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Hugo (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. The place was wrecked. The house I stayed in was the only one in the street left standing. The family had lost two sons. I was sleeping in the younger one’s room, and for all they knew he could have been killed by an elder brother of mine. I was very polite and so were they. We didn’t talk about the war. We didn’t talk about the occupation, or about bombing, or about my hostess’s nervous tic. We talked a little bit about politics, but only as if it was an entirely theoretical subject on which none of us could possibly hold a personal opinion. We certainly certainly certainly weren’t going to talk about German nationhood.’
Nicholas looked quizzical. ‘Conversation must have been a little bloodless.’
Antony laughed. ‘It’s unbelievable, isn’t it. Already we’re so bored of peace that “bloodless” is a pejorative term. Of course it was bloodless. That was the point.’
‘But seriously, you’re such a flâneur. Whatever you did or didn’t talk about over the dumplings at home, you went out. I know you. You must have met people.’
‘No. Sorry. Up early for a walk. The Pinakothek every morning. Library every afternoon. No dumplings, but an awful lot of pork and mushrooms. Then evenings writing my paper on Altdorfer. To which I owe the job that allows me, as you say, to gad about now.’
A pause. Nicholas, thwarted, casting around for a more promising approach. Antony – smooth, obliging, emollient Antony – opaque.
Ticket collector. Antony’s second-class ticket. Embarrassment masked by jollity. And, soon, the car awaiting them at Finstock Halt.
*
Nell and her father went up to the big house after tea. Daddy drove the Land Rover, with Wully’s chin resting on his left shoulder. Nell was on the bonnet, sitting in the spare wheel, her small hands scrabbling for a purchase on the rubber, her hair tangling in front of her eyes. Her mother didn’t know she did this. Nell, constantly aware of how she might be jolted out and tumble under the front wheels and be squashed, was terrified, but she never said so. Fear was the price she gladly paid for the privilege of being her father’s fellow-conspirator.
Summer after tea was the best time. As the sun descended the flowers turned luminous. And the grown-ups grew brighter and strange too, changing into their evening clothes. Mr Rossiter met them on the steps, already dressed in a silk smoking jacket patterned with twisty petal shapes. Paisley – a new word for Nell.
They looked to see, as they always did, whether the giant brown dog-statues flanking the door had a present for Wully. There was a sugar lump between the left-hand one’s front paws. Then they went through the house, and out onto the terrace that overlooked the part of the park where the land swept down to the lake and up again to the double row of conker trees screening the village nearly a mile away. This was the Rossiters’ special bit of park, where ancient oaks stood isolated in deer-nibbled grass and where any rider was exposed to the stare of all the house’s high sash windows. It was grander and plainer than the expanse behind, where Nell’s family picnicked between the avenues and played kick-the-can around stands of bracken, or where she could ride her pony through the copses alongside her father, hidden from anyone who might laugh at her still needing the leading-rein.
‘They need feeding, Nell,’ said Mr Rossiter. Down the middle of the terrace ran a canal, where giant goldfish lurked. They were immeasurably old, their shell-like pallor uncanny. Nell suspected them of cannibalism – why else would the little red and orange fish flashing above them never get a chance to become as gross and slow as they? She had a recurring dream, from which she would wake screaming, in which someone she couldn’t see would say, in a gentle, insinuating voice, something she could never afterwards remember. These bloated fish, glimmering in murky water, were ominous in the same kind of whispering way.
She went to the little building at the end of the canal, where the fish food, smelling of cowpats, was kept in an enamel bin. With its frilly arched windows and stone pinnacles, this pavilion was Nell’s architectural ideal. Wychwood itself, its garden front a pilastered cliff of grey-tawny stone, was too grand for her to comprehend it. In all her daydreams the princess with waist-length golden hair and the ever-sympathetic identical twin sister lived in a palace that was the fish-food house built large.
‘Who’ve we got so far?’ her father was saying. He knew, and so did Nell, that house-parties were Mrs Rossiter’s treat, and that Mr Rossiter was apt to slip away from them after dinner to go fishing. Nell’s father was Mr Rossiter’s agent but also his ally in wife-teasing, guest-dodging and – up to a carefully judged point – making fun of the people Mrs R asked down from London.
‘You’ve met Flossie.’ That was the girl who had swum with them that morning. ‘Jolly girl. There’s two more just come off the train. Antony.’ He was another regular visitor. Nell liked him because he always spoke to her but she could never understand his jokes. ‘Nicholas. And there’s a couple Lil took to in Scotland last year. Helen and Benjie. Lovely woman. Husband runs a restaurant and wears suede shoes.’
Nell’s attention was on the fish. The faded monsters lay still while the brilliant tiddlers snapped at the smelly flakes. The insects, called water boatmen although the whole point of them was that they didn’t need boats, skated over the meniscus, as confident as Jesus. So that story might be ordinary-true as well as deep-down-true. (Nell’s mother had explained the difference, but only the Bible was allowed the latter. If Nell said anything that wasn’t ordinary-true, then it was a lie.) Perhaps Jesus had the same kind of special feet. She stared as hard as she could at the insects, but even when she opened her eyes so wide they felt they might pop out she couldn’t see their feet at all. Looked at under a microscope, might they be like tiny canoes?
‘We won’t use the pool after this weekend,’ said Mr Rossiter. ‘Get them to empty it on Monday, will you, Hugo, and refill it ready for when we get back? It’s turning into weed soup, isn’t it, Nell?’
Her father was nodding, but Nell couldn’t say a word. It was true that the walls of the pool were coated with green slime, and the pine needles floating on it clustered into fairy log-jams, but wouldn’t it be rude to admit it? And anyway she was dismayed. She knew that refilling the pool took two whole days, and afterwards the water was much, much colder. ‘Oh can we swim tomorrow, then?’ she said.
‘No, Nell,’ said her father, quick-sharp. They never came up to the pool when there were weekend guests. But ‘Yes,’ said Mr Rossiter, and when her father looked awkward he went on, ‘just this time. Flossie said she had fun with the children this morning.’
Helen
When people first meet us they think, what can Helen see in that buffoon. And then after a while, not long at all usually, they think, how can he stand her. She’s so dull. Next they’re inviting us to stay. And then they’re never going to invite us to stay again because Benj has made a pass. At the hostess, or the host. Or the dog, for goodness sake. When he became besotted with that absurd white fluffy thing of Cressida’s. Wouldn’t leave it alone all weekend. But more likely the teenage daughter, or the au pair. And then they begin to think, she’s so dignified. And clever. And you don’t notice it at once, but isn’t she beautiful. What can she see in that clown.
Lil understands, I think. She and Christopher aren’t an obvious pair either. I like coming here. I’m glad she took me up, as one might take up petit point, or the clarinet, or a pretty orphan. Relationships based on caprice suit me. I take what comes my way. Benj floated in and scooped me up as though I was a small hairy dog. No one had ever treated me with such disrespect, and I found it restful. I don’t suppose we’ll be together for ever, even though he depends on me more than he knows. In bed, we are harmonious.
He drove down today, with Guy in the front, so they could talk, he said. He likes being the raffish uncle. He offers the boy cigarettes, which he refuses, and takes him out to Muriel’s or the French Club. Showing off. Benj isn’t really a bohemian. He likes to lunch at the Ritz. But he knows the young are impressed by that kind of thing. Guy is nothing like as snubbing as most teenagers but this afternoon he barely spoke – he gets car-sick. Benj rambled on. His ridiculous car is another thing I like about my husband. I made a nest on the backseat, with the fur rug full of zipped-up pockets for your Thermos or your knitting. Of course Benj doesn’t knit but he likes ingenious contraptions. That thing like a fire extinguisher which supposedly creates soda water.
I read through my bit on mazes. If I can have a draft ready this week the typist at the Institute will make sense of it before term begins. Another thing that others might resent, but I find a relief, is that nobody ever asks about my work. Nicholas did as soon as he met me, because he’s inquisitive, but that’s different from being interested. I think it helped him bring me into focus (serious, unworldly, perhaps a bit of a crank) but he didn’t actually want to know about it. I’ve liked all the journalists I’ve met, but they don’t have much range.
After we dropped Guy with his friend – that drowning look he gave, the ordeal of a whole weekend’s politeness – I got in the front and Benj fiddled with the radio and we sang along together. Everything about Frank Sinatra is abhorrent to me: the cockiness, the smug voice, the assumed sophistication. All polish, no patina. But, for better or worse, I sing along.
We’ve been given the tapestry room. North-facing. That must be a lucky coincidence; no one here would give a toss about the way sunlight fades vegetable dyes. But our window, mullioned and small-paned, is in the centre of Wychwood’s axis. Sitting here at the tiny writing table (the bigger one, as usual, is cluttered with useless stuff – three-panelled mirror and silver brushes and crystal caskets full of cotton-wool balls), I’m looking straight, or nearly straight, down the beech avenue to a church tower. So arrogant. So grand. Before the other wing was built, in the days when this must have been the best bedroom, people were being killed for entertaining the wrong kind of religious faith. Here, though, a church tower is a gazebo, just something to close the view.
I’ll wear my grey dress with tight sleeves tonight, and amethyst beads. No point trying to out-sparkle Lil. I’m the serious one. A bit fierce. What can she see in that buffoon?
*
At drinks time Benjie was not wearing suede shoes, but a smoking jacket of patchwork silk in purple and pink, and he and Lil were both so animated that between them they created an uproar. At Wood Manor, though, it was so still you could feel the night falling as stealthily as dropping eyelids. Nell, bathed and in her nightie, looked out of her bedroom window, the one shaped like an egg, and saw her mother walking between the herbaceous borders towards the summerhouse where her father was clattering the ice in the martini jug. He wore a smoking jacket like Mr Rossiter’s and his velvet slippers with gold letters on the toes. Her mother was in Nell’s favourite dress. Blue and silver stripes, the stripes turning the long skirt into a ribbed bell, and arranged diagonally around the top to make a lovely symmetrical puzzle of her chest and arms. Pale dress and pale tobacco plants glimmered in the warm dark. It was a lonely thing to see her mother so unaware of her. When Nell got into bed her parents’ voices came up to her still, until they went indoors and all she knew of them were the rectangles of light the dining-room windows threw on the lawn, the brilliant negatives of shadows cast by adulthood into the dreamy cave of childhood and sleep.
Antony
Not Lil’s most brilliant assembly, but I was lucky to be seated next to Christopher’s niece Flossie. Barely eighteen, and not the least bit awed by the set-up. Her father is in Persia, something to do with oil. With her parents abroad, Wychwood is her weekend home. She was funny about her London life: the publisher’s typing-pool full of women looking forward all morning to unpacking their fussy little greaseproof-paper parcels full of lunch; the debs’ hostel in Belgravia; the landlady who sits all day in her room off the hall ready to pounce on anyone breaking the rules and receiving a male visitor. ‘We all loll about in our pink quilted dressing gowns eating Rice Krispies for breakfast and pretending not to be competitive about where we’ve been the night before.’ She made the vision of these frowsy human rosebuds at once erotically suggestive and ridiculous. She’s a racy, ebullient girl. I can see why Lil makes a pet of her.
On the other side Helen, who’s doing something at the Warburg, so we could talk shop. She invited me to come and see some Mughal miniatures. Claims that one shows a knot garden identical with the one at Montacute. Sounds improbable to me, but I’ll go along politely. Benjie’s always been a shameless show-off and he’s adopted a new persona since I knew him in Berlin. Now he’s a fat Flash Harry – ye gods, that smoking jacket!
We didn’t linger long after the women had gone out. Cole Porter impersonations round the piano afterwards. I don’t blame Christopher for slinking away.
*
Christopher walks down Tower Light. No forebear of his planted this avenue. Its beeches are older by several human generations than his traceable family tree, as old as the house his grandfather bought largely for the pleasure of possessing them. He is digesting his dinner and planning to smoke a cigarette. To any observer it would appear that he was alone, but alongside him, stealthy as the small creatures coming out now for their night’s hunting, walks his ghostly son. Christopher cannot see his child, but he has a sense of him, like the flicker of a dim light just out of his line of vision.
He doesn’t know whether the boy – he was called Fergus – ever comes in the same way to Lil. He’s never asked her. Nor does he know whether the visitation is a consolation or an aggravation of grief, but he deliberately makes times, like this one, in which it can occur.
The boy whom he sees but doesn’t see is not as tall as he would have been now. All the details of his appearance are those of the child he was when he died. The knob of his ankle-bone rubbed red by the upper rim of his sturdy buckled sandals. The delicacy of the tendons at the back of his neck. The sharp wings of his shoulder blades beneath his Aertex shirt. His solemnity, which hasn’t yet been varied in these séances – as it was in life – by wild giggles.
Down and up again. The avenue runs for four miles, rising and falling as it traverses the forest between the two villages which abut Christopher’s estate, running from church tower to church tower, cutting a passage from one public building to another through a great expanse of woodland sequestered and private.
Christopher arrives at the wall and passes through the iron gates. Twice as tall as he is, they are awkward to manoeuvre. Inside the wall the park stretches palely away between the massive trunks. Beyond the wall the beeches are backed by dense woodland. Turn off down a smaller ride, then onto a rutted track to the sawmill, always going down now, into gloom, and there, at the lowest point, abruptly the trees retreat, and the mauve sky reveals itself, reflected in water. Across the dam to the spot where the bank curves outwards to make a platform and the trees lean obligingly aslant as though to avoid the backward flick of his line. The smell of water-mint enfolds Christopher. This muddle of trampled grass has been crushed by his own feet. This is where he likes to come, night after summer night, making a hide for himself – a confined vantage point from which, instead of moving lordly though the land he owns, he can retreat and watch it being itself, unmastered.
For the next two days, he will be on parade. He likes house-parties more than most of his guests probably imagine. Lil plans them and invites the guests, and shepherds them from room to room, from game to picnic to tête-à-tête. Christopher remains aloof, but – as Lil is consciously aware and as he perhaps intuits – he is an essential part of the entertainment. Tall, gentle Christopher, with his scrupulous courtesy that fails to mask his indifference to most of his visitors, is of a piece with his setting. He completes the picture. And they in turn complete, for him, the thing he has constructed here, and which needs their eyes.
*
The paper’s Berlin stringer was filing down the line.
Today quote Hero of the Soviet Union close quote Marshal Konev arrived in Berlin as commander of all Soviet forces in Germany period
In May comma 1945 comma Konev led the Red Army in the Battle of Berlin period
It has been reported that his Cossack troops butchered an entire defeated German division comma using their sabres to cut off arms raised in surrender period
Konev’s appointment signals a hardening of the Soviet line on German affairs period
At a factory in East Berlin yesterday comma East German Chancellor Ulbricht was heckled by a worker calling for free elections period
Ulbricht responded by saying free elections had brought the Nazis to power period
Quote Whoever supports free elections supports Hitler’s generals exclamation mark close quote
New paragraph
West Berlin continues to be inundated with refugees from the East period
The twenty-nine camps set up to receive them are all now full period Twenty-one aeroplanes comma chartered for the purpose comma took off from Berlin today loaded with refugees en route to cities in the West period
An official said today quote if it goes on like this comma East Berlin will be a ghost town close quote period
The copy-taker said to his neighbour on the desk, ‘I was in Berlin in ’49 – national service – what a dog’s dinner!’ and passed the typed-up report with its four carbons to the runner, who carried it to the night editor on the foreign desk, who took it to the editor, who said, ‘Has Nick seen this?’
‘I’ll be reading it to him.’
‘This Konev. What do we know?’
‘A very big potato. Just setting him out on the board is aggressive.’
The editor was known to love chess. It irritated him the way his subordinates played up to him by using board-game terminology.
‘So the Soviets are huffing and puffing.’
‘Mmm. Shall I call Nick back in?’
‘Where the hell is he?’
‘Some fancy-pants weekend in the country.’
‘Leave him there for now. As long as you’ve got the number.’
That evening, a few miles east of Berlin, domestic staff at the House of the Birches, which had once been Hermann Goering’s hunting lodge, were preparing to entertain. East German premier Walter Ulbricht had invited most of his senior officials and their wives to visit him there at four o’clock the following afternoon. It was hot. A lovely weekend for a garden party.
*
