Notwithstanding by Louis De Bernières Page B

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