My visitor has been with me for five of his days now. I was surprised when he first arrived, with his scuffed suitcase and that brown bag over his shoulder, which makes me think of Edward’s satchel; even more so when the doors were locked on the house that night and he remained. It has been a long while since anyone stayed here overnight. Ever since the Art Historians’ Association opened the house to the public, I have seen only weekend day-trippers with sensible shoes and tour books.
The people from the Association have put the young man in the rooms of the old malt house, part of the closed area that was once used briefly to accommodate a caretaker, and into which the visiting public are Not Permitted. It wouldn’t do to have him take up residence inside the house, for it is set up like a museum now. Antique furniture, much of it from Edward’s own collection, purchased with the house when he bought it, has been ‘arranged’, taking care to leave room for the tourists to mill about on weekends. Bunches of lavender with velvet bows have been placed on the seats so that no one tries to use them as intended.
Just before my clock strikes ten each Saturday morning, a group of volunteers arrives, positioning themselves about the house so that there is one per room. They wear tags that read ‘Guide’ around their necks and it is their job to remind people Do Not Touch! They are primed with partially correct historical anecdotes so that when they catch the eye of a half-willing tourist they can ensnare them with their spiel.
There is one in particular, Mildred Manning, who likes to sit on a Quaker-style chair at the top of the attic staircase, baring her teeth in the grim approximation of a smile. Nothing makes her happier than to catch an unwitting guest in the process of setting down their pamphlet on the table beside her. This infraction grants her the prized opportunity to intone that ‘nothing should be placed upon Edward Radcliffe’s furniture.’
Edward would have hated her. He couldn’t bear the zealous over-protection of ‘things’. He believed that beautiful objects should be cherished but not revered. And so, with Edward in mind, some days when the year is creeping towards autumn, I spend my afternoons draped around Mildred’s shoulders. No amount of clothing can keep a person warm when I get too close.
I have taken a preliminary inventory: my visitor’s hair is dirty blond in colour and his skin is sun-browned. His hands are weathered and capable. They are not the fine hands of a painter. They are the hands of a man who knows how to use the tools that he carries with him when he heads out on his daily rounds.
He has been very busy since he arrived. He wakes early, before sunrise, and although he does not seem pleased about the fact, groaning and then squinting at the phone that he keeps beside his bed to tell the time, he nonetheless elects to rise rather than to remain in bed. He makes a cup of tea, quickly and sloppily, and then showers and dresses, always in the same clothing: a T-shirt and faded blue denim jeans, tossed the night before across the bentwood chair in the corner.
Whatever it is that he is doing requires him to frown at a map of the manor grounds and a series of handwritten notes. I have taken to standing at a distance behind him as I try to discover what it is that he is up to. But it is no use. The handwriting is too small and faint to read and I dare not go nearer. We have not yet been acquainted long enough for me to know how close I can get. I can be an oppressive companion and I do not wish to scare him off.
Yet.
And so I wait.
I do at least know what it is he keeps in that brown bag of his; he unpacked it last night. It is a camera, a proper camera of the sort that Felix might recognise were he to rematerialise suddenly in the here and now.
Something that Felix would not recognise, however, is the way my visitor is able to connect the camera to a computer and have the images appear, like magic, upon the screen. No need any more for a darkroom or developing solutions with their acrid smell.
I watched last night as he scrolled through picture after picture. Photographs of the churchyard; headstones, mainly. No one that I knew, but I was transfixed all the same. It was the first time in many years that I have been able to ‘leave’ this place.
What do his photographs tell me about his purpose here? I wonder.
Not nearly enough.
He is out there somewhere now; he has been gone since breakfast time. But I am patient, far more patient now than before.
I have been watching from the window in the stairwell, looking beyond the chestnut tree towards my old friend the Thames. I do not expect my young man to return that way: unlike others who came to Birchwood before him, he does not favour the river. He considers it at times, as one might a painting, but only from a distance and not, I think, with pleasure. No boat rides for him thus far.
No, I watch the river for myself. The Thames flowed through my life just as surely as blood flows through a body. I can only go as far now as the wall of the field barn in the north, the Hafodsted Brook to the west, the orchard to the east and the Japanese maple in the south. I have tried to travel further over the years, but alas, to no avail. The sensation, if I dare, is like an anchor being pulled. I do not understand the physics; I only know that it is so.
My visitor is not as young as I first thought. He is muscular and able, with the pulsing physicality of an animal made to come inside against his will, but there is something that weighs on him. Hardships tell upon a man: my father aged by a decade during the months after my mother’s death, when the landlord began to knock on our door and the two of them engaged in tense discussions that became more and more heated over time, until at last, on a bleak wintry day, the landlord shouted that he’d been as patient as a saint, that he wasn’t a charity and it was high time my father found himself a new situation.
My visitor’s hardship is of a different nature. He keeps a printed photograph inside a scuffed leather wallet. I have seen him take it out late at night and pore over it. The image is of two small children, little more than babies. One of them grins with juicy happiness at the camera; the other is more circumspect.
The way he frowns at that photograph – the way he rubs his thumb across its surface, as if by doing so he might enlarge it and permit himself a closer view – makes me certain that they are his.
And then, last night, he made a call on his mobile telephone to someone he called Sarah. He has a warm voice and was polite, but I could see by the way he clenched his pen and clawed his hand in his hair that he was struggling.
He said, ‘But that was a long time ago,’ and, ‘You’ll see, I’ve changed,’ and, ‘Surely I deserve a second chance?’
As all the while he stared at that photograph, worrying at its top left corner with his fingertips.
It was that conversation which put me in mind of my own father. Because before Mrs Mack and the Captain there was my father, always looking for his second chance. He was a clockmaker by trade, a master craftsman, his skills unsurpassed and his expertise sought by those with the most elaborate timepieces to repair. ‘Each clock is unique,’ he used to tell me. ‘And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals.’