It had been a long day, an early start, a hundred mile drive, and he was going home, back to a quiet evening before another busy week.
The January afternoon was the wrong side of three o'clock, but the relentless wind and rain of the morning had subsided leaving clearer skies, thin high clouds. He had driven a few miles out of town, metaphorically shaken the dust of its Sunday streets from his shoes. Either side of the road vistas of vast fields stretched into the distance. There was an 8-sail windmill, a sign to a doll museum, the occasional church spire rising above trees. He found himself looking to turn off the main road: to wander into unknown country, to stop the car and walk a little. A few miles further on he saw a promising turning and left the main road.
The house stood on its own a 100 yards distant from the road. In front no garden, just an expanse of cropped grass, where one could imagine croquet being played on a summer's day. The building was probably early Victorian, a balanced structure, a porched front door separating two large rooms with French doors leading out to a gravelled drive. The masonry was painted a subtle mustard brown, the window frames and doors a brisk white. A gentleman's residence of another age; perhaps the former vicarage of the redundant church he had strolled to explore a little further up the road. There, he had peered into the locked building to see an expanse of black plastic sheeting hiding the once pews, and at the end of a side chapel an arresting stained glass window glowing in Mediterranean blue.
From the churchyard unfenced grazing land lay unanimaled, sheepless, and cattlefree. Large oaks held singular positions against the steep fall of the sky to the far horizon. In the nearer distance woodland stood in a general air of managed tidiness.
A little further down the road a fallow field beckoned his interest. Its grass winter-bleached in a ten-acre square, fenced, and before a wood. He took out his camera and composed a shot. The image held stark simplicity: the field, the fence, the wood, a touch of sky.
He realised these environs into which he had wandered were quite unpeopled, empty of life. Only rooks swirled around the church tower. And silence. No cars on the single-track road. No tractors in the wind-parched fields.
He felt himself rest in the peace of it all: the house, the church, the fields, the empty road. At his feet yellow aconites graced a shallow ditch: a grateful sudden colour in a washed out landscape. It was all of a piece this place, nothing and everything. He had come, stayed a while, would get back in the car a little colder than when he'd left it. Was there some story here he would never know? A village-less church? Or was this a place to trigger fiction, on which to bring the imagination to bear. He thought himself into the gentleman's residence. Sitting at his worktable before the almost French windows. She would enter, only the rustle of her dark dress a welcome disturbance. She would place her hand on the back of his neck. He would close his eyes in gratitude and in love that all this should be so.
