Peculiar Ground. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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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.
Hugo and Armstrong exchange glances.
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