Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  When I looked up next Guy was hobbling back towards his room with his arm around Holly’s shoulders. His striped djellabah (how many years had he had that?) billowed behind him like the draperies of a saint ascending into a baroque heaven. To Benjie he was a surrogate son. To me, he once offered sex. I was shocked. He laughed, and said, ‘You can but ask,’ and didn’t so much withdraw the offer as erase it on the instant, so that it was as though it had never been. In the drawing room Benjie was strumming lustily and singing, ‘Carry us away … captivity.’ I never saw Guy on his feet again.

  The film crew were setting up in the hall and Manny was muttering to the man with the sound-boom. Nicholas touched my arm. I followed him into the library. Selim was there, blubbering.

  ‘I don’t know what’s brought this on,’ said Nicholas. ‘He won’t talk to me.’

  I sat beside the poor fellow and put a hand on his knee. He jerked away as though he’d been touched by something filthy. I pretended not to notice. I said, ‘Do you want to go home?’

  He nodded. It occurred to me the question was ambiguous so I said, ‘Back to the hut?’ He nodded again and got to his feet, wiping his nose clumsily on his sleeve – he, who was so fastidious. I saw the distaste with which he rejected any chair upon which snuffly old Lupin might have sat.

  I said, ‘We’ll be OK,’ and Nicholas said, ‘Well done,’ and went back towards the drawing room. Selim found his coat and scarf – even in despair he feared English winter weather. I took him through the hidden door in the panelling that led into the kitchen corridor, found the torch and went on out into the yard. The door was torn from my hand and slammed back against the outside wall. Two dustbins came past, hurtling over the cobbles, fetching up against a wall with the clangour of gigantic gongs. The rushing air was in spate, and filled with tornaway leaves, twigs, branches. A bicycle skidded after the dustbins, lifting and clashing as the current tossed it. A tarpaulin sailed overhead, trailing ropes like terrible tentacles, toothed with the metal pegs that should have held it down.

  I said, ‘Christ!’ and spread my arms to prevent Selim following me out, but he was already through, and I saw the wind take him. He staggered, was flung forward, scrabbled on all fours, was felled again, caught himself up and scrabbled forwards until he reached the archway leading out onto the great lawn. He passed through it upright, his long coat bearing him up like a kite. There was light falling from the windows but the sky was pitch-black.

  Once, some years ago, alone in the mews house, I heard stealthy movements downstairs. I had always thought that should someone break in I would pretend to be asleep, avoid confrontation, but that time I surprised myself. I didn’t even pause to put on a dressing gown, but went downstairs at speed, half-naked and vulnerable without my specs, and said, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing.’ The man ran straight out, carrying the suede jacket (new, expensive) I kept hanging on the hook by the door. (I knew who he was. He must have noted the fragility of the house’s defences on the night I brought him home with me from the Coleherne. Some queens found the risks we used to run exciting: I was mortified by them.) It was only after I’d slammed the door behind him and shot the bolt that I began to shake.

  Then I was braver than I’d anticipated. This time, the reverse.

  It amuses me that popular culture celebrates those who work in the secret services as action heroes. I may be the most craven, but we were – are – on the whole, so far as I’ve ever been able to see, a shifty lot.

  It was perfectly obvious what I ought to have done. You don’t just turn your back while a fellow-being is blown away. If you’ve got a shred of decency you catch onto his coat-tails and either wrestle him back to earth or let the wind take you too. I didn’t do it. What I did instead was drop to my knees. I kept my eyes tight shut against all the flying stuff, my head down, and crawled back the few feet to the doorway. It was hard to breathe. The air was racing so fast I could scarcely snatch enough to keep my lungs fed even had I not been gasping with fear. A fencing panel, heavy enough to break a man’s back, somersaulted by and smashed into a window. By the time I made it indoors I was so battered I had to sit on the floor, head hanging between knees, until I was brought back to my senses by old Lupin, lapping with his obscene pink tongue at the blood trickling from my knuckles.

  Mrs Duggary was there. She said, ‘It was after the rushing mighty wind blew out of heaven that the disciples began to speak in tongues and all the people on earth could understand each other.’ She’s always referred to herself as ‘a godly woman’. When I first started coming here she used to carry round the embroidered velvet pouch for collection every Sunday at evensong. (Matins, of course, she couldn’t do. Sunday lunch for the house-party was the culminating act of her life’s weekly drama.) I wonder whether anyone from the house goes to church now. She sat down beside me – an elaborate sequence of ungainly moves – and held a tea towel against the cut on my bald head and handed me a glass of brandy, which I really didn’t want. ‘I don’t think it’s going to work here, do you? That poor man – he speaks English like a teacher, but nobody seems to understand him, for all that.’

  Selim

  Blown away.

  Blow-Up – Nell’s favourite film, she said, and I went to the Moulin Rouge to see it – perhaps I really was more interested in her than I acknowledged even to myself – and I recoiled from its self-satisfied decadence. Blow-dry. By-blow. Blow-Out – another film: that one amused me. To have seen a lot of pretentious European films during your student years, said Jamie, who hadn’t, was the mark of a sexually unsuccessful man. Nonsense, said Francesca, I’d never have slept with Nicholas if he hadn’t been able to blather on about 400 Blows. Blowpipe. Blowhole. A blow to the head. A blow to one’s pride. A blowing-up. Blowjob – how dismal that phrase is, with its acknowledgement that for so many a sexual act is joyless work. Blow into this, says the speed-cop. Blow winds and crack your cheeks. Now blow, says the doctor, his stethoscope to your chest. Blow bonny breezes. It’ll all blow over, sings the idiot optimist.

  I blew it, and then I was blown away.

  There they all were, with their silly brick decked out like an idol in the middle of the table. Flora blew me a kiss as I came in (she did that to everyone) and said, ‘Sit here, Selim.’ They were all blowing hot air. And I blew my top. How many of them really cared about Germany? Only Guy, and he was upstairs on his deathbed. How unseemly to be carousing beneath him. Some of them had fought to break Germany into pieces. To blow it up, to blow it to smithereens, to blow it to kingdom come. Benjie had anyway, and who knows what Antony has done?

  I wanted to make a scene. I wanted to bang the table with my fist. I wanted to send things crashing and breaking. Once, in that same house, instead of a chunk of concrete, a feast might have been assembled around the carcass of a deer. Savage, that. Kill a beautiful wild creature, and flay it, and torture its dead flesh with fire, and then lay it out on your finest platter and garnish it with hazelnuts and damsons and wreathe it with aromatic herbs and then grow drunk while devouring its meat. Savage but meaningful. Kill – eat – thrive. The triumph of violence. There’s a ghastly splendour in it. But this travesty sickened me, this ignorant honouring of a namby-pamby freedom.

  I am feeble. I don’t rage. I sulk.

  Brian Goodyear watched me. He has eyes like a bird’s. He knows how I think.

  Nicholas sat next to me. I said to him, ‘The story you’re all so worked up about is over. The story I’m part of is the one you need to think about.’

  He said, ‘Go on.’ He has never been in the least bit friendly to me, but he is attentive.

  A man with a heavy camera hoisted on his shoulder was manoeuvring between the scattered chairs, the soundman following him close with his boom. They kept glancing back at Manny who shifted them from one group to another with small hand movements, as a shepherd directs his dogs.

  Francesca leant across the table and said, ‘You’re right. We’re hearing now from people we’ve never
heard from before.’

  She talked about the Islamic scholars and imams being given a voice in the British press. She said how startled some of her friends had been by their intransigence, but also by their gravitas, the thoughtfulness by which they have arrived at their world-view. She said, ‘Not my colleagues. In the Foreign Office we all know that wherever we are stationed we’re going to be the clumsy ignoramuses blundering about in societies whose mores we don’t understand.’

  A vision crossed my mind of British officers, scarlet-faced and scarlet-tunicked, seated on chairs because their poor legs were so stiff and inconvenient, plumed hats laid awkwardly on the tessellated floor beside them, engaged in a colloquy with an Indian potentate and his court, men with watchful faces and loose robes who lounged at ease on cushions.

  Mr Armstrong, the old keeper, came in. He was wearing a three-piece suit and, unlike anyone else there, a silk tie. Christopher’s bespoke finery, passed on to him by Lil. Mark Brown, who had been sitting next to Francesca, stood up to take his elbow and lead him to a seat. Jamie slipped into Mark’s place and raised his glass to all of us, saying ‘To glasnost’.

  ‘We were talking about the other big story,’ said Nicholas, ‘the one of which, as Selim rightly reminds us, he is part.’

  For a second Jamie looked blank then said, ‘Oh yeah, the fatwa.’

  His offhandedness annoyed me more than it ought to have. I said, ‘Yes, the fatwa. Which has come as such a nasty shock to you people here because you think the only significant others in the world’s affairs are other white Europeans.’

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ said Jamie.

  Nicholas said, ‘Our coverage of Middle Eastern affairs is generally considered to have been pretty thorough.’

  Francesca said, ‘I can assure you my days are absolutely jam-packed with seminars on the Iranian Question. The Iraqi Question. And of course we’d all be out of a job if it hadn’t been for the Palestinian Question keeping us all running around in circles for the past half-century and more.’

  Jamie interrupted. When we were all young he could be very entertaining when drink loosened his tongue. Now, though, it makes him belligerent. He leant across the table and said, as though hurling his words into my face, ‘I can’t stand all this self-pitying drivel. I’ve spent most of my evenings for the past six weeks with a pair of Turkish Muslims and they’re as concerned as any other Berliner is about what’s going on. The way you’re talking – it’s over. Antediluvian. Dividing the world up religion by religion. That’s just not the way it is.’

  Francesca was saying, in her talking-slowly-to-the-idiot way, ‘In fact, Jamie, we all think religious affiliations are still highly significant. In the Arab world especially.’

  Jamie and I were glaring at each other.

  Nell came towards us, her child sleeping on her shoulder. Her hair was straight, with grey in it. Her dress was dark blue, plain, quite long. She looked exhausted. She was thinner. I thought – as I had never thought when she was a girl – that she was beautiful. She put her hand on Jamie’s shoulder, and he reached up without looking round, and laid his own paw on it. She lifted the baby down and left her in Jamie’s arms, smiled at me with her face but not her mind, and went to join Armstrong and Lil. Jamie barely looked at his daughter, but his arms closed gently around her, cradling her. Francesca was still talking. I watched the baby’s tiny wet mouth working, sucking a dream of a nipple perhaps. Saliva pooled between lips as dainty as rose petals. My boy’s lips were plump and purple. On the table between us there were grapes that had been dipped in syrup so that, cooled, each was encased in a glassy skin of sugar. Still sleeping, Jemima blew a perfect bubble, just their size, and just as magically combining the properties of translucence and formal perfection and extreme fragility.

  I couldn’t bear it. What blew me, blundering, from my seat, in blind search of somewhere secluded in which to break down, was nothing to do with religious affiliations or the realignment of power-blocs in the post-Cold War world. It was the simple yearning of an animal for its young, the kind of pain that makes a cow whose calf has been taken away from her bellow all night through in the stall, or sets a cat prowling up and down a house croaking out her dismay when her kittens are gone. The kind that makes men whose wives have left them, taking their children, into drunks and obsessives, addled by vindictiveness and self-pity.

  My son has learnt to blow kisses. He thinks kisses are called blowies. Blowie blowie, he says, climbing my legs as I sit in my chair, climbing as doggedly as a sherpa trudging up a Himalaya. Blowie blowie. Snuffling and nuzzling at my knees as though to remind me how kissing is done. And then, when I lift him, his chortling filling my ear with damp warmth. Blowie blowie.

  I was undone. I was mad, but also abruptly cured of madness. I would go back at once, the very next day. Mrs Rossiter – Lil – had come to me weeks before. She’d tapped on the door of the hut and said, ‘Have you got a moment?’ and we’d sat on the rattan chairs by the pool while she said, ‘I don’t know how you’re placed, Selim. I mean for money and so on. But if there’s anything you need, you know, you can ask. I don’t suppose you want to be the Hermit of the Hut for ever. It’d be silly for you to be stuck here for lack of the airfare.’ Then she’d changed the subject and we’d talked pleasantly enough about Kashmir. She’d been there in the ’50s. She’d found the houseboats on Lake Dal ravishingly pretty, she said. Had I noticed that the fretwork decoration of my hut’s eaves had been inspired by them? (I hadn’t – the imitation was barely approximate.) She didn’t seem to know that Srinagar was a lost paradise for my people.

  I was resentful at the time. She’s trying to get rid of me, I thought. She’s bribing me to go away. Now I just thought, She’s right.

  I went into the library and Nicholas followed me. He gave me water to drink, and a monogrammed handkerchief. I couldn’t speak. He said, ‘Just take your time, and if there’s anything I can help with, tell me.’

  There wasn’t. He is too smug, too much at home here.

  Eventually I could control my voice sufficiently to get out, ‘Where’s Antony?’ I don’t know exactly why I wanted him. I suppose I scented a vulnerability in him that matched my own. His secret work: the pathos of the fact that it’s a secret everybody knows. I thought he would understand why he shouldn’t ask for explanations. He came. He led me out.

  ‘Let’s blow,’ Guy used to say, when a party bored him. I blew, and then I was blown away.

  *

  There was no transitional stage. There was breathless calm. Then there was storm. A watcher in the park would have seen trees thrashing, bending, their leaves stripped, their branches snapping, their roots straining, while for another infinitesimally small moment others stood nearby serenely immobile, not yet seized by the onrush. The noise came first. Then the tremendous punch of invisible energy. Then the blasting torrent of air.

  Some creatures had foreseen it. Worms and small rodents burrowed deep. Fish nosed into mud. Creatures made for standing flattened themselves. It didn’t help them much. Things not made for flying flew and became missiles. Things not made for lying were flung down, crashing onto whatever was beneath them. Lupin, too deaf and foolish to sense the danger, waddled out the door Antony had left open and was bowled over and dashed against the wall of the kitchen yard, his back broken.

  Inside the house there was a sound as of a bombardment. Goodyear took charge. All windows closed. All shutters closed. All doors shut. Fires extinguished. The smoke blown back down the chimney made the air acrid. There were enough candles lit already to save them from groping in the dark when the electricity cut out, but the flames flew horizontally sideways. ‘Torches,’ shouted Mark Brown. There were some in the pantry.

  Benjie herded people out of the drawing room, where the long French windows creaked and vibrated, and over to the lee side of the house, to the marble hall with its massive sustaining columns. ‘This was built to last,’ he said. ‘Should be all right here. We’ll wait it out.’ Antony h
ad a knob like a cartoon character’s on his forehead. He kept saying, ‘What about Selim? Shouldn’t we go looking for him?’ ‘No point,’ said Goodyear. ‘He knows where we are, but we’d never find him. He’ll have found somewhere to lie low.’

  They waited. They were excited and afraid. Time went by. And then, when nothing much was happening but more soughing and roaring and battering, they were bored. Jemima wailed, however much her parents shushed her and rocked her, and spat out the teat of the bottle they offered her.

  ‘Where’s Mrs Slatter?’ asked Mark Brown.

  ‘She didn’t come,’ someone said. ‘She said it wasn’t a night for being out in.’ There was a pause. Of course no one really believed the old lady had magical powers. But still.

  Holly came downstairs. ‘Guy’s sleeping through all this,’ she said to Flora. ‘Should I wake him?’

  ‘No,’ said Benjie. ‘No, best leave him be. His room’s on the safer side of the house.’

  The wind flattened itself to the thinness of a sheet of paper and tore under the massive double doors, lifting the polar-bear-skin rug and rattling the pictures on the walls. The temperature had fallen steeply. Holly and Flora went upstairs and returned with armfuls of blankets and eiderdowns. People began to bed down on the floor, looking in the weird light of torch-beams like an army encamped.

  The wind’s hullaballoo erased all other sound. Afterwards they all agreed how extraordinary it was that they hadn’t heard the noise the great cedar made when it tore up its own roots and toppled towards the house, its upper branches smashing half a dozen windows in the garden wing.

  A quarter of Norris’s beech avenue was felled by the storm, each great tree bearing another down so they lay with roots entangled in each other’s fallen crowns. The furthermost trees crashed onto the wall, reducing it to a lowlying jumble of stones over which the terrified fallow deer leapt, escaping its enclosure, as their forebears had been pointlessly trying to do for over three hundred years.