QUINTESSENTIALLY | Insider | 2011 December

In the restaurant, we sat, just staring. Sometimes at each other, sometimes out over the plains of the forest and then out further across the twilight hours, carried as they are on the wings of a thousand swans, sometimes white, often black with all the poetry of nightfall. Their wings glide, high above Hartwell House and swoop along the rushes and further along towards Blenheim Palace and Woburn Abbey along the way.

It is here, just an hour from London, that deer dance across ravines now frosted over by the drip of mid-winter, tripping as they do across the Vale of Aylesbury. It is here that a lake shudders in lonely thought, impressed as it is by the silhouette of this 17-th century stately mansion – the very metaphor of ‘pensive reflection’ – in-awed by its strange inhabitants, by their laughter, their pensive smiles, amused too by their fond appreciation for its Jacobean furniture, its eerie figurines – each with their own unique countenance, becoming graver, darker, lighter, then stronger in bearing and power, then sensitive to your own sense of amazement as they climb up the sweeping staircase to 33 suites covered in fine fabric and a selection of shortbreads and ‘luxury fruit’.

I couldn’t figure out if my sighs in the almost forgotten candlelight were for the one, or for the other. My eyes rested on the one, the one I repeatedly called ‘buttercup’ (keeping a straight face all the while, and this just to try and make her laugh, for her smile had started so thinly, and was now growing steadily). My fork was heavy with a poached fillet of brill with lemon grass, and her lips were pressed against Ruinart Brut Rose, and they turned to find themselves reflected in the purple glass that divided the moon beam and shattered it on ten pale, motionless fingers (and one sapphire ring). I noticed that mine own eyes were both dilated, and shone with a similar intensity to that moon which found a place in her own.

Dear reader (for you are dear to me if you are reading this), you will ask me if such is the poise of romance that the world inside must find its immediate reflection in the world outside, that the sigh must escape from the heart into the ether and not in the other direction. And I will agree, and passionately at that. For what is this forest and these grand public rooms, the high ceilings and yellow cupolas and the fine paintings and the exquisite plasterworks (even if carved from a golden blade), and the beauty of this bookish garden, that infamous porch and its dark blue grass where a fountain and a poet that looks like you sit for one moment in time….what is it, and how can it be appreciated unless its sigh goes from the inside out, from one pair of eyes to another, from one lip to another, now acquiescing and saying ‘Yes. But look, there’s another one…another deer…another rabbit…another moon!’

My ponderings, so far, and so often, describe hats, and coats, the perfection of a stuffed saddle of rabbit (yes, and here it is brought over by one so elegant and softly spoken as to seem almost part of the country tweed that covers my shoulder), or the soft and supple notes of another glass of rosé that she had with the specialité de la maison – chicken breast with perfectly creamed potatoes – and the home made fudge or the pyramid of blackcurrant parfait with puddle of summer berry compote – so deliciously prepared, so thankfully devoured.

But I think of you as you read this, and I realise that such detail, though necessary, though in ‘the manner of things, and important for that reason’, are only details, and not the reason why you would choose to come here at all.

For I, in this twilight hour that I hold the pen, and remembering the air of wealth in that library with the great fire where we played chess for hours until finally she won (my boast has its purpose here too), and those fluffy white bathrobes, and that waistcoated man with the wide ancient smile that carried my bags out and into the waiting cab, and her smile as he hugged her goodbye, am left with a feeling of… Yes!

For it is the beauty of such a place in old Albion, with its lakes and swans and winding shadows so stoically wrought, that it holds the remnants of a thought that itself reminds us that such beauty cannot be around us if it does not exist with even greater potency within the very fibre of our beings.

www.hartwellhouse.com