The snow began to melt as our plane landed at Oslo, although wet snow had still been falling when we passed through Bergen. The next day the sun sailed high into a clear sky and the northern summer began between one hour and the next. We took the boat from the landing stage behind the town hall to Bygdøy, the peninsula of museums and reticent, substantial houses. Restaurant gardens running down to the water. Fresh white paint already on the fences by the landing stage.
The streets were flooded with new sunlight. The grass was dust-brown, just emerged from the snow. Birch trees racing into leaf, classical villas in painted wood, windows thrown open to the warm air. And at the end of every empty street, the shaking brilliance of the water.
Then the two rich boys passed, running at an easy pace, like a film, like a vision. Absolute privilege in their perfections of haircut and dentistry. Sons of ambassadors, inheritors of forest castles, moving through the world but not of it, moving towards their evenings of showers, cologne, white clothes, dinner at oval tables overlooking the sea, a pale yacht steered through the long dusk to far islands in the archipelago.
And we lumbered on to the Ship Museum: the haunting photographs of the labourers cutting the great keels free from their mounds. Tatters of embroidery, their colour and substance gone to nothing with time, the rags which the Osberg Queen had taken with her into the dark.
Bø in Telemark. A wooden house above a mountain lake, a place of stillness and constancy. To pass a whole life here (never travelling south, never troubling Europe) would be one possibility for a life lived well. Fine gradations mark this turn of the year to spring: the glass of the lake rising a little with the snow melt; steel drifts of ice on water like mercury. The first wood-anemones on the scrubbed table which runs the length of the room. Then yellow clouds of birch pollen move in the brightening air, light draws out, the table is set below the quick shadows of leaves through the endless evenings. Inside, broad, green-painted planks line the low rooms, and a precise cone of birch logs burns in the corner fireplace.
And always, the blue in the distance, ‘seven blues’, sevenfold recessions of mountains.
Lysefjord. Warm air from the sun-baked granite, cold air coming down from above, from the snows still lying on the tops of the fells. Warm and cold air in strands mingle around the boat on the water, coiling around my forearms, the strands of warm and cold absolutely distinct.
Soft rain in warm mist had turned Bath dim and menacing, stewing in its basin of hills. Noise on the train made it impossible to work, enforcing desperate thoughts of the insane tally of words which I had undertaken to write by the end of August. Then the slow bus from Bath to Downside: moving through deep combes in the sombre, storm-hovering afternoon, the air rank with the smell of elder and the soft-flowered bushes brushing against the windows in the narrow lanes.
The walk from the village street up the drive into the other England: the staircase temporarily deserted, the keys trustingly in the doors, a note of welcome on the Regency desk in the guest room, panic temporarily abating as heavy air resolved into rain over the towers of the Abbey.
The next day, Dame Margaret was speaking of relics: the smell of the body of Dom Augustine Lawson, like peppermint, a sweet smell of peppermint.
From a letter to my friend in the south:
Moving to midsummer in Aberdeenshire under boringly clouded skies – so that when I took the dog out at midnight last night, I could only really see an afterglow in the greyish sky rather than the white night which we might have expected. It has been one of those weeks dominated by weather – continual massing of thunderclouds, thickening of air, more thickening of air, then nothing. (A kind of weather which Simon Armitage writes about beautifully in A Book of Matches – heavy, glassy air at midsummer.) A whole week of an uneasy, sleepy sense that a million things need to be done and are not being done. I fear I have really sleepwalked through most of it, waiting for the storm to break and wake me.
A long drive across Kent, under blinding sun. Tile-hung villages, sandwiches and little tarts of fresh strawberries eaten by a shadowy pond. Remoteness of the coast north of Dover, the nostalgic trimness of the narrow streets of Deal. My wife interviewed Edward Burra’s courteous godson there: notes for a biography. He was perched in a terraced house opposite the castle, planning to leave England for good before another winter came. The fine manners of the 1950s made it clear, to the second, when the visit was over. So we were turned loose into the afternoon streets, and found our way towards the sea and the pier. A great curve of shingle beach, the houses on the esplanade alternating English marine stucco with Dutch brick gables.
Chalk cliffs to the south of us, their glimmer not moonlight but heat haze. More chalk cliffs to the south-east, near across calm water: the coast of France. As astonishing and troubling as the sight of the hills of County Antrim from Kintyre, an easy crossing, an unexpected point of nearness. In an autumn afternoon of storms and shifting mists and lights, would France flicker in and out of sight at the end of the wind-hollowed tunnels of cloud? A momentary imagination of this seafront on a winter night during the great wars of the last century: gunfire sounding over the water, the shore fouled and trapped with concrete blocks and wires, the belligerent picturesque of Eric Ravilious.
By the kindness of his family, I looked through some of Ravilious’s pre-war letters in the Record Office at Lewes later the same week, an afternoon snatched from the notebooks and photocopies which accompanied me wherever I went. In the dimmed, hot reading room, the letters became as immediate as a dream, a medium through which to enter the days of 1934, days of 1935, days of 1936. An irrecoverable Essex of great trees and flint villages. Time passing with an amplitude unimaginable now, even in dog days when the sky burns to white and the afternoon stretches out with the smell of dust and roses in the streets.
Ravilious noticed everything: the gradations of rust and soot on a tar-engine put away for the winter; the room in the opposite house in Castle Headingham, white-panelled with the Beatitudes painted in blue and red. His imagination decorated a railway bridge for the Jubilee of 1935, as in his own seaside murals at Morecambe, with an airy scaffolding strung with flags.
He bought a corduroy workman’s waistcoat, the last in stock in the village shop. He dressed in the colours of his paintings: a sweater in billiard-table green, an ochre-brown tie. He played snooker and cycled between the flat fields to visit friends in the next village. One summer day, he simply reported, ‘I’ve no news. Nothing’s happened.’
The heat persisted long after the Record Office had closed: heat trapped in the bricks of the lanes around the castle, heat blurring the outline of the downs above the garden of the pub at Berwick, where, twenty years ago, there was no bar and the beer was fetched in jugs from the kitchen.
The last week of July in a borrowed cottage in the north of Cumberland. Our absent host kept his father’s brass telescope at the window of his attic study, trained on Scotland across the water. A church amongst cornfields, with a curious eighteenth-century inscription tablet giving the birthplaces of the rector and his wife by the names of the tribal divisions of ancient Britain. An odd and lonely posting out on the slopes down towards the Solway, with the Calvinist hills of Scotland looming across the estuary.
A shaded lane with few houses: a post box in a wall half a mile away. Views over the cornfields and across the Solway at every gap in the deep hedges. A field-path beyond the lane, with a runnel of water beside it, its channel in deep shade under the branches of the hawthorns. One bend in the stream breaks forward into the sunlight and the water draws the light into itself, reflecting up onto the undersides of the leaves. Cotman might have painted it, as he painted the drop-gate over the stream in Duncombe Park or the runnels and tree-brash on the Greta. As in his pictures, this thread of water in sunlight is everything and nothing, a sliver of light on a ditch and the distillation of England.
One day we went up into the North Pennines, a respite from the flawless warmth of the plain, to see the installations a contemporary sculptor had made in the lead mining museum amongst the spar boxes assembled by the Victorian miners. This included a private expedition into the top level of the mine itself, the flooded horse-level, where he had placed great doors of lapis and gold to glimmer in splendour at the end of the tunnel. Near these resplendent portals of the dark, a candlelit chamber hewn out of the whinstone held a great water-driven wheel, a pumping-engine. It was still working with its splash and creak, one of the same machines that is illustrated in the sixteenth-century treatise on mining in the Old Library at Aberdeen, the same machines which filled the imagination of the adolescent Auden. Then the flawless, unrelenting weather continued on the plain of the Solway as I worked with my back to the brilliant windows, to fields where they were already taking in the harvest.
On to the house which an old friend has inherited in northernmost Yorkshire: a handsome cube of eighteenth-century stone, four square rooms on each floor. A fine pedimented doorcase. Heart-wrenching views of green dale, stone wall and thorn tree from every window. A grand house in miniature, fine in every last detail. Perhaps a dower house for the widow of a substantial farmer. In a hamlet of good stone houses, up on the hill above the market town, a beguiling but mysterious group, including an extraordinary mid-Victorian fantasy in Oxford Gothic. What can have led people with means to have built this elegant rookery for themselves up on the hill, in the teeth of the wind and the glory of the light?
If I were English, there would be nowhere I would better like to live.
We walk down the hill on Saturday evening, past the cheese factory and through a back gate into the steep churchyard, then down to the Anglican church to hear the Roman Mass, a wholly sensible arrangement in such a remote place. We pause on the way back at the grave of my friend’s spouse to say the usual prayers for the dead, then look up to the enfolding hills in the prodigious, bright air.
What a beautiful house it is to come back to – still the explorer and traveller’s base-camp that it has been for decades. Small stones from the far shores of the world; books everywhere: cricket and spirituality. Black-and-white photographs of poets and Rugby League teams. A lectern by the study window with binoculars and the Psalms, a view up the fell to a field barn riding the skyline like a tower in a dream.
In the middle of the evening the sheer force of accumulated and unfinished work does for me in illness and exhaustion: two bad days running a fever in a spare room. Then back down into Cumbria from the hauntingly remote moorland station at Garsdale. A building or two and the platforms right up on the moors, with the archaic maroon-red paint of the Settle to Carlisle railway. A place from Auden’s early poems, from the world of John Buchan thrillers: joining joking at the junction on the moor.
By the end of August the book was done, and the turn of the year was suddenly marked by the appearance of a great basket of chanterelles in the grocer’s shop at Aberlour. I walked with Andrew to the suspension bridge over the Spey, to a familiar place of solace where the river rattles broad and fast over the stones, too tired to see or hear, too tired to drive home. A dinner party the next night. After a last perambulation of the starlit and lantern-lit garden, I was awake at dawn, too tired to sleep and for a moment too tired to go on in any way, to go on at all.
Then the epilogue, a casual excursion to the Low Countries. Planned and undertaken in a state of lassitude and unreality, of neither knowing nor caring what to do next, all worsened by the exhaustions of travel in the late-summer ‘state of emergency’. Drifting through the Netherlands in a condition of hallucination, revisiting places best-known from autumn afternoons and winter twilights fifteen years ago, and seeing them all in the deadly even light of the windless days. Streets in Delft, Leiden, the Hague: uniform, sunlit, unfrequented, otherworldly.
The strangeness intensifies once the sky had darkened from dried-lavender to green to black: the canal-streets in Delft extravagantly quiet, the streetlights slung between the trees. The first leaves are turning despite the warmth of the air. The whole effect is romantic-revival – pleasure-gardens, a park illuminated for a festival.
But in a month there will be mist; earlier dark. The little patrician houses will still be spilling regular stripes of light from the windows of small rooms grandly appointed. Why is there no Dutch tradition of ghost stories? These streets, in the silence and their antiquity, are a natural setting for them. A disoriented visitor wandering these shadowy regular canals and seeing horrors through a curtainless window would, of course, be unable to find the house in the light, although able to find it all too readily as soon as dark returned.
Disquiet attends a banquet-picture of a swan in the Mauritshuis, the shape of the bird is re-formed on top of a pie presumably made of its flesh. The beak is gilded, with a glass bauble hanging from it; on its head, a crown of flowers like the crowns in Mexican paintings of nuns on the day of their profession, the flowers not looking like real flowers so much as like the feather-work made by enclosed religious communities; the flowers which materialise at seances.
Southwards in the same unvaried, purgatorial exhaustion: sleepwalking through the familiar beauties of the Spanish Netherlands and seeing only details – a black cat amongst lavender in a restaurant garden, a gilded ship at the apex of a gable. The eye slid over sumptuous, beloved acres of Rubens, barely engaging at all. In the relentlessly hot saloons of the gallery at Antwerp the only picture which seemed wholly real was a Magritte, a rising moon tangled in dusty late-summer foliage with blue dusk behind. The picture is titled with its date: 16 September, 1956. Fifty years later, there was nobody else observing its birthday, nobody else in the ground-floor galleries, nor in the bookshop nor cafés, and only sunlight and dust in the avenues outside.
In the Jesuit church of St Ignatius (now St Charles Borromeo) there were all the familiar, beguiling subtleties of the Counter-Reformation. Panels of figured stone flanking the side altars, so that the markings of the marble formed fantastic rock-scapes and hermitages for the painted figures of the saints which inhabited them. The grain plants and seed heads of the new world, cut in marble, intermingled with the eucharistic corn and grapes on the altar rails. There was even a great altar cloth in one of the sacristies off the galleries, with the life of St Ignatius worked in point-lace. The kind of minor flowering of the Baroque sensibility which usually interests me most, here passed across vision and mind without anything connecting or remaining.
But a door suddenly opened into the garden behind the Rubens house, throwing into relief a vine branch with the sunlight caught in the edges of the leaves. Awake and alive for a moment, the thought came that all happiness, all ease, was concentrated and held in that brilliance behind the leaves. We could have gone farther south, the trains so quick, so easy – we had time in hand, but no strength. Misty rain started to fall as we left Rotterdam and the heat began to falter, then the airports like nightmares and a taxi home through the dark. We woke in the north to the little winds on the surface of the lake and the leaves already turning on the wide trees.