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.
Since Froggy’s day he had walked that hill and lain in the bracken with other lovers, and had come to see that places are only precious because of the ways in which one has loved there. There was a sandpit near Sweetwater where he used to sit and write love poems to Froggy and those who came after, always, it seemed, accompanied by a patient collie. Near the Hurst there was a small woody glade of bluebells and kingcups between two ditches, which became at first the site of future solitary romantic misery and, later on, an enchanted place to take a rug and make love on the moss in dappled light.
Certain locations have the ability to retain the emotions of generation upon generation, until they begin to exude them like the resin that forces itself out of the veins of a pine. On Maclachlan’s bench at the top of Busses Common, in sight of Blackdown and Chanctonbury Ring, Peter would always think that others must have been able to feel what had happened to him. It was the natural place for rendezvous, and since Peter and Froggy’s youth there had been any number of lovelorn village teenagers who had ineptly failed to meet there.
THE DEVIL AND BESSIE MAUNDERFIELD
AT SIXTEEN, BESSIE Maunderfield was petite, vivacious, ingenious and undeferential. Despite these disqualifications, she obtained employment at the manor house, not least because she was related to both the cook and the groom, and her mother had been a childhood friend of the housekeeper. Naturally, it was envisaged that she would leave the job as soon as she married, but for the time being she arose at six, and, whatever the weather, put on her pattens, and clumped a muddy two miles along the Chiddingfold Road that ran through the Hurst. If she was lucky, there might be a lift to be had on a cart, but it was no quicker than walking. If it rained, she held a tray over her head to protect her black curls, and, if the worst came to the worst, she had a canvas cape that was well smeared with pork lard. The cape was the invention of an uncle who had served with the West Surreys, and seen something like it being used by fishermen in a foreign land where he had been on campaign. It was very effective, but it smelled dreadful, so the housekeeper would make her hang it up on a nail in the stable.