The windows showed me his kit was empty, and when I walked back to the front of the cottage and knocked on the door, there ‘as no answer.
Might he have gone away? It was a time of year when people did go away. But they went to their families, surely, and so Aurelius, having no family, would stay here. Belatedly the reason for Aurelius’s absence occurred to me: He would be out delivering cakes for Christmas parties. Where else would a caterer be, just before Christmas? I would have to e back later. I put the card I had bought through the mail slot a off through the woods toward Angelfield House.
It was cold; cold enough for snow. Beh my feet the ground was frost-hard and above the sky was dangerously white. I walked briskly. With my scarf ed around my face as high as my nose, I soon warmed up.
At the clearing, I stopped. In the dista the site, there was unusual activity. I frowned. What was going on? My camera was around neck, beh my coat; the cold crept in as I undid my buttons. Using my long lens, I watched. There olice car on the drive, builders’ vehicles and maery were all stationary, and the builders were standing in a loose cluster. They must have stopped w a little while ago, for they were slapping their hands together and stamping their feet to keep warm. Their hats were on the ground or else slung by the strap from their elbows. One man offered a pack of cigarettes. From time to time one of them addressed a ent to the others, but there was no versation. I tried to make out the expression on their unsmiling faces. Bored? Worried? Curious? They stood turned away from the site, fag the woods and my lens, but from time to time one or another cast a glance over his shoulder to the se behind them.
Behind the group of men, a white tent had beeed to cover part of the site. The house was gone, but judging from the coach house, the gravel approach, the church, I guessed the tent was where the library had been. Beside it, one of their colleagues and a man I took to be their boss were in versation with another pair of men. These were dressed one in a suit and overcoat, the other in a poliiform. It was the boss who eaking, rapidly and with explanatory nods and shakes of the head, but when the man in the overcoat asked a question, it was the builder he addressed it to, and when he answered, all three men watched him ily.
He seemed unaware of the cold. He spoke in short sentences; in his long and frequent pauses the others did not speak, but watched him with inteie one point he raised a finger in the dire of the mae and mimed its jaw of jagged teeth biting into the ground. At last he gave a shrug, frowned and drew his hand over his eyes as though to wipe them of the image he had just jured.
A flap opened in the side of the white tent. A fifth man stepped out of it and joihe group. There was a brief, unsmiling ferend at the end of it, the boss went over to his group of men and had a few words with them. They nodded, and as though what they had been told was entirely what they were expeg, began to gather together the hats and thermos flasks at their feet and make their way to their cars parked by the lodge gates. The poli in uniform positioned himself at the entrao the tent, back to the flap, and the other ushered the builder and his boss toward the police car.
I lowered the camera slowly but tio gaze at the white tent. I khe spot. I had been there myself. I remembered the desolation of that desecra
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