Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  *

  Shortly after the almighty din gave way to an eerie quietness, a dawn with no birdsong, Guy began to move his long hands, alternately clutching and smoothing the crewelwork bedcover Flora had spread over him. An hour later he died. All that time Benjie and Flora were beside him, Benjie in a chair, with his head bent, praying, Flora lying alongside Guy on the bed. He didn’t speak, but he fixed his eyes on hers as though their connected eye-beams could keep him grappled to the consciousness from which he was slipping away.

  Benjie stirred. Flora glanced over at him, just for a moment. Guy’s eyes wandered and dimmed. When she turned her gaze back to his she could find no purchase. The connection was gone. She knew he was dead but she waited a while before she said, very softly, ‘He’s stopped breathing,’ and then turned on her back. The position she had held for so long had become excruciating. Benjie took Guy’s hand, immobile now, and kissed it, muttering.

  How strange he is, this husband of mine, she thought. We all have someone we talk to in our minds. Benjie has God, and I never even knew it. I have Guy. She wondered whether she would still address her thoughts to him. She thought she would.

  Benjie was sobbing, and talking aloud to Guy now. She knew there were people who thought the two men had been lovers. She wondered whether it was true – it was a matter of indifference to her. Benjie loved sex, as she had plenty of reason to know, and no conventional sense of propriety would have held him back. But Guy – she didn’t think Guy would have wanted to try anything so incestuous. He’d had liaisons with older men, it wasn’t that, but he was exogamous. She suspected he was a masochist. He quested through parks and clubs and along empty shopping streets at night, exchanging glances with strangers reflected in the lit windows of clothes shops, in pursuit of difference and titillating pain. There are two kinds of promiscuous people, she thought. Those like Benjie, who just love to do it. And those like Guy, who are barely interested in pleasure, for whom sex is an adventure of the mind. None of that mattered very much. It was his voice she’d miss. His contralto laugh. His excitable body, always twisting, curving. Guy never stood up straight.

  There was something unfamiliar about the light. She went to the window. And then out into the gallery, and all the way around it to the triple-arched window on the other side of the house. What she saw was so hard to comprehend she stood there for a long time, shivering. Then she went back to Benjie. He stood up. They were both still fully dressed, and in their mouths was the dirty taste of sleeplessness. He held her. They rocked on their feet. They didn’t speak. Neither wanted to be the one to say futile, comforting things. She began to cry loudly, with a lot of tears and snot. She had never been a dainty girl. At last she managed to say, ‘The cedar’s down. So many trees down. Hundreds of years. Nell and Dickie were little children when I came here. I hadn’t even met you. There were peacocks. They’d been here for hundreds of years.’ Benjie crooned and rocked her. ‘And fucking Manny,’ she said suddenly. ‘He was filming. I stole the place from Lil and Christopher and then I let him in. I made the puncture.’ Benjie said over and over again, ‘It’s not your fault.’ He didn’t know what she was talking about. He said, ‘Do you want to stay with him?’ She looked startled. She said, ‘No, no …’ and then, ‘His father. We must tell his father …’ And then, as though she’d only just noticed, ‘We never had a child.’

  *

  A very old woman walked along the periphery of the park. A hump had grown between her shoulders, pushing her head forward, but she held herself as upright as it permitted her to do. A mess of torn branches rose to the height of the wall on her right, driven and dumped there by the wind.

  The path was repeatedly obstructed by fallen trees. When she found them she picked her way carefully around, past brambles and the great pits revealed by torn-up roots. She sang to herself as she went.

  Her granddaughter ran after her, and took her arm. Holly. It was bright and still. Everything had been turned over, churned up. Clots of wet leaves had lodged themselves in the crooks of high branches. The dead bracken and grass lay flat to the ground. Branches that had fallen a century ago and lain peacefully to moss over and rot had been upended. Everything was glossy, dark and wet.

  ‘Don’t you want to sit down,’ said Holly.

  ‘No,’ said Meg Slatter. ‘This I must see.’

  There were no birds singing, none of the usual rustlings and peckings and tiny crepitations. From the house it seemed that each fallen tree opened a gap, stripping the landscape bare piece by piece. Down here, among the fallen branches, the wreckage of the trees formed new barriers. It was hard to know where they were.

  ‘Mrs Rossiter went out early too,’ said Holly. ‘Most of them are asleep still.’

  By the time they reached the junction of the wall and the avenue the sun was fully up and the haws on the fallen twigs were glistening.

  ‘There’ll be birds that never come back,’ said Meg.

  The wind must have come straight down the avenue, so neatly had the colossal trees fallen one upon the next. The two last in line – giants both – had crushed the wall, leaving the wrought-iron gates standing. Rigid black lace, the tallest thing around.

  ‘Guy died,’ said Holly.

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear it. Very sorry. They kept the plague out of here once. They shut the gates. Kinder times now.’

  They could see two tractors in the distance, by the crossing of the avenues. The mirrors had fallen and smashed. Jagged reflections came off them, throwing shards of light back up into the pale sky.

  ‘Brian Goodyear knows what to do,’ said Mrs Slatter.

  Lil Rossiter was sitting on the tumbled stones. In that wrecked and rumpled landscape she looked extraordinarily neat. She rose and came towards them. She nodded to Holly but addressed herself to old Meg.

  ‘Your godson would have been thirty-eight,’ she said.

  ‘You never forget the day,’ said Meg.

  They walked together round the end of the gate, supporting each other over the unstable heaps of stone. Deer watched them uneasily from among bare and toppled trees. ‘They don’t know where to go now they’re out, poor things,’ said Holly. The older women glanced round, but didn’t pause.

  The forest had shrunk. Where stands of mature trees had closed off the view, now there were gaps and openings and unflattering light. Rides that had been passages through dense woodland were exposed. Groupings of trees that had grown around each other had been decimated, so that instead of accommodation and symmetry there were meaningless distortions and ugly vacancies. The lakes, always before revealing themselves gradually, as glimmerings through leaves, were now instantaneously apparent.

  The meeting-house’s garden was, extraordinarily, intact. Its position at the bottom of the slope had sheltered it. On the curved stone bench at its centre, slumped awkwardly sideways, sat Selim.

  Holly ran back to summon one of the tractors. Meg and Lil stayed with him. He was incoherent, and one of his arms appeared to be broken. He spoke very quietly. The colour came and went in his face, from grey to dun and back again. Lil held his good hand and he talked in a whisper, of his wild night. Of how he had crawled and flown, and how he thought it would be less dangerous to run with the wind than to struggle against it, and how impossible it was to keep up with its pace. How it had knocked him down and tossed him and slammed him against hard things, and how hard things had battered him. How dark it had been, how hard to breathe, that was the worst of it. How he was so whirled about that he was like a paper bag tossed, how he came over the gap in the wall and then fell and rolled, his arm so tortured that he screamed all the way as he tumbled down the slope, but the scream was just a part of the wind and how he fetched up in a ditch against the chapel wall. The terror, after the churning and the blasting of the wind, to be returned to a situation in which he had to move himself, and found that he couldn’t. The wailing all night long, and then at last the strangeness of silence when the storm passed. The bathos. As though an ag
gressor had fallen upon him and attacked and beaten him and forced him to draw on all the strength and courage that was in him and then, all of a sudden, had smiled and waved and gone away.

  When it was light he saw where he was, and dragged himself into the little garden where he knew he could be seen.

  ‘I must go now,’ he said, his voice more feeble each time he said it. ‘I must go home.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lil. ‘You will, but first we must get you patched up.’

  They laid him on the trailer and heaped branches around him so that he would be less shaken as they lugged him up to the house, lurching over the grass because all the drives were blocked. Holly wrapped her coat around him, and wedged her own body against his, to try to warm him, and hold him together. The doctor had only just come for Guy – there had been so many calls that night. When he saw Selim he said, ‘Let the dead bury the dead – this one I can do something for,’ and strapped Selim’s arm and helped him very gently into the back of his car, and said, ‘I’ll take him to the Radcliffe – I’m going there now. You won’t get an ambulance this side of night.’

  Five days later Selim went to London, where his cousin cared for him, and his nephews taught him to play mah-jong one-handed, and thence, eventually, he went home to Lahore.

  Antony

  It took a while for the significance of that charade in the hotel in Berlin to dawn on me. I wasn’t the identifier, or not only that. I was the identified. They’d never trusted me before – I was idiotically shocked when I realised it – but that flickering eye contact between me and a near-stranger had corroborated my story. Giraffe-man told me afterwards, ‘The value of your information was thereby greatly enhanced.’ His diction was as robotic as ever. An advantage for them. For me, though, an enhancement of risk. Had I now to fear umbrellas?

  As it turns out, or as it turns out so far anyway, no, I did not.

  I was once so envious of the younger men’s freedom. Now they’re dying for it. And here am I, Antony the dapper art-dealer, Antony the spy, alone in my austerely elegant house that no one will muss up again. How intimately transgressive it felt when Jack first started dropping his jeans, unfolded, onto my bedroom floor and tapping the tiny marmalade-coloured hairs from his electric razor onto the bathroom’s green marble. Alone again, poor Antony, poor old Antony now, love and politics both having failed me, but alive, alive-O.

  *

  Meg Slatter and Lil Rossiter each declined a seat on the tractor. ‘I’ll come back for you later in the Land Rover, then,’ said the man Goodyear had sent. ‘Don’t run away.’ They sat. The mosaic pavement that had survived nearly seventy human generations muffled in damp leaf-mould, whose every tessera had been nosed by legions of worms or scuttled over by myriad centipedes and woodlice, was now preserved beneath Perspex. It looked desiccated, like the two old women’s skin.

  ‘You’d have been a grandma, now,’ said Meg.

  ‘Only if Fergus’d married. So I’d have lost him that way.’

  ‘“Not losing a son, but gaining a daughter,” that’s what Brian Goodyear said when his boy married our Holly.’

  Lil blew out her lips like an irritated horse. She couldn’t abide cliché.

  Meg laughed. ‘Mr Christopher used to do that when he was just a tiny maggot of a thing.’

  ‘He loved you before he loved me,’ said Lil.

  Meg didn’t deny it. ‘I was pretty much a child too, when I was nursery-maid,’ she said. ‘But he’d mind me. Yes. And wave his little arms.’

  ‘And Fergus loved you best.’

  ‘Holly says that too. Says her girls look up and start twittering when I open the door. It’s not about loving, though. You need your parents, but you need someone else too. That’s what godmothers are for.’

  They sat quiet for a while. Meg’s head trembled persistently.

  Lil said, ‘Tell me what happened to the two blue boys.’

  1665

  All day I have been jostled and incommoded. I hoped to sleep at Oxford, but the bridge was barricadoed and guarded by men with muskets. I left the highway and cantered on to Woodstock by hidden tracks I remembered from my previous sojourn in these parts. There, the migrants on the road being fewer, the local people had yet to harden their hearts against them. There were lodgings to be had by first-comers, but not by me. I was repeatedly turned away. I arrived at this inn on a crossroads after dark, rain-sodden, hungry and fretful. I count myself singularly fortunate to have found a bed here, albeit one I am likely to share with vermin and, if I am unlucky, with some late-arriving fellow-traveller.

  There is a great hubbub below. I feared I would have to wait a tedious while for my supper. But by the time I had freed myself from my outer garments, which clung to me like waterweed to a drowning man, the servant was knocking at my door. A party had just departed in haste, he said, leaving half their repast unconsumed. He hoped I would not be too dainty to avail myself of their leftovers – the kitchen being so hurried that it might be a considerable time before any fresh meal could be prepared. I gave him a coin and declared myself to be barely acquainted with the concept of daintiness, and he accordingly left me a dish of stew, somewhat less than hot, but savoury. The rushlight is too feeble to let me know for certain what I have eaten. Some scraps of dark meat, venison perhaps, with brown onion-gravy and carrots. The fire is just sufficient to raise a steam from my coat. My fatigue is so extreme as to deny me rest. All my muscles are jumping like hares. I write now to calm myself ready for sleep, rather than in any hope of arriving at a judicious understanding of the day I have passed.

  One word has set this multitude on the road. A word more potent than avaunt or abracadabra, or than all the hocus-pocus of witches and witch-hunters. Plague.

  In any great cataclysm there are those who refuse to recognise good grounds for fear. These are they who loiter in their houses as the flaming magma oozes down the volcano’s flank, confident that it will cool and harden before it reaches their gardens’ bounds. These are they who, when the enemy pours in through the shattered gates of a city, lean genially from their upper windows, loudly declaring their faith that the newcomers will abstain like well-schooled seminarians from loot and rapine. Some of them survive to boast of their sangfroid in the face of danger: some do not. There are still many thousands of Londoners of this kind, going about their business in the city.

  Many more, though, have shut up their houses and, having deputed some trusted friend to keep a watch on shop or warehouse, have gathered together their families and set out on foot. Some have relatives in the countryside with whom they hope to find a refuge. Others give no thought to where they are going, but flee, headlong, as though from a fire.

  Several times today I have refused extravagant sums of money, offered me for my good Bess. She is a dependable cob, and strong enough, but two months ago I could scarcely have got the price of a saddle for her. For the past week, though, it has been impossible to come by a horse, or even a donkey, within twenty miles of London. It strikes me that for one who does not scruple to feed upon the despair of others, a calamity like the one now upon us creates fertile ground for the flourishing of a fortune.

  I have come from St Albans, where I have been seeing to the beautification of Lord Verulam’s meadows. The chain of lakes at Wychwood have provoked such admiration that I am kept of a bustle satisfying clients who wish to follow the vogue for pleasure-grounds interrupted by sky-reflecting expanses of water. Absorbed for two happy weeks in thoughts of drainage and sluicegates, and in visions of placid waters with great platters of waterlily leaves afloat upon them, I have heard the news from London only intermittently and as it were muffled. My Lord and Lady Verulam would talk of whether it were advisable to send servants to retrieve their fine clothes from their house on the Strand, lest, the plague augmenting in the coming weeks, it might become inconvenient to return to town. I barely listened.

  Once I had passed without the walls bounding Lord Verulam’s park, though, the drama unfolding itself
in the unhappy city forced itself upon my attention. For the past four days I have been journeying in an arc around the northern reach of London’s larder-lands. From these orchards and gardens and small farms wagons go daily, in ordinary times, to feed the great mass of urban humanity who, like drones in a beehive, occupy themselves with their curious impractical businesses, depending upon others’ labour for the wherewithal to eat. Now those fields have endured a visitation as strange and grievous as the cloud of locusts that descended upon Egypt.

  It was not just the roadway that was crowded. The meadows and moors have grown populous. Behind every hedge I saw encampments. It is fearful how quickly a city can dismantle itself. That which takes centuries to make can be unmade in seven nights. Prosperous merchants, accustomed to tapestried walls and painted ceilings, are now vagrants. They shelter in poor huts hastily constructed from logs and brushwood, the contrivances of unhandy citizens who never before so much as thatched a pigsty. Elsewhere a cloak, hung upon a staff, is all the lodging. Each camp was teeming with people; gaggles of children in fine clothes grown dirty, elders who sat upon the ground as though stunned to find themselves lifted by dire circumstances from their chairs at the fireside and deposited out of doors, to endure hunger, fear and rain.

  Farmhouses have barred doors and boarded windows. The villages have closed in upon themselves. Carts have been pulled crosswise at the approaches to greens. Piles of brushwood obstruct the roads, until each little settlement bristles, like a hedgehog tightly rolled in self-defence. There is no knowing, these days, upon whose shoulder the angel of death may be squatting.

  The country people are not unkind. In Buckinghamshire I saw how matters are contrived. The migrants send their headmen to converse, by shouting across a field, with those from a village. An arrangement is made. The travellers leave money – then withdraw to a considerable distance. The villagers, all muffled up, sally forth and leave foodstuffs, then scuttle back into their houses as though a wild beast were after them. Then at last the wanderers can approach and carry off the vegetables or pails of milk that have been left.