A Month in the Country (15 page)

That morning I had my first letter. Heaven knows how she had learnt where I was, but it was from Vinny: she wanted me home again. There were other things too but that's what it amounted to – she wanted me back. I had no illusions. She would go off again, would come back again. And I should be there.

When I read it, I packed up my gear – everything but my remarkable overcoat. I left it hanging on its nail for Mossop: he'd pointedly admired it more than once and I'd nothing else to give him. Then I went down and had a last look round. The good old Bankdam-Crowther, now reprieved – perhaps this was the moment to put it through its paces and depart in a climacteric roar of smoke and sparks? Then I dawdled down behind the south arcade to second for the last time her grieving husband's Farewell to Laetitia.

Ah, amantissima et delectissima.
Vale

And I thought, Perhaps you did well to leave early; it may not have lasted.

Last of all, I gazed beyond the scaffolding to the great painting half hidden in the shadows. Truthfully, I felt nothing much. Certainly no more than a bricklayer may feel as he goes on to a new house. There had been a grey wall and now there were shapes and colours.

So I humped my pack and went out into the yard. Though it was past nine, the grass was soaking with dew and cobwebs drifted, breaking away from bushes and briars. All was as it had been – the fields, the high woods, even the crouching cat. It stared hostilely at me as I lifted the loop of binder-twine to open the gate, meaning to cross the meadow to say cheerio to Moon before going down to the station and the Ellerbecks. Then (and I can't explain it) the numbness went and I knew that, whatever else had befallen me during those few weeks in the
country, I had lived with a very great artist, my secret sharer of the long hours I'd laboured in the half-light above the arch. So I turned and climbed the ladder for a last look. And, standing before the great spread of colour, I felt the old tingling excitement and a sureness that the time would come when some stranger would stand there too and understand.

It would be like someone coming to Malvern, bland Malvern, who is halted by the thought that Edward Elgar walked this road on his way to give music lessons or, looking over to the Clee Hills, reflects that Housman had stood in that place, regretting his land of lost content. And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart – knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.

But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.

Stocken, Presteigne
September 1978