Louis de Bernieres - Notwithstanding - Stories from an English Village

This was the scenery that framed Peter on the occasion of his first tryst. He saw little of the beauty around him, because his consciousness was fixed upon the booming and buzzing of his inner life. The dog, holding no brief for this, lay at Peter’s feet, huffing and whining for the entire two hours that they waited for Froggy to come.

Growing more and more despondent, frequently looking at his watch (the first he had ever owned), his heart aglow with ever diminishing hope, anticipation and excitement, Peter sat on the Maclachlan bench, scrying through the trees for any sign of movement from the direction of Froggy’s house. He often thought he saw the glimmer of chestnut hair, the luminescence of pale skin, the white furry ruff of her purple coat. The last half-hour he spent with his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands.

During the following months he spoke to no one about what had happened, since nothing had. He resolutely replied ‘Nothing’ when Joan repeatedly asked him what the matter was. He sat in his room, night after night, sometimes all night, at the desk that the Major had made for him, and tried to write things down. For the first time in his schoolboy’s literary life, he found no adequate words.

He was caught up in the inexpressible turbulence of a grand love’s first emphatic disappointment. It was like a window through which he perceived for the first time the unsatisfactoriness, the faultiness, the mess and futility of the world. He saw that life would not after all be as he had dreamed. Everything falls away, everything escapes. He became infuriated, almost to the point of hysteria, about slippery, errant destinies and unembraceable loves. He knew now about optimism’s loss, which no philosophy can console.

Froggy was the focus of this rage. When she wrote to him (‘ My darling darling, I’m so so sory I found your note but it was too late I didnt look in my bag til last night please forgive me I wold have come if Id known really I would Im so so sory how will you ever forgive me? ’) he cursorily sent her note back, with all the spelling and punctuation mistakes corrected.

Thus pompously, capriciously, inexplicably did Peter end the affair and fall out of love. For a short time, and only occasionally, he even felt some pleasure at his new freedom. When he and Froggy saw each other they said hello, and then nothing, just as they always had, so that her heartbreak and his rancour never knew the light. She even took his dog to a competition, winning the event for the dog most like its owner, but no word passed between them about the abortive tryst.

Peter would always think that he had infected the bench with disillusionment, resentment and injured pride. It rotted soon, and had to be replaced. Even when he sat there, decades later, he could feel the ache that came up through the sodden oak of its legs and planks. There was still the taste of dust on his tongue. The beginners’ oak tree had become too tall and difficult to climb. The rollicking dog and its amiable successors were buried beneath the roses.

It was true that the common gave him other pleasures. He loved the memory of his tiny daughter planting acorns at the path sides in the confident expectation that they would be trees by the weekend — but he was always sad on the bench. It was there he learned that nothing works out as it should.

Since Froggy’s day he had walked that hill and lain in the bracken with other lovers, and had come to see that places are only precious because of the ways in which one has loved there. There was a sandpit near Sweetwater where he used to sit and write love poems to Froggy and those who came after, always, it seemed, accompanied by a patient collie. Near the Hurst there was a small woody glade of bluebells and kingcups between two ditches, which became at first the site of future solitary romantic misery and, later on, an enchanted place to take a rug and make love on the moss in dappled light.

Certain locations have the ability to retain the emotions of generation upon generation, until they begin to exude them like the resin that forces itself out of the veins of a pine. On Maclachlan’s bench at the top of Busses Common, in sight of Blackdown and Chanctonbury Ring, Peter would always think that others must have been able to feel what had happened to him. It was the natural place for rendezvous, and since Peter and Froggy’s youth there had been any number of lovelorn village teenagers who had ineptly failed to meet there.

AT SIXTEEN, BESSIE Maunderfield was petite, vivacious, ingenious and undeferential. Despite these disqualifications, she obtained employment at the manor house, not least because she was related to both the cook and the groom, and her mother had been a childhood friend of the housekeeper. Naturally, it was envisaged that she would leave the job as soon as she married, but for the time being she arose at six, and, whatever the weather, put on her pattens, and clumped a muddy two miles along the Chiddingfold Road that ran through the Hurst. If she was lucky, there might be a lift to be had on a cart, but it was no quicker than walking. If it rained, she held a tray over her head to protect her black curls, and, if the worst came to the worst, she had a canvas cape that was well smeared with pork lard. The cape was the invention of an uncle who had served with the West Surreys, and seen something like it being used by fishermen in a foreign land where he had been on campaign. It was very effective, but it smelled dreadful, so the housekeeper would make her hang it up on a nail in the stable.

It was of course traditional for the sons of squires to fall in love with serving maids. The sons of squires frequently found themselves unattracted to the women of their own class, since there is a limit to the amount of time one can listen to halting renditions on the piano in between discussion of one’s mutual acquaintance. The sons of squires usually did eventually fall for one of them, or become resigned to one, but they married with very little expectation of pleasure, and indeed, very little pleasure did they receive. They took to staying out as much as possible, or, if the house was a very large one, contriving to find themselves always at the opposite end of it. For the son of a squire a serving maid seemed like a cheerful and affectionate creature who might have been prim and virtuous in her own way, but seldom became a prig before the age of thirty.

For the maid, the squire’s son was a thrilling creature, quite unlike the young men of her own class, who were given to slumping in front of the fire with pipes and jugs of ale that gave them halitosis, hawking gobbets of phlegm into the cinders for the pleasure of seeing them sizzle, and whose conversation was mainly about the weather. The squire’s son rode a beautiful shiny big horse that gave him well-muscled thighs. He had elegantly cut clothes with more buttons than were useful, his top hat was tall and well brushed, and when he spoke he never grunted, but employed long sentences containing many unusual and lovely words. Best of all, until he married, he had high spirits and joyful eyes.

Piers de Mandeville, however, was not the kind of squire’s son who assumed that a serving maid was his by right. He was a more democratic sort. He was naturally able to find more or less anyone interesting in some way or other, and understood that hearts should be protected. He particularly appreciated liveliness and intelligence wherever he found them.

He found both on a day in early midsummer when he entered the withdrawing room one morning, with the intention of playing some airs on his violin. His fingers were neither fast nor dexterous, but he had a feel for the soul of a melody, and he was looking forward to playing through a collection of airs by James Hook, which had arrived the previous day by the hand of a cousin who had presently come down from Merton. It had occurred to him that at that time of day there should be no one to discommode in that particular room.