"It is the same in spring," he said. Different quality, the same quality of light. You've been here in every season. "I was born here." He stated it as a fact flatly. But beneath the flatness lay something that was not flat at all.
The specific weight of a person describing something both true and enormous. The way people say, "I grew up here," and means something much larger. Felicity turned from the view and leaned back against the balustrade, a posture not entirely appropriate for a terrace, and looked at the house. Alifford Court was beautiful in a way that was also melancholic, too large for one person, visibly designed for more, with an east wing that from this angle appeared dark in its windows. The particular dark of rooms that have been closed rather than merely empty.
I wasn't born anywhere in particular, she said. My father was good at starting things and less good at finishing them. We moved frequently when I was young. I used to think I'd prefer a fixed point, a place that was always the same. And now she considered the valley.
Now I think it depends less on where you are than on whether you are actually there when you're there, whether you are present to the place or only moving through it. I've known people with fixed points who were never truly in them. He was quiet. The beeches made their copper sound in the wind. He was very close to her, she realized.
Close enough that she could clearly see the lines around his eyes, lines that spoke not of severity, but of something older and more specific. The lines of someone who had at some prior point laughed a great deal, and who had then spent some years on the careful project of forgetting how. "Do you have family nearby?" she asked. "Oh, sister in Dorset. We correspond." A pause.
We are fond of each other at appropriate epistolary distance. And here he looked at the closed east wing. Not currently. She did not press the matter. She had learned from her father's slow dying and the 14 months that followed the shape of a closed subject.