named bench · i · west walk
Three slats on iron straps, set where the wall begins to turn south. The wood is larch, weathered to the colour of an old hare. From four o'clock onward the sun comes in low over the espaliers and lays a long warm band across the middle slat, and it is this band, more than the bench itself, that the bench is for. The brass nail-heads, when they catch the light, look briefly like nothing at all.
The view is the walled garden from its far corner: four box-edged beds, a sundial that is wrong by twenty minutes, the chimney of the kitchen behind. The pear espalier on the south wall is the bench's nearest neighbour and its best company. On still afternoons you can hear bees working the lavender at the other end and, more faintly, the village clock striking the half from somewhere across the river.
It is sat on by whoever has read enough — a book closed on a thumb, a finger keeping the place. The gardener takes it at four for the time it takes to drink something. Visitors find it by accident and stay longer than they intended, and what they think on it is usually the kind of thing you can only think when nobody asked you to.
field-note the warm band on the slat is widest at five, narrowest at six, gone by twenty past. sit before the band; do not chase it.