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.