Peculiar Ground. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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,