Peculiar Ground. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ gave those weekends, for me, their marvellous bouquet.

      For the last few years I have been subjected to repeated questioning. I have been asked to recreate in meticulous detail encounters that were furtive and disappointing at the time and look shabby in retrospect. That sounds sexual, but I’m talking here not about my incompetent attempts to gratify desires I’d scarcely acknowledged to myself then, but about my even less successful go at making the world a better place. The sessions are frightening, but also – to my surprise – almost unbearably tedious. There is, though, an unlooked-for benefit. Sullenly obedient, hauling up memories, I find, trapped in the net with all the slimy stuff, pearls and bright fish. My interrogators (absurdly overdramatic word for these human clipboards) get banal information. But I find lost time, transformed into treasure trove.

      They’re making their record of me. This – fragmentary and self-indulgent – is mine. I’m not particularly keen on examining my life. Sorry Socrates: but surely we should all be licensed to consign our past silliness to oblivion. Sorry Freud: repression seems to me a jolly useful thing. But I like taking out little bits of my life, and looking at them. I kept a sketchy kind of diary (some of it encrypted of course) and now I’m patching the gaps with memories I’ve netted. People have photograph albums, don’t they? Same kind of thing.

      The weekend I’m remembering was the last of the summer, not because summer was over but because the grouse season had begun and the Rossiters would be going north. They both shot. I don’t think Christopher did so with much enthusiasm away from home. Presiding over days when his estate was laid out in all its mellow loveliness for guests come to kill his pheasants was gratifying, but he was really more of a fishing man. He was self-contained, dreamy even. But he could strike a salmon with a swiftness that was matched by the unexpectedly sharp humour with which he responded to any misguided smart-alec’s attempt to underestimate him. Lil, on the other hand, loved everything about shooting. It was very unusual in those days for a woman to join the guns and she knew what a piquant figure she cut – dainty and lethal in pleated skirts and tight-waisted tweed jackets. She was a genuinely good shot, and it amused her to see how that affronted some men.

      So that August weekend at Wychwood had the kind of languor to it of a siesta before a taxing evening. Soon there would be sleeper-cars and sport and then – for some of the house-party – the brisk back-to-work of September. But we were still in the season of moving like somnolent dogs from one patch of shade to another. Iced coffee under the cedar tree. Picnic tea down by the upper lake in the hideous pagoda of which Christopher’s father had been so proud. Long afternoon hours when it seemed as though everyone had vanished, when the only living beings announcing their presence were the peacocks with their yearning cries.

      *

       The estate office. A long room by the stables. Plentiful windows, but set high in the walls, so that although the low, late sunlight comes in, the men indoors can’t see into the yard. Whitewashed walls. Shiny oilcloth maps. A brick floor worn down in the middle like an aged bed.

       At a green-baize-covered table, Wychwood’s cabinet is in session.

       Christopher Rossiter (head of state, or rather, proprietor) is at the centre of one side of the table. Hugo Lane (Nell’s father and Rossiter’s prime minister, or land agent) is on his left. Across the table, with the sun in their eyes, sit Mr Armstrong (minister for pheasants) and Mr Goodyear (minister for trees).

       Armstrong is tall and gaunt, with the curt manner of a military leader. On shooting days, when he is marshalling his small army of under-keepers and beaters, he asserts his authority with the cock of a tufted silver eyebrow or, to a beater who strays out of line, a guttural roar. Mr Goodyear is a generation younger and physically his opposite – stout of body, florid of face. Both grew up within a mile of where they are sitting. Both spend hours and hours of every day alone in the woods. Both are greatly respected by their men, but Goodyear, who drinks in the Plough and is celebrated county-wide as a storyteller, is the more loved. They have first names of course, but neither Christopher nor Hugo would dream of using them. None of those present have ever wondered whether this formality is courteous or insulting. Hugo calls Christopher ‘Christopher’ when they’re alone together. Christopher sometimes responds in kind, and sometimes calls him ‘Lane’. This use of the surname is socially neutral: it means only that they have reverted for a while to the manners of their schooldays. In referring to each other in the presence of the other men, they use the Mr.

       Mr Hutchinson, clerk to the assembly (and to the estate), sits at the end of the table to keep the minutes, holding the fat blue-marbled fountain pen his wife gave him for their wedding anniversary. The matching propelling pencil is still, and will for years remain, nestling unused in its white-satin-lined presentation box. Christopher, just back, with huge relief, from London, is in a grey suit. Hugo is in jodhpurs. All the men wear ties.

      Hugo – This won’t take long. You’ll be busy getting Doris ready for her triumph next week, Armstrong.

       Armstrong’s nervy little spaniel always wins the canine beauty contest at the village fête. Now he turns aside the implied compliment gracefully.

      Armstrong – I gather Mr Green’s going to give us quite a surprise.

      Goodyear – Giant figs, is it?

      Christopher – Any figs at all are a miracle in Oxfordshire. I hope he gets the Cup. But now, Mr Lane thought . . . (tails off).

      Hugo – Yes, let’s rough out the drives for the first three shooting days. If we know what needs doing before Mr Rossiter goes to Scotland, we can get cracking on it while he’s away. Armstrong, how’s Church Break looking?

      Armstrong – Crawling. Crawling with them it is. You better get your eye in, Mr Lane. Time to get the clay pigeons out, I reckon.

       Mr Hutchinson sniggers. Hugo Lane is an outstandingly good shot, and proud of it. Armstrong is teasing him.

      Goodyear – You’re going to have to be careful not to shoot these ramblers, though.

       The others are taken aback.

      Christopher – Ramblers?

      Goodyear – There’s a fellow down in the pub pretty well every night now banging on about rights of way. He’s got this idea there’s an old, old road went along Leafield Ride to the Cider Well, and all the way on alongside the lakes, through the park and home farm to meet the Oxford road. He’s going to walk it, he says, and no one can stop him, he says, because it’s a public highway. And I’ve heard he’s going to do it on Saturdays.

      Christopher (to Hugo) – Do you know about this?

      Hugo – No. Who is this chap?

      Goodyear – He makes furniture. Bashes the chairs around to make them look old and sells them to those mugginses in Burford. Good-looking boy. Just moved into the village a month or two back, but he’s nephew to the groom at Lea Place. The thing is, he’s got other people worked up about it. Says there’ll be a hundred of them soon, and they’ll just walk wherever there’s an old green road, and if you try to stop them they’ll take you to court.

      Christopher – Can they do that?

      Hugo – Not if I have anything to do with it.

      Christopher – But really. Legally?

      Goodyear – He says you can’t keep people out. Not if there’s a right of way.

СКАЧАТЬ