Singing in the rain. The female is on the other side of my yard and despite the downpour, they continue to sing back and forth.

"I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found." Anne Sexton, 1928-1974

This is a photograph I took yesterday when I visited Tilton House, Keynes’s final home and place of death. The house is in a sad state of disrepair. Tilton sits at the foot of Firle Beacon, in the South Downs. It began as a Sussex farmhouse and was given a Georgian face in the eighteenth century. It has always been a lease from the Gage Estate. In August 1925, after Maynard Keynes married Lydia Lopokova, he took the lease on Tilton. From then on, Keynes divided his life: London in the week, Cambridge for working weekends, and Tilton for the rest. The Treatise on Money (1930) and, above all, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) took shape here. Keynes was moderately wealthy and gave the house electric light, central heating, and French paintings. He added substantial acreage and farmed it through a manager, playing the “gentleman farmer” à la Clarkson. He loved the place enough to take its name. Raised to the peerage in 1942, he became Baron Keynes of Tilton. He died here in April 1946, and his ashes were scattered on the Downs above. Lydia stayed on, increasingly alone, until her own death in 1981. Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’s great biographer, took the lease in 1986 and wrote at Keynes’s own desk. When he was ennobled in 1991, he took the name of Baron Skidelsky of Tilton. More recently, Tilton became a yoga-and-writing retreat, but the business moved to a different location some time ago. Standing in front of Tilton yesterday, I thought how odd it is that we let this happen at all. The National Trust already keeps Monk’s House, where the Woolfs lived. The Charleston Trust keeps Charleston, a few minutes down the same lane. Tilton is the missing corner of that triangle. Surely someone, the National Trust or a smaller foundation, could take Tilton on and open it. It would not take much, and it is worth doing.