Manny hadn’t delivered two hundred marchers, but he’d done pretty well. There must have been fifty or sixty of his mob climbing out of beat-up vans or straggling up the hill from the railway station. He and Jamie sat under a big oak by the narrow forest road towards Wychwood’s north gate. ‘Free the Music’ read the placard they’d strapped to its trunk. Like the standard of a medieval warlord raised in time of famine, it drew a ragtag following. A few spaced-out voyagers on other astral planes – Wychwood’s magic spring was a magnet for leyline followers and druids. Veterans of les événements and of Grosvenor Square, people Manny had met when he was squatting 144 Piccadilly, or just people he’d bumped into when he’d gone down to the Roundhouse the previous evening, after his telephone marathon, and walked up and down the queue of people waiting for doors to open on the Patti Smith concert, handing out photocopied fliers promising free entry to a mind-blowing concert and a chance to make an outcry against elitism and the political emasculation of music. Jamie knew a few of them – he’d marched in his time. He hadn’t called up any of his Oxford friends.
*
The Pale Young Gentlemen were onstage when the big green car crossed the bridge at the end of the lake and drove up the avenue towards the house. They were performing their last number – a cover of ‘Go Now’ – when it reappeared, taking the steep downward curves of the lakeward track with stately deliberation. Hugo Lane guessed at once who was inside it. Chloe’d positioned them off to the side of the stage, right down by the water, where Dickie would be able to see his parents without appearing to look.
‘That car!’ said Hugo. ‘Where did that spring from? I’ll just …’
‘If you leave now Dickie will never forgive you. I mean it. Long after we’re dead he’ll be complaining that his father wouldn’t listen to his first public performance. If he’s famous enough he’ll be writing books about it.’
Hugo lit a cigarette. The car came to a standstill just uphill of the ice-house. Benjie, his pink seersucker suit easily identifiable even from this distance, waved both arms, then took off his hat and waved that too. Jack Armstrong opened the back door and Hugo saw two figures get out. Lil climbed up onto the bonnet and held up her binoculars. Christopher leant against the car’s flank, pointed at something, and seemed to be calling up to her.
‘They’re watching him,’ Chloe was yelling above the music. ‘So the bloody hell can you.’
Chloe never swore. Startled, Hugo switched his gaze back to the stage. His son was scarcely visible behind the drum kit, but the noise he was making was tremendous. They were just four skinny boys, so frail and little against the backdrop of great trees with their coarse late-summer foliage, but there were a good fifteen hundred people going wild, applauding them. It had never occurred to him that all this drumming and strumming was anything other than a silly fad. There were tears running over Chloe’s cheeks and her nose had gone red. He passed her his hankie and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Well I never,’ he said. ‘Still can’t hold a croquet mallet right, though, can he?’
‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ said Chloe. He was bewildered to realise she was furious with him.
Antony
It was extraordinarily moving to see Lil and Christopher arrive, together again, just like that. I did ask Lil, some years later, how she’d done it and she said, ‘No one did anything. It was just there waiting to happen.’ I suppose sometimes all you have to do is hold out your hand.
It was like that, in the beginning, with me and Jack. The first time, he was scarcely out of school. I remember going up to the pool late one evening, a couple of months before that night with Nell. After dinner, but it was June, and the sky was still silvery pale. I always love the way the water becomes eerily warm after the sun has gone. He was there with Green, poking at some shrub or other. They were always great mates. When they saw me they both started to leave: the Wychwood staff were trained to be invisible in those days. And I said, ‘Hang on a minute, Jack.’
That’s all it takes. ‘Hang on a minute’ and the doors to Paradise open. Green said goodnight and set off towards the kitchen door – he had a trug full of strawberries for the house-party’s breakfast. Jack had seen me watching him for months, he must have, though he said later it all came as a complete surprise to him. Of course he was very young, a child really. It was almost dark, with the breathless closeness those yew hedges generated. He was standing by the entrance to the changing hut. I walked past him and went in, and looked back, and then the miracle of translocation occurred. Neither of us remembers having taken a step, but the yard and a half of distance between us ceased to exist. His lips were so cool. The inside of his mouth so warm.
A few weekends, and then for years he ignored me. Understandable. And I was too much of a coward to try again. The possibility of imprisonment does make one pause. I never told him, once we were together again, how I’d yearned for him.
For Lil and Christopher there were complications, naturally. They’d been married for quarter of a century but they’d been separated for nearly half that time. They each had suitors who were disappointed by their reunion. It was common knowledge that Christopher had a woman up in Scotland. I can’t say on whom Lil was turning her back. There were a lot of people in her orbit. Which of those dear dear friends were, or hoped to be, lovers, is not for the rest of us to know. Perhaps none. She was well into her fifties, after all. But certainly there were quite a few who’d squired her around.
They arrived at the concert looking regal, and took up their positions on the slope as though entering the royal box. A restoration is a disruptive thing. Benjie handles such situations with finesse (odd to think how clumsy I thought him on first meeting), but the fact is his regency looked like coming to an end in the moment the Bentley crossed the bridge. I was down by the stage and even from that distance I could see how the focal point of the party shifted. Flora in her golden dress was soon sitting up on the car bonnet with Lil. She wasn’t Mrs Noah any more, steering her own ark. Next to Lil, a blade of white in tight trousers and a shiny jacket, she looked like a blousy bridesmaid.
*
Jamie and his army waited in the field across from the Leafield gate until it was dark, by which time most of them were pretty stoned. They walked into the forest so quietly that a barn owl, hunting up and down the ride in the valley, carried on with its deliberate swoops unperturbed, pale and soft in outline as a moth.
The music came to them first as a pulse, and then as a wailing coupled with a drone. They regrouped by the Cider Well. Some of them waded barefoot into the stream and baptised themselves with its water, or filled bottles with it. One man peeled off and walked back the way they’d come. He’d be selling magic water in second-hand scent bottles off a stall in Portobello Road the next five Saturdays. (And since it went so well, he carried on with water from other sources. He wasn’t a cynic. He kept a reserve of Cider Wells water, and each little phial contained at least a drop of it, and as he ran his kitchen tap he intoned a spell.) Others brought out their stashes and began to roll up.
Jamie repeated his orders. ‘We’ve got right on our side here. Stay strictly on the path. Dance if you want, but always on the footpath. If we break that rule, they win. This isn’t trespassing. This isn’t civil disobedience. We’re just doing what we’re entitled to do, travelling a public right of way.’
‘They’re not going to get off on that, man,’ said Manny beside him. ‘You’re making it sound like we’re the fucking Ramblers’ Association.’
He stepped in front of Jamie. ‘We’re not the transgressors here. We’ve – got – the – right. We’re not the rich dicks breeding birds to kill them for pleasure. We’ve. Got. The. Right. We’re not the arseholes who want to keep the people’s music locked away for their private pleasure.’ When he fisted the air this time his followers were ready with the response. ‘WE’VE – GOT – THE – RIGHT!’
And then he was singing.
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry
skies above
Don’t fence me in.
Jamie, who’d heard this song – the Ella Fitzgerald version – thrumming beneath his college-room’s floorboards more times than he could stand remembering, was belting out the refrain with him. The straggle collected itself into a column and set off singing down the darkened ride. There was a smell of leaf-mould and crushed sorrel. Old man’s beard hung ghostly on the slopes containing them. The wall of electronic sound rose as they advanced, but they gamely threw their reedy voices at it.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love
Don’t fence me in.
*
Brian Goodyear was fond of that song too. He favoured the Bing Crosby recording. He joined in under his breath.
Gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
Dooby dooby dooby and I can’t stand fences …
He and Hugo looked down at the marchers from the grassy plateau which ran right to the valley’s upper rim.
‘So what do we do about them?’ he asked.
‘Not a thing. Not a single thing, provided they stay on the right of way.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘We’re down on them like a ton of bricks.’
‘What? Fisticuffs?’
‘Arrest warrants. I asked Brown to call Mr Plod as well.’
‘Brown’s all right.’
‘Yes,’ said Hugo. ‘I used to hate his guts, but he’s done us a favour tonight.’
‘They’ll be going right through where the food stalls are.’
‘You’ve got some of our chaps there?’
Goodyear nodded. They set off briskly, crossing to where a track would bring them slantwise down to the third lake, near the semi-ruined barn known, for some forgotten reason, as the meeting-house.
*
Guy and Flora stood together at the side of the stage. Guy was doing his usual tight-muscled dance: a twitch of each shoulder, a pelvic gyration. Flora raised her arms, gauzy sleeves falling back, and swayed. They both had their eyes shut. Nell stood with them, looking not at the stage but at the dense mass of people covering the slope beyond the water, and the house above, whose lit windows showed only as an occasional dim hallucination behind the syncopated glare of Sonder’s lightshow. Her brother was suddenly beside her. It was impossible to hear anything he said.
*
Down by the meeting-house a bonfire was smouldering, and scores of potatoes wrapped in foil were baking in the embers. Mr Underhill and Mrs Duggary had taken charge of catering outdoors, as it fell under their purview in the house. Mrs Slatter’s famous Scotch eggs were piled on a card table covered with a groundsheet: she hoped to make enough from selling them to buy an electric bicycle. Mrs Duggary’s jam-making pans (‘You could boil a missionary in that one, easy,’ said Underhill, with satisfaction) had been brought out with terrible warnings as to the displeasure she would feel were they to be returned dented. The surplus peas, the waste of which, year after year, caused Mr Green such regret, formed the basis of the soup now simmering in those pans on a brick-built range, to be doled out into paper cups. Ham sandwiches, fishpaste sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes. And alongside the home-made stuff, lots of the kind of food Mrs Duggary referred to as ‘greasy muck’. Underhill had invited all the vendors who had descended on Oxford for St Giles’s Fair to set up stalls. Chips, hot dogs, hamburgers, bacon sandwiches. The smells of frying onions and brown sauce hung thick.
The beer tent, its side open, was busy. In the roofless meeting-house a bar sold everything else drinkable. Jugs of orange squash and lemon barley at one end, the hard stuff down the other and, in the centre, urns full of tea.
Most of the village families were there. They’d stood in the sun all afternoon to hear their local heroes perform, dancing on the spot and singing along with the choruses, hoisting children on shoulders, fanning themselves with hats, pushing through the crowds to the increasingly horrible latrines. When the boiler-suited Germans came on, they had started to think about supper, and getting on home. They’d trooped through the great wrought-iron gates leading from park to encircling forest, open for the first time anyone could remember, taken the downhill track and clustered around the food stalls. The music was still loud, but you could just about hear yourself think.
Mark Brown dropped down the steep slope above the clearing, half-tumbling, half-scrambling, and leapt the last four feet or so, to land close to the bonfire. Goodyear was running across to the water cart where two of his men and half a dozen of their buddies stood smoking, beer-mugs in hand. Hugo Lane found Brown.
‘They’ve passed the Cider Well,’ he said. ‘They’re coming the long way round down Leafield Break. Be here in twenty minutes or so. A hundred of them, not more.’
‘I got the constable on the line.’ Brown was panting so hard he could hardly get the words out. He’d run up through the home farm. ‘He’s on his way, but he’ll be on his own. Fat lot of use that’ll be. What do we do?’
‘We clear a passage for them. If they keep going on through we won’t stop them.’ They both walked towards the crowds around the food stalls, shouting and waving their arms.
*
Nell and Dickie slipped through the narrow door in the park wall alongside the cascade, and were abruptly in darkness. The bracken almost met across the path. They were wading through a waist-high mass of fronds they couldn’t see, and there were nettles as well. They’d been coming this way since they were little. Mrs Slatter told them once it used to be a channel full of water, but somebody got drowned and it was filled in. They called it the tunnel. As children, they’d run through it, heads low, prisoners escaping to where their mother waited by the second lake, with the old frying pan which was only used for picnics.
When they were far enough off to be able to hear each other Nell said, ‘What are we doing?’
*
A couple of Manny’s marchers lay by the Cider Well, flat on their backs, watching the stars. The sky kept changing colour.
‘Are we falling off?’ asked the girl.
‘Off what?’ asked the boy, and snickered idiotically.
‘Off the world,’ she said.
He rolled over and put an arm across her belly. ‘Hold on tight,’ he said. ‘I’ve got you.’
She squirmed a bit. She knew it was her boyfriend’s arm, but she also knew it was the root of a freakish plant that was trying to drag her underground.
Old Meg Slatter stepped out of the trees. She looked at the two of them without any apparent interest, and went down to the stream. She had lumpy things in a cloth bag with a drawstring. It was the one in which her granddaughter took her regulation black plimsolls to school. Now she took the things out. Pop concert or not, this was the night for digging them up. They smelt of earth. She knelt down to wash them and then, tired, stayed there on all fours – knees on the stream’s muddy verge, hands on the rinsed pebbles of the stream bed.
She’d never have let anyone who counted see her looking so done in, and so ungainly. But these two – she didn’t know them. And it wasn’t as though they were models of decorum either, was it?
The young woman was crooning softly. The man propped himself up on his elbows and saw Meg. He said, ‘Um. Are you all right?’ She sat back on her haunches, feeling the joints crunch. As she did so the bag and its contents slipped from her hands. She grabbed at it and toppled sideways. The man said, ‘Oh cripes,’ and ran down the bank, his wide trousers flapping against thin, thin legs. Meg’s clothes, the dress covered in small flowers, the brown cardigan, were just like his mother’s. He got her bag for her. It was heavy. The way she’d fallen, her skirt was rucked up. He didn’t know how to help her but he squatted beside her until she said, ‘I don’t know who you are, but you can make yourself useful,’ and her tone, the crosspatch tone that certain women of her age, for some reason, felt obliged to use with the young, normalised the eerie night scene for him and he was able to say ‘Do you want to grab hold of my hand?’
&nb
sp; By the time she was on her feet they were friends. She patted his arm and told him he was a good boy. Her skirt was sopping wet but she didn’t seem concerned about that. The girl offered the striped gold-threaded scarf that was tied around her head as a towel. ‘Thank you,’ said Meg, ‘I’m Mrs Slatter.’ Then, as though impelled to offer them a privilege as recompense for their help, she said, ‘This is hellebore. The root. It’s poisonous. Take a bit. Plant it in your garden. It’s lucky. Poisonous things tend to be.’ They looked uncertainly at the black knob. They weren’t at the living-together stage, not anywhere near it. Neither of them had a garden. ‘It’s the right time,’ she said. ‘You can only move stinking hellebore at full moon.’
‘Far out,’ said the girl. ‘Like it’s a witchcraft thing?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Slatter, pulling down her cardigan and thinking she’d better get back to her stall. ‘Like that.’
*
When the confrontation came Nell and Dickie were on the other side of the lake. Two more of the Pale Young Gentlemen had come after them: Rob Goodyear and the good-looking bass player who’d just joined. The glassless windows of the meeting-house were reflected in the invisible black water. So was light in all shades of flame from hellish orange to livid. Paraffin lamps, wood-fires, torches, the headlights of half a dozen stationary Land Rovers, and the sky flushing green and pink behind them as Sonder’s show played itself out. They could see people they knew – their father, Goodyear, Brown and a dozen others, marshalling the crowd into two segments, between which a broad open way led down to the water. There was jostling, and some anger, and little children haring from side to side.
Peculiar Ground Page 26
