The lake is not real. It was dug out by hand in the 1790s, by men with picks and shovels, and carts to take away the spoil. Men who, presumably, felt they might have had better things to do than dam the Silvergate and force her underground, damn the landed gentry, damn their fate…or perhaps it was work and a job’s a job and being out on the land, even if you’re making it something it was never meant to be, is better than being in some shoe factory.
The lake is real enough. It is wind-blown water. It has reed beds and fish and there’s talk of otters, a rumour of a kingfisher nesting, the reality of a lonely, single Egyptian goose (all dressed up and nowhere to go).
Ok, perhaps it’s really just an oversized garden pond, artfully designed to look like a stretch of river, wider than the stream they finessed to make it. A statement of power and wealth. But the reeds don’t know or don’t care. The geese will take their turn on the catwalk and pretend everything is ok. Away back-stage the woodpecker does his drumming. The avian choir don’t quite meet their cues, deliberately, provocatively, auditioning for their solos.
By the house, the water is shallow, its sandy bottom enticing for childish paddling. I want to remove my shoes and walk in, and then out into the depths and swim (is it even deep enough?) to where that beige water becomes glacial blue. Mr Darcy notwithstanding, I suspect such behaviour is frowned upon. So I don’t.
Instead, I find a tree to sit beneath. It is April. The magnolia is in full bloom in its sheltering, the pears and plums spatchcocked against the walls of the kitchen garden are coming into flower, bleeding white daffodils are dying back, the first bluebells are ringing on the embankments of the formal terrace, but out here on the lakeshore, the trees keep their own seasons. Time has no meaning for them. They live not by the clock, but by the moon and the sun and the earth. By the pull of the stars, the growing light, the rain-watering. It might be a warm April day, but the light hours are still as short as they ever were, and the moon draws up the sap in its ancient rhythm.
The trees are hazy with not-yet buds. I sit beneath a young-ish oak of only a few more decades than me, or at least not a century or two more. I look up at a mosaic of sky. Fractal sapphire and cobalt, shot through with quartz where a plane left its trail. I look down into the water, fallen twiglets, pick-up-sticks that won’t be. I watch the reflections of the branches on the surface, shadow play. And then…
…then something else catches my eye. I am so used to seeing trees reflected in water, I had no idea that the reverse can happen: that water is reflected on trees, that the bark can mirror the water just as easily as the lake can mirror the branches. I am caught in a hypnotic trance. Where the branches overhang and reach down towards the surface, light carried on ripples makes the jump and pulsates upwards. Each wave wraps itself around its landing branch, a ring of light, that ascends, followed by the next and the next. Beating, pulsing, like electrical current, like heartbeats, like pulsars, stars, the breathing of the universe, or some whispered secret conversation between the lake and the tree.
Like the rings of Saturn fallen to earth and trying to climb back to the sky.
Like breathing.
Lost in thought.
I am neither.
Not lost. Not thinking.
I am sitting under a tree, by the water. They are in silent conference with the sky, probably don’t even know that I am here. No more does the Egyptian goose that paddles by, nor the woodpecker thrumming his lunch somewhere distant, nor the coots or moorhens that call from their hidings in the reeds, nor the tiny purple flowers at my feet. Ground ivy, gill-go-by-the-ground, creeping Charlie, an expectorant – which is why she’s calling to me – mucus needing to be shifted.
Aleshoof – a clarifier of the old beers before hops.
A mint family member, not a nettle though she mimics them close enough.
Today in her infancy, but full of wisdom, she clusters round my feet and says: look and learn.
I look. I will learn later. Ground ivy, aleshoof, tunhoof, catsfoot, field balm, and run-away-robin. Such a tiny unseen plant at this stage, with so many names. People looked more closely back then. Today, did any other than us who sat down by the lake even see them? Children ran around the gardens looking for cardboard eggs, larger than they were. But one little boy wanted to be held high under the magnolia to touch its soft petals. Another wanted to be held over the fountain to see where the water came from, how the pump worked. There is hope for the world while it still holds such curious young minds. And such parents willing to lift and explain.
But I’m still sitting under my tree, watching the light show.
Pulsating rings of light rising up overhanging branches.
Higher, on the underside of the not-yet-canopy, those lights dissipate, become smoke in the enclosed roof of a long-house, looking for the outlet, a misty breath of lake-light, shimmering on the underside of lichened limbs, seeking the breaks in the stained-glass windows of skylight.
It isn’t mist. It is only light. And yet…and yet…I am not so sure.
My gaze is drawn again to the low branches and the pulsating rise of ring-light. A trick of the light, and the wind, and the water, and the overhanging branches. Now I have seen it I will need to go and look for it elsewhere. Part of me doesn't want to ever find it again. I want to have been spelled, specifically enchanted. I want this moment to be imprinted somewhere deep within me, never lost, and never quite understood. I want it to remain one of those shadow-space moments: the barely-there mystical maybe: the fragile nothingness of presence and the passage of time.
