The ruin has history. No, histories. A Roman Villa cannibalized by the Britons; a Saxon Castle besieged by the Normans; a Catholic Monastery sacked on Henry VIII’s order.
In the present, it is two-and-some walls around a statue. To Robert Penn, it’s his favorite place.
Or it was. Penn is the last to leave for Europe of those that are leaving. His father’s talk about the Great War thrilled him as a child, but now the time comes for Penn he’s nervous and clings to home. He wants to join the LDV like his father (“Look, Duck and Vanish,” James calls them derisively, and James is already in France waiting for Penn).
Penn has the ruin to himself to say goodbye. He’s brought his camera. Almost all of the photographs he’s taken over the years come from here.
The statue is a favorite, framed perfectly by the suggestion of an arch against a school-photo sylvan backdrop. A woman pulls herself from a book on a pulpit-plinth. Erosion has slimmed her to the point of starvation, her eyes are blank and flaky with lichen, and her nipples are long since gone. Mossy cracks suggest intense concentration.
Penn remembers being lifted to sit between her clawing hands. It’s strange to think he’d fit against her belly once, those muscular arms reaching down on either side, her twisted face bent over him.
He will give this photograph to the village’s millennial exhibition, he decides, though he’ll be in Europe for the celebration.
The statue had been Penn’s first kiss. He presses his lips to the stone, once more, for luck.
Life picks up from where it left off: Penn presses his lips to a real girl he wooed in the ruin, witnessed by friends and family, before God. Of the boys who left the summer that he did, he is the only one to return, and of all the summers he is one of few. When the guilt of it lays heavy, he takes out his photographs and remembers the others as hard as he can.
Penn works as an archivist in the village hall. It quietens his mind of shots and shells and Rose doesn’t mind working at the grocer’s. They live on his parents’ small holding and Rose takes freshly laid eggs to sell at work. It suits her to have straw in her wavy hair, dirt on her freckled cheeks, and a soft white apron around her soft little waist.
Penn feels the luck of being alive.
One wet winter afternoon, Penn sorts through the leftovers from the millennial exhibition. Rose told him it was a somber affair but that much was made of his photograph. It was tinted to make it look like a color picture, which is less exciting he has the equipment to take color photographs himself. It’s funny how quickly these things become affordable.
Many of the pictures are of the ruin. Amateur archaeologists and historians have written accounts attempting to describe its past. One account comes from Penn’s uncle; Penn smiles, knowing the story without reading it.
He lays the pictures upon his cramped desk and admires them. Some have faded until they are barely distinguishable. One, in a stiff paper frame, shows a Victorian couple holding hands in front of a portion of wall that has since crumbled. Another shows a human skull, marked by a reference system Penn doesn’t know. An insipid watercolor behind grubby glass has the ruin surrounded by smoggy Victorian industry. A photograph of a rather better oil painting, one Penn recognizes from James’s grandparents house, has an eighteenth-century Lady with her hand on the book, the statue invisible behind her. James, of course, is dead.
Penn catalogues numbly. It is only as he tidies away the last few pictures that his eyes start tripping over discontinuities. He is not in the mood to study the photographs more closely, and blames it on angles, lights, states of disrepair.
Penn’s James, Jimmy Penn, is three. He has visited the ruins many, many times before this, but this will be his first memory: his father lifting him to sit between the arms of the statue, and his own screams. Jimmy refuses to go back for years. Though Penn does not remember it that way, Granddad insists he reacted just the same.
Sitting in his office, Penn seeks out the exhibition images again. He isn’t sure what he’s remembered.
“She’s going to get me,” he’s been told he screamed. Sitting against her stomach, head on her breasts. But James doesn’t reach her breasts, and really, his son is just as average as he’d been at that age.
She is too small to see in the watercolor. The oldest photograph only has one arm, but there’s something wrong with the positioning of it to Penn’s eye. He finds nothing else to support his suspicions, though. She might be deeper in the book there, but the camera is lower. Her hands might have a weaker hold on the pedestal here, but it could be the winter light. She might be obscured because there is less of her in James’s painting, or the artist might have chosen to remove her in the Lady’s favor. She is striking in a way that rather detracts from fleshy women.
Perhaps his son is just a little short, or his father’s memory is a little weak, Penn tells himself firmly. He is not going mad.
Penn pretends he does not know that his Jimmy… Jim’s first sexual encounter was at the ruin. Times have changed. His own romantic encounters had centered there, but he feels that there’s a difference. Nothing he did would leave mud on the inside of his trousers.
It’s another place now. It hurts Penn to think of it this way, with underwear and alcohol and joints. Yes, he knows about that, too.
Rose is sick. The doctors want to cut her breasts off. They say she might die anyway.
To distract himself, Penn retreats to his office and opens a familiar filing cabinet. He immerses himself in a time when his friends saw more of the statue than any real girl. There was that fancy he’d entertained about it; he’d wondered if the war had sent him mad. That’s what the American boys complain about these days, and Penn wonders if it is only distance from his war that makes theirs look so sadistic.
He remembers James’s portrait of his ancestors. Where will it be, with the death of his grandparents and now his parents? His mother’s funeral was barely a month ago. There might have been an aunt; Penn’s mother would have known. They’d all gone to school together, like Penn and James and Rose.
He finds the village registry and traces his finger down the list of deaths. Up to a point he knows almost all of the names. Other people have moved here since to fill the spaces the war left, and they will always be strangers.
Rose is going to die soon, and Jim will leave, and Penn will be an odd old man.
He puts the registry and pictures away, determined not to be too odd too soon.
When Jim and Trissy bring Toby to stay, they ask Grandpa Penn specifically not to take him to the ruin. It will scare him, Jim says with a rueful grin. There’ll be needles and condoms, Trissy sniffs. Penn gives Jim a wry smile; Jim blushes.
Penn takes Toby regardless, of course. Toby is quiet when Penn sits him against the girl’s legs. To Penn’s disgust, Trissy is right. He and Toby write letters together to the council.
Toby asks to go back to the ruin. Unfortunately, he has that timing unique to children, and does so minutes after his parents arrive to fetch him home. Penn gets an earful.
It’s over a decade later when the BBC seeks Penn out. Penn does not get to meet any of the presenters, only a tired research assistant and camera crew, but it gets his grandsons interested. Jim and Trissy are divorcing, and it’s nice to have something to distract the boys.
Robert finds a dead rabbit and Toby kisses the statue on a dare from Grandpa. The BBC cleaned the place up, but they’re done here now. They’ve taken all of Penn’s memories from the archive.
He takes his grandsons with him to ask favors of strangers. Penn feels vulnerable when he’s alone, but when he mentions the BBC James’s cousin opens the door wide. Penn explains how he knows she has the painting, but doesn’t dwell on the man who would have owned it.
Only her hands are visible. Toby thinks it’s the wrong place, but Robert looks scared enough for Penn to tell him a bedtime story, about how he hadn’t seen her belly button when he was a child, and how Robert’s daddy had barely seen her bum, and Toby just missed spying her knobbly knees.
Trissy wins the children. She shouts at Penn for scaring Robert, using words Penn only learned from her.
Penn visits the statue monthly despite his joints. He takes photos.
Now there is so little of her left trapped in the book she is escaping more quickly. When he sees her ankles he starts visiting once a week.
His grandson, Robert, is with him the day they discover she’s gone. He has taken to visiting his grandfather regularly, staying with him. Robert has dropped out of university and his mother isn’t taking the news well. Penn doesn’t advise Robert to join the army. Not another Robert Penn, another Pendulum Bob. The army’s had enough of them, Penn thinks.
Tomorrow Penn is going into A Home. It will be nice, he has been told. It will cost them a lot, but they’re doing it for him. There will be people his own age. There is no one his age where he lives: they’re all dead.
Robert doesn’t comment when Penn meets him in the kitchen at quarter to midnight. He doesn’t even say goodbye, though Penn can see he wants to. Penn kisses his forehead and walks out the door.
As he looks for her he makes up explanations. She was a human girl, cursed. She is a creature of heaven—or hell. She is a stone spirit, old as the mountain she was carved from.
She is walking towards the village. Penn does not question that she knows it is there. He watches her walk over things. The hedge at the side of a private driveway is no obstacle. A dead badger, road kill, is squashed even flatter beneath her feet. She walks into a brick wall and keeps walking until it crumbles. It gives Penn time to catch up.
All traces of erosion are gone. The graffiti has disappeared. She is tall and thin, with unmoving hair and pupilless eyes, uncolored by lichen. She can hold no expression but the desire to escape. Penn doubts she can talk.
“I kissed you,” he says.
She has stone ears, solid. Can she hear him?
“I was not the only one,” he goes on. “You must have felt centuries of us. But you’re faster now, so perhaps we’re a little less fleeting.”
She turns her head to look at the font of this nonsense. Penn expects the scrape of stone on stone. Her motions are silent.
“I just want to say thank you,” Penn mumbles, reduced to a blushing adolescent again. “Thank you for putting up with us. And…also, I don’t blame you for leaving. All the old families are gone This place is full of strangers. No wonder you left faster.” He realizes he is babbling. “I’m leaving, too,” he finishes.
She nods.
“M-may I?” Penn stutters. “For the memories?”
For a moment he thinks he sees her smile, but it might be a trick of the moonlight. She presents a cheek to him.
As he kisses that cheek, she puts a hand to his chest. He falls slowly. When he lies on the ground, peaceful, as cold as her, she moves to walk on. He obstructs her path now and she raises a foot to step on him. She pauses, looks down, and steps over him. She walks on.