Arcady and After

Maggy Johnston and Piet VanDongen, a married couple who had lived and worked abroad for most of their married life, decided several years before they were due to retire that they would find a moorland village in the north of England, where she had grown up, and buy a pretty house there. They would fit out the house, cultivate a garden, entertain old friends, make new ones, write books, and travel. And so it came to pass. One day Appleby-le-Moors found strangers moving into the old miller’s house on the green, and Maggy and Piet found people smiling at them on the street as if they knew who they were. “Why Appleby?” the postmaster wondered when Maggy introduced herself in his village shop. “Because it’s always been a lovely village,” Maggy said. “It was, and it still is.”

“And your husband?”

“The Netherlands are not far away. Overnight from Hull.”

“Welcome,” said the postmaster, the former accounting manager for a firm making agricultural machinery. “May you be happy here.”

“I have a lot of looking round to do,” Maggy confessed. “Not a difficult task. And it’s very moving. To find places much the same, you know.”

The postmaster looked at the neat gray-haired lady in her gray trousers and black quilted jacket, her silver earrings and necklace, and took in her amusement. “It’s so beautiful!” she added. “For years I’ve lived in places where I didn’t particularly want to live—Chicago and Toronto and Los Angeles, places where we worked. Interesting, of course, but without the resonance I find here.”

“And your husband?”

“He can’t get over it. Where are the dark satanic mills? he asks. Where are the sooty working-class terraces and the factory chimneys and the stick figures of Mr. Lowry?”

“You can get to Bradford by train quite easily,” said the postmaster humorously. “We’re in a ‘Place of Outstanding Natural Beauty,’ don’t forget.”

“As if that nailed it.”

Yet surprise bore Piet along like a wave. Why? Maggy wondered, walking home with the newspaper.

But beauty is always going to be foreign, and Maggy needed familiarity. That is why she decided to go with Piet back to the boarding school a few miles off, where she had been happy long ago, and where she might anchor her shapeless longing on the once familiar. By no coincidence both house and gardens of the school were outstanding of their kind, the eighteenth-century grand English or Scottish kind. That had provided a good reason for Maggy’s parents to send her there, so some of the distinction might rub off on her, rough little creature as she’d been. And that was the good reason too for Piet, an architect and connoisseur of houses, to accompany her.

The house had been designed about 1700 by a gentleman of the neighborhood, one of those amateurs of the classical age who erected a single masterpiece before going back to private life. To reach it Maggy and Piet drove through two sets of huge wrought-iron gates and two lots of parkland, all grass and vast oaks, and then whirled over a graveled courtyard to the double staircase of the house that led up to the entrance above.

“Enough to make you turn in your suit,” said Piet, who had picked up his splendid English before the colloquialisms of television. “A nice color, this stone. Nice and warm. Still the building is hideous. Guess why it’s a school.”

“Come, Piet, it’s absolutely beautiful.”

“In the Netherlands people have more respect for the public than to do this sort of thing. Showing off in this totally unscrupulous way.”

Maggy laughed. “You’re a snob, Piet. Yet you’re right—when the house burnt down in the 1880s, the family had the cheek to build it again.”

“Bad electrics, sure.”

“They liked grandeur. Someone told me that the local vicar was incensed at the time. He wrote that tenants in the village lived in leaking hovels. He said that the lord of the manor had a moral duty to tend...