If anything gets started it’ll be all hands to the pump.’
‘Sir!’ the other two said, and clicked their heels in a mock salute.
Flora, onstage, spoke into a storm of static. When she realised no one could hear her she flailed her arms, wide sleeves flying, while the German sound engineer struggled to get the amplifiers under control.
‘My darling wife,’ Benjie shouted in Antony’s ear. ‘Doesn’t she look just like the Christmas angel?’
The angel in question, a stocky wooden one in Wychwood’s chapel who was always, by long tradition, draped with tinsel and spangled gauze for the annual midnight mass, was nothing like as animated as Flora, but at the considerable distance from which they viewed her the likeness was close enough to make Antony smile.
‘Actually I was thinking Mrs Noah in that old toy ark.’
‘No, no. Definitely the angel. And if she keeps flapping her wings like that she’ll soon be airborne, bless her.’
The two men stood halfway up the slope towards the house, beneath one of the ancient horse chestnuts. ‘Oldies and baldies,’ Benjie had announced at breakfast, as it became evident the day was going to be hot, ‘get first refusal on any patch of shade that’s going.’ He’d chosen his spot days ago. The ice-house was just a step away, and he’d got Underhill to secrete a stash of smoked salmon and vin rosé in it. His particular guests would not be eating hot dogs. Nor would they be obliged to use the trench-latrines. Underhill had a lad standing by at the narrow garden gate near to the tennis court, to open up whenever any of the chosen ones wanted to seek refuge in the house.
Between them and the lake, the grass was now all but invisible. People lay. People stood. People waved their arms at friends found, or jumped up and down on the spot in an attempt to see where friends lost had got to.
‘How did Flora find such a crowd?’ asked Antony.
‘Oh come, come. If she can fly, she can muster the troops. She’s really very, very good at this sort of thing.’
‘On
e could make a lot of money putting on shows like this.’
Benjie turned and tapped the side of his nose and beamed at him. ‘One most certainly could,’ he said.
*
Mark Brown took against Manny on sight. And the more time they spent together the more he regretted giving any time to such a nutter. Jamie McAteer was OK. He was reasonable, if a bit grouchy. But Mark knew this Emmanuel’s type. There were people in the Right to Roam movement who had that same self-righteous fervour, and they never achieved anything much. Mark worked within the law, always. He didn’t like martyrs and he didn’t like fights.
He’d made a point of chumming up with the people who opposed him. Farmers – they were the toughest nuts to crack. Not surprising, really. Landowners, agents, keepers, foresters like his now close friend Goodyear – he was matey with them all. There was nothing to be gained, he reckoned, by getting on people’s wick. Show them you’re one of the good guys, and eventually they might come round to thinking you’ve got a point. He’d been living in the village for over a decade. The cricket team, the singsongs – he was part of the scenery. He bought his timber from the farmers over whose land he’d got the footpaths opened. He had boys – and a girl, young Holly Slatter – working for him on Saturdays, teaching them the trade. One of them was turning out nice little footstools in his dad’s garden shed now, and selling them in Burford too, and the family were glad of it.
He’d had a few run-ins with Hugo Lane, but they’d been rather jolly occasions, actually. There was the time, some years back, when he was cutting the barbed wire over the stile by the Leafield gate – not for the first time, more like the fourth or fifth. Lane had come up on horseback and done his ‘Can I help you?’ routine that scared people so. Luckily he had Nell with him, on a nervous little pony, so Mark knew he wouldn’t want to get into anything ugly. Mark carried on snipping. Lane carried on telling him it was private property and so forth, but since neither was going to change his mind, or budge, they’d ended up having a good chat, over the wire, about which imported hardwoods made the best garden furniture. Mark had been amused to see a little clump of iroko saplings in the park when he went up to Wychwood a month or so later to deliver a plans-chest for the office. They didn’t thrive. He could have told Lane they wouldn’t – the soil was far too heavy. But the point was that he had things in common with the people up whose noses he was getting. Far more than he did with this self-important demagogue with his nervous fidgets and his Trotskyite specs. He couldn’t exactly tell them not to walk a public footpath – he, Mark Brown, the champion of walkers’ rights. But he was not at all happy about what he guessed they were going to do.
Peculiar Ground Page 25
