​Tom loved mornings; loved a cup of tea while listening to the shipping forecast on Radio 4, sitting at his desk in their cottage on the outskirts of Tobermory. Writing is so much fun when an idea comes floating by, waiting to be plucked out of the air and thrashed down on paper. But writing is mostly about not having an idea, and blankness, some absurd monster waiting to devour him without a trace.
 

The blankness of the page on his laptop screen screams at him, you can't leave me... you cannot leave me like this! So, with a cup of hot early morning tea, he sits down to find something to say.

But what?
 

He looks hard at what has gone before. Six weeks of hard work has produced little he liked, and when such things happen he's prone to losing confidence; imagining himself to be a writer with the outstanding ability to put down five million words without slapping to life one substantial character in one small base of a story, not even a comic strip, not a single interesting obituary in a local newspaper, not so much as an autumn pickle recipe.
 

What, he wondered, could he say about writing that hasn't already been said? He's a man who has seen his fiction on the shelves, written, done, finished, printed, stamped, bound, borrowed, read, repaired, and shelved. A life of writing and composing, and in all this time, what has been missed? Moons have waxed and waned, trains arrived and departed, lives still teetered on the brink, suitcases packed and unpacked, bells ringing in far-off steeples, journeys begun, finished, and yet being travelled, soft burning September skies, a dog barking over the hill, letters written, sealed, posted, talking of love or fear or fun, and all these things happened but went by unnoticed because of writing.
 

All the time thinking to himself, what if a train arrives and I'm not there to see who gets off? And because he's a writer, he is there, and no one gets off.
 

Inspiration, like that train, blows its whistle and moves off.
 

Tom stares out the window, across to Ardnamurchan, when two hands fall upon his shoulders. His wife, Katherine. He raises his hand to rest on hers.
 

"I know there is nothing I can say or do, Tom. I know what is happening in your head is private and your own. I know how difficult it must be to be always going on; to be always thinking about something remarkable, or ordinary, but you can do it because you've always done it. It's just, well, I can see when you're despairing and sad, and I love you just the same and just as much as when your ideas come easily and you're happy and fun."
 

She hugs the back of his head and closes her fingers on his shoulders, reassuringly. He tries to smile without turning to look at her. He is a man who has fought all his life; if it isn't with his fellow man, it is with blank paper.

​

***

​

The weeks passed.
 

They decided to take a break, a few weeks down in Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset, and, with good fortune, Katherine found a cottage to let just outside Bude on the northern shores of Cornwall, in a tiny hamlet called Upton. A change of walls might do what six weeks shut up in his own study had not.
 

The Cottage, Aldine.
 

Katherine had reserved almost two weeks to enjoy the area. Tom did what he always did: went with Katherine's advice. The couple flew to London, rented a car, and drove down to Cornwall, anxious to rest up, enjoy the different surroundings, and maybe find a reason to write again.
 

The cottage presented perfectly, and stepping into the kitchen, Tom felt something loosen in his chest that he didn't try to name yet, the particular ease of a room that had clearly never once gone blank on anyone. The couple were met by Michael Smith, owner of Aldine Cottage. Standing in the kitchen, Michael watched them a moment before he spoke, a habit Tom would only understand much later, when Shirley admitted, not without pride, that fifty years of strangers through her kitchen had taught her to read a person in under a minute, and that Michael had learned to trust her verdicts before he'd even opened his mouth himself, deciding on instinct alone which guests wanted the history and which just wanted the Wi-Fi password. Whatever he saw in Tom that afternoon, it earned him the full account before the kettle had boiled: how he and his wife, Shirley, had bought the place in 1976, newly married.

As Tom listened, he looked around the kitchen. Someone, the owners themselves, he assumed, had furnished the cottage with a deliberate care for how a home should feel to a stranger staying in it.
 

Immediately noticeable wasn't just the furnishings, though they'd plainly been chosen with more thought than a holiday let usually gets, but the workmanship underneath them. Nothing left as it was found. Through a glazed door off the kitchen he could see into a small laundry, two machines tucked under a worktop that matched nothing out of a catalogue, and a run of coats and boots folded away onto an iron rack behind a door that shut properly, the way old doors rarely do any more. Every modern convenience, discreetly placed, so as not to argue with a Cornish cottage that had clearly made its mind up about what it was long before anyone thought to fit a dishwasher into it.
 

Michael left them to settle in, promising to pop back "if anything was a trouble," which it wasn't, and it was that evening, wandering the house with a glass of wine while Katherine unpacked, that he found himself turning the cottage's own name over in his mind instead: Aldine, a printer's word, surely, something in it that rang like the old Venetian press that first put pocket-sized classics into the hands of people who could never have afforded the great folios. He was still turning it over the next morning, only to find on the kitchen wall, under the stairs, the proof of it framed in dark oak: a dolphin coiled round an anchor inside a wreath of fruit and flowers, and cut into the plate beneath it, in worn capitals, AL DVS.

 

He stood a long time in front of that print before he understood what he was looking at: Aldus Manutius's own device, the mark the Aldine Press in Venice had stamped into its books from 1502 onward, festina lente, make haste slowly. He felt, absurdly, as though a guess he'd made under his breath the day before had just been handed back to him, confirmed, by the house itself.
 

The rest of it he found the way you find things in a place you're only borrowing: not looking, particularly, just being somewhere long enough that it starts showing itself to you. The front room had a pink velvet sofa, French in shape, its white paint gone soft and chipped along the arms, and a shelf running the length of one black beam, hardbacks faded to that particular rainbow only decades of a west-facing window can make, with two plants trailing down past a foxed little watercolour. Outside, the garden had its own quiet collection: a lamp bolted to the gatepost where the wall gave way to open grazing land, greened over and strung with the ghosts of old cobwebs, as if it had washed up there of its own accord; another on the corner of the summerhouse; a third, wired and working, over the back door. Ship's fittings, all of them, bulkhead lamps, brass or bronze gone green-black with weather, a wire cage guarding each bulb the way you'd guard a light meant to survive a following sea.
 

In the front hall, half-hidden by the turn of the stair, hung a small wooden box with a glass front: FRNT DOOR, LIVING RM, BEDROOMS No.1, No.2, each spelt out in worn gilt letters over its own little enamelled window, and underneath, in smaller print, CHRISTY BROS & CO LTD, CHELMSFORD. A servants' bell board, still wired, still (as far as Tom could tell, tapping the glass) capable of doing whatever it had once done. And in their own bedroom, on the wall an arm's length from the headboard, a single brass push, connected still, its wires tucked back into the plaster, worn smooth by whatever thumb had once pressed it and never told anyone why.
 

* * *

​

Michael came back the next morning, this time with his wife, Shirley (keen, Tom suspected, for the pleasure of seeing the place through somebody new's eyes as much as for anything to do with the boiler). They found Tom and Katherine on the patio, where Tom had spent the morning with a pot of tea and, for once, not much writing, having made two small discoveries of his own an hour before.
 

The first was under his own chair. The flagged patio was laid from reclaimed stone, no two pieces matching, and the slab beneath him had lettering worn into it that the low sun caught sideways: Caroline R. Reeve, the beloved wife of Wm Reeve, who departed this life June 12, 1888, aged 46. Though lost to sight, in memory ever dear. And beneath that, in a later, slightly different hand: Also William Reeve, the beloved husband of the above, who departed this life August 14, 1911, aged 70 years.
 

A little further along, in one of the darker flags nearby, something else caught the light: small clusters of something bright and brassy, faceted, cooked right into the grey of the stone rather than sitting on it.
 

"Oh, that's nothing to do with us, or the cottage," Shirley said, when Tom asked, waving a hand the way you'd explain where a bit of secondhand furniture came from. "We buy our slate off a yard near Delabole, quarry's been cut there since before the Conqueror came, or near enough, and when a headstone's not wanted for its grave any more, it's still good flat stone, and cheaper than new. We didn't go looking for that one. It just came with the load."
 

"And the gold in it?" Tom said.
 

"Pyrite. Fool's gold, and rightly so." Shirley seemed pleased to be asked.
 

"The lamps are mine, while we're at it," Michael said, before she could answer that one for him too. "Ship's fittings, off boats too far gone to be worth anything else. People think there's a story in them and there generally isn't. Cheaper than new brass, and a good deal better looking." He said it without embarrassment, a man entirely at peace with liking salvage for what it was rather than what it might be made to mean, and Tom, oddly, found the plainness of the answer settled something in him that a more mysterious one would only have unsettled further.
 

It was the house's own history, in the end, that Michael seemed readiest to tell.
 

"We bought Aldine in seventy-six, the year we married," he said again, filling in what he'd only sketched in the kitchen. "From a Mr Gard, H. J. Gard. And Gard had it, before us, from Dr Richard Wilson. An editor, up in London, Nelson's, though nobody called them that. He'd spent his retirement here, by all accounts, and died not long before Gard sold it on to us." He got up and went to the shelf under the beam, drew down a slim, faded hardback, and from inside its cover a folded letter, the paper gone soft as cloth.
 

'Bent Trees,' it was headed, and dated April 17, 1976.
 

Dear Michael,
 

My wife joins me in wishing you both a very happy married life. In particular, we were pleased to learn you were to start it in 'Aldine Cottage,' which holds such happy memories for us aand our dear friend Dr Richard Wilson, who lived there in his retirement. I feel sure he would have liked you to have 'The Muse Of Quiet' as from one occupant to another.

​

To you both,

H. J. Gard

​

"He left us the book, saying he thought it belonged with the home," Michael said. "Said as much when he handed the keys over. Something Wilson had made his name with, and he didn't think it right it should go anywhere else."

​

The book itself was a 1938 first edition, jacket gone the colour of weak tea: The Muse Of Quiet, "edited, with an introduction, by Richard Wilson," of Nelson's, Thomas Nelson and Sons, whose offices near Paternoster Row had for a century turned out cheap, sturdy classics and new fiction, most of it printed at the great works in Edinburgh where Wilson himself had trained as a young man among six hundred compositors and binders, before a war took most of that generation of them.

​

"All I know beyond that," Michael said, "is what the local paper said when Wilson passed, that he'd very nearly given up the whole trade once, back before the war, and that this was the book that stopped him. Never said how. Just came home here in the end and never left again."
 

They were getting up to go, Michael's cap already in hand, when the first shriek came from over the wall, high, ragged, almost human, cutting clean through whatever solemnity had gathered on the patio.

​

"That'll be Percy," Michael said, entirely unmoved, as though a peacock announcing itself at the boundary of a Cornish garden were the least remarkable thing that had happened all evening. "Wanders over from the farm most evenings around now. Makes that noise for no reason anybody's ever worked out." And with that piece of information delivered with exactly the same weight as everything else he'd said that morning, the two of them let themselves out through the gate, Shirley pausing to touch the crooked lamp on the gatepost the way you'd touch a gate you'd opened ten thousand times before.

​

Katherine, laughing despite herself at the second shriek, went in to find her coat. Tom stayed out a while longer, watching a bird the colour of a church window pick its way along the top of the field wall as if it owned the ground on both sides of it, and found, not for the first time that week, that the strangeness of the place had stopped feeling like strangeness at all, and started feeling like company.

​

* * *

​

Katherine wrote the note herself the next morning, propped against the milk on the step, a short, polite thing, asking whether Shirley might know more, since Michael had only ever described the lamps by what they were and never by why he kept them.

The answer came back two mornings later, tucked under the door in an envelope with no stamp, in a small, decided hand.

​

Dear Katherine and Tom,
 

Forgive the scrap of paper. I find I still write better than I explain things aloud these days, so you'll have to make do.
 

The lamps are Michael's doing, as he told you, though he's never been one for saying more than he strictly has to. His grandfather was a Captain Henry Smith, master of a coasting vessel out of Charlestown for the best part of forty years, carrying china clay round the coast and bringing back whatever there was call for. He came to Cornwall originally from Watchet, over the water in Somerset, sailors before him too, I believe, though nobody kept much of a record. Michael collects those old ship's lights the way another man might keep a photograph on the mantelpiece, and would never once tell you that himself. I don't imagine he's entirely aware of it either.
 

I hope this satisfies your curiosity. It satisfied mine, thirty years ago, when I asked him the very same question and got the very same short answer, and had to go asking round the harbour at Charlestown myself to get the rest of it.
 

With love,

Shirley

​

Tom read it twice, standing on the patio. There generally isn't a story, Michael had said, about a scatter of old ship's lamps in a rental cottage. Tom understood, properly for the first time, that he hadn't been hiding anything by saying so. He simply hadn't thought his own grandfather's forty years at sea counted as a story worth telling a stranger over a boiler complaint. It took his wife, asked directly, in writing, to think it did.

​

* * *

​

He took the book to bed with him that night, though he didn't read past the introduction. He lay a long while in the low room under the eaves with the week's finds turning over in his mind: Gard's letter and Shirley's, the near-rhyme of Aldine and a woman's name it had only ever resembled, the Reeves lost to sight and dear in memory doing quiet duty as a coffee table, a scatter of fool's gold that meant nothing beside a scatter of ship's lamps that meant a great deal more than their owner let on, and a stranger's blank page from ninety years ago lying just underneath his own, the way you'll turn a thing over until it stops meaning anything, and at some point the turning-over became a disturbance, and the disturbance became a dream.

​

He was asleep, and then he was irritated in a way that had no obvious cause, the particular needling wrongness of a sound heard through a wall, a nib scratching, crossed out, scratching again, and he sat up in the dark of the dream still inside the dream, and went to find where it was coming from.

​

There was a man sitting on the pink sofa in the front room, in his shirtsleeves, a glass at his elbow gone untouched, and it took Tom no more than a glance to know, the way you know things in dreams without being told, that this was Richard Wilson.

​

Wilson looked up without much surprise, the way a man looks up who has already decided nothing tonight can shock him further.

"Ah," he said. "You'll be a dream, I expect. I've had rather a testing evening, and my head's started manufacturing company." He said it lightly enough, but there was a fire nearly out behind him, and a single sheet of paper on the bureau across the room with perhaps six lines on it and a great deal of crossing-out, and Tom, standing there in whatever a dream considers clothing, found he could read it from across the room the way you can in dreams: Dear Sir Alfred, it is with considerable regret, and after some years' service to the firm, that I must tender...

​

"Bad night for letters," Tom said, for want of anything better.

​

"Bad fifteen years for letters," said Wilson, and stood, restless, and reached for a coat that wasn't there before, seeming to remember he didn't need one, not really, not for whatever this was. "Come out. I find I can't sit still in this room a moment longer, dream or no dream, and if you're going to keep me company you may as well do it under a sky, not a ceiling."

​

They went out through the arched door and across the flags to a wooden table Tom hadn't noticed there in daylight, though something in him understood, without quite placing it, that he was sitting exactly where a certain gravestone would one day be doing service as a coffee table, fifty-odd years before anyone thought to bring it there. The stars over Bude were enormous and completely unbothered by either of them.

​

"So," Wilson said, settling himself, some of the fight gone out of his shoulders now he was outdoors. "A writer, I'd guess, from the way you're standing there like the page owes you money."

​

Tom laughed despite himself. "That obvious."

​

"Only to another sufferer. What's yours, a novel, is it? Won't come?"

​

"Six weeks," Tom said. "Not a word I like. I keep thinking about a train I might miss if I stop watching for it, and then I sit there watching, and nothing comes, and nothing gets written either."

​

Wilson nodded slowly, as if this were a diagnosis he'd heard given before, in slightly different words, by every author who had ever sat opposite him with a manuscript that wasn't ready. "I'll tell you what I tell them, then, since you're a dream and can't very well repeat it to my employers and get me thought stranger than I already am. Fifteen years I've sat on the other side of that particular desk. Fifteen years reading what other people manage to get down, looking for the one thing my trade is actually for: not commas, not structure, any fool with a red pencil can manage that, but the spark. The thing under the words that isn't quite skill and isn't quite luck, that you can't teach a man and can't manufacture, only recognise, if you're any good at your job, and turn from spark into something like greatness, if you're very good at it indeed. And I haven't found it. Not properly. Not in longer than I care to admit. I sat down tonight and started to wonder whether the fault was theirs, all these years, or whether it was mine, whether my own eye's gone dull with looking, the way a coin goes smooth from being handled, and if it has, then I've no business sitting in that chair in London taking a salary for a skill I no longer have."

​

"That's not the same as mine," Tom said, though even as he said it he wasn't sure.

​

"Isn't it. You're waiting for a train that isn't coming and blaming yourself for not being ready when it does. I've been waiting for one particular manuscript, one particular morning, to prove to me I've still got the ear for it, and blaming myself in the meantime for every dull thing that's landed on my desk instead. We're both of us sitting on a platform, Tom, is what I'm saying, whoever you are, dream or otherwise, waiting for something to arrive so we can finally get on with the part where we do our jobs."

​

He was quiet a moment, looking out at the dark field beyond the wall.

​

"Here's what I know, for what it's worth from a man who may not exist come morning," Wilson said. "A writer's job was never to wait for the idea. That's the whole trick of it, and nobody tells you when you're starting out, because it sounds so plain and unpromising next to whatever you imagined the job would feel like. Inspiration doesn't punch a clock. It isn't a conductor, checking his watch, obliged to arrive on time because you've bought the ticket and you're standing on the platform being patient about it.

 

It's a passenger, same as the rest of them, getting on when it pleases and not a moment before, and if you're not already at your desk, pen moving, when it finally does step off that train, it'll walk straight past you and go looking for the fellow who was working anyway." He tapped the wooden table once, for emphasis, or perhaps only because his hands wanted something to do. "Your job is not to wait, Tom. Your job is to write. Whatever comes. Especially when nothing does."

​

Tom sat with that a while. "And yours?"

​

Wilson looked almost surprised by the question, as though it hadn't occurred to him that his own advice might be standing in the garden waiting to be pointed back at him. "Mine," he said slowly, "is to keep the chair warm and the door open, so that when somebody finally does write the thing worth publishing, there's still an editor there who remembers what it looks like when it arrives. If I go home to Edinburgh tomorrow, that door shuts. Somebody else's door, maybe, but not mine, and I rather think..." He stopped, and laughed, once, short and startled, the sound of a man catching himself mid-sentence in the middle of talking himself out of something he'd spent the whole evening talking himself into.

​

"Well," he said. "Would you listen to me. I still know how to say that, even now."

​

He sat a moment longer, and something in his face had eased that hadn't been eased when Tom came down the stairs.
 

"If anyone should ever ask you," Wilson said, "you may tell them the muse isn't gone. Only quiet, now and again. That's not the same thing as finished with you, whatever it might feel like at three in the morning."

​

Tom felt the garden beginning to thin around the edges the way dreams do when they've said what they came to say, the stars losing their fixedness, the cold stone under his hand turning soft and unreal.

​

"I ought to go back up," Wilson said, rising, brisk again, a man with a use for the rest of his night after all. "There's a manuscript on my bureau I haven't given a fair reading in a fortnight, out of pure bad temper, and I find I owe it one before I do anything so final as post a letter I can't take back."

​

* * *

​

Tom woke with the grey Cornish morning coming level through the curtains, Katherine still asleep beside him, and lay still a long while before he understood what the dream had actually been for.

​

He got up, quietly, and went downstairs, past the bell board with all its flags lying flat and ordinary in their little windows, out through the arched door and onto the patio where the flagstones still held the night's cool, and set his laptop on the wooden table, the same table, more or less, where a gravestone would one day hold up a coffee cup, though nothing was there now but the early light and the sound of Percy, somewhere off past the wall, deciding it wasn't quite time to start his noise yet.

​

He did not write anything about Wilson, or Gard, or the Reeves lost to sight and dear in memory, or a peacock with no discoverable reason for his shrieking, or a house that had been waiting twenty-five years to get the tenant its name deserved. He opened the laptop, and the page was exactly as blank as it had been for six weeks, and he found, for the first time in six weeks, that this didn't frighten him in the slightest. He began to type, fast, sure of himself, the way a man moves when he's stopped asking permission of the empty page and started simply filling it, about a man who loved mornings, and the shipping forecast, and a cup of tea, and about the particular monster that blankness makes of an empty page, and about a train that never arrives for the man who only ever watches for it.

​

Katherine found him there an hour later, still typing, and went back inside without a word, made a pot of tea, brought two cups out, and set his down beside the laptop without interrupting the sentence he was in the middle of.

​

"It's been a while," she said, watching him, "since I've seen you look like that."

​

He looked up at her properly this time, and didn't try to smile without meaning it, because for once he didn't have to.

​

​

​

Author's note:
 

Aldine Cottage is a real place on the outskirts of Bude in North Cornwall, kept exactly as lovingly as this story suggests by Shirley and Michael Smith, who host guests through Airbnb. Nearly everything strange and true in these pages started with an actual stay under their roof: the ship's lamps, the reclaimed slate with its stray gravestone and its flecks of fool's gold, the Aldine Press device on the stairs, the old bell board, and Percy, who really does turn up most evenings with his noise. Richard Wilson and H. J. Gard were real too, so far as an old letter and a first edition can make anyone real, and this story is one guest's way of thanking them for a house that clearly has more in its walls than either of its owners ever thinks to mention unless you ask twice.
 

If a few days in North Cornwall ever call to you, Aldine is worth searching out. And if you do stay, give our thanks to Shirley and Michael, for the house, the tea, and the patience they showed a stranger's odd questions about lamps and gravestones.