William & Mary will have to wait

This morning I got up earlier than I consider altogether decent for a Saturday morning, in order to drive to Hampton Court to do some research. It was cold and grey, with dull light and a nasty east wind, and there was scarcely anyone about except for security people with their coats buttoned up to their chins and an air of bracing themselves for the day as much as the weather. I found my way through arches and past gates as instructed, collected my pass, and trudged past the backs of low buildings - storehouses, offices, goods yards and so on - and through the gardens. Under not-yet-leafed trees what must have been spectacular carpets of daffodils are brown and shrivelled now: between them a few bluebells are showing. Seemingly miles away, and far above our heads, the roof of the Tudor hall and the chimneys and pinnacles of the great gateways are elaborate and remote: an untidy accumulation of Wolsey's blood-coloured grandeur, staring down everyone who approaches. I could smell the woodsmoke where they were lighting the fires in Henry VIII's kitchens. It began to rain.

Through a door in a wall, and round a corner and a couple of centuries, the long, long William & Mary front stretches away. The cream-coloured pillars and windows and even the clipped baytrees are as regular as a regiment, eyes fixed on the prospect across the formal garden. It must often have been as cold and grey for them on ordinary days: not rich or sunlit or exciting, just working days. I turned under a portico, beyond which in a courtyard a fountain was being thrown about by the wind, so that the noise echoed around among the pillars while I looked for the right door. It was tucked in a corner and I knocked, bare knuckles on old, hard wood. Of course: how else could I summon the inhabitants of a place like this?

Hampton Court has two faces, their backs joined but their gaze in opposite directions. I love the place, but today this doubleness of aspect and character was confusing. The glamour and violence of Elysabeth and Antony's world in A Secret Alchemy is not distant in time or nature from Henry's, and that's where I should be, that's the world I've lived in for so long. But the clean, clear rhythm of Wren's palace speaks to me of the world I want to enter: the ordering of science, the balance and elegance of form, the confidence of reason. It's not as simple as that, of course. The late fifteenth century saw the beginnings of humanism, of scientific enquiry, of classical scholarship and modern economics: you can read their words, and understand. The late seventeenth century was still a land of witch-hunts, starvation, heresy and violence, and they're so often still blind to what we can see so clearly. But each world for me has its own particular texture of smell and colour and sound: music, too, and a certain feeling on the skin.

But I can't live in two places at once. Treading along the thick, shifting gravel of the paths I felt unsteady, unreal, as you do on a long journey, suspended between two places which hold two separate meanings. No, I can't work if I have to gaze in two opposite directions. Much of me wants to: in many ways I've cast off from Here - A Secret Alchemy - and want to get There and settle down. But there's a lot to do still, Here, and I want to do it properly, because I've lived here too long to ride off without a backward glance. William and Mary will have to wait.

Comments

[roger]

Oh wow. I don't know how you do it, Emma. Lovely piece of writing. Didn't anyone ever tell you blog posts were supposed to be lazy and slummy, dashed off bits of nothing?

[Emma Darwin]

Thank you, Roger, that's sweet of you.

It really was a stronger, odder experience than I was expecting. One of the joys of blogging is having somewhere to put a little moment like that one, which craves expression but has no natural home in anything I'm writing at the moment. Occasionally I'll scribble bare outlines in a notebook - definitely lazy and slummy and dashed off - but having to think it through and then make it coherent is a different thing all together.