Peculiar Ground. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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       Friday

      All the smells in the changing hut were peculiar. Indoor smells were warm – floor-wax, ironed sheets, toast. Outdoor ones were fresh and wet. These fell into neither category. There was the urinous whiff from the rush matting. The tang of creosote. Rubbery smells from bathing caps and the thick soles of sandals. The dusty breath of the high yew hedges, the aura of the overhanging pine trees, which smelt nothing like her father’s pine shaving soap and whose needles covered the ground behind the hut with a carpet which was at once prickly, if an upturned needle spiked your foot, and as silky as vegetable fur.

      Nell and her brother came almost every morning. It had to be mornings because by the time they’d digested their lunch the tall trees’ shade had made the unheated pool a rectangle of green-black chill. The pool wasn’t designed for children. There was a coir-sleeved diving board, springy as a catapult, but there was no shallow end. They had to climb in down the metal ladder, goose-bumps rising as the water reached the ruching of Nell’s bathing dress, or Dickie’s matted wool trunks. A clumsy turn and a plop backwards into the inner tubes of car tyres that served them as coracles. Her mother swam up-down, up-down, up-down, but Nell and Dickie just drifted, jack-knifed as though in hammocks, their lips gradually turning blue as their noses burnt pink.

      It was quite different when other grown-ups came. Her mother was no distraction. You only noticed your mother when she went away. But when Mrs Rossiter came and sat down beside Mummy on another of the wicker chairs, and got Mr Underhill to bring a tray, and started being amusing (all the grown-ups agreed Mrs Rossiter was amusing), the drift of Nell’s thoughts between the blank sky and the shivering water was obstructed. It was Mrs Rossiter’s pool. It was so kind of her to let them use it. But Nell was beginning to understand, from the way her mother’s voice changed, and from the shoulders-back propriety with which she sat to drink her lemon barley water, that people being kind could make you feel worse rather than better.

      Nell was interested in Mrs Rossiter, in the leopard-spotted chiffon scarf she wore round her neck, and the way her voice came grating, not flowing, from her mouth. She had no children. Her pug-dog was called Lupin. She knew how to drive an aeroplane.

      That Friday it was not Mrs Rossiter, but her husband’s niece, who came through the arch in the yew hedge that led onto the winding path through shrubberies, down to the croquet lawn, and beyond that to the stony terrace with the huge magnolia tree where they sometimes had tea. She was as tall as a grown-up but she wasn’t one quite. She pulled her dress over her head and there was her bathing dress already on and she held her nose with one hand and stuck the other straight up in the air as though to make a pole she could slide down and jumped straight in.

      The waves made Nell’s tyre rock and slurped over the sides of the pool. The girl came up and with her hair wet she looked like a child (ladies wore bathing caps). She bounced a little in the water and said, ‘I’m a dolphin,’ and began circling the tyres doing funny little dives which made her bottom stick up into the air each time her head disappeared. Dickie giggled. Nell was too frightened to begin with, but then she began to laugh too and the girl seemed to like that and she dived more and more and sometimes she’d shoot up so that she was standing up into the air as far as her waist and she blew out water like a whale. Nell laughed so much a warm gurgling feeling filled her up and her throat ached. Everything seemed very bright and noisy. All that flying water catching the sun like mirrored ribbons. All that splashing and laughter in that hedged-in space in which her mother was always anxious that they shouldn’t shriek. It was as though the girl didn’t know and wouldn’t care how polite they always had to be when they came up to Wychwood.

      Nell didn’t entirely like it. It was as though the pool garden, an enclosure so rich in significance she would dream of it for the rest of her life, was just water, the topiary just bushes. But the girl, who was called Flossie, seemed to her wonderful.

      Antony

      There was always something a mite humiliating about the way Lil Rossiter used to whistle me up for a weekend. It wasn’t the last-minute invitations I minded. I’ve never really understood why it should be considered a slight to be treated as a reliable substitute for a defaulting guest. What rankled, however often I was subjected to it, was the lack of a greeting.

      Of course I was always expected. The car waiting to meet me at the station, and the suavity with which Underhill dispatched me to my room, testified each time to the fact that I was at Wychwood because my hostess had wished that I should be. But you would never have known it from her vague ‘Ah, Antony . . .’ as she saw me coming into the marble hall at drinks time.

      It wasn’t only me. I saw her being equally offhand with others. But for them there would be a compensating moment later, when she turned on them with a quick smile and did that startling thing of leaning over and talking right into the other’s ear as though what she was saying – usually quite banal in fact – was so intimate and risqué it must be treated as entirely confidential. With me she tended to remain, right through until Monday morning, as nonchalant as she was with the servants or the boring wives.

      I suppose it sounds as though I didn’t really like Lil, and perhaps that was true then, but I always welcomed her call. We were connected in a tenuous way – step-relatives rather than blood ones. She was three years older, and she’d made a fuss of me at family weddings and so on when I was a child. Grown up, she still took me for granted as one might a sibling (neither of us had any real ones). I was more than presentable (I’m still pretty good-looking for my age). I was a useful companion for her outings. We gossiped. She’d insist I go with her (usually at very short notice and with no consideration for the fact I had a job to do) to give an opinion on any picture she was buying. On slow mornings in the gallery I would ring her, getting a brusque brush-off one time in three, but on other occasions long, satirical accounts of her last night’s doings at Quaglino’s. In company she virtually ignored me. I was like one of Racine’s confidantes, a person of negligible interest per se, who was party to some conversations that were very interesting indeed.

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