Houses Revisited

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again... and many other houses besides. I love absorbing fictional places that set the scene to favourite novels. I imagine retracing familiar characters' footsteps as stories unfold, like Charles Ryder, revisiting Brideshead, recalling motoring there from Oxford with Sebastian on ''a cloudless day in June'' years before. However many times we may revisit Chatsworth, Ickworth or Hatfield we feel we know Brideshead more intimately for we were party to the ''fierce little human tragedy'' played there. We too knelt in the art nouveau chapel, witnessed the tension at Lady Marchmain's Christmas house party and watched the reconstruction of the Queen's bed in the Chinese drawing room on Lord Marchmain's return from Venice, coming home to die.
It is easy to slip back there, as to Manderley, returning to the cosy library with its burning logs or Rebecca's bedroom, its curtains drawn, shutters closed. We hear the sea from the west wing and smell again the sweet, heady scent of azaleas in the Happy Valley.
How well we recall Bathsheba's parlour at her farmhouse in Weatherbury as Sergeant Troy prises open Fanny Robin's coffin to reveal their illegitimate child or the ancestral mansion at Wellbourne whereTess and Angel Clare spend their ill-fated honeymoon. Similarly, we remember Bramshurst Court, boarded and barred as their refuge before their arrest at Stonehenge.
Close your eyes and imagine Thornfield, a burnt-out ruin, Wuthering Heights or the drawing room at Netherfield Park. A spirit of place lingers on in our imagination and memory. Dodie Smith's Belmotte will always be cold, damp and decrepid, Stephen Colley's room unbearably bleak and touching. Even after being burnt down, William Trevor's Kilneagh remains in memory a comforting refuge from the harsh Troubles.
It is impossible to imagine Brandham Hall other than in a heatwave, set in a hazy summer of cricket matches, ladies with parasols. The past is not so much a foreign country as an Edwardian country house we may have visited in childhood, somewhere between Sandringham and Holkham.
In contrast, The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate is seen in autumn shortly before the outbreak of the Great War. Time stands still at Nettleby Park; the lights are already dimming. We sense we shall not see them lit again so brightly. Similarly, events leading up to the Second World War cast a long shadow across Darlington Hall in The Remains of the Day.
In Matilda's England William Trevor explores the relationship of house and owner and its effect on the new inhabitants of Challacombe Manor. Henry James' ''old family place in Essex'' in The Turn of the Screw and Laurel Cottage in Barbara Vine's A Dark Adapted Eye are equally charged: suitable backdrops to sinister events.
Some fictitious places seem so familiar it is as if we have been there like Nancy Mitford's Alconleigh or Linda's appartement in Paris, so wonderfully mocked by Lord Merlin and Davey Warbeck. Who has not seen the entrenching tool, the cabinet of diseased fossils or the store cupboard, fondly named Aladdin? They are as real to the reader as the paintings on the stairs at Manderley, the broken ornament, Rebecca's writing desk.
Once read, some places are never forgotten: Miss Havisham's candlelit, cobwebbed Satis House, the cosiness of the upturned boat in David Copperfield, Mrs. Minver's London drawing room. I will always remember the isolated vicarage in J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country or the farmhouse known as 'The Vision' in Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill with its oak four-poster bed and faded cretonne hangings. A Sussex bedroom described by Elizabeth Jane Howard and a Cotswold sitting room by Margaret Drabble in The Realms of Gold have stayed with me for twenty five years. Does a badger's skull still stand on the wooden chest or a copper kettle on the hearth? Are the curtains with their faded pattern of birds and acorns still the same? Does Natasha still make real bread, real marmalade?
Penelope Lively writes memorably of interiors in both adult and children's fiction. In A House Unlocked she returns to the fictitious Medleycott from Going Back for a factual account of her grandmother's country house, Golsoncott. I thought it seemed familiar: a hazy memory from a long time back, a paperback I lent a friend years before.
We have shared the joys and sorrows of such places; sometimes it is a wrench to leave. We can only wait for the sadness to pass. Even Cecil Beaton's moving biographical account of his lost love, Ashcombe, does not upset me as much as a scene towards the end of Ann Michael's novel, Fugitive Pieces when a young academic visits the Greek house where Jakob Beer, writer and Holocaust survivor lived. There are poignant reminders of lives spent, ''evidence of a life so achingly simple'' that has come to an end.
So these are some of the places I remember, to be revisted time and again. They remain constant in an ever-changing world: comforting retreats, fixed in time, rooted in our imagination. We have only to turn the key in the lock and go inside.

(Originally published in The Hedgerow)