“I thought about that, Ems,” I replied. “It’ll be really busy at the weekend, and you’ll be bored. I’m going to be sitting reading from the diary for ages. It’s just a short bus ride.”
Emily dried a plate with a mauve-striped towel.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’ll leave after you in the morning. Be back before you’re home. You won’t even know I’ve been gone.” Just like all the times I did not even know she had been gone.
“You’ll have to tell me all about it when I get home, then.”
She put down the plate and towel, and gave me a hug.
“I need to do some paperwork,” she said. “Just disturb me if you want me.”
I did not want her, not that evening. Purple, yellow.
Everything was white. The snow had started during the night, whilst Emily and I slept, or whilst I slept, at least. Emily often stayed up, working. Occasionally I woke to the sound of her talking on the telephone, too quietly to hear individual words, and she always told me it was America, and the time difference made it necessary, and I should be sleeping, and she said goodnight and kissed me on the forehead as though I were a child, and perhaps I was. And in the morning everything was white.
Emily was leaving as I came downstairs. She suggested I postpone my trip but I could hear the cars out on the High Street, and see little patches of stone cake showing through the icing on the garden wall. I shrugged and wandered off to make a cup of coffee, to the slamming of the front door and a fragile crunching as Emily made her way down the path.
The bus left from outside the Café of Our Little Round Lady and took about thirty minutes to get to Barbroke village, another Cotswold collection of postcard cottages with thatched roofs, a post office which sold souvenir tea towels, and an antique shop with the blinds down. “Reopening in January,” read a note on the shop door, although it could have been years old: the shop could have closed during the war and never reopened. By the single road running through the village, just past a straggling pub, two gatehouses stood either side of a driveway which turned to the north. One of them had the appearance of a home whilst the other lacked roof and windows. In front of the derelict shell I found a green sign with gold lettering. Ahead, it told passers-by, lay Barbroke, family seat of the Fitzpatricks, which could be enjoyed for £4.50 on any day of the week during the spring and summer months, or Thursday to Saturday during autumn and winter. The text was accompanied by a sun-bleached sketch of a stately home, which did little to raise the spirits.
I took the diary from my satchel and opened it at a bookmark made from an old envelope: the day of Penelope’s arrival. She did not have much to say. The train from London “had progressed at a snail’s pace” and it was late at night by the time the carriage met her at the station and took her to the house, where Diana was waiting. Cook had a supper prepared for her, which she ate at the kitchen table with Diana, and then she went to bed, pausing only to write a few blunt sentences. The approach to the house was mine to discover.
As I passed close to the habitable gatehouse the front door opened and an old man stepped out, smoking a pipe. He took it from his mouth and pointed the stem along the driveway.
“Won’t be open while another forty minutes or so.”
“Well, I suppose the walk will take me a little while. I shan’t hurry.”
“You can stop at chapel. They open it early. Stop on way to the big house in mornings, and on way back.”
“Thank you. I’ll do that. It must be warmer in there than out here.”
“Not much.”
He retreated into the house.
“Nice to meet you. Thank you,” I said, but I was talking to a closed door.
The curve of the approach quickly straightened and I found myself walking down a wide avenue towards a free-standing, stone triumphal arch, about half a mile away. On either side, visible through the bleached branches of trees, the landscape lay beneath a tenuous mist. The arch was oddly out of place in the quiet morning of Barbroke, asking me to look upon it and despair whilst the lone and level fields stretched far away. I had thought that it would frame the house, but the ground sloped upwards for another few hundred yards before dropping out of sight. It left behind a view of distant hills, pale in the sallow sun, dissolving into the avenue as though I had caught them in their march to the village behind me.
A red-brick wall marked the edge of a graveyard with a vernacular parish church at its centre. A weathered sign read, “Church of Saint Cecilia,” and gave the times of services, which were held on the first and third Sundays of the month. If the doors were locked, it informed the would-be palmer, then the keys could be found with Mrs Tompkins, who ran the ticket office at Barbroke and could be contacted by telephone. The accompanying number had too few digits to have been updated within the past twenty years. A piece of paper, wrapped in plastic and fastened with drawing pins, made it abundantly clear that the building and cemetery were not the property of the estate. I passed through a rusting metal gate which filled the world with its shrieking, and walked down the short path between the graves.
The church was made of the same pale stone as the arch, but weathering and hints of Norman architecture showed it to be much older. The man at the gatehouse had been right: the roof was still white with snow. I gave up hope of finding much warmth within.
Inside, the air hung still and expectant and swallowed up the sound of my footsteps on the worn paving slabs. Carved mediæval figures in loose-fitting robes marched around the base of the font which stood to my left. Its elaborate wooden cover was attached to the roof beams by a system of ropes and pulleys which ended in a complex, improvised knot tied around a metal peg in the door jamb. Next to the peg, set into the wall, a rusted metal box clasped a modern padlock beneath a small hole for donations. My twenty-pence piece made a hollow clank, its fall unbroken by other coins. A faded, black-and-white copy of Edward Burne-Jones’s Saint Cecilia hid beneath the mottled glass of a cheap frame. In the half-light the background blurred to a smudge of ink, losing all the beauty of the stained-glass original. Only the lighter parts of Cecilia’s gown and the small pipe-organ she was playing showed with any degree of clarity.
Magazines and leaflets rested on top of a bookcase of hymnals. They covered news from other churches in the area and charitable initiatives by the Church of England. A photocopied sheet, worth a suggested donation of ten pence, described the history of the church. Built in the early twelfth century, restored and extended at least once in every century since then, it was the only remnant of the original village of Barbroke. The homes which used to surround it were demolished during the construction of Barbroke House in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Fitzpatricks had rehoused the villagers, out of sight, away from the summit of the rise which lay to the south of their property. The church was still used by the locals and had been used by the Fitzpatricks, too: their box-pew could be seen at the front of the nave, overlooked by the pulpit to the left of the chancel.
The north side of the church had been extended to create an additional aisle, separated from the central space by an arcade. Between each pair of arches, in the spandrel at the top of the supporting pillar, hung a hatchment bearing the coat of arms of some past earl. The external wall of the aisle provided the backdrop for a series of chest tombs, each with a marble figure lying on top. The earliest and largest of these—the tomb of George, First Earl of Barbroke—occupied the middle position. On either side of George the tombs became increasingly recent. I walked to the western end. There was Albert, Diana’s brother, killed in action in Burma in 1885.
A small sanctuary stood at the eastern end of the aisle: a raised footpace bearing an uncovered table. The table was dressed with the melted remains of two candles, in plain holders, and an unadorned brass cross. Behind it, acting as a reredos on the east wall, hung a large painting of Saint Cecilia holding a violin and looking heavenwards: a copy of a seventeenth-century original by Guido Reni. A pair of frayed red
-velvet kneelers gathered dust in the corner. And there, beside them, the last of the Fitzpatrick chest tombs bore the date 1892, and a few lines attributed to Swinburne. I read them aloud to myself, quietly and without echo.
“Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,
To think of things that are well outworn?
Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,
The dream foregone and the deed forborne?
Though joy be done with and grief be vain,
Time shall not sever us wholly in twain;
Earth is not spoilt for a single shower;
But the rain has ruined the ungrown corn.”
Diana lay in cold white, her head on a carved pillow with tassels at each corner which fell gently to the marble beneath. Her face, unlike those of her companions, was turned towards the nave. Delicate locks of hair curled from beneath her left cheek onto pillow and shoulder. Where the earlier sculptures presented attitudes of determination and resolve, Diana’s eyes were closed and her mouth relaxed, peaceful. She had lost all her colour in death. Her right hand rested on her stomach, holding a book, closed but for the separation of pages on either side of the index finger which parted them, endlessly keeping her place, halfway, unfinished. Her left hand had fallen by her side, still clutched around the handle of an oval hand-mirror. Its glass pressed unseen against the folds of her gown, a hidden truth. Bas-relief flowers grew from the handle across the surface of its back. I had never doubted that Diana was dead, but I felt a sadness which arose from her having had so little life.
I sat on the floor, with my back against the end of a pew, pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them and hugged myself as I looked up at Diana. Algernon Charles Swinburne and James Whistler. Three “Symphonies in White”, each one painted by Whistler, and the first just a woman in a white dress standing on a tiger-skin rug before a white curtain, but still rejected by the Academy in London and the Salon in Paris. The third accepted by the Academy, and the last of his paintings to use his lover as a model, and she another Jo H. but Hiffernan not Hopper. And the second, a woman in white standing by the hearth with one arm on the mantelpiece, and gazing into a mirror like Velázquez’s Venus, so some say the reference was intentional. Swinburne, then, a poet who saw the second Symphony and wrote a poem, “Before the Mirror”, which Whistler loved enough to paste onto the painting’s frame. And in the church, in the cold, I could remember only a fragment that came to me with the white of the marble. “Soft snows that hard winds harden, Till each flake bite, Fill all the flowerless garden.” Swinburne—Swinburne, friend and downfall of Simeon Solomon; who wrote of Solomon’s blending the lineaments of woman and of man; whose poem “Anactoria” led Solomon to paint Sappho and Erinna in their garden; who turned against his friend, calling Solomon “a thing unmentionable”, “abhorrent to the very beasts”—Swinburne must have been Diana’s own choice, because who else would choose him, with his poems causing outrage, with his decadence, with his lesbianism and necrophilia and all? She chose him, and how could she be refused a dying wish? Swinburne wrote his “Hermaphroditus” on seeing the Borghese Hermaphrodite in the Louvre, and so the thread ran back to Velázquez, and Turner and Rokeby, and on, on to Swinburne’s friend Burne-Jones, just plain Ned Jones when they met at Oxford, yet to create his “Cecilia of the Cheap-Framed Copy”. Diana, surrounded by these lives, but having no real part in them, and at the centre of Taylor’s painting through Penelope and with Penelope. Taylor and Penelope and Diana. Diana, the third symphony. And Emily and I, but then I should be the second, always the second, and he the unwanted third. I realized I was crying, quietly, secretly, hiding it from myself. Swinburne must have cried when his friend died: not Solomon—probably not Solomon—but Lizzie Siddal, poor Lizzie Siddal; for her he must have shed his tears.
I looked again at the ten-pence photocopied sheet to see if I had missed anything about the tomb, about Diana. There was nothing. These were the Fitzpatricks of Barbroke, and there was nothing more to be said, and I wondered if perhaps the pain of forced resettlement remained after all these years, a legacy of appropriation and class distinction. When I closed the door behind me the echo remained, trapped with Diana.
The sun had appeared whilst I was inside. I had noticed the change, fades of clouds coming and going, diffuse variations internalized by the fabric of the place, as though the church were replaying past illuminations as it pleased, to whatever effect it sought, for whatever audience it possessed. It seemed only natural. Outside, though, the brightness was stark and shocking and the day felt later than it ought.
I left the arch behind and walked slowly towards the house, just out of sight over the rise of the gentle slope ahead. Only once did I hear anything other than the crunch of my footsteps, the flap of wings, the susurration of frost falling from naked boughs. I turned, expecting to see a car approaching, but the avenue remained empty and I was puzzled until I noticed a van passing the entrance by the little house with the old man, heading along the road to the village.
From the summit of the rise the approach arced gently downwards and to the east, crossing an ornamental lake before turning again to the west to arrive at the front of the house. The grey-blue of the sky, the snow, and the stones of the building blended in the sunlight as though the whole scene were captured in a faded photograph. Only the clouds of my own breath brought movement and reality. I walked on, letting the cold convince me of my own presence. The trees left the sides of the avenue, giving way to sullen winter grasses and a brick building which looked to be part of an old stable block. A sandwich-board by the door was dressed in the same green and gold as the sign by the gatehouses. It entreated me, politely, to enter and buy a ticket, should I wish to go any farther into the picture ahead of me.
The ticket office was a sparse affair, a small room with a cheap bookcase against one wall and a table towards the rear. Behind the table sat a thinner version of the café’s Woman in Tweed Uniform. She looked old enough to be the Mrs Tompkins of the church’s sign, still waiting for a caller demanding the keys to the church, even after all these years. A Bakelite radio was playing something baroque. The sound of the door had caused the woman to look up from her paperback novel. It rested, open, on the table, with words pressed onto scratched wood and the cover upwards, adding a splash of pastel pinks and greens to the room. She spoke.
“Hello dear. Did you want a ticket for the house or just the gardens? It’s four pounds and fifty pence for both. Two pounds for just the gardens.”
“Hello,” I said. “Is it possible to get a ticket for the house alone?”
Table Lady gave me a look which I ascribed to some blend of disappointment and pity, as if I had just told her that I had failed to get the exam results I needed for a place at university. She gestured towards a set of uninspiring leaflets on the bookcase.
“Oh, you wouldn’t want to do that, dear. Barbroke is famous for its gardens. Always has been, since the eighteenth century. There’s bits of Capability Brown all over it, if you take my meaning. And the autumn colours. But you’re too late for those.”
I handed over a five-pound note, receiving in return a printed ticket that looked like it came from a cloakroom and a handful of coins from a black tin kept under the woman’s chair, for security, presumably.
“Take one of the white leaflets for the garden and a blue for the house, dear,” Table Lady said as I turned to go.
I thought about asking her if her name was Tompkins, but she had the air of someone who was longing to perform, if only the opportunity arose. I decided I would be letting myself in for an hour of sciatica, and widowhood, and probably something to do with the requisitioning of the house during the war. So, instead, I thanked her, picked up the leaflets and returned to the white with the sound of Vivaldi’s “Summer” fading behind me.
Table Lady was not wrong about the gardens, judging by the map in the leaflet. They were laid out as a relic of some forgotten eclogue. Pillars and urns brought Poussin to lif
e through the death of those worthy of remembrance. Clothed in snow the territory was the map: shadows and stone translated to cross-hatches and lines, with only scale to differentiate between what I held in my hand and what lay before me. The little information which the leaflet provided left me with room to create my own stories. I had the names of landscape features and statues and buildings. I had the arrangement, the physicality, but I had no truth of them. The white world was my Klein Blue and I would find its reality in the silence, and its meaning in the sheltering voices of Penelope and Diana.
The approach passed through a break in a stone ha-ha which continued outwards to left and right and curved until lost to me. I walked between two more gatehouses, both in a state of mortal disrepair, and crossed over the lake on a weathered, three-arched, stone bridge. A series of carved urns punctuated its parapets. They looked out of place, an architectural afterthought, their incongruity amplified by their refusal to adopt the winter shading of the bridge. A few paces beyond the lake a path led off to the right, where a wooden arrow nailed to a tree suggested I would find “The Grotto” and “The Temple of Minerva”. The temple was only a few yards from the main approach. A flight of three stone steps led up to four Ionic pillars which supported an unadorned pediment beneath a sloping roof. The row of pillars defined the front of a single room, with a bench against its back wall and niches on the two sidewalls. The niches, according to the leaflet, once held statues of Minerva, in a time when the plain, white walls were covered in murals depicting her victory over Ignorance.
I sat down on the bench and pulled a sandwich from my bag, eating it whilst taking in the view, first down the length of the lake and then up towards the house, partially obscured by trees. I could make out twin staircases. They reached upwards to a neo-classical frontage both elegant and awash with overstatement.
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