The Lure of Solitude
by Michael Burnett
part 1
The house was perfect, as they say, on paper.
I’ll be the first to admit that I hate company, always have. I was beyond sick of the modern high-rise bachelor pad with its stupid big windows and paper-thin walls; I was beyond tired of my hip young neighbours and their techno-or-whatever-you-call-it thumping away like a piledriver into the small hours. I felt like a sardine in a very small tin in desperate need of some solitude, some space and, God forbid it, some peace and quiet. Is that really too much to ask?
The wretched apartment did have one thing going for it, though. I’d bought it during a slump in Downbank’s fortunes for a pittance and was pleasantly surprised by the estate agent’s valuation upon putting it up for sale. Over the years, my tiny mortgage had allowed me to amass a considerable amount in savings and on top of the sale of my apartment — now apparently very popular with the more-money-than-sense yuppie crowd — I found myself with a level of spending power that was frankly beyond my wildest imaginings. I’d realised then that I could finally start looking for houses, not apartments; it was obvious that, if I played my cards right, I could finally get to experience real solitude. No more rowdy young neighbours, no more neighbours at all, maybe. Finally, I’d be able to relax.
I’d been working remotely for over a year, with no plans to return to the office, so I threw caution to the wind and cast my net hundreds of miles wide in my search for a new property. There was nothing keeping me in Downbank, after all: no family, at least none I cared to see; no friends, no workplace to attend, no clubs or association memberships. For weeks, I trawled the property listings twice or even three times each day, my heart thumping with anticipation.
The house came up for sale at shortly after nine a.m. on a Monday morning, and by nine-thirty I’d already arranged a viewing with the vendor for the following day, booked a return train ticket to the nearest railway station to Winterlock, and a taxi for the rest of the distance. By Wednesday afternoon of the same week, I’d put down my deposit; the competition, if there even was any, never stood a chance. Six months later I was turning the key in my new front door as Winterlock’s newest resident.
Winterlock is a funny old place.
Positioned on the banks of a small estuary in the Norfolk salt marshes, it was a thriving fishing and pastoral town until the late nineteenth century when it suffered a most unusual fate. There was no disaster, at least not as far as the historians have been able to uncover; no fires or flooding or livestock disease, and no economic woes to speak of. Just families up and leaving all of a sudden, one after the other, a mass exodus of people until the prosperous town of thousands became a taciturn community of the dozen or so households that were presumably too poor to leave, their dilapidated homes surrounded by crumbling, empty buildings and weed-infested cobblestone paving.
Whatever the reason, Winterlock had become, in just a few short years, a ghost town. And yet, despite the general dereliction and misery of the town as a whole, it did have a single remaining jewel in its fallen crown.
Winterlock Manor, grandiose former home of the town’s mayor, is positioned on a wooded outcrop above the town proper. It affords a stunning panoramic view of the marshes, all the way up to the coastline, and its half-timbered glory is strangely untarnished by the passage of time.
I can only suppose that the previous owner, despite never actually having lived at the Manor, kept it in good nick for investment purposes. I expect he’s quite pleased with how things had turned out, as was I. Upon my arrival, Winterlock Manor gained another, unofficial name: My House. Or, perhaps more accurately, My Castle, although in retrospect I have to admit that it was never really just mine. But I get ahead of myself.
My first few weeks there were pure, unadulterated bliss.
My sleep was now deep and uninterrupted by the selfish exuberance of youth. I awoke each morning with the dawn, spending the early hours of each day exploring first the grounds, then the woodland and, finally, the salt marshes, taking care to avoid the occasional rambler.
I’d start the day’s work at nine or ten, then take a long lunch on the covered decking to the rear of the house, come rain or shine. By late afternoon, when all the work was done and dusted, I’d go for a short jog, a couple of laps around the house being quite enough for me.
After that I’d take a shower and cook myself some dinner, then relax in the study with a glass of wine and a paperback. I got into a routine and, simple though it might seem to others, it was one I quickly grew to love.
I’d never needed much, I reasoned. It wasn’t my fault that the little I did want was so hard to achieve, but I’d done it in the end. I deserved my happy solitude, and I devoured it like a hungry man offered his first meal in days. But the carefree times did not last.
The first time I shouted at the grocery delivery driver was about four months after I’d moved into Winterlock Manor. I’d just managed to escape from an interminable Zoom meeting with the company director and was already agitated; already I’d begun to feel besieged.
The driver knocked on my door too loudly and spoke too loudly, chatting endlessly about God only knows what. So, when he dropped the case of wine, I let him have it. I was furious well into the evening. Why did they have to come right up to the door, anyway? Why did they even have to come onto my property? Couldn’t they just leave the food at the gate? Still in a rage, I wrote a letter of complaint to the local distribution manager, filling each typed line with as much bile as I could summon.
It turned out that this was only the beginning.
In the weeks that followed I became more and more hostile towards callers of any type, more and more obsessive about my privacy, my solitude and my precious silence. I’m fairly certain that I even made a window salesman cry, despite his red-faced protestations to the contrary. I put up an enormous ‘No Cold Callers’ sign at the gate, and then another, farther down the road. I put a fence up, replete with ‘No Trespassing’ signs every few metres, then topped it with razor wire, only stopping short of electrifying it to avoid the enormous expense.
I disconnected my phone and had the dozen-or-so photos of the Manor, which had been a short-lived tourist attraction at some point or other, removed from Google. I became desperate and inconsolable at the thought of seeing another human face, and began to avoid work Zoom meetings, complaining of headaches and fever. The lie soon wore thin.
The day I was given the sack, I felt a wave of relief pass over me. I terminated the call and, in a fit of sudden pique, threw my computer monitor to the floor and gave it a good kicking. I drank half a bottle of brandy that night, overjoyed that I had closed forever what felt like a gaping hole in my defences, at the very heart of my private fortress.
Soon after that, I built a large-sized parcel receptacle at my gates, pinning up printed instructions to any and all delivery drivers to simply leave the goods inside it, and let me well alone. And with that, my reputation was cemented. Nobody bothered me again.
A year passed, and I had not seen another human being in all that time. I did not miss them.
As my cash reserves dwindled, I switched from cooked to canned meals, disconnecting one appliance after the other to save money. My boiler broke down and, not being able to bear the idea of fielding a repair visit, I simply sat in the cold, several blankets wrapped around me to keep out the chill on the grimmest days. I stopped washing, stopped exercising; my days consisted mostly of rereading old books and ferreting around in the various rooms of the house.
By then, the idea of venturing out beyond the gates had begun to fill me with horror. Most days I could not bear even to go outside; I began to collect my food and parcels after dark, feeling somehow that if I could not be seen, then I was not really out of doors. I stopped noticing the weather entirely, unless it was to hastily close a curtain to keep out the glare on the sunnier days.
By then my world had grown terribly, terribly small but, at the time, it seemed that the Manor was all I needed. Having nothing much else to do, I began to get more and more closely acquainted with the house, spending hours at a time memorising the colour schemes and the layout of the furniture in each room, and sitting on each chair and sofa in turn to test their firmness.
I found an old grand piano in the drawing room that kept me occupied for a time. In the scullery, I found an old mangle that entertained me for a full afternoon, if you can believe it. I worked my way through each of the many rooms in turn, starting from the ground floor and working my way up. Eventually I came to the attic. And once I’d opened the dusty old ceiling hatch and climbed up into that cobweb-strewn space, I berated myself for waiting as long as I had done to explore it.
What a hoard of treasures I had found!
I am no expert in the valuation of antiques, not even a bit, but even I could tell that I had stumbled upon quite a magnificent collection of curiosities, from way back when Winterlock Manor was at the heart of a vibrant community of fishermen, farmers and merchants. I discovered then that Lord Hooks, Mayor of Winterlock at the time and former resident of the Manor, was a diligent keeper of records and, in the following weeks, I devoured ream after ream of town hall meeting notes, local census data, financial tables and more. It was like I’d woken from a dream and was once again full of purpose. The listlessness, the sleeplessness, and the ill-humour evaporated as I embarked on a journey of discovery that often continued well into the night.
Copyright © 2022 by Michael Burnett
