landmarks she could see and watching the planes passing. She told me that on nights when I was due back from one of my trips abroad, if she knew the time of my flight, she would sit on the sofa at the south-west end watching for me and checking the clock and staring and staring to see if she could guess which plane I was on. I remember calling from the airport one evening to say that I had landed and she said she was quite sure she’d worked it out, so sure that she’d actually jumped up and run to the glass and pulled the panel across and stood on the balcony and leaned out into the night and stared and stared to see if she could see my face at one of the windows of the plane, knowing all the time that such a thing would have been impossible. When I arrived back at the apartment she was standing just inside the door smiling and she said I saw you I saw you I’m sure I did and I had hardly put my bags down on the floor before she was tugging at my coat and kissing me and taking my hand and walking me through to the bedroom saying fuck me fuck me right this minute and don’t ever go away again I hate it when you’re gone.
I have a very clear memory of the first night I ever spent here. I didn’t sleep at all. It was only a week after it had been finished and the smell of paint was fresh in the air. I slid the panels in my bedroom wall right back so I could see out to the space beyond and on through the glass, right across the night. I lay with my head propped up on the pillows and I thought about the fact that there was nothing above me apart from endless sky. And as I lay I had a sense that there was nothing beneath me either. It was as though I was floating in mid-air, my bed a Zeppelin cut loose from its mooring. The feeling I had then, that the whole apartment might take off at any moment and drift wherever the breeze sent it, is one that has never quite left me in all the time I have lived here.
Now that Rachel has gone and it is only me again, I will sometimes spend a night sitting on the sofa at the south-west end, wrapped in my duvet and looking out at the lights of the planes passing. I will follow the paths they trace across the blackness of the sky and I will wonder where they are going, or where they have been, and I will imagine the people sitting up there full of the anticipation of homecoming.
A few weeks after that first morning, when Rachel moved her things in and came to live with me, she asked if she could put her desk up against the glass where she’d seen the heron. I offered to share my study with her, or even to have it partitioned so she could have a room of her own, somewhere she could be alone, but she said she wanted to be closer to the outside, and to sit and watch the heron when it came. And this is where I am sitting now at the close of the day while the evening settles outside and everything becomes still. There is no sound apart from the occasional wail of the buses as they pass along the New North Road, like dinosaurs roaring, Rachel used to say, or whales turning in the ocean.
When she wasn’t in the library, or teaching at the university, she would work here at her desk most days, looking out at the canal with her books on the shelves behind her. She slotted them into the spaces that she found amongst my own so that now, when I am searching for an old textbook or browsing for one of my mother’s gardening books to read in the silence of my weekday breakfasts, I am from time to time surprised by a volume of Shelley, or Keats, or by a run of novels. And sometimes I will open one of those instead and see an inscription, ‘To Rachel, My Love’, without a signature, and I will begin to read and find myself rushing through an open weir, carried away by a current that is strange to me and new. And when I am halfway through and utterly lost to myself, no longer in London but far away in Italy, a fifth person in an abandoned hillside villa lit only by candlelight and now and then the
I have a very clear memory of the first night I ever spent here. I didn’t sleep at all. It was only a week after it had been finished and the smell of paint was fresh in the air. I slid the panels in my bedroom wall right back so I could see out to the space beyond and on through the glass, right across the night. I lay with my head propped up on the pillows and I thought about the fact that there was nothing above me apart from endless sky. And as I lay I had a sense that there was nothing beneath me either. It was as though I was floating in mid-air, my bed a Zeppelin cut loose from its mooring. The feeling I had then, that the whole apartment might take off at any moment and drift wherever the breeze sent it, is one that has never quite left me in all the time I have lived here.
Now that Rachel has gone and it is only me again, I will sometimes spend a night sitting on the sofa at the south-west end, wrapped in my duvet and looking out at the lights of the planes passing. I will follow the paths they trace across the blackness of the sky and I will wonder where they are going, or where they have been, and I will imagine the people sitting up there full of the anticipation of homecoming.
A few weeks after that first morning, when Rachel moved her things in and came to live with me, she asked if she could put her desk up against the glass where she’d seen the heron. I offered to share my study with her, or even to have it partitioned so she could have a room of her own, somewhere she could be alone, but she said she wanted to be closer to the outside, and to sit and watch the heron when it came. And this is where I am sitting now at the close of the day while the evening settles outside and everything becomes still. There is no sound apart from the occasional wail of the buses as they pass along the New North Road, like dinosaurs roaring, Rachel used to say, or whales turning in the ocean.
When she wasn’t in the library, or teaching at the university, she would work here at her desk most days, looking out at the canal with her books on the shelves behind her. She slotted them into the spaces that she found amongst my own so that now, when I am searching for an old textbook or browsing for one of my mother’s gardening books to read in the silence of my weekday breakfasts, I am from time to time surprised by a volume of Shelley, or Keats, or by a run of novels. And sometimes I will open one of those instead and see an inscription, ‘To Rachel, My Love’, without a signature, and I will begin to read and find myself rushing through an open weir, carried away by a current that is strange to me and new. And when I am halfway through and utterly lost to myself, no longer in London but far away in Italy, a fifth person in an abandoned hillside villa lit only by candlelight and now and then the
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