19 May 1985

This was a sad day. All of the students left for home. Patty and I felt melancholy watching the last of them go off down the long lane to the village, most of them in a hired coach, but others in groups of two or three in cars belonging to family or friends. Following a policy that has governed many of my days over here this time, I decided to write my way out of the gloominess in which I was wrapped as I walked through the Abbey's suddenly empty rooms and looked over its deserted swards and paths. I sat on the terrace and composed this note to the students:

                         A FAREWELL MEMORANDUM

     Although I will not post this memorandum until after I return to the States on June 1, I am writing it at the Abbey. As I write, Patty and I are sitting on one of the benches on the East Terrace, near the Library windows. It is just after 4:00 p.m., about six hours after the largest group of you left by coach and minibus for London and the airports.
     The late afternoon air is bright, warm, and still and full of the calls of woodpigeons, the bleat of sheep, and the final echoes of the bells in the tower of All Saints Church. The sounds seem almost mournful, right now, on this day of leavetakings, and a mood of sentimental melancholy grips those of us who watched you leave. Your departure has convinced some of us staying on here that the Abbey is, indeed, full of ghosts, for we see and hear your spirits still walking the halls of this great old house.
     Out of such a mood, I send these lines to thank all of you for your help and friendship during this past term. Life at Wroxton is, sometimes, a social as well as an educational challenge, and I am grateful to you for measuring up so well to both kinds of tests. Patty and I will long remember you with affection and respect. We hope that we can see you again one day back home. Whether we do or not, we wish you well and ask you to call upon us if you think that we can help you.

Roughly two hours after I finished the memo, Patty and I decided to go up to the Wroxton House Hotel for dinner. Blue as we felt when we arrived, we were soon given other things to think about. We sat next to an attractive young English couple and across from a middle aged English husband and wife in a cozy room. Typically for English restaurants, the conversation was quiet, as were the four English diners' use of the knives and forks: every now and then you could hear a stray word and a barely audible click of a utensil. So soft spoken were our neighbors that the splash and gurgle of a waiter refilling a wine glass was a conspicuous sort of clatter.
     Suddenly, a party of 15 Americans entered from the bar and took their places at the long banquet table on the other side of our corner table. Most of them carried drinks, and most of them were laughing loudly and speaking to each other in semi shouts. For five minutes or more they argued with one another about the ingredients of a "Harvey Wallbanger." "What's a Harry Wallbanger?" one of them finally asked. "Harvey, not Harry," another corrected. "It's a drink with Gallianos." The two nearest us dropped out of the larger group discussion to call the attention of a third to a bull's eye mirror on the wall. "We had a bull's eye mirror once," the man said. "No we didn't; we thought about getting one," put in the woman beside him in the tones of a wife bored and offended by her husband's consistent mistakes. "What kind of Cha bliss are we havin' with our dinner?" one of the men at the far end of the table asked the headwaiter pouring white or red wine. "Is it dry or sweet?" "Dry, of course, sir," the headwaiter replied, gracefully concealing his astonishment at the question. "OK, I'll have some of the white," the diner answered.
     A man two or three seats closer to us told the white wine drinker something about red or white wine—I couldn't tell which because a group between him and me exploded into laughter over a remark by some member of their party about some kind of wine being "bad for anyone with a kidney condition." The young English couple exchanged quick glances and slowly rose and left the room, as did the older pair soon thereafter. I thought suddenly of the way that the pair of cardinals that visit our garden back home darts away whenever a flock of starlings or cowbirds flies in, bickering and chattering.
     When we got back to the Abbey it was nearly all dark inside. Piano music, however, eerily filled the Great Hall, illuminated only by the pale gray light of the dying day. Patty and I sat down quietly in the deep shadows, listening. We were not sure who was playing, since the keyboard was hidden from us in the bay below the oriel window. We decided—perhaps insisted, given the stories we had heard about the Abbey's disembodied residents—that it must be Philip Inwood, whose bicycle we had seen parked outside the rear courtyard door through which we had entered the building.
     We sat almost motionlessly for twenty or more minutes, watching the room darken. The suits of armor on either side of the fireplace steadily lost the lustrous pewter glow they had given off when we first took our seats. Gradually, they became only lighter shadows in the thickening gloom. The music swelled and quickened. The mercury vapor lights on the front porch stair wall flared on, casting onto the ceiling coffers and wall above the fireplace the heavy black outlines of the stained glass armorial bearings in the oriel window. As the daylight disappeared, the black outlines grew increasingly hard edged, sharply defined against the rosy gold light of the porch lamps.
     The experience was an extraordinary one. We broke into applause when the music stopped, causing the pianist—it was Philip—to rise in understandable fright and tell us that we had given him a real start. We told him that his music had given us a tremor or two, also, until we succeeded in convincing ourselves that he—that someone—was actually at the piano.
     We went up to our bedroom and to bed, considerably lighter in spirit than we had been for several hours. Before I dropped off to sleep, however, I lay quite still, listening to the slow, lower-register kleine nacht music of the Abbey itself: its drawn-out, wood-sounding shudders, its arhythmic clicks and creaks, and its stony sighs. Then I went to sleep, not unwillingly, but somewhat sadly, groggily aware that my days and nights in the great old house were nearing their end.