ANGELFIELD AGAIN

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    The day before, orain, I>９9ｌｉｂ?</a> had imagined activity and noise: shouted instrus and arms sending messages in urgent semaphore; es, pla and slow; stone crashing on stone. Instead, as I arrived at the lodge gates and looked toward the demolition site, everything was silent and still.

    There was nothing to see; the mist that hung in the air made everything invisible that was more than a short distance away. Eveh was indistinct. My feet were there one moment, gohe . Lifting my head, I walked blindly, trag the path as I remembered it from my last visit, as I remembered it from Miss Winter’s descriptions.

    My mind map was accurate: I came to the ga<s></s>rdely when I expected to. The dark shapes of the yew stood like a hazily paiage set, flattened into two dimensions by the blank background. Like ethereal bowler hats, a pair of domed forms floated on the cloudlike mist, the trunks that supported them fading into the whiteness beh. Sixty years had left them rown and out of shape, but it was easy today to suppose that it was the mist that was softening the geometry of the forms, that when it lifted, it would reveal the garden as it was then, in all its mathematical perfe, set in the grounds not of a demolition site, nor of a ruin, but of a house intact.

    Half a tury, as insubstantial as the water suspended in this air, was ready to evaporate with the first ray of winter sun.

    I brought my wrist close to my fad read the time. I had arrao meet Aurelius, but how to find him in this mist? I could wander forever without seeing him, even if he passed within arm’s reach.

    I called out “Hello!” and a man’s voice was carried bae.

    ‘Hello!“

    Impossible to tell whether he was distant or close by. “Where are you?”

    I pictured Aurelius staring into the mist looking for a landmark.

    ‘I’m o a tree.“ The words were muffled.

    ‘So am I,“ I called back. ”I don’t think yours is the same tree as mine. You sound too far away.“

    ‘You sound quite near, though.“

    ‘Do I? Why don’t you stay where you are aalking, and I’ll find you!“

    ‘Right you are! An excellent plan! Though I shall have to think of something to say, won’t I? How hard it is to speak to order, when it seems so easy the rest of the time… What dismal weather we’re having. Never known murkiness like it.“

    And so Aurelius thought aloud, while I stepped into a cloud and followed the thread of his voi the air.

    That is when I saw it. A shadow that glided past me, pale iery light. I think I k was not Aurelius. I was suddenly scious of the beating of my heart, and I stretched out my hand, half fearful, half hopeful. The figure eluded me and swam out of view.

    ‘Aurelius?“ My voice sounded shaky to my own ears.

    ‘Yes?“

    ‘Are you still there?“

    ‘Of course I am.“

    His voice was in quite the wrong dire. What had I seen? It was not Aurelius. It must have been an effect of the mist. Afraid of what I might yet see if I waited, I stood still, staring into the aqueous air, willing the figure to appear again.

    ‘Aha! There you are!“ boomed a great voice behind me. Aurelius. He clasped my shoulders in his mittened hands as I turo face him. ”Goodness gracious, Margaret, you’re as white as a sheet. Anyone would think you’d seen a ghost!“

    We walked together in the garden. In his overcoat, Aurelius seemed even taller and broader than he really was. Beside him, in my mist-gray raincoat, I felt insubstantial.

    ‘How is your book going?“

    ‘It’s just  the moment. Interviews with Miss Winter. And research.“

    ‘Today is research, is it?“

    ‘Yes.“

    ‘What do you o know?“

    ‘I just want to take some photographs. I don’t think the weather is on my side, though.“

    ‘You’ll get to see it properly within the hour. This mist won’t last long.“

    We came to a kind of walkway, lined on each side with es grown so wide that they almost made a hedge.

    ‘Why do you e here, Aurelius?“

    We strolled on to the end of the path, then into a space where there seemed to be nothing but mist. When we came to a wall of yew twice as high as Aurelius himself, we followed it. I noticed a sparkling in the grass and on the leaves: The sun had e out. The moisture in the air began to evaporate and the circle of visibility grew wider by the minute. Our wall of yew had led us full circle around ay space; we had arrived back at the same e had entered by.

    When my question seemed so lost in time that I was not even sure I had asked it, Aurelius answered. “I was born here.”

    I stopped abruptly. Aurelius wandered on, unaware of the effect his words had had on me. I half ran a few paces to catch up with him.

    ‘Aurelius!“ I took hold of the sleeve of his greatcoat. ”Is it true? Were y<tt>９９lｉb.t>ou really born here?“

    ‘Yes.“

    ‘When?“

    He gave a strange, sad smile. “On my birthday.”

    Unthinking, I insisted, “Yes, but when?”

    ‘Sometime in January, probably. Possibly February. Possibly the end of December, even. Sixty years aghly. I’m afraid I don’t know any more than that.“

    I frowned, remembered what he had told me before about Mrs. Love and not having a mother. But in what circumstances would an adopted child know so little about his inal circumstahat he does not even know his own birthday?

    ‘Do you mean to tell me, Aurelius, that you are a foundling?“

    ‘Yes. That is the word for what I am. A foundling.“

    I was lost for words.

    ‘One does get used to it, I suppose,“ he said, and I regretted that he had to e for his own loss.

    ‘Do you really?“

    He sidered me with a curious expression, no doubt w how much to tell me. “No, actually,” he said.

    With the slow and heavy steps of invalids, we resumed our walking. The mist was almost gohe magical shapes of the topiary had lost their charm and looked like the u bushes and hedges they were.

    ‘So it was Mrs. Love who…“ I began.

    ‘… found me. Yes.“

    ‘And your parents…“

    ‘No idea.“

    ‘But you know it was here? In this house?“

    Aurelius shoved his hands into the depths of his pockets. His shoulders tightened. “I wouldn’t expect other people to uand. I haven’t got any proof. But I do know.” He sent me a quick glance, and I enced him, with my eyes, to tinue.

    ‘Sometimes you  know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you  remember. I ’t explain it.“

    I nodded, and Aurelius went on.

    ‘The night I was found there was a big fire here. Mrs. Love told me so, when I was nine. She thought she should, because of the smell of smoke on my clothes when she found me. Later I came over to have a look. And I’ve been ing ever since. Later I looked it up in the archives of the local paper. Anyway—“

    His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someoelling somethiremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualo disguise its signifi case the listeurned out to be unsympathetic.

    ‘Anyway, the minute I got here I khis is home, I said to myself. This is where I e from. There was no doubt about it. I knew.“

    With his last words, Aurelius had let the lightness slip, allowed a fervor to creep in. He cleared his throat. “Obviously I don’t expeyoo believe it. I’ve no evidence as such. Only a ce of dates, and Mrs. Love’s vague memory of a smell of smoke—and my own vi.”

    ‘I believe it,“ I said.

    Aurelius bit his lip a me a wary sideways look.

    His fidehis mist, had led us uedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had old anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, ahe<var>.</var>mselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatieo fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment.

    ‘I believe you,“ I repeated, my tohick with all the waiting words. ”I’ve had that feeling, too. Knowing things you ’t know. From before you  remember.“

    And there it was again! A sudden movement in the er of my eye, there and gone in the same instant.

    ‘Did you see that, Aurelius?“

    He followed my gaze to the topiary pyramids and beyond. “See what? No, I didn’t see anything.”

    It had gone. Or else it had never been there at all.

    I turned back to Aurelius, but I had lost my he moment for fidences was gone.

    ‘Have you got a birthday?“ Aurelius asked.

    ‘Yes. I’ve got a birthday.“

    All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years.

    ‘I’ll make a note of it, shall I?“ he said brightly. ”Then I  send you a card.“

    I feigned a smile. “It’s ing up soon, actually. ”

    Aurelius opened a little blue notebook divided into months.

    ‘The eenth,“ I told him, and he wrote it down with a pencil so small it looked like a toothpi his huge hand.

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