Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village Page 8

  Just now, however, young Peter had been told to go and pick daffodils, at the very time when hormones were bursting to life in his body and there was nothing more important in life than not being a girl.

  Adolescence had already damaged him. Nowadays his psyche had degenerated into a whirlpool of resentments, longings and animal impulse, but a couple of years before he had been so bright and intelligent that he had been able to memorise a poem in three readings. At Guildford Grammar he had regularly achieved 100 per cent in several subjects during end-of-term exams. He had won double-plus marks for his French composition. Joan used to boast that he had got his brains from her side of the family, from her father, a mathematician who even understood relativity and could calculate the dimensions of circles in his head, using pi to three decimal places.

  Above all, the twelve-year-old Peter had been happy. His mind had buzzed with energy, his religious faith had been instinctive, and he had lived unquestioningly in his little universe of Latin verbs, punch-ups at school, edifying parables, catapults, yo-yos and marbles.

  Like everyone else he had eagerly awaited the arrival of his first pubic hairs, without realising how much they would hurt him. He had thought that the first one was a stray hair floating on the surface of the bathwater, and had not realised that it was his until he had plucked at it in order to drop it over the side of the bath. That sharp and astonishing twinge, however, was as nothing compared to all the psychological agonies that followed.

  Peter started to wonder why life was meaningless. Given his Anglican inoculation, it was perhaps strange that this should have happened. But it wasn’t that he knew life was meaningless; it was that, deep in his bowels, he began to experience it. His bones and blood began to tell him that one day they would be nothing but earth or ash.

  What was it that would make the world seem like the fresh, uncomplicated place it had always been before? What was it that would restore the purpose in life that puberty had removed? He began to feel unhappy. Fits of horrible violence came over him and he wanted to go out and kill. He felt that he wanted to fight, and not stop until he was dead or victorious. He began to play furious games of football with his friends that would go on for three hours or more, because afterwards he felt purged enough to be equable for a while, to sleep peacefully. Recently he had been unable to turn his mind off at night, sweating in his sheets, tormented by everything in general and nothing in particular, a detainee and plaything of his own whirling brain and dissatisfied heart.

  Nothing would have sorted Peter out except for the arrival of a large platoon of indulgent nymphomaniacs, an eventuality of little likelihood in Notwithstanding. It might at least have quietened the canker of physical longing that gnawed in his throat and guts. Even that would not have been enough, for Pandora’s box had opened more completely than that. Not only did he crave incessantly a satisfaction he could barely imagine and could not have, but he had fallen in love.

  He had been in love as a child, it is true: with his hamster, with a little blonde girl at primary school, with the picture of his father as a young man, with Diana Dors and Valerie Singleton on the television, with the family dog; but these kinds of in-love did not hurt and grieve.

  Now he was in love with a friend’s sister, and he was in a state of spiritual pain. She was chestnut-haired and freckled, skinny and bouncy. In the summer her freckles joined up. She was slightly croaky in the voice, and she was a Methodist, which didn’t seem to matter now, because love had made him broad-minded. He knew nothing about Methodists apart from the fact that they didn’t burn people at the stake, were opposed to enjoyment and might not be proper Christians. Because of her voice, everyone called her Froggy. She was twelve, she lived half a mile away up the hill, and she and Peter’s little sister spent much of their time together, giggling a great deal and conspiring in hushed voices. One of their favourite topics was discussing what it might be like to have periods, how big their breasts were likely to grow once they got started, and how relatively ‘developed’ were the various friends they knew. They were fascinated by sex, but knew that it was immoral and that any girl who had it was a tart. Peter knew, contrariwise, that any boy who had it was inconceivably lucky.

  Froggy was also in love with Peter, but they hardly ever spoke. They could think of nothing to say, too tongue-tied and awkward to speak to each other at all. They never managed more than ‘hello’, and Peter spent most of his time with his friend Robert, and Froggy’s brothers. They liked to collect conkers or small dead animals, and put them on the railway line, just to see what the trains did to them.

  Instead of speaking, Froggy and Peter exchanged a whirlwind of letters. Hers he would always keep. ‘My Darling One … I miss you,’ she would begin. When they arrived his heart would leap at the sight of the rounded handwriting. The letters were breathless with longing, incandescent with passion. ‘My darling darling darling,’ they read, followed by pages of news about her friend Andrea, and about the savage teachers who attacked and oppressed them at school. Froggy wrote, ‘I love you, my darling, I love you’, and she concluded her letters with ‘All my everlasting love’, or ‘All my tons and tons of all my special love ever faithful’.

  Their epistolary passion had endured for a year and yet they had never held hands, kissed, or said anything other than ‘hello’. On the day before his mother’s request to go and pick daffodils, however, a day of the spring holidays, he had contrived to break the impasse, by slipping a note into Froggy’s plastic adolescent handbag. He did it on two false assumptions, the first being that girls go through their handbags every day, and the second, that upon finding the note she would come to the assignation. He did not know that women are not what you think; they have hesitations and peculiar fears, a sense of right-timing and self-preservation that is obscure to men. Neither did he know that a handbag, even that of a twelve-year-old, contains more than a woman’s essential supplies. His note vanished into a congeries of brush, purse, broken biscuits, tissues, coagulated make-up, old bus tickets and chocolate wrappers, much of it being of extraordinary antiquity. The note read: ‘Come and meet me at the Maclachlan bench at two thirty tomorrow. Today is Tuesday.’ It had not been easy to find a moment when he could put the note in her bag, but somehow he had done so when she had left it momentarily abandoned in the hall while she was upstairs, giggling with his sister.

  Peter did not know precisely what he and she would do up on the common at the Maclachlan bench. Perhaps they would kiss, hold hands, declare their love outright. Perhaps she would take him in her arms and he would feel the length of her sweet and burgeoning body against his. Peter did not imagine that they would have sex. If he had known that it was imaginable, he certainly would have imagined it. He was in love, and he thought he knew the cod wisdom, frequently passed on from his mother while his father sat in resentful silence, that sex and love were different and not really connected.

  Peter did not sleep at all that night, and was forced to sit up and read a book. He read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which his parents had hidden on the shelf in a brown wrapper, making it the most obviously tempting book in the house. His parents might just as well have written on its spine ‘Attention all children! Read this book! It’s got sex!’ All the children did read it, and none of them understood it much. In any case, the book wasn’t as explicit as they might have hoped. Peter read it that night without taking it in. He was too much consumed with anxiety and speculation.

  Spending the morning lying in the orchard, shooting down daffodils and thereby picking them in the manliest possible fashion, seemed the only way to pass the time without going mad. He was quite a good shot, but his Webley Junior was only a small-bore 177, and sometimes when he hit a stalk, the flower still didn’t topple. He decided that any hit counted as a plucked flower, otherwise he would never get enough of them in time for lunch. Sometimes he would aim at one flower, and another immediately behind it would topple over instead. The dog kept sabotaging his efforts by pouncing on him, snu
ffling in his face and wandering about in the line of fire. One of the cats, who enjoyed every spring sitting motionless and upright among the flowers, watched them both as if they were mad. ‘He thinks he’s a daffodil,’ Joan used to say. Next door, Miss Agatha Feakes, wearing her brown peaked cap and one of her vast home-knitted cardigans, threw seed to her chickens and milked the goats. A white-headed blackbird came down nearby. She’d known it for nearly ten years. She listened to the repeated pneumatic cough of the air rifle, and reflected that boys will be boys.

  Joan made corned-beef fritters and baked beans for lunch, and afterwards Peter sought hopelessly for something to take up the slack until it was two o’clock and time to go out with the dog. There was only half an hour to wait, but it was, in emotional terms, a year. He emptied the waste-paper baskets, even though it wasn’t Thursday, and separated out the things that were not inflammable, small bottles and aerosols for female potions and lotions. They were often lilac-coloured. He had to watch out for his father’s discarded razor blades. The residue, which included the womenfolk’s balls of cotton wool with suspect deposits, and rough drafts of his own apostrophic poems to Froggy, Peter burned in the incinerator.

  At a quarter past two Peter called the dog, who had been sighing pointedly ever since early morning. The dog sighed and waggled his eyebrows every day until he was walked, affecting an air of suffering, but as soon as anyone went to the walking-stick stand or fetched wellington boots, he would lift off vertically into the air, bouncing straight up and down so rapidly that it was impossible to attach his lead. You had to throw one arm around his neck and restrain him while his back half continued to cantilever up and down. In order to avoid unmanageable explosions of excitement, the family had had to learn to avoid mentioning the word ‘walk’ anywhere near the dog. Thus they progressed through ‘W-A-L-K’ to ‘promenade’, to ‘Spaziergang’ to ‘paseo’ to ‘peripateion’, with the dog always only one linguistic step behind.

  Peter set off up the road past the big house where the famous actress lived with her charming but alcoholically outrageous bisexual husband, and past the council houses. In one of these houses lived John, gardener to the Shah of Iran, who had kept a motorcycle combination secretly from his wife all the years of their married life. He passed the hedging and ditching man, who was up to his waist in mud, brambles and nettles. He was cradling in his hand a cantankerous tortoise that he had found at the end of its hibernation in the bank side. Peter passed what was to become the Institute of Oceanography, unaccountably sited in the middle of the countryside rather than by the sea. Once a large workhouse, it was at this time Notwithstanding Homes. It housed a tribe of noisy and emotionally damaged children, who felt a natural and reciprocated disdain for the fortunate children of the village. Once Peter and Robert and Froggy’s brothers had got into a stone-throwing fight with some of them, which had ended with one of the Homes’ children receiving a large and ragged gash in the forehead. Peter, who had thrown the stone, had been aghast and guilt-stricken, and from then on all hostilities had ceased, both sides understanding at last the appalling consequences of war. The disadvantaged children retreated behind their twenty-foot wall.

  Peter entered the woods and strode along a track that, after centuries of use, had sunk fifteen feet below the level of the forest floor. The banks on either side were thick with blueberries that, the moment they were ripe, fell victim to old ladies and squirrels. To the left was a stand of enormously tall Scots pine, where Polly Wantage, to the detriment of squirrels, ventured forth daily in brogues and plus fours, armed with her twelve-bore, and to the right lay the sandy hillside, brackened and bridle-pathed, which was known as Busses Common even though no one knew who Buss had been.

  At the end of this track was a low white house whose owners had two Mercedes, were rumoured to possess an aeroplane, and were said to drive all the way to Harrods in order to buy butter. Peter turned right and followed the fence that separated the nuns of the convent from the outer world. Peter could not conceive why anyone would want to be a nun and renounce sex for ever. He had never had any himself, but he knew a priori that it would be as mad, self-defeating and bizarre as renouncing respiration or water.

  There was a gentle slope to these tracks and paths, but at the summit of it, at Maclachlan’s bench, people realised that they had unwittingly gained a very great height. There was a sapling oak next to the bench, just right for a child’s first climb, and steep paths descended from it, down which it was customary to have vertiginous races, and where, in winter, the children, the dog and their mother careered together on toboggans, whooping with exhilaration, numb in face and finger, breathless with the exhaustion of dragging the sledges.

  From the bench one could see across the ocean of trees to sombre Blackdown, where Tennyson and his friends had fled in order to avoid literary tourists on the Isle of Wight. In these parts Helen Allingham had painted her pictures of rose-draped cottages and the rural life thereabouts, to be condemned for ever by urban art snobs as a sentimentalist, even though those places were exactly as she depicted them, and often still are. The England that Peter saw, and Allingham before him, was the England that the English used to love, when England was still loved by the English.

  Even though he had always lived there, this countryside that he surveyed from the crown of the hill still seemed to Peter an enchanted place, not because it was home, but because it had the archaic atmosphere of Arthurian romance. Because of the density of the trees one could see no dwellings in any direction for tens of miles, and when there was a mist in the low places, rising up off the fields and following the lines of the brooks, it took very little imagination to conceive of squired and mounted knights wending their way through the Hurst on quests. Down among the trees there was even a pink tower, of curiously suggestive appearance, where, had it not been a structure for the pumping of water, a fair demoiselle might have been imprisoned.

  To the south among the breasted downs in the far distance rose Chanctonbury Hill, with its unmistakable ring of trees, tall and majestic, unreduced as yet by the great hurricane, where everyone said that the Sussex witches danced naked at Sabbaths. Folk would say that they wouldn’t go there, it was frightening, frightening and weird. North of the down, nothing could be seen at all because of the trees, but amid them lay the sagging cottages of agricultural workers, and the unpretentious houses of the rural middle classes, red-tiled in the Surrey farmhouse style from first floor to gutter. Disappearing beneath a forest of rhododendrons lay Sweetwater, a deserted dark tarn that had all but died of oblivion, where Peter had fished for years without ever seeing anything but moorhens and minnows. Once he had been caught poaching there, with Robert from Cherryhurst who was famous for catching the Girt Pike at the Glebe House.

  This was the scenery that framed Peter on the occasion of his first tryst. He saw little of the beauty around him, because his consciousness was fixed upon the booming and buzzing of his inner life. The dog, holding no brief for this, lay at Peter’s feet, huffing and whining for the entire two hours that they waited for Froggy to come.

  Growing more and more despondent, frequently looking at his watch (the first he had ever owned), his heart aglow with ever diminishing hope, anticipation and excitement, Peter sat on the Maclachlan bench, scrying through the trees for any sign of movement from the direction of Froggy’s house. He often thought he saw the glimmer of chestnut hair, the luminescence of pale skin, the white furry ruff of her purple coat. The last half-hour he spent with his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands.

  During the following months he spoke to no one about what had happened, since nothing had. He resolutely replied ‘Nothing’ when Joan repeatedly asked him what the matter was. He sat in his room, night after night, sometimes all night, at the desk that the Major had made for him, and tried to write things down. For the first time in his schoolboy’s literary life, he found no adequate words.

  He was caught up in the inexpressible turbulence of a grand love’s
first emphatic disappointment. It was like a window through which he perceived for the first time the unsatisfactoriness, the faultiness, the mess and futility of the world. He saw that life would not after all be as he had dreamed. Everything falls away, everything escapes. He became infuriated, almost to the point of hysteria, about slippery, errant destinies and unembraceable loves. He knew now about optimism’s loss, which no philosophy can console.

  Froggy was the focus of this rage. When she wrote to him (‘My darling darling, I’m so so sory I found your note but it was too late I didnt look in my bag til last night please forgive me I wold have come if Id known really I would Im so so sory how will you ever forgive me?’) he cursorily sent her note back, with all the spelling and punctuation mistakes corrected.

  Thus pompously, capriciously, inexplicably did Peter end the affair and fall out of love. For a short time, and only occasionally, he even felt some pleasure at his new freedom. When he and Froggy saw each other they said hello, and then nothing, just as they always had, so that her heartbreak and his rancour never knew the light. She even took his dog to a competition, winning the event for the dog most like its owner, but no word passed between them about the abortive tryst.

  Peter would always think that he had infected the bench with disillusionment, resentment and injured pride. It rotted soon, and had to be replaced. Even when he sat there, decades later, he could feel the ache that came up through the sodden oak of its legs and planks. There was still the taste of dust on his tongue. The beginners’ oak tree had become too tall and difficult to climb. The rollicking dog and its amiable successors were buried beneath the roses.

  It was true that the common gave him other pleasures. He loved the memory of his tiny daughter planting acorns at the path sides in the confident expectation that they would be trees by the weekend – but he was always sad on the bench. It was there he learned that nothing works out as it should.