Lucy Hughes-Hallett - Peculiar Ground

‘When I was a boy here, my parents used to talk about the invasion. Germans would arrive in the village dressed as nuns, they were saying. Can you imagine how exotic that was? I’d never seen a nun. They were going to drop out of aeroplanes. The Blitz had taught us that anything could fall out of the sky. There was no limit to the ways in which normality could be exploded. I was very much afraid, and at the same time I couldn’t take it seriously. We kept knapsacks packed with clean vests and chocolate, so we could take to the hills. What hills? What were we going to do in them? Our nanny had told us over and over again that you couldn’t live on chocolate.’

‘American schoolchildren are being taught, now, to hide under their desks when the warning comes. Is it kind to suggest there’s any chance of survival, or is it just dishonest?’

A pause.

‘Macmillan believes Khrushchev can be talked down, and Jack and Mac are close,’ said Nicholas.

‘Those Kennedys put ambition before the clan. Remember Joe losing at tennis here? Perfect manners, of course. But he cared dreadfully.’

Of course Nicholas didn’t remember. He would have been a child when Kennedy p ère was en poste in London, but he refrained from saying so. He liked Christopher’s benign assumption that each one of his acquaintances was acquainted with all the others.

‘Khrushchev is wily. So is Brandt and he thinks he can ride on Kennedy’s coat-tails.’

More names of people she didn’t know. Snail-Nell became a dog and – as dogs do – she slept.

Antony

It transpired that Christopher had expressly invited the Lanes to swim that morning, and Lil rang up and apologised very graciously, and explained that she had been so shaken by seeing the boy in trouble that she had lost her head. I think she really was mortified. She can be spiteful, but humiliating the man in public like that wasn’t her usual style.

By late afternoon everything was affable again. Hugo Lane, with what degree of soreness I couldn’t determine, had returned to the house to make up a tennis four. I met his little girl on the terrace trailing after Mr Green (they seemed to be good companions) as he set off to pick vegetables for dinner. I was curious to see a part of the domain I didn’t know, so I joined their expedition. Green wore corduroys gartered with raffia below the knee but, for all that he looked like an illustration from an Edwardian children’s book, he liked talking motorbikes. I egged him on to expatiate on the rival merits of the Triumph and the BSA (Beezer, he called it) while Nell walked, humming to herself, behind.

The walled garden is a good quarter of a mile from the house. The entrance is all but choked by a fig tree. Green, who likes his peach trees splayed against the walls as though crucified and his strawberry-beds neatly tucked in under veils of tarred netting, is uncharacteristically lax in his treatment of this tree. Figs aren’t easily come by in Oxfordshire: he’s inordinately proud of, and indulgent towards, his enormous green pet. We had to duck under its lowest branches, Nell grabbing a great stubby-fingered hand of a leaf as we passed. Beyond were rows, racks, bamboo canes tied into tepees, pergolas – all sharply angled contraptions, framed by exactly squared-off box hedges at shin-height – all striving ineffectually to contain the voluptuous lollings of vegetation.

Within the high brick walls it was intensely still and hot. There was no view out except upwards to the white sky. The scents were of stagnant water and dried hay and lightly rotted compost. Nell and I stopped by a sprawl of tomato vines and began to pop tiny red fruit into our mouths, where they felt warm, and lightly furred, and autonomously alive. Green’s pain at seeing his babies so devoured was writ large on his face, but so was his awareness that I was privileged and that Nell – at whom he might otherwise have growled – came under the aegis of my guestly protection.

‘Does your father let you wander just anywhere?’ I asked her. I wasn’t looking for information, just filling a pause.

‘I’m with Mr Green. I must always make sure there’s a grown-up who knows where I am. And I mustn’t go swimming on my own. And I mustn’t go upstairs unless Mrs Rossiter asks me to.’

‘And is it lovely coming over to Wychwood?’

The question didn’t seem to mean much. To her, Wood Manor and Wychwood were continuous, the whole domain her home. I wasn’t really paying her much attention, when she said something that compelled it.

‘Daddy and Mrs Rossiter like to talk about grown-up stuff sometimes so it’s good for me to be with Mr Green.’

‘And what about Mr Rossiter and your father?’

‘Um. Well they talk about things I like.’

Hugo Lane was a very good-looking man. I hustled Nell towards some gooseberry bushes and set her to picking me a handful. Hairy semi-transparent jade-green globes full of viscous fluid and little black pips, the germs of life. The hortus conclusus was suffused with carnality now; not pretty fertility symbolism but gross reminders of sex. Was I jealous, and if so, of whom? I didn’t like what I was imagining.

*

The ghostly boy did come to Lil too. She saw Fergus flailing in the pool, and although he resolved himself all but instantaneously into Hugo’s little Dickie, the glimpse opened an oubliette down which she dropped into the blackness of the night he drowned. Hours later, bored on the tennis court, she was still dazed.

She hated playing doubles with an overactive partner. Benjie, pink-faced and surprisingly adroit in his absurd flowery shirt, was leaping about at the net, intercepting the balls that should have given her a chance to demonstrate the elegance of her long passes. Annoying, but useful in that the game granted her a respite from conversation. Lashing out at Hugo like that had been unforgivable. As Flossie’s tennis partner he seemed at ease, gently teasing the girl as she missed one backhand after another, but watchfully helping her out as well. But he was under an obligation to behave, which made it all the worse that Lil had abused her freedom to misbehave with impunity.

Walking back up the avenue, she slowed down to talk to him. Benjie, abandoned mid-anecdote, latched unperturbed onto the only other available audience and went ahead with Flossie.

‘You gave me a fright this morning.’

‘I know. I could kick myself. I was being a rotten father. And what must have gone through your mind.’

‘I saw Fergus. Just for a second. Less than a second.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘No. I’m sorry. That’s what I wanted to say. Let’s forget it now.’

A hiatus.

‘Do you want to show me where the new rose-beds are to go? Green could get started on it next week.’ Hugo’s voice was light and steady.

‘I suppose they can all amuse each other for a minute or two.’

She led him through a green arch, across a round lawn entirely encircled by blackish yew hedge, out beneath another arch, down steps foaming with alchemilla into an alleyway bounded on each side by rows of pleached limes.

‘I thought down at the bottom there, you see? This view needs an ending.’

‘A sundial’s not really big enough for the centrepiece,’ said Hugo. ‘You’d need an obelisk. Or maybe a flowering tree. A weeping pear.’

‘But if it was on a stone plinth? With a threepenny-bit-shaped arrangement of rose-beds around it, and then a wrought-iron gate beyond?’

Hugo laughed. ‘Not just a few shrub-roses then. Actually, you know, a fountain would be the thing. We could bring Norris’s Triton up from the home lake. It’s wasted there. We could pipe the water down from the canal.’

‘Boboli-under-Wychwood.’