The Counterplot
Hope Mirrlees
9781465652836
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Plasencia was a square, medium-sized house of red brick, built some sixty years ago, in those days when architects knew a great deal about comfort, but cared so little about line that every house they designed, however spacious, was uncompromisingly a “villa.” Viewed from the front, it was substantial and home-like, and suggested, even in the height of summer, a “merry Christmas” and fire-light glinting off the leaves of holly; from the back, however, it had a look of instability, of somehow being not firmly rooted in the earth—a cumbersome Ark, awkwardly perched for a moment on Ararat, before plunging with its painted wooden crew into the flood, and sailing off to some fantastic port. It is possible that this effect was not wholly due to the indifferent draughtsmanship of the Victorian architect, for there is a hint of the sea in a delicate and boundless view, and the back of Plasencia lay open to the Eastern counties. Even the shadowy reticulation of a West-country valley, the spring bloom upon fields and woods, and red-brick villas that glorifies the tameness of Kent, are but poor things in comparison with the Eastern counties in September: yellow stripes of mustard, jade stripes of cabbage, stripes of old rose which is the earth, a suggestion of pattern given by the heaps of manure, and the innumerable shocks of corn, an ardent gravity given by the red-brown of wheat stubble, such as the red-brown sails of a fishing boat give to the milky-blue of a summer sea; here and there a patch of green tarpaulin, and groups of thatched corn-ricks—shadowy, abstract, golden, and yet, withal, homely edifices, like the cottages of those villages of Paradise whose smoke Herrick used to see in the distance. An agricultural country has this advantage over heaths and commons and pastoral land that the seasons walk across it visibly. On a particular afternoon in September, about three years ago, Teresa Lane sat in a deck-chair gazing at this view. She was a pallid, long-limbed young woman of twenty-eight, and her dark, closely-cropped hair emphasised her resemblance to that lad who, whether he be unfurling a map of Toledo, or assisting at the mysterious obsequies of the Conde de Orgas, is continually appearing in the pictures of El Greco. As she gazed, she thought of the Spanish adjective pintado, painted, which the Spaniards use for anything that is bright and lovely—flowers, views; and certainly this view was pintado, even in the English sense, in that it looked like a fresco painted on a vast white wall, motionless and enchanted against the restless, vibrating foreground. Winds from the Ural mountains, winds from the Atlantic celebrated Walpurgis-night on the lawn of Plasencia; and, on such occasions, to look through the riven garden, the swaying flowers and grasses, the tossing birch saplings, at the tranced fields of the view was to experience the same æsthetic emotion as when one looks at the picture of a great painter. But the back of Plasencia had another glory—its superb herbaceous border, which, waving banners of the same hues, only brighter, marched boldly into the view, and became one with it. Now in September it was stiffened by annuals: dahlias, astors, snapdragon, sunflowers; Californian poppies whose whiteness—at any rate in the red poppyland of East Anglia—always seems exotic, miraculous, suggesting the paradoxical chemical action of the Blood of the Lamb. There were also great clumps of violas, with petals of so faint a shade of blue or yellow that every line of their black tracery stood out clear and distinct, and which might have been the handiwork of some delicate-minded and deft-fingered old maid, expressing her dreams and heart’s ease in a Cathedral city a hundred years ago.
