We were driving back from Wales and a faint idea swelled in a matter of two or three miles into a chance that mustn’t be lost. It was a fine windy day – for weeks the wind had been tearing, rushing autumn forward across fields and gardens and stripping the trees which in calmer days might have made a longer showing. I slowed at the junction after Swindon, and turned off and soon we were into the narrow lanes that lead over towards Shrivenham and Woolpeck. The Downs in their dreamlike mutable way lay low at first, like a failure of memory. I said, ‘If I live as long as my mother, I’ve got twenty-three springs ahead of me.’ It was the way I’d reassured myself years ago as middle age set in – that there was as much time ahead as behind, and the charm still perilously held as the proportion dwindled.
‘By that measure,’ Richard said, ‘I’ve got one. Which way are we going?’
‘I thought we might get up on the hill for a bit, I don’t think you’ve ever seen that view.’ And in four or five minutes the Downs began to rise and occupy the lower sky, sublimely far off yet close at hand, with everything under them, farms and woods and folds in the land, shown to a new scale. The Byre was falling into shadow, the lone thornbush still a marker halfway down the slope, the crown of the hill radiant above in the late sun; the notch in the circuit of the Rings showed clear against the blue. It was more or less the view Cara had captured in the painting we have, and Richard said simply, ‘Ah, yes, I see . . .’
We came into Woolpeck on a lane that threaded through from the west and brought us to a T-junction by a row of thirties semis, the old council houses, gardens gravelled for cars now, roofs an up-to-date sheen of solar panels. I turned right out of instinct, unhappy for a moment at not knowing where I was. Then the road bore round steadily to the left and past the end of a barn and there across the meadow on Richard’s side was the farmhouse, the three gables and ten staring windows, the old bareness to it, and a feeling something further had been stripped away. My mind was absorbed in impressions beyond words, and I pulled up on the verge where the hedge was low enough for us to see across. ‘Yes . . .’ I said, staring and nodding, ‘my god . . . well, they seem to have got rid of the tennis court, and there was a huge hedge beyond it, and then the shed Cara used as a studio – that’s all gone.’ ‘Right . . .’ said Richard, ‘well, perhaps we should get out’: so we did, and as I gazed at the house I had a weird sense that we ourselves were being watched. I felt I had a somehow inadmissible purpose in being there, and when a woman came past with a dog and said, ‘Hello!’ in the country way I’d grown up with but abandoned in London I smiled and walked on as if we weren’t concerned with the house at all. But of course it was spellbinding, it stood off in the present as it possessed me from the past. If its setting looked bleaker and barer, at least to the right the picture was framed by the double line of beeches flanking the drive, the last leaves clinging on, heads as high as the roof of the barn beyond. ‘Those trees had just been planted when I first came here,’ I said.
‘Well, that was nearly fifty years ago, love,’ Richard said.
All trace of the Pollitts had gone – I felt this very clearly. Giles had let the farm, on a long lease, and the house had the ordinary unhaunted look of a place where a family get on with their busy lives, not thinking of the family who lived there before. We came to the gateway and looked in for a minute. There was a sense of order, of the proud but unsentimental use of a serious property. I felt the mystery of its self-containment, practical but private, engaged as it always had been in its own business, which was no business of ours. As we went back to the car and then drove on and up as far as we could, to the hikers’ car park, I tried to explain the presence of the place in my mind, its function, so habitual as to seem instinctive, visited innumerable times, little mental occasions, glimpse more than word, though particular words bring it back: chickenwire, Clytemnestra, plutocracy. When I hear even now of a coup d’état it is Ernest the Hereford bull that I see. The house itself is where any novel I’m reading is instantly set, the stage-set of sofa, rugs, table I’m crossing and speaking in has, in my mind alone, a view of the sunlit Downs from the window, a boot room unimaginable to the audience, and a high-fenced tennis court, like a further stage, waiting.
We were up at the Rings for the sunset – leaning on the wind, thrilling and awesomely accelerated from the strong winds of childhood – a breathless feeling of alarm at our new weather, whatever its episodic splendour. It was bleak, after a lifetime of fears defied, to face these further challenges, which after our death will be inescapable to others as death itself. I thought randomly, mere images of clever David Hadlow, radiant Nina Adeleke – in their middle years, as the whole globe combusts. Still, for now, the last sunlight, edging upwards across the Vale, lit the woods and hedgerows, ancient churches, cars on sidelights tiny in the far-off lanes, and turning homewards. ‘We’d better go down,’ said Richard, ‘before we get blown down.’ I took his arm, and we made our way, cautious then scuttling, off the steep grassy bank, and then on towards the car.