Book 2, Chapter 5 – The Foxhunt
Rupert selected his dress with his customary attention to detail – an open-necked olive green shirt with a discreet monogram of Che Guevara stitched in red thread on the breast pocket, under a classic tweed sports jacket in a straw-coloured, herringbone pattern. His shoes were highly polished oxblood brogues. To complete the ensemble he wrapped his long, striped college scarf nonchalantly around his neck. He wanted to achieve the casual-but-elegant look that was the virtual uniform of the undergraduate at Christ Church in 1982. The conventions of the style allowed for some token individualism. In his case, it was the heavy stitch blue jeans prestressed by cowboys on a working ranch in Wyoming – if the owner of the expensive Chelsea boutique where he bought them was to be believed.
It felt good to be going home to Ardun. Oxford could be stressful. Still, he was uneasy about abandoning his studies even for two days. As a sop to his conscience he packed a tote bag with two books and a sheaf of loose notes. His tutor in anthropology was relentless. Although the following week would be the last of Hilary term before the Easter vacation, he had asked Rupert for a written critique of the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and required that he read The Savage Mind and dip into the author’s other works on totems and myth.
This week he had not followed his usual Friday evening routine. After dinner he had worked in his rooms until past midnight preparing notes for his speech to the Oxford Union on the following Monday evening. He had spoken briefly before in Union debates when he intervened from the floor with points of information, but this was to be his maiden speech. He wanted to finish the draft before he went to bed so he would be free to enjoy the foxhunt on Saturday and the Hunt Ball in the evening, followed by a bucolic Sunday at Ardun.
He was still bleary-eyed at eight o’clock the next morning as he set off down a quiet Cornmarket towards St. Giles to meet Rose outside Pusey House where she usually parked the estate car when she came to fetch him. Without speaking, he smiled at her broadly as he kissed her proffered cheek.
Twenty-five minutes after leaving St. Giles’ they passed the high, black and gold iron gates of Blenheim Palace on the Duke of Marlborough’s estate. After they had cleared Woodstock, the traffic thinned and the landscape became exclusively rural. His preoccupations with university affairs began to unravel and his spirits lifted as he anticipated the foxhunt and its familiar rituals. They were rituals, Rose reminded him, that required proper dress. She had taken the liberty of laying out the ancestral mustard-yellow hunting costume with its dark, green velvet lapels. It pleased the Earl so much when Rupert wore it.
They entered the grounds at Ardun through the main western gate, motoring slowly up the long, winding drive. The morning sun was having difficulty coaxing the last remnants of mist from the ferns in the lower woods. On the high ground, near the house, the hoar frost that whitened the meadows was beginning to glisten as it melted. When Rupert stepped from the car and tasted the clean, cold air of Ardun and smelt the familiar musk of its soil and shrubs, he experienced again the ineffable joy of homecoming.
The first moving thing he saw was Oliver with his fishing tackle tucked under his arm, striding southwards from the house across the strip of meadow that had been deliberately left uncultivated, where snowdrops and crocuses had flowered in abundance seven weeks before, followed by broad swathes of yellow daffodils. Already red poppies, primrose, honeysuckle and other wild-flowers were preparing to take the stage for the spring and summer. In a moment Oliver would disappear below the brow of the sharp hill that dissected the bluebell woods as he strode towards the stream-fed lake at the bottom.
Rupert felt an impulse to catch up with him. But as enticing as the prospect of Saturday morning fishing with Oliver might be, Rose reminded him that the Earl would be setting off for the foxhunt in less than an hour, at ten o’clock. He would expect Rupert to mingle with the house-guests.
***
After visiting the kennels and stables to greet the dogs and horses, Rupert changed into his hunting attire and went to the Trophy Room where his father was playing host to about fifteen guests conversing in small groups.
The walls of the Trophy Room were oak-panelled and the ceiling was beamed to give the impression of a hunting lodge. A large fireplace with carved stone surrounds overhung by an oak mantelpiece heightened the effect. Above it was a framed engraving of the original lodge that had burnt down in the late 17th century to be replaced by the existing house.
Hunting scenes from every generation for the past three hundred years were recorded in small sketches and watercolours hung in asymmetrical groupings on either side of the fireplace. They depicted deer stalking, grouse and pheasant shooting, hare coursing with beagles as well as boar hunting and foxhunting with hounds and horses. Guns in glass cases adorned one wall. On the others there were mounted heads from Canada. There were bears – grizzly, black and polar – and caribou and moose, deer and elk, horned mountain sheep and goats, silver and red fox, wolf, coyote, beaver and puma.
When Rupert arrived in the Trophy Room, his father was conversing with his friend, Sir Mortimer Granville, and a married couple from Texas. “Clients of Brown’s – up from London for the hunt,” the Earl explained as he introduced the Texans to Rupert.
“Sally and I have been doing your quaint Cotswold villages,” the Texan explained to Rupert.
Sally greeted Rupert with a coquettish simper and squeezed his arm familiarly as though she had known him all her life. She called him “Rupidoop” and confided in him that she and her husband had discovered some “dandy stores with genuine, old antiques”.
The introductions over, the Earl turned his attention to the massive head of a musk ox that he had been describing when Rupert arrived.
“An Eskimo in the Arctic shot it. He sold it to a Mountie, who sold it to the Hudson Bay Company, who presented it to my grandfather.” He turned to Rupert: “Our very own woolly mammoth, isn’t it, Rupert? To think its offspring are still living in the wild up there, in the circumpolar regions.”
“They’ve outlived the buffalo,” said Rupert conversationally to the Texan.
Extract 2
While they quizzed each other, the single-mindedness of their curiosity kept the intimacy of the previous evening at a distance. But after two hours they had talked themselves out and with fewer words they retraced their steps up the hill to the edge of the wild-flower meadow west of the house, where they paused to catch their breath and look back and down at the surface of the lake.
Rupert was conscious of Morning Star’s laboured breathing and the heat from her body and he eased closer until he felt the pressure of her hip against his thigh and the heat radiating from her body. The breeze was stirring her hair, lifting and twisting it in a dancing plume over her forehead. He could not resist the impulse to catch it between his fingers, and smooth it with the palm of his hand and when she involuntarily responded by inclining her head to look up at him, his hand slid to her forehead and he found himself doing what he had imagined the previous evening – tracing his finger outwards along her eyebrows, down over her prominent cheekbones, along the bridge of her nose and across her lips.
Her eyes were wide and serious as her gaze held his. But the quickening of his pulse and his bolting imagination were not enough to overcome his deeply rooted inhibitions. Was the severity of her look an admonition or emotional engagement? It occurred to him that the urgency of his own searching eyes might appear too intense. He softened his stare with a quick smile and lowered his face so that his cheek touched hers, and he whispered, “Thank you for coming to Ardun. I enjoyed our talk.”
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