Some nights he took down the game of Snakes and Ladders. They’d always played with the same counters. Leonard’s a perfectly rounded grey stone he’d found when their mother and father took them to the seaside at Salcombe; Tom’s a silver coin, a tuppence given to him one day by an old man he’d helped after a fall in the street. They’d been religious about their lucky counters, each insisting that his was the finer, but Leonard could remember being envious of Tom’s, because nine times out of ten times his brother won the game. Tom had always been the luckier of the two. Except, of course, the one time it had mattered.
One day in early 1924, Leonard’s legs were especially restless. He packed some water in his kitbag and went out for a walk as he often did, but when darkness began to drop, he didn’t turn around and head back towards the house; he kept walking. He didn’t know where he was going and he didn’t care. He slept eventually where he fell, in an open field, the half-moon gleaming above him in the cloudless sky. And when a lark at first light woke him, he gathered his things and set off again. He walked from one side of Dorset to the other and on into Devon, finding and following the paths of Dartmoor, communing with its ghosts. He began to notice how many different shades of green there were, layers of foliage in the trees above him, the way strands of grass faded to white as they neared the earth.
A beard grew and his skin browned. He gained blisters on his heels and toes that hardened so that his feet were those of another man, a man he preferred. He became expert at selecting a stick to walk with. He learned how to lay a fire and grew callouses on his fingers. He took work where he could get it: odd jobs that required no commitment and forged no connection, and when he finished the task he took his meagre pay and walked on again. He met people sometimes, strangers on the same path, and they exchanged a nod or even a wave. On rare occasions he spoke to a fellow traveller in a country pub, surprising himself at the sound of his own voice.
It was at one such pub that he saw his first photograph of England taken from the air. It was lunchtime on a Saturday and the pub was full; a man was sitting alone at one of the wooden tables out front, a dusty black bicycle leaning beside him and a leather cycling cap still on his head. He was poring over a large printed photograph, taking notes, and hadn’t noticed at first that Leonard was observing him. He scowled when he saw, moving instinctively to cover his work with his arm, looking for all the world like he might have been about to snap at Leonard, but then something in his expression changed and Leonard knew that he’d been recognised. Not that they knew one another; they’d never met before. But they were all of them branded in some way after where they’d been, the things they’d seen and done.
The man’s name was Crawford and he’d served in the Royal Flying Corps. He’d been employed afterwards by the Ordnance Survey and was now travelling the counties of Wiltshire and Dorset, plotting the location of archaeological sites; he’d already identified several that were previously unknown. Leonard had always preferred to listen than to talk, and he drew comfort from the things that Crawford told him. They confirmed for Leonard a number of the vague, unformed notions he’d been feeling about time and its malleability. Crawford’s photographs brought together time and space in a single image, showed the past co-existing with the present; and Leonard realised that he felt a greater connection to the ancient people who’d tracked the very paths across the land that he followed now than he did with the bright young things dancing the nights away in London. He was aware as he walked of belonging; in an essential way he knew himself to be of the earth, and with each footstep he drew further solidity from it. Belonging. The word lodged in his mind and when he resumed his travels that afternoon he found his feet moving to the rhythm of its syllables.
It was late that day, when Leonard was deciding where to set up camp for the evening, that a thought had come to him, a distant memory from his first-year History course at Oxford: a paper that he’d read about a Victorian movement, which included an artist called Edward Radcliffe. Although there were a number of artists in the self-termed Magenta Brotherhood, Radcliffe had been memorable due to the tragic story attached to him: the murder of his young fiancée and his subsequent spiral into decline. Even so, the group had not interested Leonard at the time: he’d been bored by the Victorians. He’d resented their certainties and scoffed at their fusty black lace and cluttered hallways. Like all modernists, like all children, he had sought to define himself in defiance of the looming granite stature of the Establishment.
But Professor Harris’s Introduction to the History of Art had been thorough and thus they’d been required to read the paper. It had referenced at one point a ‘manifesto’ penned in 1861 by Edward Radcliffe and titled ‘The Art of Belonging’, in which the artist exulted about the connection he perceived between human beings and places; between places and art. ‘The land does not forget,’ Leonard could remember reading. ‘Place is a doorway through which one steps across time.’ The paper had gone on to mention a particular house that had obsessed the artist and in which he believed he had found his own ‘belonging’. To eighteen-year-old Leonard, Radcliffe’s musings about place, the past and belonging had seemed extraneous and dull. Now, though, a decade later, he couldn’t get the words out of his head.
When Leonard eventually made it back to his parents’ house, he was thinner than before, and hairier; his skin had weathered and his clothes had become worn. He’d expected his mother to recoil or shriek in horror at his deterioration, and to order him upstairs to wash. She did none of those things. She opened the door and, after a split second of surprise, dropped her tea towel to the floor, wrapping her arms so tightly around him that he thought his ribs might crush.
She ushered him inside, wordlessly, to his father’s chair and fetched a bucket of warm, soapy water. She took off his old boots and the socks that had moulded to his skin, and began to wash his feet. It was something he couldn’t remember her doing before, not since he was a very small child, and silent tears appeared on her cheeks. Her head bowed and Leonard was aware, as if for the first time, of her greying hair, its changed texture. Over her shoulder, a collection of family photographs stood side by side on the lace-cloaked table: Tom and Leonard in their sharp army kits, as little boys in shorts and caps, as babies in crocheted bonnets. Various uniforms across time. The water was so warm, the kindness so pure and unexpected, and Leonard so out of practice at receiving such things, that he realised he was crying, too.
They had a cup of tea together later and his mother asked what he’d been doing these past months.
‘Walking,’ said Leonard.
‘Walking,’ she repeated. ‘And did you enjoy yourself?’
Leonard told her that he had.
A little nervously, she said, ‘I had a caller the other day. Someone you used to know.’