Peculiar Ground. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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СКАЧАТЬ (to Christopher) – Bunny had some of these chaps marching through the home farm at Swinbrooke, day after day, and the police wouldn’t lift a finger.

      Armstrong – If these jokers are running around on a shooting day . . .

       He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. All five men present can imagine the consequences. Pheasants disturbed before the drive, or flying back during it. Dogs all confused. One of these rambler-types stepping out in front of the guns, playing silly buggers. And then, oh Christ, if one of them got shot.

      Goodyear – They’re going to ruin the countryside, that’s what they’re going to do. Someone lit a fire by the Cider Well three weeks back, left a patch of black earth as big as a bicycle wheel.

      Hugo – Actually, that would have been me. Dickie’s birthday. We were cooking sausages.

       Christopher winks at Goodyear, who grins. The way Hugo indulges his children is a running joke. Armstrong remains stony-faced. He once found Nell and Dickie digging a tunnel under the fence around one of his breeding pens. They wanted to help the baby pheasants escape.

      Hugo (bracing himself) – I’ll go and see this fellow. What’s his name, Goodyear?

      Goodyear – Mark Brown.

      Christopher (who has stayed calm through this exchange) – What about the hellebore?

       The forest is home to a rare strain of hellebore. It’s an unlovely plant with black antennae sprouting from the centre of its greeny-yellow bracts, of interest only to botanists, but to them a treasure. It grows nowhere else in the British Isles. Hugo looks at Christopher, as he frequently does, with the startled expression of one hearing excellent good sense spoken by a cat. Christopher is so gentle and so disinclined to project his own personality that it is easy to forget, not only that he is lord of this domain, but also that he is very acute.

      Hugo – Yes! We can get those Nature Conservancy bores back.

       Everyone is cheered. The Nature Conservancy people tried, two years ago, to declare Wychwood a precious relic of England’s primaeval forest, to be protected in all ways possible from change and development. They made quite a to-do about the hellebore. Then Christopher and Hugo between them managed, by polite unhelpfulness, to make what they saw as this unwarrantable bit of bossiness go away. Now their old adversaries are possible allies.

       Goodyear also gets the point. If he’s not going to be allowed to scythe the hellebores, controlling the undergrowth the way he and his father before him have been doing for over forty years, well, perhaps that’s a small price to pay for having his woods declared out of bounds for towny interlopers. To Goodyear, whose house is three-quarters of a mile from the nearest tarmacked road, even the villagers are townies.

      Hugo – I’ll go and have a word with this fellow Brown – see where that gets us. Okey-doke. So. Armstrong. We start with Church Break, and then?

       And so the rambler question is put out of mind. Half an hour later, their heads full of autumnal images, the men disperse, Armstrong to put his pretty bitch through her paces yet again, Goodyear to walk the track which leads through the forest to his cottage, Christopher to play the host, Hugo to retrieve his horse from the stables, submit silently to the groom’s loquacious judgement on her unfitness and ride her home, cantering down the avenue muffled with dark late-summer leaves, Wully scampering along behind.

      *

      Nicholas was sleek, talkative and busy. Seeing him at Paddington, Antony had a momentary desire to dodge behind a pillar. This impulse overcame Antony on any chance meeting, a shaming residual trace of the gauche boy he had almost succeeded in overpainting with his adult persona: Antony the effortless conversationalist, Antony who was so adroit in embarrassing situations, Antony who could charm clients into believing that a meeting resulting in a transaction immensely profitable to himself was an engagement he had set up purely so that they could delight in each other’s company. It was that Antony who took over now (he really liked Nicholas), and waved and strode forward, throttling, without fuss, regret for the novel he could otherwise have been reading on the train.

      ‘I suppose we’re going to the same place?’

      ‘Ant. Good. Good. I want you to tell me everything there is to know about Germany.’

      ‘I can only tell you what I know, which is mostly about Altdorfer. I take it that’s not what you want.’

      ‘It’ll do to start with. Are you going First? Do you think we could get teacakes?’

      Antony, who had a second-class ticket, didn’t answer the former question. They climbed into the dining-car, and settled in. Dull-metal pots of tea and hot water. White damask tablecloths and napkins. Heavy knives. Seats upholstered in dense stuff like brutally shaved carpeting, prickly as burrs. Tiny dishes of raspberry jam.

      ‘I’ve got to do something on Berlin.’ Nicholas wrote for a newspaper. He liked to present himself as an amateur whose accurate summations of complex political situations were all the more wonderful for the fact that he brought so little prior knowledge to them. He did not expect anyone to believe in this act: he would have been affronted if they did. It made for good conversation, though. Even off-duty, at Lil’s house-party, he would be drawing everyone out, and giving pleasure as he did so. There is nothing so flattering as being treated as though you might have something useful to say.

      Nicholas himself was not to be drawn. His bonhomie was a blackout blind. Gratified by his questioning, acquaintances forgot to question him in turn.

      ‘I won’t be much help to you. It was over five years ago now, and I was in Munich.’

      ‘Ah yes. Art and naked gymnasts in the Englischer Garten.’ Each of these men – both bachelors in their thirties – had wondered, without pressing curiosity, about the other’s sexual orientation.

      ‘Yes, and Bavaria isn’t very German – it’s full of ochre Italianate palaces. Actually, I don’t know really where Germany is.’

      ‘That’s been the trouble, hasn’t it? Trying to cobble together a fatherland out of a lot of squabbling siblings. Attempting the impossible puts people into a bad temper. And then they lash out.’

      ‘We do it too, of course. Inventing our nation.’

      ‘Yes.’

      Both at once looked out of the window. The Thames Valley cradled the railway line as it skirted water meadows in which black and white cows plodded. Willows marked out the curves of the invisible river. Hanging beechwoods curtained the horizon. Low sun on a square church tower. They both laughed, catching each other’s thought.

      ‘Perhaps we really are living in the place you see on tourist-board posters,’ said Antony.

      ‘Yes, and look,’ rapping a pot-lid, ‘there’s honey still for tea. But I’m not letting you off. How much did your Bavarian friends care about their Prussian brothers? What would they sacrifice to hang on to Berlin?’

      ‘I never had that sort of conversation. I was there to see the Alte Pinakothek, which our side had smashed to smithereens.’

      ‘Twelve years before.’

      ‘Nicholas, twelve years is nothing. СКАЧАТЬ