The weather is fine and clear today and so it is busy at the house, a constant stream of tourists, with bookings for lunch at one of the nearby pubs. They shuffle through in small groups and I cannot bear to hear the guide tell yet another cluster to close their eyes in ‘Fanny’s bedroom’ and ‘smell the ghostly hint of Miss Brown’s favourite rose cologne’; and so I have left and am making my way down to the malt house, where Jack is trying to keep a low profile. Earlier this morning I saw, amongst the papers that he’d printed from Mrs Wheeler’s recent email, a letter from Lucy to Ada, written in March 1939. Alas, the body of the letter was covered and I have not yet been able to see what it says. I am hopeful that by now he might have moved the other papers aside so I can have a proper read.
In the hall downstairs, a group has gathered around the landscape painting that hangs upon the southern wall. It is the first work that Edward ever had accepted by the Royal Academy, one of the paintings referred to collectively as the ‘Upper Thames works’, a view taken directly from the top window of this house. The vista itself is a pretty one, overlooking the river: a stretch of fields, a dense area of woodlands and beyond that the distant mountains; in Edward’s hands, though, the pastoral scene is transmuted via shades of magenta and deepest grey into an image of disconcerting beauty. The painting was heralded as signifying a shift from representational paintings to ‘art of atmosphere’.
It is a bewitching piece and the tourists today say all of the same things that they always do. Things like ‘Wonderful colours,’ and ‘Moody, isn’t it?’ and ‘Look at that technique!’ But few of them ever purchase poster copies from the shop.
One of Edward’s gifts was an ability to take his own emotions and, through choice of pigment and brushstroke, render them visually with uncompromising fluency by the force of his own need to communicate and be understood. People do not purchase copies of View from the Attic Window to hang above their sofa because it is a painting fuelled by fear, and despite its beauty – without even knowing the story behind its creation – they sense its menace.
The landscape depicted in the painting impressed itself upon Edward when he was fourteen years old. Fourteen is a fragile age, a time of changing perceptions and emotional transition, and Edward was a boy of particularly intense feelings. His was always a compulsive nature. I never knew him to be half-hearted about anything, and in his childhood he had enjoyed a series of obsessive interests and pursuits, each ‘the one’ until the next arrived. He was consumed with stories of fairyland and theories of the occult sciences, and had, for some time, been determined to raise a ghost. The idea had come to him from his illicit reading at school; hours spent poring by candlelight over ancient treatises found deep in the vaults of the library.
It was at this time that Edward’s parents embarked upon an art-collecting jaunt to the Far East, which took them away from England for the next year. Thus, when the summer holidays arrived, he was sent not to the house in London where he had grown up but to his grandfather’s estate instead. Wiltshire is an old and enchanted county, and Edward used to say that when the full moon rose high and silver the ancient magic could still be felt. Although he resented his parents’ abandonment of him, and the despotic grandfather who must be borne, his fascination with spirits and fairy lore was further fed by his removal to the chalk country.
He thought carefully about where to go to raise his spirit, and considered several nearby churchyards before a conversation with his grandfather’s gardener convinced him instead to follow the River Cole until it met the Thames. There was a spot, the old man said, a clearing in a woods not far from there, where the river turned sharply back upon itself, in which fairies and ghosts still walked amongst the living. The gardener’s grandmother had been born in the north during the chime hour and knew such things, and it was she who had told him of the secret place.
Edward confided the events of that evening on a drizzly London night when we were together in his candlelit studio. I have remembered the occasion of the telling so many times since that I can hear his voice now, as if he were standing right beside me. I can recount the story of that night in the woods as if I had been there with him when it happened.
After walking for some hours, he found the river bend and ventured into the woods, leaving chalk flints that he had collected earlier that day as markers to guide him home. He arrived in the clearing just as the moon was rising to the centre of the sky.
The night was clear and warm and he had worn only the lightest of clothing, but as he crouched behind a fallen log he felt a brush of something very cold against his skin. He shook the sensation away, thinking little of it then, for there were far more interesting things happening to occupy his thoughts.
A beam of moonlight illuminated the clearing and Edward felt the pull of premonition. Something, he knew, was about to happen. A strange wind blew and the surrounding trees rattled their leaves like fine pieces of silver. Edward had a sense that there were eyes hidden in the foliage, watching the empty clearing, just as he was. Waiting, waiting …
And then, suddenly, it was dark.
He glanced skyward, wondering if a cloud had come from nowhere to blot out the moon. And as he did so, he was gripped by a sickening claw of terror.
His blood was as ice and, without knowing why, he turned and fled back through the woods, picking his way from one piece of chalk to the next until he emerged on the edge of the field.
He continued, he thought, in the general direction of his grandparents’ house. There was something behind him, chasing him – he could hear it over his own ragged breaths – but when he threw a glance over his shoulders there was nothing there.
His every nerve was alight. His skin rippled cold as if it sought to leave his body.
He ran and he ran, the landscape dark and unfamiliar around him as he leapt over fences, broke through brambly hedgerows, and pounded across fields.
All the while, the creature followed, and just when Edward thought that he could run no further, he glimpsed a house on the horizon, a light visible from a window at its top, like a lighthouse in a storm, signalling the way to safety.
Heart thumping in his chest, he headed towards it, scaling the stone wall and leaping to the ground to land in a moon-silvered garden. A path of flagstones led to the front door. It was not locked and he opened it, hurrying inside and pushing the door closed behind him. He slid the bolt across.
Edward climbed the stairs on instinct, moving higher and higher, away from whatever it was that had pursued him through the fields. He did not stop until he reached the very top, the attic, and there was nowhere else to go.
He went straight to the window, scanning the nocturnal landscape.
And there he stayed, watchful and alert, taking in every detail of the view until at last dawn broke incrementally, miraculously, and the world was once again restored to normal.
Edward confessed to me that for all of the tales of mystery and horror that he had read and heard and invented for his sisters, the night in the clearing of the woods, when he fled for his life and sought refuge in this house, was his first experience of true fear. It changed him, he said: terror opened up something inside him that could never be properly sealed.
I know now exactly what he meant. True fear is indelible; the sensation does not recede, even when the cause is long forgotten. It is a new way of seeing the world: the opening of a door that can never be closed again.
So when I look at Edward’s View from the Attic Window, I do not associate it with the fields outside Birchwood Manor, even though the likeness is uncanny; it makes me think instead of small dark spaces, and stale air, and the way a person’s throat craves and burns when struggling to find the very air for their next breath.
The tourists may not purchase posters of View from the Attic Window for their walls, but they do buy copies of La Belle.