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By Root 361 0

of countryside, though gradually all we could see was our own faces in windows that had turned into long black mirrors. Somewhere above Stoke-on-Trent I visited the buffet car, sensing once again, on my way through a succession of carriages that swayed as if I were drunk, the excitement caused by the prospect of eating something cooked in a moving train. The timer on the microwave gave off a chunky mechanical sound, like a detonator in an old war film, then rang a dainty bell to signal that it had finished with my hot dog—just as the train went over a level crossing, behind which I could make out the shadow of a group of cows.

We arrived at Oxenholme Station, subtitled ‘The Lake District', shortly before nine. Only a few others alighted with us, and we walked silently along the platform, our breaths visible in the night chill. Back inside the train, passengers were dozing or reading. The Lake District would, for them, be one stop among many, a place where they would look up from their books for a moment and take in the concrete pots arranged symmetrically along the platform, check the station clock and perhaps let out uninhibited yawns before the Glasgow train pulled off again into the darkness and they returned to a new paragraph.

The station was deserted, though it could not always have been thus, for unusually many of the signs were subtitled in Japanese. We had called from London to rent a car and found it at the end of a parking bay under a street lamp. The rental company had run out of the small models we had asked for, and had delivered instead a large burgundy family saloon that had a heady new-car smell to it, and an immaculate grey carpet across which the marks of a vacuum cleaner were still visible.

2.

The immediate motives for our journey were personal, but they might also be said to have belonged to a broader historical movement dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century, in which city dwellers began for the first time to travel in great numbers through the countryside in an attempt to restore health to their bodies and, more important, harmony to their souls. In the year 1700, 17 percent of the population of England and Wales lived in cities and towns. By 1850, 50 percent did, and by 1900, 75 percent.

We headed north towards the village of Troutbeck, a few miles above Lake Windermere. We had reserved a room at an inn called the Mortal Man, where two narrow beds with stained blankets had been pushed together. The landlord showed us the bathroom, warned us of the high phone charges, which he suspected (from our clothes and our hesitant manner at the reception desk) we would be unable to afford, and, as he took his leave, promised us three days of perfect weather and welcomed us to the Lake District.

We tried the television and found news from London but after a moment switched it off and opened the window instead. There was an owl hooting outside, and we thought of its strange existence, out there in the otherwise silent night.

I had come in part because of a poet. That evening in our room, I read another section of Wordsworth's Prelude. The cover of the paperback was illustrated with a portrait by Benjamin Haydon, which showed Wordsworth severe and aged. M. declared him an old toad and went to have a bath, though later, while standing by the window applying face cream, she recited several lines from a poem whose title she had forgotten, which she said had moved her perhaps more than anything else she had ever read:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind

Ode, Intimations of Immortality

We went to bed, and I tried to read further, though it became hard to concentrate after I found a long blond hair caught on the headboard that belonged neither to M. nor to me and hinted at the many guests who had stayed in the Mortal Man before us, one of whom was perhaps now on another continent, unaware