The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  The doctor set a heavy metal coffee-maker on the hob and opened a jar. It was strange to see him perform a domestic task — perhaps because I owed my only experience of such houses to Victorian novels where they were attended by armies of staff — but he seemed quite accustomed to it.

  ‘It is a magnificent house,’ I said, stating the obvious, as we sat at an oak deal table in one corner.

  Again the pained smile. ‘Far too big for me, of course,’ he replied, and then related a concise history of Combe Hall. It was built in sixteen twenty, he told me, as a consolation for the non-inheriting younger son of a Richard Kempe, the nobleman who owned this corner of the county — thus explaining, apparently, the oversized grandeur of its windows and ceilings. Hartley’s grandfather, a lawyer, bought it from the by-then-ruined Kempes in the early years of the next century, and it had stayed in the Comberbache family ever since, passing down a tangled chain of sons, step-sons, daughters and cousins.

  ‘But you have Hartley’s name,’ I observed, ‘so the line cannot have been so very tangled.’

  The doctor laughed. ‘The line, as you call it, has been given a helping hand by a tradition that the owners take over the name, whether they were born with it or not. My father took it, though his was Hughes — a good enough name, but somehow not as appropriate as the house name, which was my mother’s.’

  ‘So the second Hartley —’

  ‘Our prudish adversary …’

  ‘— was your mother’s uncle?’

  ‘Correct. Her mother’s elder brother.’ He rose and swept up the empty cups. ‘But I have prattled long enough! Our labours are waiting.’ We retraced our steps to the library, and he vanished once more into his study.

  British topography dominated the second shelf. I began to refine my technique: I would lift out the next book and only then replace the previous one; I would balance the book on its spine on the roving shelf, supported by the hand of whichever arm I had hooked around the ladder; with my free hand I would carefully work through the leaves, my glasses perched on my nose, as the various and indescribable scents of mingled words and years rose to my nostrils. I found my first few loose objects — a series of ancient flattened leaf skeletons in Stephen Graham’s The Gentle Art of Tramping, a train ticket dated nineteen thirty-three, a blank scrap of blue paper. None of these seemed worthy of the doctor’s attention.

  It was a visit to those ‘facilitates’ that uncovered the next clue, the next line in the arcane mural that was the combe. As I returned through the dining room, I glimpsed, through the door to the gloomy hall, which was ajar, a woman at the front door. Her back was turned to me, and in a couple of seconds she had opened the door part-way, stepped quickly out with a graceful sideways swing of the hips, and closed it quietly behind her. She had been wearing a close-fitting tweed skirt, a tailored jacket and a red scarf. I fancifully thought I could detect a faint remnant of perfume in the air, but it was only the hall’s heavy pine-scent wafting through on the momentary draught.

  I was delighted by this new promise of interest, and as I creaked back up the ladder my mind began to hum with absurd but pleasant speculations. The doctor had not mentioned any family — had in fact implied that he lived alone — but I realised that he had told me much more about his ancestors than his own circumstances. After all, I thought with a grim smile, I’m a free man now — but that tainted reflection immediately dampened my pleasure.

  At one o’clock, the doctor reappeared again and, seeming pleased with my progress, led me back to the kitchen where he began to prepare a simple lunch.

  ‘A lad from the village brings fresh bread and milk twice a week,’ he said, carving into a big round loaf. ‘He has one of these bicycles with springs, you see. It’s a marvellous thing — he let me ride it once. Even the eggs survive unscathed, usually.’

  He told me to help myself to ham, cheese and tomatoes, and we carried our sandwiches into the dining room. As we ate, he at the head of the table, facing the garden, and I on one side, I was startled by an eerie, metallic shuddering sound that seemed to come from under the floor.

  ‘There she goes!’ said the doctor, triumphantly. ‘Don’t panic — it’s just the central heating. I fired it up as an experiment. It is a fully functional specimen of pre-war plumbing. Let me know this afternoon if you feel any warmth.’

  ‘Where are the radiators?’ I asked, looking around the room.

  ‘Oh, there are no radiators as such, just a few big copper pipes running about the house. I don’t usually bother with it.’

  I looked at my knuckles, which were bluish with cold, and grimaced jovially.

  When we were back in the library, the doctor led me to a window. Heavy grey clouds had covered the sky, and a breeze swirled in the treetops and chased a couple of leaves across the lawn.

  ‘Sleet is my prediction,’ he said, peering upward. ‘The house stands at an altitude of five hundred and thirty feet. As you can see, it is splendidly sheltered from the north, south and west winds — and this fact has allowed the arboretum to flourish — but our winters are cold.’

  ‘How high are the hills?’ I asked, following his gaze up towards their looming brows. A solitary buzzard circled far above.

  ‘The highest is Grey Man, to the north-west,’ he replied, pointing, ‘at eleven hundred feet. Fern Top, above M’Synder’s cottage, is a shade under a thousand feet and Hart Top, to the south, is rather lower.’ He turned from the window. ‘I will lend you a map to aid your explorations.’

  I worked steadily through the afternoon. When the day began to fade I switched on the chandeliers, which flooded the library with a warm yellow light, and later, as the black dusk set in, I cranked the brass handles that hauled the great heavy curtains across the windows.

  On the third shelf down, the complete works of W. H. Hudson, in twenty-four volumes, marked a gradual transition from travel writing towards natural history. There followed many varied works on botany, zoology and ornithology, and the fourth shelf began with a beautiful copy of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, dated seventeen eighty-nine. The flyleaf bore the inscription, in spidery ink faded to brown, ‘O Mother, They will sing for you, why not for me? Your son, Samuel. 18th March ’90.’ Two blank pages at the end of the book had been covered in exquisite drawings of birds, insects and flowers.

  Given the date, I supposed that this might have been written by a son of Hartley and Sarah, and carried it carefully down the ladder to show the doctor.

  ‘Ah, you found the White,’ he said, laying down his pen. ‘Yes, I have seen it — in fact I read it many years ago.’ He cast a fond glance over the drawings. ‘After the death of her husband, Sarah discovered that she was a talented draughtswoman. You will see more of her work, I expect.’ He handed back the volume.

  ‘Hartley died young, then?’ I asked.

  ‘In his forties,’ replied the doctor, absently, once again absorbed in his own work. ‘It was not so very young at that time.’ He scribbled an annotation on the paper he was reading, his face a picture of pained concentration. I withdrew.

  So it was that these long-dead souls began to reach out to me from the pages of their books. Back in the library, I looked again at Sarah’s portrait, painted when she was a young woman — perhaps my own age. She looked sorrowful, yes, but comprehending. I liked looking at her. As I looked, I remembered the other woman, the living, pine-scented one I had glimpsed in the hall.

  I was on the ladder, wondering when I should stop work for the day, when a flood of sound burst into the silence, making me start and almost lose my balance. It was music — the first of Bach’s cello suites. Music in a library. I half-turned on the ladder and looked out across the great room as the first few winding bars curled and rolled from wall to book-lined wall. A shiver spread slowly from my neck down my spine, a reaction to this bewildering collision of beauty. ‘What is this place?’ I whispered to myself.

  I climbed down and stood by the table, immersed in the rich shock of soun
d. The inhuman fineness of Bach did not seem defiant here, in Combe Hall, as it does when you hear it in your living room, or in a city church over the indifferent mewing of traffic. It belonged here: it filled the house like air. The dark polished wood and tarnished brass, the great chill windows, the distant ceiling and, most of all, the books themselves, seemed to comprehend it, as it comprehended them. The study door was thrown open and the doctor walked slowly into the room, smiling, his arms crossed. He, too, comprehended entirely.

  ‘Rest, now,’ he said, during the brief pause between the Prélude and the Allemande. ‘The working day is over.’ He turned and indicated a series of small music speakers tucked unobtrusively in the shadows under the gallery. ‘One of my contributions to the collection,’ he said. ‘I hope Hartley the elder would forgive me — I know the younger would not.’

  He led me through the dining room into the hall, both of which were filled with the music. A sprinkling of long pine needles lay on the black and white flagstones.

  ‘Usually you will dine at the cottage,’ he said, ‘for I keep irregular hours and eat a late supper. But tonight I have asked M’Synder to cook for us here in the house, so that we can have a talk.’ He lifted my coat from a hook beside the door. ‘Before that ordeal begins, I expect you will want to escape this old place and breathe some fresh valley air.’

  I fastened my coat obediently, and he opened the door. ‘Thank you for the sterling work,’ he added, shaking my hand, ‘and come back at seven o’clock.’ The wide door swung shut, and I stood on the dark, mossy driveway across which the notes of a cello faintly drifted from behind heavy curtains.

  7

  I pulled my hat down hard on my head and walked slowly towards the bridge. It was windy and very dark, and after a few steps I gratefully remembered M’Synder’s torch and let its merry pool of light lead me onward. It seemed a longer walk in the dark, and the lamp over the cottage door was a welcome sight.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Browne,’ called M’Synder’s voice, as I hung up my coat in the hall. ‘I’m glad to see you found your way — but there is only one way, of course.’ I noticed a red scarf hanging on a peg, and a pair of elegant but muddy boots standing by the door.

  ‘I would have been done-for without the torch,’ I said, entering the warm parlour, where M’Synder sat with a book folded back in one hand and the cat curled up under the other.

  ‘That reminds me,’ she muttered, looking at the clock and rising. ‘I must be going up to the house myself.’

  Since it was only six o’clock, as she prepared to leave I fetched A Month in the Country from my room, settled myself by the fire and began to read.

  ‘See you later, Mr Browne,’ she said, at the door, ‘and don’t be late!’ The front door swung shut, and I was alone with the shifting embers, the quick padding paws of the cat, and the ticking clock. Or was I alone? I remembered the boots, and the three bedrooms, whose doors were kept shut.

  I read for half an hour, then changed into my slightly smarter pullover (sorry, Auntie June) and, after a moment’s indecision, put on my moleskin jacket. I splashed my face at the little basin and brushed my frothy hair. Then I set out back along the lane.

  This time the doctor opened the door. Music was still playing softly through the house — again a lone cello, but something different that I did not recognise. It produced a vaguely expectant atmosphere that reminded me of my parents’ rare dinner parties when I was a child, when my mother had put on perfume but the guests had not yet arrived. I felt rather flattered as I performed the now-familiar ritual of hanging up my hat and coat, and the doctor led me through a different door, on the right this time, into a splendid panelled parlour.

  ‘Sherry?’ he asked, fetching two glasses from a corner cabinet. He lifted a decanter from a row of at least a dozen standing on a long side table.

  A number of fine but well-worn upholstered chairs of different designs and periods stood in a semicircle around the fire, which was flanked by two cosy-looking corner seats below narrow windows on either side of the massive chimneypiece. There, set into the ornate marble relief and dominating the room, hung an allegorical painting of two women. One, spectacularly naked, upheld in her hand the sun, which shone on her white skin and fair, windswept hair, and the open white gown flung about her shoulders. The other cowered at her feet in supplication, wrapped in a heavy mantle of dark blue, shielding her eyes.

  ‘That was one of the many locations where the arms of the Kempe family were proudly displayed until Hartley made his alterations,’ said the doctor, handing me a crystal glass. I was aware of him watching me as I studied the painting. ‘These were added later, of course,’ he added, pointing to two huge landscapes on the opposite wall: nineteenth century depictions of the sublime. One showed sunlight breaking through sweeping clouds over a mountain pass; the other, a red sunset beyond a lake surrounded by distant, jagged peaks, with a mass of storm clouds rolling in. ‘I call them Hope and Despair,’ he said, as we sat down by the fire.

  ‘It must be a valuable collection,’ I suggested, sipping the dry sherry, trying to look at ease but feeling like an undergraduate at the vice-chancellor’s lodgings.

  ‘It is valuable to me,’ he replied, simply. ‘If you mean that it could be a target for thieves, yes it could — but it is not, because they don’t know about it. Believe it or not, very few people know that we exist, here in the combe.’

  ‘I do believe it,’ I said, laughing. At that moment I heard the soft click of the door opening, and turned in my chair.

  ‘Ah, Rose is here,’ said the doctor, rising. I sprang up too, as Rose, she whom I had earlier seen in the hall, entered the room.

  The second thing I noticed about her, in that instant of meeting face to face, was that she was very young — a girl and not the eligible woman I had imagined. How old? It seems we men (forgive us!) are naturally incapable of guessing a girl’s age once she has become nubilis. I later learned, however, that she was seventeen.

  Before I noticed her youth, I saw the scar. It ran down from her temple to the middle of her cheek, dark and irregular, slightly distorting the corner of her right eye. She had sharp, pretty features, and her green irises had that rare iridescent colouring that makes eyes intense and disquieting — but of course her beauty only magnified the horror of the scar. My response to it was not that uncomfortable blend of tender, useless pity for the child and indignation at the pitiless world that one feels on seeing a small child in a wheelchair — her calm, proud eyes seemed to forbid pity, and instead I felt a kind of solemn admiration, as for one who carries with dignity a burden of grief or regret. She nodded a greeting to the doctor, and then looked at me steadily, as a young child looks.

  ‘Allow me to present Rose, my ward,’ said the doctor. ‘Rose, this is Mr Browne, the man from London.’

  ‘How do you do,’ I said, as though I were in a novel, which is how I felt after this introduction. Her hand was very cold.

  ‘Welcome to the combe, Mr Browne,’ she said, in a soft, relaxed voice — her accent was keenly clipped, like the doctor’s. She wore a short tunic dress with a dark bluish print and tiny beads sewn into the neckline, with dark red tights and black court shoes. He handed her a glass of a darker sherry, and we resumed our seats.

  ‘Rose has been staying with friends for the new year,’ said the doctor. ‘She gets rather bored here, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I do, sometimes,’ she said. ‘So do you.’ The doctor shrugged and smiled. ‘So will poor Mr Browne,’ she added, ‘I am sure. How long are you staying, poor Mr Browne?’

  I hesitated. ‘Until the job is done, I hope,’ I replied, glancing at the doctor. ‘I expect it will take a month or so.’ He was holding up his glass, watching the flames through the pale sherry, and said nothing. ‘Maybe you could show me around the valley,’ I suggested. ‘So far I’ve only seen it in the mist and in the dark!’

  Rose took an adolescent gulp from her sherry and winced. She was sitting with her scar towards me
. ‘That would be fun,’ she answered, in a level voice that almost suggested, but did not quite suggest, sarcasm.

  There were questions that I would have liked to ask, but felt I could not, and this left me with nothing to say. At last, the doctor came to the rescue.

  ‘Mr Browne is an astronomer,’ he said, ‘so you must show him the star-tree. I believe the Quadrantids are upon us this week, are they not, Mr Browne?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, enthusiastically, glad to be steered into familiar territory. ‘The maximum occurs on the third or fourth — probably early tomorrow morning. To be honest, I’ve never had much luck with them.’

  ‘You could be forgiven for being less patient with a winter display,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you that Hartley was an astronomer? Our night skies are the darkest in England.’

  ‘And the cloudiest,’ added Rose, quietly. ‘Besides, there is no view to the north, south or west.’

  ‘Not from the valley, perhaps,’ I replied, impressed by her quickness, ‘but your Grey Man would make a first-class observatory.’ At this suggestion, Rose seemed to glance at the doctor, whose face was frozen in a particularly pained smile.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, after a pause, and drained his glass. Then the clear, distant note of a dinner gong sounded, and he got slowly to his feet. ‘I hope you are both hungry,’ he said, and we followed him to the dining room.

  I barely recognised it as the room where the doctor and I had taken our simple lunch. Now the table was like a golden pool, glowing softly in the darkness and laid with silver and crystal. Four narrow candle flames flickered as we entered, and then stood upright — the only other light was a dim orange glow from the fireplace. M’Synder was laying out three steaming bowls of soup.