As we left, the sun was setting beyond the village; the bell was chiming vespers; the blackbirds were calling in the darkening trees. These things have been said a hundred times before; all of us have experienced them or can imagine how they might be, and saying them again does not make them more true, or help us to understand them better. Instead, they stand in place for the other, less expressible images that accompany them, conferring upon the landscape some nebulous, additional quality, and filling it with the stunted potential, the numb and inadequate regret of certain kinds of leave-taking. At the same time, everything has to be hurried; there is no time to reflect. Even now eternity has settled at your feet, but you don’t have time to attend to it; the bells and blackbirds say the same; you don’t have time to attend to it, and your life is a mistake. Everything would be understood if you could only pause a moment, but now the sun has set; it is already too late, and the ambiguous evening has become a conundrum even to itself; there is nothing left to grasp in this unremarkable night

For myself, more generally, I had no time for questions, either of the evening or the future; our headlong flight – the soporific motion of its smile that kept faltering against the window, as I blinked to keep it above the rubber of the seat edge - was an answer in itself; and if we stopped for deer, strangely pallid in the headlamps, their star-like eyes were so all-absorbingly reflective that I doubted they could be of this world. Then, once again, we were hurtling between the grey hedgerows against the night, until a different, lavender-edged darkness claimed me, and I was passed around by hands, and there were leaded casements and the edges of stairs, and in my tiredness and disorientation I kept tripping over until somebody lifted me up and laid me down on something soft in a lightless, peaceful room with heavy walls.

Next thing I knew it was sometime before dawn, and my name was being repeated against the rising whistle of a kettle; punctuated by smoky lights, I saw strange tunnels entering a familiar hillside at odd angles, and felt as if a particular kind of existence were passing away. Like yesterday’s horizon, the vertical lines of houses started to buckle, and then smoothly to slip away beneath the bottom of the frame; where their centres had been, spots of purple widened and faded into blooms of stone. And then the edges became hard and linear once more, and, abruptly, I was definitively awake.

The room was different from the one I had imagined. True, it was spacious and quiet, but the walls were peeling and the floor covered in plaster; through a torn, yellowed pelmet half a bemused day had forced itself beyond the dusty panes, and now reclined with no particular affirmation on an old, round rug in the window seat. In the middle of the room there was a step ladder, above which was a smooth, damp section of ceiling, as if something there had recently been mended or removed.

Leaving the room, I navigated a number of corridors, which ended up at a grand three-sided staircase with a long, threadbare carpet partially secured by crooked carpet rails, and partially held in place by lumps of masonry or metal which had been balanced at the sides of alternate steps. At the bottom of it there was a wide hall, from which further corridors branched off in many directions. I started to look for light switches, and found none. Then I started to look for lights, and found none of them, either. Everything, I realised, was lit by daylight; in places small white suns hung upon the walls or straddled the corner of a room, but everywhere else where the sun had yet to reach, the house was grey and dim. In their own way, even the spaces of illumination were themselves difficult to decipher, for the concentrated lightness there was too bright to reveal anything; it was simply its own thing, instead, and the house was an onlooker which, though decisively dappled by the broken light, seemed to feel no reciprocal obligation to surrender to the enquiry.

I recognised the kitchen almost instinctively, although its furnishings gave little away. Rather, there was something in its proportions that reminded me of the kitchen in my primary school, with its many-paned windows descending to the long, wide work surfaces that covered three edges of the room. Everything else, I knew, was in deep cupboards, and some of them you needed to hook open with a stick. I quickly found an aluminium kettle and put it on the hob, vaguely aware that it was still warm, and the cupboard remained locked as I did so. Then, still half asleep, I addressed the white haired man who had been standing in the doorway with his hand under his chin, declaring that I would go to the shop. The words and the saying of them were smooth and inconsequential; it was like a gradual shift of light; I didn’t have any particular shop in mind, and when the old man replied, I found myself thinking of railway carriages banging together, inevitable and undisturbed.

“You’ve only just come here, and you want to go out again,” he said wryly. I smiled; this was the humour of an older man, more awake than me, more distant than me, and yet even he, through an effort of will which also paid homage to the wisdom he had accumulated over the years, could reach back into the common past we shared to place a little nugget of humour before me.

“You’ve only just come here, and you want to go out again. You don’t want to spend a moment with me,” he smiled in turn. “It takes twenty years for you to come here at all, and now you’ve hardly clapped eyes on me but you want to go away again?” He spoke quietly and thoughtfully; the retort was presumably whimsical, since he was still smiling; yet somehow it lacked whatever fundamental quality was required to make it funny or flippant.

Perhaps catching sight of my own thoughtful expression, - “I’m joking, of course,” he added. “The fact is, you’d do better to go out later, not now.”

“Why later? What’s wrong with going out now? To buy milk?” I asked too quickly.

The three questions shot out one after another in identical black coats; striving to be inconspicuous, the first one paused, pretending to tie its lace, and the other two immediately collided with it.

“Don’t ask questions before I have the answers,” he said sharply, as if he were unused to having his judgment questioned, and had yet to discover a diplomatic way of expressing his dissent. “At ten a.m,” he added, in a more subdued voice, “the shift changes. There are two women in that shop, and the woman who succeeds the dawn steward is the more approachable and also the more presentable.”

Indeed, she was nicer, much nicer; she – she had a good way about her, minding the shop, he said with inspiration … She had a good way about her … He was clutching at straws; something had been lost; and it unsettled me to hear his tentative, clumsy speech clanking about like that. With feigned relief I let out a peal of laughter, for I could not endure the charade for long.

“She had a good way about her,” I repeated. “What on earth does that mean? I do believe you’re sweet on her. I do believe you are.” He was shaking his head, but so effusively it was more like a bow, and I saw clearly the wide, bald oblong on the top of his head: “Sweet on her, yes you are. I do believe you are …”, I said, wanting to do nothing to dispel this antic gesturing of his, which seemed to me more innocent and uncontrived than anything he had said.

“Yes and no,” he said suddenly, precisely, and clearly, as if all his thoughts had been collected in an instant, and the course before him was now clear to see. Even his shoulders relaxed; he had readied himself for a journey, but someone else was at the wheel, and he could give me his full attention. “Yes and no. Actually, mostly yes …” he conceded, secure enough now to take a detour, even to laugh at himself. “But it isn’t quite as you imagine.” And now the sun moved out from behind the refuge of its cloud, and, falling cleanly and lucidly in that room on the table and upon his hair and the side of his left ear, I found him smaller and more energetic, with a purpose more concentrated in some particular thing; I felt that this strange mansion with its studied desuetude was simply a formless space within which he lived, rather than any kind of extension of himself; I felt a resilient, hopeful sanity intermingled with loneliness, like the memory of a great grandmother’s fingers as they once buckled your duffle coat as a child.

It wasn’t quite as I imagined; now the story was effortless; I looked forward to the telling as much as to the conclusion, but, like the beginning of my journey the day before, everything seemed to mean more than I could comprehend, and nothing would wait for me. The grumpy one – it was her daughter, actually. In fact, this was the reason for her grumpiness, and for his staying away. She had never approved; not that it had ever come to anything.

“Well, it all happened many years ago, and it happened like this. They sent me to one of those old public schools you read about, and in the mornings before chapel I used to stand at the window and look out over the quadrangle there, and often she would come out of Ashburnham House and walk along the raised pavement towards Barton Street, but not once, in all the years that I stood there watching, did she turn to look my way. And now I’ve said that, I don’t need to say any more; that’s all I need to say. But if I did say one thing more, then I would say this: While the eyes might be open, the heart is closed; and, even if the heart were open, the soul would be closed, and there wasn’t hair enough to hang myself from that Rapunzel’s casement; there was only substance without spirit. And then she grew ill – very ill indeed. It is one thing to tolerate the unlove of a superior woman, to be spurned by her in her strength; but it is quite another to be overlooked by her in her weakness; that reads too much like detestation. And yet, the one you hate most is yourself, for wanting her to love you rather than to get better; you don’t recover from that; you develop very particular views about many things. “You do know what I mean?”, I kept demanding. “You do understand? You do comprehend?” For she had given me so little comfort I had lost all my bearings in the world; I didn’t even know if I made sense any more. Well, that stirred her, although I never expected her to reply. I had given up; I knew my cause was hopeless. She had spent too long failing to understand; why should she suddenly understand now? Why should she feel regret, now? Why should she feel compassion, now? What could I do with her commiseration; what could I learn from it; what could I save from those idle years of worship, now? Because understand that she looked me very clearly in the face, and I think it must only have been an inkling of my utter heartbreak that gave her the strength to do so. And then she touched me, which was also the only time she touched me, and she said the single word “Don’t”, - which was also the only time she alluded to my love; and ever since then I have lived in the shadow of that prescript, and that prescript is now forty eight years old. Yet how could I not love her?” he demanded. “I would have kissed the very ground she walked upon; I would have swigged her very piss from the toilet pan. But these impossible pronouncements are easy to make because I can’t have her; all I can have is the memory of her, walking toward me across the courtyard, walking through my heart, again and again, as if she couldn’t pierce me enough. I thought this was it, the world about me, and then I saw her. I thought this was it, but it wasn’t. Or rather, it didn’t have to be; it just turned out that way. For it is the choices not taken that sustain us; it is they that guide us; it is they that will live after us.”

He was silent for a moment, and I tried in vain to hear the sound of birds outside the window. It was nearly ten; the shift would be changing any moment; perhaps I would even get to see her for myself?

He shook his head. “You couldn’t see her if you tried. She uses a mop,” he added cryptically, without explaining who or what. “Anyway, if that’s how you feel, why listen to another word? No one ever listened to me. I might as soon talk to the wall, for all anyone cares.”

I left the room; I could not think of an answer, and everything about my grandfather and his house weighed heavily on me. I needed, even if only for a moment, to escape the obsessive place, and find some lively thoroughfare in which things were forgotten, not twisted out of shape through constant introspection. The front door was imposing; you could have ridden a cart and horses through it, although it opened easily enough, and I was surprised to see we were on the cliffs overlooking the sea. The house must have the best vantage point in the village, I was reflecting, when I turned back and saw straggled scrubland as far as the eye could see. There was no village; there wasn’t even a track; there was nothing but that stone house and a long, sore graze across the land where the car must have crossed the night before.

“Grandfather,” I muttered involuntarily: “What is this harsh, deserted world in which you live?”