The cottages were of pale honey-coloured stone. Each had a central gable with chimneys on either side and pretty bargeboards rising to its peak. Matching sash windows were set into each of the two levels, and an entrance portico with a roof pitched to match the gable stood above the front door. The door itself was painted a pale lilac-blue. Unlike the front gardens of the other cottages, which were overflowing with a perfect chaos of English summer flowers, number six contained a number of notably more exotic species: a bird of paradise, and others that Leonard couldn’t name and knew he hadn’t seen before.
A cat meowed from a patch of sunlit gravel stones before standing and arching and pouring itself through the door, which Leonard saw now was on the latch. She was expecting him.
He felt unusually nervous and didn’t cross the road at once. He allowed himself another cigarette as he went over the list of talking points he’d prepared. He reminded himself not to set his expectations too high; that there was no guarantee that she would hold the answers he sought; that even if she did, there was no certainty she would share them with him. She had been very clear on that front, saying to him as she left the churchyard, ‘I have two conditions, Mr Gilbert. The first is that I will speak only if you promise strict anonymity: I have no interest in seeing my name in print. The second is that I can give you one hour, but no more.’
With a deep breath, Leonard unlatched the rusted metal gate and closed it carefully behind him.
He didn’t feel comfortable simply pushing the door open and arriving inside with no announcement, so he knocked lightly and called, ‘Hello? Miss Radcliffe?’
‘Yes?’ came a distracted voice from inside.
‘It’s Leonard Gilbert. From Birchwood Manor.’
‘Well, for goodness’ sake, Leonard Gilbert from Birchwood Manor. Come in, won’t you?’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The cottage was pleasantly dark inside, and it took a moment for his gaze to arrive at Lucy Radcliffe in the midst of all her treasures. She had been expecting him only a minute before, but clearly had more important things to do than to sit in readiness. She was engrossed in her reading, posed as still as marble in a mustard-coloured armchair, a tiny figure in profile to him, a journal in her hand, her back curved as she peered through a magnifying glass at the folded page. A lamp was positioned on a small half-moon table beside her and the light it cast was yellow and diffuse. Underneath it, a teapot sat beside two cups.
‘Miss Radcliffe,’ he said.
‘Whatever do you think, Mr Gilbert?’ She did not look up from her journal. ‘It appears that the universe is expanding.’
‘Is it?’ Leonard took off his hat. He couldn’t see a hook on which to hang it, so he held it in two hands before him.
‘It says so right here. A Belgian man – a priest, if you can believe it – has proposed that the universe is expanding at a constant rate. Unless my French is rusty, and I don’t think that it is, he’s even calculated the rate of expansion. You know what this means of course.’
‘I’m not sure that I do.’
Her cane was leaning against the table beside her and Lucy began now to pace across the worn Persian rug. ‘If one is to accept that the universe is expanding at a constant rate, then it follows that it has been doing so since its beginning. Since its beginning, Mr Gilbert.’ She stood very still, her head capped neatly by her white hair. ‘A beginning. Not Adam and Eve, I don’t mean that. I mean a moment, some sort of action or event that started it all off. Space and time, matter and energy. A single atom that somehow’ – she flexed open the fingers of one hand – ‘exploded. Good God.’ Her bright, quick eyes met his. ‘We might be on the verge of understanding the very birth of the stars, Mr Gilbert – the stars.’
The only natural light in the room came from the small front window of the house, and it graced the surface of her face, which was a study in wonder. It was beautiful and engaged, and Leonard could see in it the young girl she must once have been.
Before his very eyes, though, her expression faltered. The light drained from her features and her skin appeared to sag. She wore no powder, and her weathered complexion was that of a woman who had spent her life outdoors, the lines on her face telling a hundred stories. ‘Oh, but it is the worst thing about getting old, Mr Gilbert. Time. There isn’t enough of it left. There is simply too much to know and too few hours in which to know it. Some nights that terrible fact keeps me from sleeping – I close my eyes and hear my pulse ticking away the seconds – and so, I sit up in my bed and I read instead. I read and write notes and memorise, and then I start on something new. And yet it is in vain, for my time will end. What wonders am I going to miss?’
Leonard didn’t have much in the way of consolation to offer. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand her regrets, only that he’d seen too many die who hadn’t had a quarter of the time that she’d been given.
‘I know what you are thinking, Mr Gilbert. You needn’t say it. I sound like a selfish and irascible old woman, and by God I am. But I have been this way for too long now to think of changing. And you are not here to discuss my regrets. Come, sit down. The tea is brewed, and I’m sure I have a scone or two tucked away somewhere.’
Leonard opened by reiterating his gratitude that she had selected his application for the residency at Birchwood Manor, telling her how much he loved staying in the house, and how gratifying it was to have the opportunity to get to know a place about which he had read and thought so much. ‘It’s helping enormously with my work,’ he said. ‘I feel close to your brother at Birchwood Manor.’
‘I understand the proposition, Mr Gilbert; many wouldn’t, but I do. And I agree. My brother is a part of the house in a way that most people cannot appreciate. The house was a part of him, too: he fell in love with Birchwood Manor long before he bought it.’
‘I’d gathered as much. He wrote a letter to Thurston Holmes in which he told him about the purchase and intimated that he’d known the house for some time. He didn’t go into detail, though, as to how.’
‘No, well, he wouldn’t have. Thurston Holmes was a talented enough technician, but unfortunately for all concerned he was a vainglorious prig. Tea?’
‘Please.’
As tea gurgled from the spout she continued: ‘Thurston had none of the sensitivity required of a true artist; Edward would never have willingly told him about the night that he discovered Birchwood Manor.’
‘But he told you?’
She regarded him, her head tilted in a way that brought to mind a teacher Leonard hadn’t thought of in years; rather, the parakeet that the teacher had kept in a golden cage in his classroom. ‘You have a brother, Mr Gilbert. I remember reading it in your application.’
‘I had a brother. Tom. He died in the war.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. You were close, I think.’
‘We were.’
‘Edward was nine years older than I, but circumstances had thrown us together when we were young. My earliest and fondest memories are of Edward telling me stories. If you are to understand my brother, Mr Gilbert, you must stop seeing him as a painter and start seeing him instead as a storyteller. It was his greatest gift. He knew how to communicate, how to make people feel and see and believe. The medium in which he chose to express himself was irrelevant. It is no easy feat to invent a whole world, but Edward could do that. A setting, a narrative, characters who live and breathe – he was able to make the story come to life in someone else’s mind. Have you ever considered the logistics of that, Mr Gilbert? The transfer of an idea? And, of course, a story is not a single idea; it is thousands of ideas, all working together in concert.’
What she said was true. As an artist, Edward Radcliffe could transport people, so that they were no longer simply spectators of his work but participants, co-conspirators in the realisation of the world that he sought to create.