4

I know few people in these parts now, the local population having changed character since my childhood, the old indigenous families mostly gone, their houses bought by incomers. Some of the older residents of the valley remember me, however, from my visits as a child, when I holidayed here every summer. Morgan, for example, the farmer in whose field – at the edge of whose field – the blue tent is currently pitched: he remembers me.

When I arrived for my aunt’s funeral last year he greeted me sadly, with a blast of whisky breath, and reached out a bony hand – as gnarled as the ancient hawthorn – as if, incongruously, to ruffle my hair, as one might a child’s, before returning with a start to the present, his eyes glistening with unwept tears, a man of a race and generation not given to outbreaks of emotion, yet demonstrably moved at that moment by the passing of my aunt, a spinster – a term deceptive in its associations – perhaps remembering those summers long ago when I had been a childhood visitor to the house, or, retreating deeper along the rheumatoid and foggy corridors of things unrecoverable, to those yet more remote days when he was a farmer’s lad and she a rebellious, wilful, young woman. He withdrew his hand slowly, reluctantly, so overwhelming was the memory and so inexorable the onset of age and the proximity of death, especially on this occasion, a funeral, refuting the passage of the years, the decades, realising that the man standing before him was himself – myself – approaching middle age and that such a tender gesture might be inappropriate, or at the least, misunderstood; and I do not believe he made that gesture consciously, rather that it had been a reflex response to seeing me, however much I too had changed, so lost was he for an instant in the vortex between the long ago and the indisputable present, and although to pat the head of a child would be acceptable, to pat the head of a child who has long since become a man would be regarded as the sign of an ailing mind.

I know few people, but am not lonely. Loneliness is not to be confused with being alone, with solitude sought out and cherished, even jealously guarded, just as I, at this moment, was protective of my little domain and for that reason suspicious of the uninvited appearance of the blue tent. Solitude could be a hard-won gift, and its disruption, or even the threat of its upset was, I realised, already taking shape, wiggling its way into my thoughts. Even the visit of the postman was an event: people who live isolated lives become like this, we get fractious about any disturbance in the predictable pattern of our days.

Although the pace of my life here is slow, my days are by no means idle.

I made my living, until last year, as a writer of articles and travel guides about places I had never visited (as well, to be fair, of a few that I had). It’s very easy to do this, thanks to the Internet. I’ve given all that up now, apart from the occasional book review or travel piece, but I am never short of things to do, and in the library, where I spend the greater part of my days, there are many books to read. I must confess, however, that the more I look at the books that line the shelves, the more perplexed I become. I have this compulsion to find things out, to expand my understanding of the world, but at times it becomes difficult for me to identify what, precisely, those things are. Sometimes it is as if the pursuit of knowledge were a mirage, that every objective is forever in flight, throwing up behind it a string of false clues in the form of ‘texts’ that lead one further and further from any kind of satisfactory intellectual resolution. Perhaps literary study of this kind is, by definition, an unending exercise in digression, the pursuit of ever-multiplying footnotes. Could this have been the course of activity that Megan had been proposing for me with her cryptic note – ‘One book opens the other?’

It goes without saying that none of the literary tasks that occupy me provides sufficient income to make a decent living – nothing near it – but with the money I received from my aunt’s inheritance, I have more than enough to get by, and my needs are relatively simple.

From the start I have imposed on myself a schedule, and my workplace is the library. I try to maintain a routine for a very good reason: since moving to Llys Rhosyn I have begun to suffer from insomnia, and have discovered that unless I set myself a timetable of some kind, my days are likely to fall apart, and night and day form one seamless trajectory. At night I sleep little, or not at all, passing most of the hours of darkness curled up in an armchair in the library, or else stretched out on the sofa in the living room, attempting to read, or watching DVDs from Megan’s collection. British films from the 1940s are my current favourite – as they were Megan’s staple – and though occasionally drifting into semi-consciousness, I never manage to achieve deep, healing sleep. In consequence, during the day, I often slump at my desk, or else succumb to slumber in the very armchair in which my aunt expired, only to wake half an hour later; and although not refreshed, I go about my business, but without enthusiasm or energy, for sleeplessness drains a person in more than a purely physical sense.

Time spent alone moves at a different speed to time spent in the company of others. It shifts in jolts and spurts, and there are long lacunae in which the overwhelming patience of the natural world serves as a constant reminder of one’s own insignificance, and whatever endeavour you have in mind, whatever tasks you set yourself, take place against the backdrop of an unyielding constancy, a reminder that despite, or because of, the changing of the seasons, the fall of leaves in autumn, the abundance of flora and excitation of birdlife in the spring, all is subject to repetition; a process of eternal return.

Seated at the big desk in the library I am able to look out over the landscape, which from this vantage point does not include the field or the tent but rather the woods that lie to the west of the house, these woods that I have known all my life, have walked in, spying on deer, collecting mushrooms in autumn and observing, when I am lucky, the nocturnal activities of badgers, or of a family of foxes, one in particular, the dog fox, who ventures out of the woods at sunset, crossing the dirt and gravel driveway where my car is parked, occasionally stopping to sniff the air before continuing on his missions of plunder and forage. I see the fox more frequently than I ever see Morgan, my neighbour.

I stare out of the big, latticed window at the woods of beech and alder that bank the hillside. The buzzard, my buzzard, is hovering at some distance from the highest trees when, with a flurry of wing-beat and a terrible shrieking, a posse of crows, a murder of crows falls upon it, flapping from the upper reaches of the woods, making their hateful sounds, harrying and feinting, closing in on him with their sharp beaks, swooping on the buzzard, which dives away, possibly injured, I cannot tell. How terrible, I think, to be set upon by crows, up there in the sky.