by Kate Morton
Leonard swam slowly back to the bank. It was another day, just like the one before.
Hora pars vitae. His Latin master had made them write it out in lines. Every hour is a part of life.
Serius est quam cogitas, said the sundial in France. A modest construction in the garden of a small church where Leonard’s unit had collapsed, spent, during a muddy retreat. It’s later than you think.
‘Come on, Dog.’ The hound leapt to his feet and Leonard noted again the animal’s remarkable gift for optimism. He’d shown up on Leonard’s first night at Birchwood Manor, almost a month ago now, and they’d adopted one another by unspoken mutual agreement. Hard to know what sort of dog he was: large, brownish, a strong, hairy tail with a mind of its own.
They walked back towards the house, Leonard’s shirt damp where it pressed against his skin. A pair of red-tailed kites was hovering like a magic act in the air above a wheat field and Leonard had a sudden flashback to the front. An enormous ruined mansion that they’d stayed at one night in France, collapsed on one side but intact on the other. There’d been a clock in the black-and-white hallway, a grandfather clock that tocked even louder at night, counting down the minutes, though to what he was never sure; there never seemed to be an end.
One of the men had found a violin upstairs, in a dusty room of books and peacetime pleasures, and he carried it down to the garden and started playing, a haunting piece that Leonard vaguely knew. War by its nature was surreal: events so shocking that they could never become normal; further shock when inevitably they did. Day after day of dissonance as the old reality and the new sat side by side, as men who’d only months before been printers and shoemakers and clerks found themselves loading bullets into guns and dodging rats in waterlogged trenches.
To Leonard’s mind there had been no irony so great in the whole four-year stretch as that afternoon spent listening to violin music in a summery garden, while less than a mile away shells exploded and men lay dying. There had been falcons circling in the distant sky then: peregrine falcons, high above the action. They were unmoved by what was happening in the fields below. The mud and blood and slaughter, the senseless waste. They had the long memory of birds; they had seen it all before.
Humans could look back across time now, too. All it had taken was a war. Another irony: that the very aerial photography developed to help bombers cause maximum destruction was now being deployed by cartographers to reveal wondrous geographical preservation on the earth below.
Wars were useful like that, apparently. Leonard’s old school friend Anthony Baxter had told him so over a pint some months back. Necessity was the mother of invention, he’d said, and there was nothing so motivating as the need to survive. Anthony worked in manufacturing – some sort of new material replacing glass. There was a lot of money to be made, he’d continued, his cheeks flushed with ale and greed, if a fellow allowed himself to think creatively.
Leonard despised money. That is, he despised the quest to possess it. In his view, the only positive to be drawn from the war was the realisation of how little a man actually needed to survive. How little the rest of it mattered. All of those abandoned grandfather clocks; people who simply closed the doors on their mansions and fled with their families in search of safety. What was real, he knew now, was the soil beneath a man’s feet. The earth, the natural world, from which could be derived every necessity, and on which were preserved the imprints of every man, woman and child that had ever lived.
Before he came to Birchwood Manor, Leonard had purchased a couple of Ordnance Survey maps from Stanfords on the Long Acre, taking in the spread of Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire. One could make out Roman roads etched into the chalk by millennia-old footfalls, crop circles where ditched enclosures once stood, parallel ridges made by medieval ploughs. Stretching back further still, the capillary networks of Neolithic mortuary enclosures could be seen; marks left during the last Ice Age.
The earth was the ultimate museum, recording and presenting a narrative of time, and this area, the Ridgeway – the chalk of the Salisbury Plain, the Cerne Abbas Giant, the Uffington White Horse – was particularly tractable. Chalk was more resistant to slumping than clay; it had a better memory. Leonard knew chalk. It had been one of his jobs in France to tunnel under the battlefield; he’d trained at Larkhill in Wiltshire, learned how to build listening posts and sit for hours with a stethoscope pressed against the cold earth. And then, pitching in with the New Zealanders, he’d dug the real thing beneath the city of Arras. Weeks on end in the dark, candles for light and a bucket turned brazier through the coldest stretch of winter.
Leonard knew chalk.
Britain was an ancient isle, a place of ghosts, and every acre could lay claim to being a landscape of legacy, but this part was particularly rich. Layers of human habitation could be glimpsed within the same parcel of land: prehistoric, Iron Age, medieval; and now, Great War tunnelling practice, too. The Thames snaked its way across the middle of the map, rising as a series of trickling headsprings in the Cotswolds and widening as it progressed. Tucked within a fork made by a slender tributary was the village of Birchwood. Not too far away, on a ridge, there ran a track, straighter than nature usually drew, a ley line. Leonard had read Alfred Watkins, and the account given by William Henry Black to the British Archaeological Association in Hereford, speculating that such ‘grand geometrical lines’ linked Neolithic monuments all over Britain and Western Europe. They were the old paths, forged thousands of years ago, magical, powerful, sacred.
The mysterious and mystical past was what had drawn Edward Radcliffe and the others to the area during the summer of 1862. It had also led, in part, to Radcliffe’s initial purchase of the house. Leonard had read the manifesto many times, and also the letters Radcliffe wrote to his friend and fellow artist Thurston Holmes. Unlike Radcliffe, who had drifted into relative obscurity after his fiancée died, his professional memory upheld only by a core group of devoted enthusiasts, Holmes had continued to paint and enjoy public life well into his seventies. He had died only recently, leaving his correspondence and journals to posterity, and Leonard had made a number of trips to the University of York, spending weeks combing through them for anything that might cast new light on Edward Radcliffe’s connection to the house at Birchwood.
In a letter sent in January 1861, Radcliffe had written:
I have bought a house. A rather charming house, which although not grand is of elegant proportions. It sits like a humble, dignified bird, within its own bend of the river, on the edge of a woods by a small but perfectly formed village. And, Thurston, there is more. I will not commit it to paper here, but will wait until next we meet, saying only that there is something else within the house that draws me, something old and essential and not entirely of this world. It has called to me for a long time, you see, for my new house and I are not strangers.
Radcliffe had not elaborated then and there, and although Leonard knew from further research that he’d lived in the area for a time as a boy, there was some mystery as to precisely what had led him to the house, and when: Radcliffe had made veiled references on a couple of occasions to a boyhood experience that was both ‘life-changing’ and ‘haunting’, but thus far Leonard had not been able to ascertain its true nature. Whatever the case, something had happened; Radcliffe was not willing to discuss it; and the event had played an important part in his obsession with – and possession of – Birchwood Manor. In December 1860, he’d sold every painting he had and made an agreement with a benefactor to provide six paintings in exchange for the final two hundred pounds necessary. Armed with the purchase amount, he’d signed the contract and, at last, Birchwood Manor and its surrounding acres were his.
Dog let out a small bark of anticipation and Leonard followed his gaze. He had been expecting to see a cluster of ducks or geese, but instead there was a couple walking towards them, a man and a woman. Lovers, that much was clear.
As Leonard watched, the man laughed at something the woman had
said; the hearty noise cut through the other morning sounds and earned him a sharp elbow to the ribs.
The woman was smiling, and Leonard found himself smiling faintly, too, as he observed them. They were so shiny and unbroken, the pair of them, their outlines so clear. They walked as if they had a perfect right to be in the world; as if they didn’t doubt for a second that they belonged right here and now.
Leonard knew himself by comparison to be thin and transparent, and his deficiency made him shy. He didn’t know that he could face a cheery ‘Good morning’ exchange; he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to summon the words or whether a simple nod would suffice. He had never been particularly easy in social situations, even before the war hollowed him out.
There was a stick on the ground, a lovely piece of blond wood, and Leonard picked it up, weighing it in his hand.
‘Hey, Dog, come on, boy, fetch.’
Leonard hurled the stick across the meadow and Dog set off in delighted pursuit, the man and woman forgotten.
Turning his back on the river, Leonard followed. The peaks of Birchwood Manor’s twin gables were visible above the top of the willows lining the Hafodsted Brook, and Leonard noticed that one of the attic windows was catching the sun so that its glass panes looked to be alight.
When Leonard went up to Oxford as an eighteen-year-old, he hadn’t imagined for a second that he would end up focusing his research on Radcliffe and a four-hundred-year-old house in a sleepy corner of the country. But then, a lot of what had happened in the intervening fifteen years went beyond the scope of Leonard’s youthful imagination. Truth be told, in 1913 he hadn’t imagined much of anything with respect to his academic studies. He’d gone up to Oxford because he was an intelligent boy from a certain class; there’d been little more to it than that. He’d opted to read History at Christ Church college because he liked the lawn and the grand stone building that overlooked the meadow. It was during a first-year introductory class that he met Professor Harris and discovered modern art.
What had been a random choice transformed rapidly into a passion. Leonard had been ablaze with the courage and effect of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, the splintering confrontation of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; he’d read Marinetti late into the night, and travelled down to London to see the Umberto Boccioni exhibition at the Doré Gallery. The irony of the readymade, Duchamp’s bicycle wheel upon its stool, was a revelation, and Leonard was infused with optimism. He craved innovation, worshipped speed and invention, embraced new ideas about space and time and their representation; he felt as if he’d crested a giant wave and was gliding at its top into the future.
But 1914 rolled on and one night his brother came to visit him at the college. They had plans to dine in town but Tom suggested a walk first on the meadow. It was summer and warm, and the light lingered, and Tom became nostalgic, talking rapidly about the past, their childhood, so that Leonard knew at once that something was afoot. Then, as they sat down at the restaurant table: ‘I’ve enlisted.’
With those two words, the war that had been brewing in the mastheads of newspapers was suddenly in the room with them.
Leonard hadn’t wanted to go. Unlike Tom, he didn’t seek adventure; not of that kind. He’d had to struggle to feel even a tickle of duty. What business was it of his if a trigger-happy madman in Sarajevo took a disliking to an Austrian archduke in a feathered hat? Leonard had resisted saying as much to anyone, not least his mother and father, who were tearfully proud of Tom’s new uniform, but he couldn’t help but think it was a terrible inconvenience that war should start right when he’d discovered his passion.
But.
He figured.
How long could it last?
It would be a brief interruption, a new experience that would only feed his ability to perceive the world from different standpoints; he would be able to study mechanisation and modernity up close …
No point dwelling on the hows and wherefores. Tom was going to France and Leonard had gone, too.
Five years later, he returned to a country and a world that he no longer knew.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
London after the war had been a shock. History had the last laugh and Leonard was confronted with change and progress on a scale he could never have anticipated. Not just the world, but also the people in it. Large-faced people he didn’t recognise loomed, all of them eager to dance and to celebrate, to laugh like goats, to shed their long hair and old-fashioned ways, and anything else that might tie them to the past and the long misery of war.
Leonard took a bedsit at the top of a building near the Holloway Road. There was a pig in the small back garden and a train tunnel deep in the bowels of the earth beneath. He’d spotted the pig when he made his inspection, but hadn’t known about the trains until after he’d paid his first month in full and was sitting with a glass of ale and a cigarette at the small wooden desk beside his bed. It was right on dusk – always a fidgety time for Leonard, when even the light could not be trusted – and he’d thought the place was being shelled, that there’d been a terrible mistake and the war wasn’t over at all; but it had only been the train. In his panic, he’d knocked his beer off the desk and earned a sharp rap of the broom end against his floor from the woman in the room beneath.
Leonard had tried to move with the times, but rather than being footloose and fancy-free he’d found himself merely unrooted. Everyone was drinking too much, but where others were made merry, Leonard became maudlin. He would be invited to a club at night and arrive with the best of intentions: he’d wear a new suit and school himself to stay upbeat, to listen and to nod, even to smile sometimes. Invariably, though, at some point in the evening, having allowed himself to be drawn into conversation, Leonard would hear himself speaking of the friends he’d lost, the way they still came to him in the stillness of the bedsit, or in the mirror when he was shaving, sometimes even in the half-light of the evening street, where he’d hear the tread of their boots behind him.
In the clatter of the club, he would find the other people at his table staring at him askance when he spoke like that, turning their backs in wounded delicacy, as if they couldn’t understand why he’d set out to ruin their fun. Even when he wasn’t speaking of his lost friends, Leonard lacked the silvery flint of frivolous conversation. He was too earnest. Too straight. The world was a bubble now, thin and glistening, and everyone else had found their way inside. But Leonard was too heavy for the bubble. He was a man out of time: too old to be one of the spirited young people and too young to fit in with the hopeless drunkards who lined the river. He felt a connection to nothing and to nobody.
One afternoon, standing on the Charing Cross Bridge as the boats and the people went back and forth, he had a chance encounter with his old professor, who was on his way to the National Gallery. Professor Harris had invited Leonard to join him and then spoken amiably about art and life and people they had both once known, as Leonard listened and nodded, turning the anecdotes over in his mind like vaguely diverting relics. When they rounded the corner into the Renaissance rooms, and the professor suggested that Leonard might think about resuming his studies, the words were as a foreign language. Even if Leonard could have seen his way back to the disconcertingly beautiful buildings of Oxford, modernism was dead: Boccioni had been killed in 1916 and French critics were agitating now for a ‘return to order’. All of the youth and vitality of the movement had ebbed away with Leonard’s own, and lay buried now amidst the bones and mud.
But he needed to do something. London was too fast and too loud, and an urgency grew within Leonard to escape. He felt it building like the pressure before a thunderstorm: his eardrums hurt with it; his legs became restless. He woke at night in a sweat, as the night trains shuddered his bedhead and the thin painted woman in the room below slammed her door after a rowdy customer. The fine black wings of panic enwrapped his throat and he prayed that they would squeeze harder and finish the job. He found himself tracing the p
aths in his mind that he had taken as a child – that he and Tom had taken together, over the brick wall at the bottom of the garden, through the shrubbery, along the lane that dwindled to nothing as it crossed the meadow towards the woods. ‘Run with me, Lenny.’ He heard it more and more often, but when he turned he saw only old men in bars, and young boys on street corners, and mean, skinny alley cats that followed him with their glass eyes.
Before his lease was ended, he slipped two months’ rent into the glass on the desk and left his bedsit, left London on one of the trains that rattled past the little windows of other people’s lives. His own family’s house was smaller than he remembered, more down at heel, but it smelled the same and that was no bad thing. His mother reopened his boyhood bedroom, but she didn’t do anything about the empty bed on the far wall. Countless conversations hung in the corners, silent by day but loud at night, so that Leonard sat bolt upright sometimes and turned on the lamp, certain that he’d catch his brother grinning at him from the other bed. He could hear the springs beneath its mattress creaking in the dark as the memory of his brother shifted in sleep.
Their old toys and books were still on the shelf – the set of wooden soldiers, the spinning top, the well-worn box of Snakes and Ladders; and Leonard reread H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. It had been his favourite story when he was thirteen; Tom’s, too. Their dreams had all been of the future then, the two of them fantasising about climbing through time to see what wonders lay ahead. Now, though, Leonard found himself always looking backwards. Sometimes he simply sat with the book in his hands, marvelling at its solidity and shape. What a dignified object was a book, almost noble in its purpose.