WHEN I LIE AWAKE

When I lie awake at night, the dreams that I have just had always lead my thoughts to ghosts, and my spirit flies out of the Gothic-revival window, over Kent, across the mist-wrapped fields, to a black pool on the edge of a dripping wood. I dip down deep into the black water and feel the rotting layers of leaves.

Then back away from the medieval dwelling and the red-brick Georgian farmhouse, up the narrow lane to the corner where gypsies have lived in their caravan for several months, close to the bald patch in the orchard where a flying bomb landed. They seem lost in the dream too: boys with their feet flung out, half in the ditch, half out; women with the most untrusting eyes on earth; children whose faces are like dinner-plates after dinner has been eaten; the modern clothes torn, twisted, arrayed into some quite other pattern.

Past these to the brow on Gover Hill, close to the house that the romantic have named Rats Castle, where two stone images guard the door; then down the newish avenue of trees, through the park to Oxon Hoath. To the west of the house is the Cedar Walk, spreading flat layers of green, like huge ancient fingers underneath grass, delicate and fine as towelling.

Push open the heavy cast-iron gate, the stone gate-pillar broken and knocked about by the soldiers, and then walk till you come to the edge of the banyard which is a corruption of the word ‘bagnio’.

On this shallow lake swans are swimming and the fish jump all the time, but so quickly that one can never see their heads or tails. A huge elm has fallen into the banyard and cannot be lifted; in its fall it crushed the boathouse, so that now a twist of wood and corrugated iron is all that remains. The cows in summer love this ruined spot to hide in from the sun and it smells of them the whole year round. There is a humped stone bridge with a stile at the bottom, with PRIVATE inscribed in an alarming red on one of the bars.

Climb up to the top of that bridge, where the boys have wantonly been knocking the stone ledging into the water, and from there look across the rushes and the water, up the curving meadows, where the cows are still browsing, to the old house all stone and early-nineteenth-century mansard roofing, with windows in the central domed piece.

The moon is rising now and the clouds that are near it, or scud across it, all have white haloes and cores of central smoky black. Then the old house winks its windows wickedly, blind eyes yet flashing. And in the rooms so still hang mirrors that have reflected two hundred years of faces. Think of them: child faces in a screaming fit, black with passion; young-girl faces wondering and dreaming like unwritten books; worn faces, taut and brooding; and ambitious faces all aglow yet afraid, waiting, hoping, planning. Thus face wipes out face, year after year, in the heart of the glass, until they form a terrifying clash. What can the glass think of all those faces, no respite from them, all filled with life, then fading?

Back away across the park, down the Alphabetical Avenue, each meagre unhealthy-looking tree’s name beginning with a different letter, until one sees the curved shape of the window, in again at it, shut it tight, draw the curtains, turn on the gas-fire and sit by it.