Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  ‘I’m going over,’ said Dickie. ‘Coming?’

  ‘No,’ said Nell. ‘No, I’ll stay here.’ Something told her it was Jamie. Whatever was going on he had something to do with it. She didn’t want to see him. She felt queasy. Inside her something clenched and twisted.

  Dickie and the others ran lightly across the dam. Nell untied the old rowing boat from its mooring-stump and pulled it under the shelter of a willow.

  Antony

  There was a fracas near the old meeting-house, where the food stalls were, but it took a while before any of us, up at the house, were aware of it. The Germans were twanging and twaddling away. I really do not know why Guy was so impressed by them. But for me that evening was blissful.

  I got Jack back. Not for long, as it turned out, but one thing the prolongation of life has given me plentiful opportunities to learn is that the prolongation of pleasure is futile. A moment’s bliss is as transformative in the short term, and as much of a solace when recollected, as five hours, or five years of it. The whole companionship/loneliness dichotomy is different of course. For that duration matters.

  At the back of the crowd a lot of people were lying in the grass. I dislike almost everything about marijuana. Under its influence the most amusing people lapse into silence. The most sophisticated start to giggle at asinine jokes, or no jokes at all. Oddly enough, though, the music was rather good. One of my most discerning clients of the next decade came to me as a result of a chance conversation during which we’d discovered how much we both liked Jefferson Airplane.

  I’m beating about the bush. I’ve noticed that I do so when approaching a memory that carries an intimidating load of emotional freight. To the point. I found Jack among the supine concert-goers. I sat down beside him. His friends drifted off. Jack stayed. We didn’t talk. The music was too loud. After a while he rolled over and smiled into my face. There was always something feral about his disordered teeth. He stood up and walked slowly to the narrow iron gate into the garden. I counted to twenty and followed him. I guessed where he had gone. In the blackness of the passage between the doubled yew hedges he came up behind and seized me.

  Helen said to me once, later on, ‘We’re both traitors, aren’t we?’ I was shocked: I thought Nicholas must have told her something – I knew they were still close – but that wasn’t what she meant. She went on, ‘I’m a feminist with a thing for dastardly men. You’re the insider who’s always looking for a way out. All that slipping off to Berlin or wherever. And Jack – wasn’t he your escape route?’ She was wrong. He was more than that. I loved him.

  By the time Guy got up on the stage and shushed the band with a flailing of his arms, I was weak and shaky and preternaturally clear-headed. We could see the stage from the gap in the yew hedge, the gap across which Jack had once walked on his hands. Guy called out, ‘Fire!’ The rest of what he said was lost in the static. Jack said, ‘Fuck!’ And leapt over the ha-ha. I’d forgotten how acrobatic he was. Seconds later he was in the great green Bentley, driving like a bat out of hell down towards the west gate.

  *

  The marchers walked into the clearing singing. Jamie, leading from the front, met Hugo Lane.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Hugo’s famous opening line.

  ‘No thanks. We’re on a public right of way.’

  ‘Quite right. You are. You go thataway.’

  Hugo hadn’t recognised him. Why would he? It was pretty dark. Jamie looked ahead. People were standing to either side of the track, paper cups or bridge rolls in hand, staring curiously at the new arrivals. An honour guard, or a gauntlet?

  His followers were hungry. Two or three of them quietly split from the column and slipped into the beer tent. Manny, beside him, said, ‘We’ve got to keep the momentum up.’ Jamie marched on, singing loudly. The lights were in his eyes. It wasn’t until he was right on the edge of the lake that he saw it. The marchers were pressing on behind him, not realising they needed to swing to the right. Those at the front were getting jostled into the water. There were angry shouts and splashing.

  Dickie and his two friends, still in their silvery stage-clothes, came skimming towards them. A woman shrieked. A man stepped forward, his arms spread. ‘Hail, astral voyagers!’ he called. He ran towards the boys, without pausing, into the lake. He was some four feet wide of the dam. He floundered and went under. Manny’s friend Gus had bought fifty tabs with him, and he’d sold a good lot of them that afternoon. It was a hot night. Within seconds half a dozen spaced-out walkers for the freedom of music were hurling themselves into the lake-water. There was rude laughter from those who’d gathered, nervous, to oppose them. What had been looking like a battle was turning into a mudbath.

  Hugo wasn’t laughing. ‘For Christ’s sake, man,’ he said to Jamie. ‘There’s mud to sink into, there’s water lilies to get tangled up in. Wipe that smirk off your face and get them out of there.’ Goodyear was already down by the bank, hauling out girls whose long hair and skirts dripped, and who babbled with terror. A fat fellow was sinking. It took five men to drag him out of the shoes the mud wouldn’t yield up. Nell rowed over. Her boat was grabbed from all sides. She poled it to the bank, and once all her lost souls were safe on land, she dropped over its side and swam back into the blackness. Dickie and his friends were on the dam, yelling at the flounderers to crawl up.

  Marchers were slipping away in the dark but there was still a tight knot of thirty or so determined to get the fight they’d come for. Someone shouted, ‘The filth are here,’ and there was a panicky surge forward. (It was true that PC Dodd had arrived on the scene, but he wasn’t making his presence felt.) A child was knocked down. A father said, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ and got hold of a big young man and shook him by his sideburns until he howled. A girl stumbled against a trestle table, toppling it. It was dark down by the water. No one could really see what was going on. Someone picked up a branch from the bonfire and ran with it.

  ‘Stop that idiot,’ shouted Hugo.

  More people were snatching up flaming branches. There was light where there shouldn’t have been. And where there should have been light there was darkness, as the generator juddered to a standstill. The children’s crying had a newly frantic tone to it. Women yelled at their husbands to bloody well get them out of there. Some of the marchers were singing again, a hoarse and desperate anthem.

  Nell swam away, out into the centre of the lake. Things moved beneath the surface, furtively caressing her legs and sides. She knew they were the stems of water lilies, but her mind filled with images of babies’ tremulous limbs, pale and malleable and purposelessly flailing. The lake-water, stirred up by the now dozens of people in it, gave off its secret smell, of life multiplying itself, fecund and silent, underwater, away from human eyes. Clean but also noisome.

  Something was happening inside her. She was close now to the far bank. She could haul herself along by clinging to the stands of waterweeds. She was terrified of mud, of its warm lubricious sucking. She needed ground beneath her. A harbour, a tiny bay, barely two foot wide but floored with flat stones. Her hands reached it. She dragged herself up. A body drowns when water rushes into it. What was happening to Nell was something quite opposite. She was slumped on the bank now, hands grasping and twisting at tufts of dying grass, helpless, whimpering, legs spread, while something flowed out of her. Her child.

  Lil

  I’ve always liked rings best. When we got engaged Christopher gave me his mother’s pearls, four strings, perfectly graduated, with a whopping heart-shaped sapphire in the clasp. I hope I was gracious, but I had to force myself to wear them. What’s the point of a necklace? It’s not as though the wearer can get any pleasure from admiring something that’s worn out of her own line of vision. But rings, yes. Rings I can enjoy.

  I have long fingers. No nail varnish. There’s something so pleasing about the exact match between fingernails and those small pink seashells – when nature gets things right one should leave well alone. O
ur engagement ring was a boat-shaped diamond. When Fergus was born Christopher gave me an amethyst surrounded by pearls. I’ve worn both rings every day, ever since, pure light and purple light, one on each hand. And because I wore them always I never lost them – I spread my fingers now and here they are. Whereas brooches, earrings, bracelets, I’ve scattered them abroad. God knows where they all went. I hope the cleaning ladies got them. I’d rather that than that they each just disappeared down some crack in the floorboards. But the point I’m trying to make is that when you don’t much care for a thing, when you don’t keep it close, it takes itself off. The same is true of a husband. And the same, I’m beginning to realise, is true of a life.

  I thought I could just walk away from Wychwood, take a twelve-year excursion and walk back in. But sitting on the car bonnet I realised what a blind fool that makes me. I’m a different person now. Wychwood is different. Too many people blowing through it, too many people for whom it’s just a house.

  The concert was boring after a while. We went in. There was supper laid out ready, but hardly anyone had come in for it. We ate. We were quiet. Both tired, but also constrained. There’s too much that can’t be talked about. We’ll need to live together again for a while before we can chatter on in the old way. We didn’t know where to plonk ourselves. Our little sitting room was full of other people’s stuff. No dogs to walk. We went up to Lady Woldingham’s room. Flora seems to have made it her bedroom. I rather salute her temerity, but Christopher was upset. There were clothes lying hugger-mugger on a circular bed, and heaps of cushions around the fireplace. We stood by the middle window, so elegant. The parterre is still pretty much as John Norris planned it. I took his hand. What a strange ambiguous frisson, the familiarity of flesh, of bones I know so well. That extra knuckle at the base of the thumb. I wonder, did she ever notice that, his Scottish concubine? Did she ever kiss it?

  He let me. It is all as it was, and all quite different. Sadder. His face is his face, but his eyes are circled with soft folds. Life is so short one really mustn’t waste a moment of it. But how to fit it all in? How to have the rapture of being completely with one man – and I do see that that would be rapture – without shutting off all the other possibilities. Can’t be done. People talk about giving themselves. That’s not something I do. It’s rather shaming to admit it, but I think that I am the only person I’ve ever really loved.

  He stroked my head, the back of my neck. He smells as he always did, of cedarwood. His touch is so light. He passed his thumbs over my eyelids. He is so tall. He leant against the shutters and gathered me up. He has always had, even in moments of the most abandoned intimacy, perfect manners.

  Guy’s Germans were still wailing away and the sky was lurid above them. Then Christopher lifted his chin from the top of my head and said, ‘What’s that?’ Way out in the forest there were flames leaping up.

  *

  Above its stone footings the meeting-house was timber framed. Three hundred years old or thereabouts, the wood flaky with age. That’s why Hugo had insisted they’d put the drinks in there, and kept the cooking fires well away. But once people started larking about with flaming branches, things went haywire. First the bunting began to smoulder, then the flames ran along its tarred string as though the silly rags had been tied up there on purpose to make fuses. Soon the flames dispensed with the strings and leapt the gap between the two walls unaided.

  Fierce heat; glaring eyeball-hurting light: but the noise was the most frightening thing. First whispers and crepitations. Then a juddering sound like the flexing of sheet metal. The fire was feeding, lapping at wood, sucking in hay, bolting down anything with resin in it, or tar, and all those nutrients were converted on an instant into power. Then came the wind, and the roaring.

  There was a stampede back up the track towards the gate into the park. Children howling. Young Bill Slatter started up the hay-lorry, with its great flatbed, and drove it away loaded with the littlest ones and their bleating mothers. Goodyear’s chaps were coming up with their milk churns. One way the fire would be stopped by the lake. Another it was likely to peter out among the stony rubble of the slope behind it. The danger lay on the opposite side of the ride, first a mass of dry brown bracken, and beyond it a stand of conifers. It mustn’t be allowed to go that way.

  Manny lifted up his voice. It was high-pitched and rasping. It carried. He’d seen fires on family holidays in Italy, he’d seen how the olive-farmers fought them with brooms and branches. Hugo waved arms at him semaphoring God knows what, but Manny was already deploying his troops across the width of the clearing. Goodyear’s foresters were drenching the ground in a broad band. People seized each churn as it emptied and ran to the lake with it, refilling it and then toiling back. There was a pile of hazel boughs by the water’s edge, cut for pea sticks, but never used. Manny got hold of one, wetted it and began to flail at the bracken. Wherever a flame appeared, he beat it down. Others saw, and imitated. They made a line. Someone was using an empty sack to beat the fire. Men dragged off their shirts. A young woman was using her skirt, its mirror-work patterns throwing off flakes of coloured light.

  Mr Green was by Hugo, shouting something. Impossible to hear. He turned and kicked his precious motorbike into life and sputtered off up the track that led slantwise into the forest, towards the upper lake. A group of the marchers had managed to haul a great sopping mass of waterweed off the lake’s surface and were dragging it up to the firebreak. One of the tractor-drivers reversed down to help them. Attached to the tractor’s rear it squelched over the ground, a monstrous slug-shaped vegetable mass.

  The meeting-house was falling in on itself. Walls toppled with dreamy slowness, dematerialising into ashy heaps. There was a great revving as all motor vehicles, the tractors and trailers, the Land Rovers and little three-wheeled sheep-trucks with their puttering two-stroke engines, backed away up the track, away from the danger zone.

  Jamie was stomping on the bracken. He felt elated. Words ran through his mind. Conflagration. Holocaust. Inferno. Ardent. Arson. He’d write about this. He most certainly would. A short story. His first fiction. And then he’d piss off out of England, and leave all this footling stuff he’d got involved in behind. What the hell had he been up to? Allowing himself to be sidetracked by a dispute about footpaths and pop music. Manny was going to Israel, to a kibbutz. Jamie’d go too. Manny might lend him the airfare. If not, well, he could probably talk his parents into it. And then see what happens. No one here is writing about the Palestinians, Selim had said to him. The English all pretend to be Arabists, but they’re not paying attention. That’d be his story. He’d kept the tape recorder the paper had given him, and no one had asked for it back yet. He’d sell his guitar and buy a camera first thing.

  There was a change in the fire’s ghastly caterwauling. Hugo Lane was sitting on the ground, his head down between his knees. Whenever he tried to stand the pain in his chest came again, and his eyes seemed to have stopped working. He couldn’t tell where up was, or down. Like being a spaceman. Peculiarly unpleasant sensation, that. He felt perfectly lucid, but unable to command his body to do what he wanted it to do. Just sit here for a bit. Bound to be fit again soon. He was staring at the ground, trying to get over the queer up-down thing, so he was probably the first person to notice that the earth beneath him was becoming sodden. He got it at once. Clever old Green, he thought. Good man, that.

  Mr Green and Jack Armstrong stood on the dam between the second and third lakes, panting. The sluicegate had seemed immovable, however much they struggled with it, until Green had had the idea of using his Triumph to drag the winch around. Nearly pulled off his handlebars, but it had worked. They’d lifted it only part-way. No need for a tidal wave. But water was seeping silently over all the ground downhill of them, shining beneath the weirdly illuminated sky like a molten lava-flow. It spread at a steady speed. ‘Fire’s not going to like that,’ said Green. ‘How did you know to come here?’

  ‘Norris’s plans,’ said
Jack. ‘You know. It was you showed them to me when I was a kid.’

  ‘Not as green as you’re cabbage-looking, are you?’ said Green. ‘Reckon we’ve probably saved the day.’

  *

  They spread bracken in the back of a Land Rover and laid Hugo on it, and took him home. He got up for breakfast the next morning, but then went back to bed and stayed there while Chloe called the doctor and begged him to come out again. The doctor, who was an excellent harmonica player but not so good at inspiring confidence, said, ‘Keep him in bed for a bit. And off the booze. He’ll live. Louis Armstrong survived eight heart attacks before the ninth one did for him. Bet you anything your husband will die out hunting. And not for a long while yet.’ Hugo was grey-faced for days.

  Christopher came to see him and said, ‘We don’t want you back at work until the shooting starts. If then. Take Chloe away for a bit.’

  Hugo said, ‘I just might do that,’ but they both knew he wouldn’t. Afterwards he said ‘dicky heart’ when people asked what the matter was – ‘But I’ve got these magic pills.’ He gave up smoking. Chloe pretended to be pleased but actually that frightened her more than anything. When he thought he was alone he would come suddenly to a standstill and rub his chest. Sometimes his hands went numb, or tingled, and he’d clench and unclench them, looking at them as though they were puzzling small beasts.

  *

  To begin with the fire ignored the water, roaring on above it like grown-ups doggedly carrying on a conversation while children, at their knee-level, tug at their clothes and whine.