Peculiar Ground. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Читать онлайн книгу.
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.
*
When Christopher sloped off, Nicholas put in an appearance in the drawing room, drank coffee and bustled about flirting so no one could say he wasn’t doing his bit socially. Then he slipped away too and set up camp in what passed in that house for a cosy study. Linen-fold panelling, a ceiling dripping plaster stalactites. The room had been deprived of one of its walls around the time of the Glorious Revolution, and now formed an L with the pilastered drawing room where Christopher and Lil hung the paintings of which they were properly proud.
He accepted a whisky and soda when Underhill appeared like a well-disciplined genie, drew the curtain across the joint of the L, and settled down in a tapestried chair beneath an upside-down pendent obelisk to try to make sense of the reports that had come in that day. Ted had rung about the Konev story. He’d heard Reuters’ man in Berlin had a hunch that the East Germans were going to do something very soon, but what it was he couldn’t guess. Not exactly what you’d call hard news.
Nicholas began to scribble out a think-piece on the limits of totalitarianism. Khrushchev being as much at the mercy of his party as Kennedy was at the mercy of the American electorate, both of them having to act tough for their respective constituencies, both of them probably clever enough to know it was a charade, the perils into which that play-acting might drag all Europe, de da de da de da de da.
Voices. Antony was showing young Flossie the pictures. The obstreperous Benjie had tagged along.
Flossie – ‘Gosh! Is it a Cimabue?’
‘Yes it is.’
Privately, as Nicholas knew, Antony had his doubts, but he was a loyal friend and a discreet dealer. So yes it unequivocally was.
‘Looks lonely. Is that a bit of his friend on the right?’ Benjie getting in on the conversation.
‘Yes, it appears to be a fragment from the right wing of an altarpiece. See how it is hinged here. There would have been another two or three angels, a heavenly chamber group.’
‘The hands are so . . .’
The hands, indeed, were