RUIN

From Banbury I took a bus. "Angelfield?" said the bus driver. "No, there's no service to Angelfield. Not yet, anyhow. Might be different when the hotel's built."

"Are they building there, then?"

"Some old ruin they're pulling down. Going to be a fancy hotel. They might run a bus then, for the staff, but for now the best you can do is get off at the Hare and Hounds on the Cheneys Road and walk from there. 'Bout a mile, I reckon."

There wasn't much in Angelfield. A single street whose wooden sign read, with logical simplicity, The Street. I walked past a dozen cottages, built in pairs. Here and there a distinctive feature stood out-a large yew tree, a children's swing, a wooden bench-but for the most part each dwelling, with its neatly embroidered thatch, its white gables and the restrained artistry in its brickwork, resembled its neighbor like a mirror image.

The cottage windows looked out onto fields that were neatly defined with hedges and studded here and there with trees. Farther away sheep and cows were visible, and then a densely wooded area, beyond which, according to my map, was the deer park. There was no pavement as such, but that hardly mattered for there was no traffic, either. In fact I saw no sign of human life at all until I passed the last cottage and came to a combined post office and general store.

Two children in yellow mackintoshes came out of the shop and ran down to the road ahead of their mother, who had stopped at the postbox. Small and fair, she was struggling to stick stamps onto envelopes without dropping the newspaper tucked under her arm. The older child, a boy, reached up to put his sweet wrapper in the bin attached to a post at the roadside. He went to take his sister's wrapper, but she resisted. "I can do it! I can do it!" She stood on tiptoe and stretched up her arm, ignoring her brother's protestations, then tossed the paper toward the mouth of the bin. A breeze caught it and carried it across the road.

"I told you so!"

Both children turned and launched themselves into a dash-then jolted to a halt when they saw me. Two blond fringes flopped down over pairs of identically shaped brown eyes. Two mouths fell into the same expression of surprise. Not twins, no, but so close. I stooped to pick up the wrapper and held it out toward them. The girl, willing to take it, went to step forward. Her brother, more cautious, stuck his arm out to bar her way and called, "Mum!"

The fair-haired woman watching from the postbox had seen what had happened. "All right, Tom. Let her take it." The girl took the paper from my hand without looking at me. "Say thank you," the mother called. The children did so in restrained voices, then turned their backs from me and leaped thankfully away. This time the woman lifted her daughter up to reach the bin, and in doing so looked at me again, eyeing my camera with veiled curiosity.

Angelfield was not a place where I could be invisible.

She offered a reserved smile. "Enjoy your walk," she said, and then she turned to follow her children, who were already running back along the street toward the cottages.

I watched them go. The children ran, swooping and diving around each other, as though attached by an invisible cord. They switched direction at random, made unpredictable changes of speed, with telepathic synchronicity. They were two dancers, moving to the same inner music, two leaves caught up in the same breeze. It was uncanny and perfectly familiar. I'd have liked to watch them longer, but, fearful that they might turn and catch me staring, I pulled myself away.

After a few hundred yards the lodge gates came into view. The gates themselves were not only closed but welded to the ground and each other by writhing twists of ivy that wove in and out of the elaborate metalwork. Over the gates, a pale stone arch sat high above the road, its sides extending into two small single-room buildings with windows. In one window a piece of paper was displayed. Inveterate reader that I am, I couldn't resist; I clambered through the long wet grass to read it. But it was a ghost notice. The colored logo of a construction company had survived, but beneath it, two pale gray stains the shape of paragraphs and, slightly darker but not much, the shadow of a signature. It had the shape of writing, but the meaning had been bleached out by months of sunshine.

Preparing to walk a long way around the boundary to find a way in, I had taken only a few steps when I came to a small wooden gate set in a wall with nothing but a latch to fasten it. In an instant I was inside.

The drive had once been graveled, but now the pebbles underfoot were interspersed with bare earth and scrubby grass. It led in a long curve to a small stone and flint church with a lych-gate, then curved the other way, behind a sweep of trees and shrubs that obscured the view. On each side the borders were overgrown; branches of different bushes were fighting for space and at their feet grass and weeds were creeping into whatever spaces they could find.

I walked toward the church. Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it. The church was positioned at the apex of the gravel curve; as I drew closer my eye veered away from the lych-gate and toward the vista that was opening up on the other side of me. With each step, the view widened and widened, until at last the pale mass of stone that was Angelfield House appeared and I stopped dead in my tracks.

The house sat at an awkward angle. Arriving from the drive, you came upon a corner, and it was not at all clear which side of the house was the front. It was as though the house knew it ought to meet its arriving visitors face-on, but at the last minute couldn't repress the impulse to turn back and gaze upon the deer park and the woodlands at the end of the terraces. The visitor was met not by a welcoming smile but by a cold shoulder.

This sense of awkwardness was only increased by the other aspects of its appearance. The house was of asymmetrical construction. Three great bays, each one four stories high, stood out from the body of the house, their twelve tall and wide windows offering the only order and harmony the facade could muster. In the rest of the house, the windows were a higgledy-piggledy arrangement, no two alike, none level with its neighbor whether left and right or up and down. Above the third floor, a balustrade tried to hold the disparate architecture together in a single embrace, but here and there a jutting stone, a partial bay, an awkward window, were too much for it; it disappeared only to start up again the other side of the obstacle. Above this balustrade there rose an uneven roofline of towers, turrets and chimney stacks, the color of honey.

A ruin? Most of the golden stone looked as clean and as fresh as the day it had been quarried. Of course the elaborate stonework of the turrets looked a little worn, the balustrading was crumbling in places, but all the same, it was hardly a ruin. To see it then, with the blue sky behind it, birds flying around its towers and the grass green round about, I had no difficulty at all in imagining the place inhabited.

Then I put my glasses on, and realized.

The windows were empty of glass and the frames had rotted or burned away. What I had taken for shadows over the windows on the right-hand side were fire stains. And the birds swooping in the sky above the house were not diving down behind the building but inside it. There was no roof. It was not a house but only a shell.

I took my glasses off again and the scene reverted to an intact Elizabethan house. Might one get a sense of brooding menace if the sky were painted indigo and the moon suddenly clouded over? Perhaps. But against today's cloudless blue the scene was innocence itself.