Aubrey lived at the end of an unadopted lane, in an Edwardian house which at one point in its history was described, in the laconic idiom of the local estate agent, as a “supr. eight bdrmed rsdnce in Yorkshire stone, archtct dsign, suit large fmly, gdns front and back, rm f.dble. grge, poss. consvtry/ washhse”; with the further annotations, “some scope f. imprvmts” and “defntly mst be viewed”. Its name, carved into the gateposts, was Clarendon.

For most of the time that he had lived there, alone, Aubrey had found little scope for. improvements. He liked the place as it was, and kept it in a state of controlled delapidation, to discourage intruders. There had once been a stout hardwood board, fixed to the rails of the garden gate, bearing the legend, painted white in italic capitals on a maroon ground, KEEP OUT, BEWARE OF THE DOG. With years of rain and neglect, the board had flaked, split, and sundered, the lower half at last falling away, leaving the injunction KEEP OUT, BEWARE, and then, with the continued erosions of time, simply BEWARE. Aubrey had allowed this to remain in place, for the benefit of mendicants, salesmen, representatives of political parties, and any members of the general public who, driven by casual curiosity, may have bumped their cars up the unmade road to get an uninterrupted view of the house. Had they done so, they must surely have turned away as soon as the driver could manage a tricky three-point turn among the potholes, for the aspect of the building from the South (it was hardly worth seeing from the North) was unsmiling. It was the long, bleak front garden, minimally tended, with its ailing plum tree, the mossed crazy paving, and the little stone slab inscribed Barkis, True Pal, 1945-1952, that gave visitors a first intimation of having called at an unsuitable time.

The house had a bad name among local tradesmen who were occasionally summoned to carry out necessary repairs - replacing old wiring, mending a stair tread, fixing a valetudinarian boiler, attending a chronic case of water-hammer. The owner was also poorly reputed as a complainant, being known, in the patois of North Derbyshire, as a “reyt mardy bogger”; but it was the house itself that put the workmen off, the old, dark, fusty, flock-wallpapered, steep-stairwelled, creaking mansion. It was generally known to be haunted. The back bar of the Royal George, a parliament of all the crafts, thrilled with rumours, competitively nurtured by rival tradesmen, of a decaying gentleman who made lewd smells, an indignant episcopal phantom who kept knocking on bedroom walls, a murdered maid who might be heard wailing piteously from the attic, and various minor manifestations, less precisely attributable, though unquestionably of supernatural origin.

But the true ghostliness of the house took a form and substance different from any of these. It was most readily apparent in the parlour, a cheerful place enough, where the brass handles of fire-irons shone, and the canopy and bars of the grate gleamed black over the ruddy blaze, whenever Aubrey had found time to lay a fire. There was a semblance of domestic order, even a cosiness, about this room. The most powerful impression, however, was of an extraordinary assemblage of portraits and photographs. They were everywhere, and in every size, from the larger pieces hung on the walls to the framed postcards set on what-nots and side tables: sepia pictures of uniformed men with elegiac moustaches; an unsmiling cleric, of oriental aspect, wearing a cardinal’s hat; one or two prizefighters; men with beards, of varying lengths; Socrates; W.G.Grace; Freud; Greta Garbo; D.H.Lawrence, in a little-known study signed, in felt pen, Love to All from Siggy, Xmas 1942 - truly an impressive collection of celebrities, with each and every one of whom, it seemed, Aubrey could claim some measure of acquaintance or relationship. To workmen awkwardly waiting in the parlour for a cheque to be written or notes to be counted these shadowy witnesses were presented as though they were indeed the master’s kith and kin. To anyone remarking on the passionately sensual features of Hedy Lamar, Aubrey, acknowledging the possibility of a resemblance would speak, sadly, of his cousin Ethel, who wasted away with the Asian flu, in Enfield, more years ago than he cared to remember. He would admit that his uncle, the cricketer Fred Merriweather Hyde, former captain of the Worcestershire County Colts, might have been taken, in a bad light, for H.G.Wells, something he had often been told. He had a tale for every picture in the gallery. He could talk eloquently and at random about his pictorial tribe, weaving strands of allusion, anecdote, and incredibly detailed supplementary information into textures of malarkey that seduced and baffled his village audience. “Tell ye what ‘tis”, one of them said, one evening in the Royal George, when the tankards tapped merrily on the old oak tables, ”yon’s gorra gob on ‘im”; meaning, under the kindly cover of homely speech, that Aubrey was an incorrigible liar.

Well, but was he? Liar - or better, romancer - he undeniably was, but the pathology of his condition was complicated. Aubrey had a recurrent, indeed deep-seated, difficulty in representing himself in ways that even he could believe in. Mendacity, a consistent and carapaced mendacity, resistant to investigative challenge, was not altogether his strength. It might be said that he was a good story-teller, but not the best of liars. He lied continually, but not entirely, and he had a preference for misleading by implication - a condition superficially nurtured, it might have been thought, by his work as an insurance claims assessor, but in fact growing out of something more deeply implanted in his character. He might give false impressions out of mere mischief, or for artistic pleasure, or more seriously to protect himself from the world’s menacing or callous intrusions upon his privacy, but beneath all these one obsession persisted: he felt the need to acquire a more interesting past than the one that followed him around, a properly illuminating context for all that he felt to be most distinctive and deserving in himself. It involved him in unremitting experiment; he could “try on” pasts as though “trying on” clothes, swapping possible hats and not inconceivable waistcoats several times a day. In his life, he would tell himself, he needed to be something more than a mere somebody: to be, rather, a somebody resembling someone.

His own true past (if any of us can be said to have a “true” past, any more than we have a “certain” future) he regarded, at the age of 28, as having been unfairly dull. For this he was inclined to blame his parents. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, says the lugubrious poet Larkin, in the one line all the world has read, or at least heard of, and while Aubrey may not have characterised his plight in quite those terms, he could not help but feel that, thanks to a respectable middle-class upbringing in the Home Counties, his life had indeed been emotionally mortgaged, destined to run on inescapably tedious lines - indeed, stretching a point, it might permissibly be said, used up. His father, John Aubrey, was a failed commodity broker, whose brief life came to an end one day in 1965, when he stepped in front of an ambulance speeding down Piccadilly to answer an emergency call. The ambulancemen helped him to the pavement outside the Reform Club, and then had to get on with their mission of mercy, leaving him to sit the steps of the Club, undisturbed and undisturbing, until a porter came out to shift him and found that he had passed away. This sad event left his wife, Felicity, and their five-year old boy John James, in circumstances that might have been regarded as straitened, had it not been for the assistance of Felicity’s brother, Sigmund Hyde, a wealthy psychiatrist resident in the village of Onceover, in the house called Clarendon, which he had inherited from his father, Edward Hyde, a highly reputed domestic architect, to whose work Niklaus Pevsner is said to have made occasional (disparaging) reference in the early drafts of his work on The Buildings of Britain. Sigmund was able to offer his bereaved sister and her boy a home in Onceover, but Felicity’s pride would not allow her to accept more than the annuity which permitted her to live in a small but adequately furnished bungalow in Tring, until her death in 1985, by which time the young John James had completed his education, at one of the newer Midland universities, having taken a good second class degree in English and Modern Business Studies, and had embarked on a promising career in Insurance. Within six months of Felicity’s death, her twin, Sigmund, had also died, leaving the house, Clarendon, to his nephew John James Aubrey. This fell conveniently for John James, then rising so rapidly in the Insurance profession as to have been appointed to a junior executive post with a large company based in the West Riding. He immediately took up residence in Onceover, resolved to embrace the bright possibilities of the future and shrug off a disappointing past.

Aubrey soon found that his life was divided between two isolations, that of a village in a nook of the Pennine, and that of his workplace, the great Insurance fortress of Liabilities in General, in the town of Steelthorp, some thirty miles away. For all its proximity to a centre of industry and commerce, Onceover was intractably rural, or worse, incorrigibly rustic. Aubrey had not fully realised, when he first moved in to Clarendon, how long it can take to win acceptance in such a place. Ten years at least is to be expected; fifteen is nearer the norm; twenty-five is not unknown. Until he is acknowledged in the street, or can enter the Royal George without reducing the noise of the bar to an uneasy, vigilant silence, or is addressed in any but formal style, the incomer must accept that he is on trial, or at best that his case is under review. He will be watched. Curtains will twitch as he passes by, and inexplicable sniggers will leap out of doorways. Rumours will circulate, and he will be vaguely aware of them without knowing quite what they are. It will be like seeing a pair of legs disappear round a corner. Tradesmen, normally inarticulate, will ply him with personal questions, so pointed as to amount to interrogation. Then one day he will be spoken to in the Post Office, and someone will tease him, and laugh at his bad jokes, and it will dawn on him that the long exile is over and that he is at last accepted.

His first five years in the village accustomed Aubrey to the feeling of being on approval. His case was not helped by the fact that his uncle Sigmund, “the old gentleman” had himself never been quite accepted, having been suspected of irregular practices up at the big house. The old vicar of St.Dismas’ denounced him from the pulpit as “Freudian”, which churchgoing villagers took to be something queer and not quite the thing, something like “Satanic”, possibly “Romish”, even “Seventh Day Adventist”. These suspicions, with others, naturally accrued to the nephew, covertly observed every weekday morning, dressed for town, making his way down the High Street, past the open yard of Arthur Harper For All Your Plumbing Requirements, past the Post Office and the General Store, past the Royal George and Bert’s All Nite Garage (Closed Mons., Thurs, Sat pm and most Suns) and so past the Church (14thC, Perp) the last marker on the road leading down to the little railway halt called, perversely, Over End. There, at 7.45, Aubrey would be joined by the station keeper, old George Wagstaff, affectionately known as “Gormless Jud”, who would say “Nah then”, and stand by the traveller in frozen silence until the train came in. It had two coaches, with a concertina access in the middle, and a driving position at either end. Until the line was privatised, this vehicle had been called, in faith, hope, and some charity, a Sprinter. After privatisation the new company changed the name to Spanner, because its routes spanned a tract of country converging on a central town - though there were those who, after a bone-shaking journey to Steelthorp, where they were only too happy to leap out and make a run for the station exit, worked hard at other explanations (describing themselves - eg - as nuts who bolted after several nasty wrenches).

When the Spanner came creaking and shuddering to a halt at Over End, Gormless Jud would bellow into the solitary passenger’s ear, “Berra gerron, fya gerrinon” and brandish his green flag almost before Aubrey had time to climb aboard. Apart from the disconcerting lurches and stutters as the Spanner negotiated the buckled, lichened course of what used to be called the “permanent way”, a track gnarled with age and use, the journey, through pleasant bottomland, past reeded streams and secretive hamlets,was normally tranquil, giving Aubrey time to dose, or meditate, or choose a section or two to read from a manual entitled “Theory and Principles of Effective Insurance Analysis: A Practitioner’s Guide”. It provided him with a fund of phrases to use when writing answers to enquiries or letters of complaint. On this route into Steelthorp, the Spanner would stop briefly at a few small stations, some of them wayside halts like Over End. The advent of such a station would be signalled by labouring noises from under the train, and by the absurd squawking of an address system advising passengers in the untalkative carriages, “The train is now approaching Grendelswell. Passengers intending to alight here should gather their belongings together now, making sure to leave nothing behind them when they leave. Please do not try to force the doors, as they open automatically, for your comfort and convenience.. Thank you” In evenings at home, Aubrey would sometimes try to imagine this address as spoken by some distinguished figure, past or present, whose intonations and vocal timbre he had fairly well in mind - Winston Churchill, Her Majesty the Queen, Margaret Thatcher, Mae West, among others. His Churchill, with the suspended phrasing, the dipping intonations, the growl of superabundant conviction, was fairly successful. Mae West was erotically superb with “Please do not try to force the doors, as they open automatically”, but otherwise unconvincing. The undoubted winner, in every phrase and nuance, was the Queen, leaving Aubrey persuaded that should the monarchy ever be turned out onto the street, there would be secure and gainful employment for Her Majesty as an announcer on the railways, or with any institution needing a system of public address.
No one ever “alighted” at any of the little stations on this morning run into Steelthorp. At some, people were waiting and these arrivals were always scrutinised by the established occupants, to check their entitlement to travel with the regulars in a seat of their own choosing. A familiar face would be promptly nodded in, or even received with a warm “Aye-aye”, or a sprightly “Ey oop”; a stranger would be more carefully observed, as Aubrey himself knew. It was five long winters before he began to feel secure in his tenancy of a seat in the rear of the first (non-smoking) carriage, and even after that time, if there had been no further newcomers joining the train at Throwup, Grendelswell, Bonetoft or Great Puddleby, he had the sensation of sitting in his corner almost on sufferance. He felt excluded, glared-at, even, at times, hated. In an emergency, he thought, in an unforeseen catastrophe requiring someone to leave the train, to jump out onto the line, or possibly to be thrown from a high embankment, there would be a muttered election among the passengers, and dark glances would be cast in his direction, before the fat guard approached him with a cold “It’s down to you. Get yourself alighted. Now.”

For some years he suffered these morning journeys as one resigned to loneliness and exclusion, comforted only by cat-naps and restorative excursions into The Theory and Principles of Effective Insurance Analysis. Then Fate laid a hand on the Spanner, in the comely shape of a newcomer, who boarded the train at Grendelswell. Aubrey recognised her immediately, glancing up from The Theory and Principles to see, with a start, the fine, pure lineaments, the holy romantic, wholly wholesome features of the woman he knew as Greer Garson, the leading actress in a 1940s film called Mrs Miniver which he had viewed, ecstatically, in a showing at The Golden Oldies Film Club during his time at college. The memory of her had become for him an icon of the young man’s yearning for the warm, wise sensuality of the mature woman. And here she was, his adored, climbing aboard the Spanner at Grendelswell, with a hitch of her skirt as she minded the step, under the inspection of those case-hardened, surly commuters. Not a soul broke the silence as, blushing and burdened with the impedimenta of briefcase, coat, handbag and umbrella, she fell into a seat briefly indicated by the guard; but Aubrey’s heart went out to her. He thought of how he had encountered her in dreams long past, in college lodgings or in the small bedroom in Tring. How, on such an occasion as this, strangers on a train, they would get up to leave at the same destination, having gathered their belongings together, and she would drop her gloves. Which he would stoop to retrieve; and then, thrilling to the touch of her cool, bare hand, he would instinctively put a protective arm about her, drawing her into him, hearing her breath quicken and his own respond as through their overcoats they knew the the enticing pressure of eager thighs; and as the train drew into to a platform marked FOREVER, his passionate kisses on her neck and throat would give assurance of his total commitment to the Only One, the Adored.

She left the train rather nimbly at Steelthorp, and Aubrey, stumbling after, crouching slightly, somewhat impeded by the wantonness of suddenly uncontrollable possessions, got out onto the platform only in time to catch a glimpse of her, expertly jinking among the crowds making their workaday exit into the city. It was what literary critics call an epiphany, or, in a phrase much favoured by centre-page journalists at that time, a defining moment. Aubrey knew in that second that true love had found him, and in the next second felt that he would never know anything of the sort. He was impelled to run after her, to speak to her, to explain himself, and so he ran, all elbows and brusque apologies, up the stairs and through the station concourse. But when he came out into the street, she was nowhere to be seen. He had lost her in a moment. Here’s another fantasy, he thought, that won’t be turned into honest fact. It occurred to him, as he trudged away to his office, that there was no portrait of Greer Garson on the parlour wall at Clarendon.

.