Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  It took a while for Jamie to register it too. The ground he stood on became slippery, and then spongy. Moving his feet was more laborious. The shouting changed its timbre. People were slowing down, looking round, pulling away up the valley’s sloped sides. The meeting-house’s ruins began to hiss and steam. It was getting darker again. Mark Brown was shooing the firefighters back, herding them up the track towards the park entrance. Everyone out. Everyone out now. Go Now Go Now Go Now Now Now Get the Hell out of here you twerps. They went. Confused. Goodyear sent two men haring up to the dam to help Green close the sluice. By the time they’d wrestled it shut the valley was knee-deep in roiling scummy water.

  Nell’s brother waded past Jamie, going towards the lake. Recognised him, turned, shouted, ‘She’s on the other side. Nell.’ Jamie went after him. They were running in slow motion. The floodwater churned as it met the lake-water. The boat, abandoned, was spinning down towards the next dam. They saw something pale and still on the far bank. The water was rising fast. Jamie was kneeling, tearing at the laces of his sodden desert boots. He said, ‘You run around. I’m going across.’ Dickie was off, but the dam was impassable. Jamie gave up on the laces. Tugged the boots off anyway. Dived in.

  The water smelt wild but it took him gently. It was busy doing what water does, going downhill, no argument, no sweat, and it carried him inexorably with it. He fought it. He burrowed through it, diving in search of a stratum of stillness beneath the rushing surface. He tunnelled, he dodged. There were things in the water, branches and clumps of tornaway weed. He couldn’t avoid them. Couldn’t see them even. Just had to hope for luck. He was aiming himself against the colossal weight of liquid, pushing with all the power of his lumpen muscular shoulders. Came up for air. Near the middle of the lake. Dived again, and found shelter. He was in the lee of a kind of underwater rampart, in an invisible corridor of calm water. He followed it, his lungs straining, until his hands touched mud. Vegetation, not slimy. Grass, not waterweed. The far bank. Breathe. Find Nell.

  *

  Darling Aunt

  Metaphorical fire and flood I’m all in favour of, but I really hadn’t intended to unleash the real thing. Truly, I am most awfully sorry to have brought such mayhem to Oxfordshire.

  Not, as we all know, that it was me who brought it. We’re not allowed to say a word against him, now he’s been sanctified as a cross between brave Leander and young Lochinvar. And as a fellow-swimmer, I have to say (through enviously gritted teeth) that I salute him. I’ve got a certificate to prove I’m a life-saver, but I’ve never actually saved a life, and I certainly would have thought thirteen times before plunging into the lake that night. Full marks for courage and natation then. All the same, entre nous, Jamie is a surly, humourless, attention-seeking plonker, nicht war? I’m so glad he’s buggered off to Israel. I gather there’s a war coming up there – he’ll like that. Meanwhile over to you, dear universal aunt and everyone’s favourite big sister, to introduce poor Nell to someone with a little more sprezzatura.

  On the subject of buggering off, I’m aware I left you short of moral support the day after the concert, but I thought the most helpful thing I could do was to take my dour Germanic geniuses off your hands as soon as poss. They were very pleased with themselves, and with the turnout and the setting, etc. etc. They seemed to think Wychwood forest had been blooming and growing for hundreds of thousands of years for the sole purpose of providing an appropriate Umwelt for their show. I don’t suppose they do thank-you letters, but you never know, one day they might write you a song.

  Your adoring nevvie Guy

  *

  Once the fire had hissed and sputtered to a soggy ending, once Nell and Jamie had been loaded into a Land Rover and dispatched to Wood Manor, Mark Brown came up and shook Manny by the hand. They were both black-faced and filthy.

  ‘You’re an effing troublemaker,’ said Brown. ‘But you did all right down there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Manny. ‘Jamie talks about you. I gather you’re The Man hereabouts.’

  ‘You have to own a few thousand acres before you’re big in this world,’ said Mark, but he was pleased.

  They walked together into the park. There was a smell of crushed hay, and spilt beer and tens of thousands of cigarette butts.

  ‘So this concert,’ said Manny. ‘It was free, right?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Mark. ‘Invitation only. They don’t want hoi polloi in, however much money it could make them.’

  ‘There are other places, though, aren’t there?’ said Manny. Agitation was a bit of a thankless pursuit, but these concerts. They didn’t just happen. Someone had to get them going. He thought he might be rather good at that.

  ‘Want to have a drink tomorrow lunchtime?’ he said. ‘There’s things I’d like to talk to you about.’

  ‘Staying the night, are you?’ said Mark, teasing, then relented. ‘You can crash in my workroom, if you like, and then, yeah, tomorrow we’ll talk.’

  *

  The evening after the concert, Mrs Slatter walked down to the old meeting-house. From half a mile away she could smell sodden ash and the rottenness of underwater things exposed to air. She took her time, when walking, nowadays.

  The lake had shrunk back to its usual limits. Brambles and underbrush had been uprooted and carried off. The meeting-house no longer had any walls above shoulder-level. The flood had washed away all the jagged debris – burnt timber, torn branches. Where there had been rubble of all sorts, the remnant of the building was floored now only with a water-smoothed layer of lacustrine sludge.

  Brian Goodyear was there before her, on his hands and knees, caked in black mud. He looked up.

  ‘How did you know?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen it before?’

  She paused. She wasn’t being cagey. It was a difficult question to answer.

  ‘My nan talked about it,’ she said. ‘Perhaps she showed it to me.’

  ‘It was buried pretty deep,’ said Brian.

  ‘Well, you know,’ she said. He kept looking at her, waiting. ‘I just saw it somehow.’

  ‘I heard that story, too, or something like it. But the way I heard it things happened another way. In a different order.’

  ‘That happens with stories,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep them fixed.’

  He nodded and moved aside so she could see what he had been doing. A muddle of little squared-off stones. Drab colours mostly. Different shades of brown and grey and pinkish-white. Black ones laid together to make a curving line. Kneeling, and using his forearm laid flat to the ground, Brian wiped more of the silt away. It was only an inch or so deep. A shape done in the red of flowerpots or old brick. Could have been a fish of some sort. More of the pinkish-white. The muddle resolved itself into a pattern, repeating, symmetrical. A patch of straw-yellow, the colour of the big house. Then, so bright it looked like a mistake, like something brand-new dropped in amongst all those faded old stones, shiny and smooth as glass, a fragment of lapis lazuli.

  Meg Slatter put her hand on Brian’s shoulder – she’d known him since he was a boy after all – and lowered herself by careful degrees onto her knees beside him. Their hands – his broad and freckled, hers longer, and ribbed with greenish veins – pushed the veil of black mud aside. Wherever they moved it, it smeared and gradually seeped back, but in the spaces they cleared they could see – as one might see, through breaks in the cloud cover, angelic hosts flying high in the firmament – they could see the two blue cloaks, the two boys.

  1989

  September

  Selim

  When I went back to England I was in a blue funk. And angry. My mother was ashamed of me. My friends in Lahore couldn’t protect me, and some of them thought I had disgraced myself. I thought I was being brave and high-principled, but I was just a fool.

  I have a cousin in North London. Ten years older than me, she has a career as a doctor, a Scottish husband and two little boys. When I rang from the airport, waking her in the small hours, she hesitated, as thou
gh unsure which one I might be out of a number of Selims. I said ‘your cousin’, and she promptly invited me to stay with her, but as soon as I arrived I could tell she was afraid.

  Their house is tall and narrow, with long windows and steps leading directly from the pavement up to the front door. I’ve lived long enough in England to know it would be considered the acme of elegance here, but Amina’s parents would feel sorry for her – it is so old and inconvenient. The staircase takes up at least a quarter of the space. The rooms feel like the compartments of a display cabinet. It is a house in which you never really feel inside: you just perch behind its façade.

  I noticed Amina kept moving me, as it were, to the back of the shelf. She made me sit at her desk in the hindermost part of the first-floor sitting room, or chatted to me standing up by the kitchen sink rather than settling with me at the table which is so close to the people on the pavement outside that, until the shutters are closed at night, any passerby can count the fish fingers on the boys’ plates. She showed me to a small room in the basement – at the back of course – and I saw her checking the bolts on the French window. As soon as I decently could, I asked to use the telephone, and called Nell Lane.

  I wasn’t particularly close to Nell at Oxford, but soon after I left she sent me what I think, despite its reticence, was a love letter. She must have thought, I’ll never see him again, so I might as well. I was touched.

  It is a piquant irony that imperialists, while despising the intellects and administrative competence of their subject races, habitually worship those subjected ones’ looks. At Oxford I more than once turned down, or adroitly deflected, approaches from much sought-after women. Spiv, sinewy and hard-edged, was one. To me there was so little femininity in her I could barely see her as a woman. Nell, though, was dreamy and reserved. She seemed passive, not out of feebleness of will, but as though she would have considered it unseemly to disclose her own preferences and desires. All this I liked. Her letter made me, briefly, regretful. I thought it best not to reply.

  After Oxford I went home to Pakistan to break it to my parents that I would not be going through with the marriage they had arranged for me, and to inform them that rather than taking up the promising opening my uncle had made for me in the police department I would be returning to England to make my way as a writer and musician. I had expected, and braced myself for, bitter arguments. Instead I was met with a baffling flexibility. Of course, of course. Just enjoy your vacation. No need to rush into anything.

  We visited Sunita’s family. Her hands were long and graceful, her voice had a pleasing throb to it. We were left alone together while our parents loudly discussed cricket in the next room. Preparations for the wedding resumed. England seemed very far away. I had friends, England-returned young men like me who confidently expected soon to be running their country. The people I had known at Oxford, with their exaggerated respect for novelty and style, their puerile adoption of an irresponsible counterculture, no longer seemed to me very interesting.

  Years went by. I wrote to Nell from time to time and she wrote back. News about people we’d known. It was an effort to recall them. We had professional interests in common. I was putting people in jail. She was looking for ways of making their time there more salutary. I was surprised when she said she was marrying Jamie. I had quite liked him but I hadn’t really thought that she did.

  And so why was I in my cousin’s sitting room? This is a story that all the world knows.

  A celebrated novelist, an Indian living in England, wrote a book. His work has always made me uneasy. My own taste is for exact realism and pared-down prose, whereas he is a fantasist and a spinner of Rabelaisian sentences that ramble through labyrinths of subordinate clauses in pursuit of a pun or a piquant grotesquerie. But I recognise that his writing has verve. To speak personally, I have never met the man, but in our occasional dealings, always conducted via an agent, he has been gracious.

  The novel reached me early. I had left the police, to my father’s disappointment, and was the editor of a highbrow journal in Lahore, which made him proud. We use words like ‘highbrow’ without irony. The self-deprecation which is so fundamental a part of English manners is not our thing at all.

  I read the book, and foresaw none of what was to follow. I obtained permission to publish a brief passage from it, evoking the experience of immigrants from the subcontinent to the British Isles. There was no response from the public. I thought no more about it for a while.

  I need not describe what happened next. The angry faces on television, the histrionic book-burnings, the fatwa, the author’s enforced retirement from the public scene. This was not an England I recognised.

  The fuss spread to Pakistan. There were marchers in the streets and then brawls. The author’s effigy was burnt. It took a week or two, then someone noticed that, three months back, we had published the extract. Our office was surrounded by angry shouters, day and night. I called a meeting at a nearby tea-shop. My staff consisted of only two people, but I summoned all our regular contributors. I was nervous. To be part of a collective is comforting. I hoped to be dissuaded from incurring any further danger.

  We could apologise. It was agreed that to do so would be craven. Shameful. No way.

  We could publish a statement defending our right to free speech. Yes, we would.

  We could demonstrate our determination to exercise that right by publishing another extract, this one from the most contentious part of the book. That which, according to the zealots waving placards outside the windows, was blasphemous.

  I didn’t want to do it. There had been death threats against publishers and translators of the book, as well as against the author himself. But the suggestion was made. Had I been prompt and authoritative I could have quashed it, but I havered, and the others present got enthusiastic about the idea. It made them feel noble. I was too cowardly to risk being called a coward. So two days later our rag came out with one of the offending passages on the front page.

  I was in the office when the stones began to bounce off the steel shutters. The telephone rang. It was one of my old mates from the police department.

  ‘You’re a target. It’ll be very tiresome for us if this escalates. You’ve got relatives in London, yes? Have you got your passport with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there a back way out of the building?’

  ‘We can get over the roofs and down through the Excelsior Cinema.’

  ‘Do it now. Walk straight through the cinema and there’ll be a car waiting by the Jinnah Street entrance to take you to the airport. Your ticket will be ready for you at checkin. Tell the others to stay inside the cinema until the next show ends and then leave with the crowd.’

  ‘I can’t just go.’

  ‘You can’t just stay. If you’re killed there’ll be no end of bother. Go to England. You told me once you wanted to be a songwriter. Write those songs. Go.’

  He gave me a number to call when I got to London. He hung up and the phone rang again. It was my father.

  ‘Anwar rang already?’

  ‘Yes. I’m leaving.’

  ‘I’m so proud of you, you idiot.’

  He was sobbing.

  It dawned on me I might not ever come back. I said the things you say in those circumstances. But actually when I got to the airport he was there and we sobbed some more. He is five inches taller than me, my father, with a profile like Julius Caesar’s. My disagreements with him have been many and furiously argued. I was more distressed by leaving him than I was by leaving my wife and son.

  And so I got the plane. And so here I was at Amina’s desk, dialling the number of Nell’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush. Answering machine. Her recorded voice told me to try another number. A long one, not London. I did so. Someone else answered, and went to get her. Footsteps sounding down a long corridor. Where is she?

  ‘Selim.’

  ‘Nell, after all these years. Nell, I’m in trouble.’

  ‘I kn
ow,’ she said. ‘I saw the paper. Come here.’

  ‘Where? I don’t know where you are.’

  ‘I’m at Wychwood. My father died two days ago.’

  Upstaged. It was disgraceful, but all I felt was irritation. When you’re in mortal danger you can expect a certain amount of attention. But those who might be going to die soon have to cede place to someone who has just gone and done it.

  ‘Oh Nell, oh my golly, I can’t bother you now.’

  ‘Yes. Come. We need something to do. We’re all just sitting around here. You remember Flora. There’s endless cottages you can hide out in. We’ll work something out. Dear Selim.’

  She sounded as if she was going to cry.

  I said stupidly, ‘He was always jolly nice to me,’ which was true. Nell’s grandfather had been in the British Army in India. By a vagary of history Hugo Lane and I – the quintessentially English, huntin’-and-fishin’ gent and the darkie, as he once, quite affectionately, called me in the course of a game of croquet – had been born in the same hospital in Lahore. Nell’s home was filled with bits and pieces the grandparents had brought home with them. Hugo had liked showing them off to me. There were some quite good things: a fine old papier-mâché letter-case from Kashmir, a couple of silk carpets. I know how to flatter. We hit it off.

  Nell ignored me. ‘Go straight to Paddington,’ she said. ‘Can Amina drive you there? Get the four-fifteen.’

  There are many irksome things about my predicament. One is the excitement it generates in others. Repeatedly I’ve had to suppress a snappy answer to people, whose comfortable lives have afforded them few such thrills, who begin to act in my presence as though they were extras in a James Bond story. Another is the licence people seem to think it grants them to order me around.

  London is full of people who look like me. A rural estate in Oxfordshire is not. If I needed to be inconspicuous, this seemed like an idiotic plan. But I wanted to see Nell. And Amina would be thrilled to be rid of me. I said, ‘Right you are, officer,’ heard Nell laugh, and got going. There was so much I didn’t know about the life she had been living all those years, that it was absurd of me to be as amazed as I was when I saw her on the short station platform, immensely pregnant. She was married, and sixteen years had gone by since she wrote that letter, but I’d been vain enough to imagine that this reunion would be, for her anyway, a romantic one.