My Norfolk host was a woman I had known in Africa. Her husband was working abroad again, and she didn’t like to be alone in the country dark. If our strained expatriate lives had not brought us into contact, we would never have been friends; after a while I realised we weren’t friends anyway, so I got on a train in Norwich and never came back. But our long drives about the county, lost in winter lanes, our limp salads in village cafés, our scramblings in overgrown churchyards and our attention to the stories of old people had made me think deeply about this territory, and want to write a novel set there. After some years, this was what I did.
We had been separated for no more than two years when my ex-husband came to England, changed. I believe people do change; there’s no mileage, really, in believing the opposite. I also had changed. I was living alone. I was sick with a chronic illness, swollen by steroid medication, and a cynic in matters of romance. Of Freud’s two constants, love and work, I now embraced just one; I was employed six days a week at two ill-paid jobs, days in a bookshop and nights behind a bar, and I got up at dawn to write my journals and stabilise my body for a venture into the world. I kept notes for future books; at that time, 1982, I had published only one short story. I had given up barbiturates. I don’t remember exactly when I stopped, or what I did with the endless supply of tiny pills from the big plastic tub I’d brought from Africa. Did I tail them off? Stop them cold? I don’t know. In view of the claims I will later make for my memory, this causes me concern. Perhaps they brought their own oblivion with them, each rattling little scoop of pinhead-sized killers. Since then I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there’s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.
Whether I was fit, that summer, to take a rational decision—well, who ever knows about that? It seemed that what I had left, with my ex-husband, was more than most people started with. So we got married again, economically, at the registrar’s office in Maidenhead, with two witnesses. It was September, and I felt very ill that morning, queasy and swollen, as if I were pregnant; there was a pain behind my diaphragm, and from time to time something seemed to flip over and claw at me, as if I were a woman in a folk tale, pregnant with a demon. Nothing, except for having to get married, would have got me out of bed, into my dress, into my high heels and into the street. The registrar was kindly and wished us better luck this time around. There was no ring; as the size of my fingers was changing week to week, I didn’t see the point, and it is possible, also, that I didn’t want to resume the signs and symbols of marriage too quickly. We had lunch in a restaurant in Windsor, in a courtyard overlooking the river. We had champagne. A witness took a photograph, in which I look hollow-eyed, like a turnip lantern. This is how—I have to shake myself to say it—I have been married twice: twice to the same man. I always thought it was a film people pursuit, or what peroxided pools winners used to do, dippy people destabilised by good fortune. I thought it was what people did when they had stormy temperaments; it was not an enterprise for the prudent or steadfast. Though perhaps, if you’re prudent and steadfast past a certain point, it’s the only reasonable thing to do. You would go on getting married and married to that person, marrying and marrying them, for as many times as it needed to make it stick.
In mid-January 1993 we made our headquarters at the Blakeney Hotel, a flint ship sailing the salt marshes. We were equipped with sheaves of property details, most of them lying or misleading. For two days we drove the lanes, crossing houses off as soon as we saw their location or exterior. I was recovering from a bad Christmas—bronchitis and a lung inflammation—and I had no voice. But voice was not necessary, only an ability to peer at the map in fading light and at the same time monitor faded fingerposts, leaning under the weight of Norfolk place names. At five on a Sunday afternoon, in near-dark, we were up to our calves in mud somewhere east of East Dereham, a stone’s throw from an ancient crumbling church and a row of tumbledown corrugated-iron farm buildings, trying to find a track to a forlorn little cottage at the end of a forlorn little row. We gave it up, sat disconsolate inside the scarlet monster, and turned our minds to the M25.
When we returned, still in bitter weather, I had got my voice back and we had narrowed our search. Often, when I was staying with my friend from Africa, we had come to Reepham to shop, and I had looked up at the long Georgian windows of the Old Brewery. It was a pub and small hotel, an elegant red-brick building with a sundial and that Latin inscription which means ‘I only count the happy hours’. By the time I returned there, ten years on, Reepham had a post office, two butchers, a pharmacy, as well as a telephone kiosk: a hairdresser, one or two discreet antique dealers, a busy baker’s shop which sold vitamins and farm eggs and organic chocolate, and a greengrocer-florist called Meloncaulie Rose. A well-arranged town square was surrounded by calm, wide-windowed houses, and a jumble of cottages tumbling down Station Road. There was no longer a station, though in Victorian times there had been two, and twelve beer houses, and a cattle market. There had been three churches, but one of them burnt down in 1543, and was never rebuilt; the history of the town is of a slow decline into impiety, and abstemiousness. On a January day, after I became a resident, a huddled old lady beckoned me from her doorway, and looked across the deserted market place to the church gates. ‘What do you make of it?’ she said. ‘More life in the churchyard than in the street today.’
The people of Reepham and the surrounding villages gather in the post office on a Saturday morning. They discuss rainfall—‘not enough to wet a stamp,’ I once heard a man say. They talk about whether they have put their heating on, or switched it off, and about nonagenarian drivers who crawl the lanes in their Morris Travellers. They are not inhospitable. They don’t make a stranger of you till you’ve lived there for twenty years. They don’t in fact make much of you at all. People once employed on the land are now quite likely to work at a computer terminal. They don’t know you, but they don’t mind that. They’re live and let live. They used to greet each other with ‘Are you all right?’ a question with a unique Norfolk inflection, but they don’t do that so much as they did. They go into their houses early on Christmas Eve, and lock the doors. They leave their windfall apples and overproduce of vegetables outside their doors in baskets, for anyone to take, and sell bunches of daffodils for pennies in the spring.
When we went to see the house, the builder’s debris was still in it. We stood in its unfinished rooms and imagined it. We imagined it would be ours. It was cheap, and a minute from the market place. At midnight, we left our room at the Old Brewery and walked to the gate: or to where the gate would be. We wanted to see it again, in privacy and silence. As we stood, hunched into our coats on a night of obdurate cold, the tawny owl called out from the tree.
Later we had a plaque made to say ‘Owl Cottage’, with a picture. But the man did a barn owl, canary yellow and thin, with creepy feet like the feet of a rodent.
It’s a strange phenomenon, the ‘second home’. Like the second marriage, it’s not something that I ever associated with myself. I thought it was for rich people who drove up prices in the Cotswolds. I never felt guilty about Owl Cottage; there was hardly a queue for it, with its tiny backyard and weekday traffic noise. We hoped that buying it would be the first stage of a permanent move to Norfolk. Getting into our car, the BMW and its less flashy successors, I would imagine this was the final journey, and that we were travelling in convoy with the removal van: that we were leaving the South-east behind for ever. When I played this game, I would smile and my shoulders would relax. But then we would grind to a halt, at the sight of some carnage or disaster on the M25, and I would have to acknowledge that it was just another short, fraught weekend trip, and that the change in our lives would have to be earned.
For a time, we would visit every two or three weeks, our two cats travelling with us. Released, squalling, from their cage, they would race through the rooms, bellowing, feet thundering on the wooden stairs, driving out the devils only cats can see. Exhausted, they would take to their basket, while we climbed the stairs to a room papered the pale yellow of weak sunshine: better people already, calmer,