The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘Thank you, M’Synder,’ said the doctor, in a low voice. ‘This is a rare treat.’ M’Synder bowed and left the room. The doctor sat in his usual place at the head of the table, and Rose and I faced each other on the two sides.

  ‘Rose, I believe it is your turn to say Grace,’ said the doctor, gently laying his napkin across his lap. Rose nodded, lowered her eyes, paused a moment for dramatic effect, and then gave a peculiar recitation:

  ‘J’étais sûr de moi,’ she began, with a perfect, precise accent, ‘sûr de tout, plus sûr que lui —’ she paused on that word and seemed to nod almost imperceptibly towards me ‘— sûr de ma vie et de cette mort qui allait venir. Oui, je n’avais que cela. Mais du moins, je tenais cette vérité autant qu’elle me tenait.’

  The doctor smiled quizzically, as though trying to place the words, then nodded with approval and picked up his spoon. Without further comment or explanation, we began to eat.

  8

  ‘Banks,’ said the doctor suddenly, after M’Synder had cleared the bowls, and as she poured wine from a tall carafe. ‘M’Synder tells me you work for one.’

  ‘I did,’ I replied, warily. ‘I resigned. In fact, I resigned when I secured this position.’ The doctor looked surprised.

  ‘Should I be flattered,’ he asked, ‘that my humble little notice so dramatically interrupted a lucrative career, or do you merely have an impulsive nature? Or, and this seems more likely, were you on the lookout for an excuse, an avenue of escape?’

  I was determined not to mention Sarah. The twin forces that had driven me to the combe, the panic and the vacuum, seemed more absurd and tawdry than ever. And yet, for the first time, I felt tempted at that moment to consider my ruined marriage as a kind of resource, an unsuspected arrow of experience in my youthful quiver. You idiot, Browne, I thought.

  ‘That is a fair assumption,’ I said. ‘I don’t intend to return to my old career.’ You, the reader, may recall the ticking air conditioner and the curved bank of screens on which, in a hundred different places, the time advanced by one minute. I had worked fifty hours a week at the bank for three years — it had been my only so-called permanent job (a grim but misleading designation) — so you probably expect me to tell you more about it. There is no more.

  ‘What will you do, then,’ asked Rose, simply, ‘after you leave the combe?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. I remembered that last volume of Gibbon standing on the shelf in London: the plan for the rest of my life stopped there. ‘What about you?’ I asked quickly, hearing the galloping hooves of the panic approaching. ‘What do you want to do?’ I was getting used to her steady, defiant gaze.

  ‘I’ll either go to art college,’ she said, ‘or join the Navy.’ I smiled and glanced at the doctor, but he was nodding earnestly. ‘Which do you think I should choose?’ she demanded.

  ‘Come now,’ chided the doctor, ‘that’s not fair — Mr Browne has only just met you.’ M’Synder re-entered with a tray bearing a magnificent roast pheasant, which she placed at the foot of the table and began expertly to carve. Rich smells of game and bacon diffused through the cool air. ‘Save some good cuts for yourself,’ said the doctor, as she served. He and I each received a leg and some tender slivers of wing, and Rose was given two splendid, long, wafer-thin cuts of breast.

  ‘A happy new year to you all,’ said the doctor, raising his glass. M’Synder acknowledged her inclusion in this toast with a silent nod, and left us.

  ‘I hardly feel that I’ve earned such a feast by searching through a few books,’ I said, as we began to eat. ‘I am certain that this unfortunate bird would agree.’

  ‘Ah, she would be a generous and a foolish creature who conceded the justice of her own consumption!’ countered the doctor. ‘But if you find your quarry in the library, as I fully expect, and if it is what I believe it to be, you will have earned pheasant, goose, swan — albatross if you desire it!’ He waved his fork expansively.

  ‘Wouldn’t that bring bad luck?’ I said, lightly. There was a moment’s silence, and Rose glanced at the doctor.

  ‘Are you superstitious, then, Mr Browne?’ she asked, with a hint of accusation in her voice.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied, with a nervous smile. The doctor returned the smile reassuringly but said nothing, and we ate for a while in silence.

  ‘You are searching for Arnold’s precious letter, I suppose,’ said Rose, later, rising to refill our glasses. I nodded. ‘Well, I don’t believe you’ll find it,’ she said, standing over me with the carafe, ‘if it even exists. But don’t let that stop you.’

  The doctor sighed wearily, as though this were an old topic. ‘We won’t,’ he murmured.

  There followed a rich pudding with cream, and port for the doctor and me. The fire had died to a mound of faint embers, and the chill of the night began to creep into the high, shadowy spaces of the room. I felt a little tipsy, and guessed that Rose, who now spoke little, did too.

  ‘I suggest that we all retire at this point,’ said the doctor, suddenly, having drained his glass, ‘before the brandy bowls beckon. We men must work tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll go and help M’Synder,’ said Rose, pushing back her chair sharply.

  ‘Leave that to me,’ he said, pushing back his own. ‘You can accompany Mr Browne back to the cottage, and M’Synder will follow shortly.’ Rose shrugged, indifferent.

  A fine, drizzling sleet glittered in the torch-beams and prickled our faces as we crossed the bridge. Rose walked with quick, easy steps on the cracked stones, and I loped to keep up.

  ‘So you live in M’Synder’s little cottage, while the doctor has that enormous house all to himself,’ I said, half joking, half curious. It was the only one of my questions that seemed broachable.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. After a while she added, ‘I used to live in the house, years ago, but I didn’t like it. It —’ she hesitated. ‘It’s a sad, gloomy old place.’

  ‘I thought you were going to say it was haunted,’ I said, and then added, mischievously, ‘but of course you are not superstitious.’ She hurried on in silence, looking down into the bobbing torchlight. The lamp over the cottage door appeared faintly ahead.

  ‘A house does not need ghosts to be haunted,’ she said at last, without turning. ‘Memory is enough, if there’s someone left to remember.’

  As I lay in the absolute darkness of my room, listening to the thin, whispering patter of sleet against the window and waiting calmly for my body to warm the sheets, I thought of Rose just a few yards away at the other end of the little landing, warming her own sheets with a slender young body, and felt a pleasant glimmer of sensuality that seemed wholesomely disinterested. Then I thought of her unexplained words, and of the doctor, alone in that great empty house in the softly sleeting combe, turning out the light in some high-ceilinged bedchamber, his face pained in the darkness, remembering.

  9

  We breakfasted together — Rose, M’Synder and I — but there was little conversation and Rose quickly disappeared into her room. The doctor was similarly taciturn when he opened the door to me at nine o’clock, and I was soon on the ladder, running my eyes along the occupants of the fifth shelf.

  He did not appear for coffee, which I made myself, or for lunch, which was provided in the shape of a fresh loaf, cheese which in that house had no need of artificial refrigeration, and a bowl of apples. I began to think that he had gone out — but whither, and how? Did he drive a car? I had not seen or heard one. During a break from the search, as I strolled about the library, swinging my arms and flexing my stiff ankles, I noticed again the third door, which I had not yet seen opened. It would lead to a room in the front corner of the house, beside the doctor’s study. I approached it, listened for a moment and then guiltily turned the handle: it was locked.

  As the daylight was beginning to fade, the doctor at last appeared from his study, looking weary. He gave me a little wave of acknowledgment, turned on the lights, sat down in what seemed to b
e his favourite chair, beneath the portrait of Sarah, and watched me. I leafed through the second volume of William Porterfield’s A Treatise on the Eye, stopping at each of the folding plates to check that it was not a letter in disguise. My assiduity was motivated by a dull dread that in a moment’s carelessness I might miss the prize, and then spend many weeks of pointless labour discovering (or rather not discovering) my mistake. It was heightened now by the thought that a book about the eye would make an amusing hiding place — I could not prevent my mind making such connections, even though I knew they were, according to this idea of a riddle with no solution, mere distractions.

  ‘I would have assigned Rose to the search,’ said the doctor, suddenly, ‘had I trusted her to be diligent. Diligence is everything in this task, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why should you trust me any more than her?’ I asked, turning my head. He smiled, allowing me to guess his reply before he uttered it.

  ‘Because you are of that pattern of persons who buy their own copies of Gibbon and reach the seventh volume.’ This was, of course, an assumption on his part. I might have come across his advertisement by chance, whilst idly (or hopelessly) thumbing pages, or indeed a friend might have found it. But, as you know, I did find it just as he imagined, in the full flow of careful reading, and diligence is indeed one of my few virtues. Is there not something unjust about a reckless assumption that proves correct?

  ‘What prompts a young banker-cum-astronomer to embark on a study of roman history?’ he asked idly, as though to himself.

  ‘I’m interested in many things,’ I replied, sliding Porterfield back into place.

  At half past five he reappeared to dismiss me for the evening, this time without musical accompaniment, and I walked back to the cottage. After just two days of work, my mind was swimming from the thousands of glimpses I had had into hitherto unknown, unconsidered wells of knowledge and endeavour — just by leafing through a few hundred books. Too much uncomprehended information crowded the front of my memory: sprawling tables of genera, subgenera and species; diagrams of the foot or the inner ear; names of towns, rivers, forests that were perhaps not far away but that nevertheless I would never see; and countless half-read snatches of prose — a tale of a morning ride on a steaming horse now turned to dust, the key to some tiny skill I would never possess, the flavour of some plant I would never taste. The thin, ignorant narrative of my own life seemed diminished, or, to be more precise, shown up. Steady on, Browne, I thought — no man can know or see everything. But I did not feel consoled.

  I was, at least, relieved to reach the cottage and the welcoming serenity of M’Synder’s parlour. The table was laid for two, and after ten minutes — during which I merely sat watching the fire, for I could not think of reading — M’Synder entered with a steaming pot of stew.

  ‘No luck yet, then,’ she said, cheerily.

  ‘No,’ I replied, joining her at the table, ‘and it’s more tiring than I expected.’ Then, as we began to eat, I said, ‘Rose is out this evening, then?’ M’Synder nodded, chewing slowly. Encouraged by that serenity in her that I have twice mentioned, I took the plunge:

  ‘How did she come to be the doctor’s ward?’

  M’Synder looked at me carefully and neatly dabbed her thin mouth with her napkin. ‘Her parents were friends of the family,’ she replied, at last. What family? I wondered. I thought she would say no more, but she added, softly, ‘They were both killed in an accident when Rose was ten. She lived with her mother’s parents for a year or so, but then she came to the combe for a visit and refused to leave. To cut a long story short, she has remained here ever since.’

  Is that how she got the scar, I asked myself, in the accident that killed her parents? ‘What a dreadful age to suffer such a tragedy,’ I said. ‘Old enough to truly suffer it.’

  ‘The poor child was much changed by it,’ said M’Synder, gravely. ‘Much changed. She had no brothers or sisters, and came to despise her only remaining family. Doctor Comberbache has helped to bring her back to the world.’

  I thought of saying that she too must have helped, but it seemed somehow unnecessary, and the conversation ended there. That night, as I crossed the threshold of sleep, I felt my hands slip away from the rungs of the ladder and my body slowly begin to tip backward, just the way it would, and I awoke with a furious, instinctive convulsion of fear.

  The next day was crisp and cloudless, with a heavy frost and just a few thin ghosts of mist hanging over the stream. The robin joined me on my walk but again turned back before the bridge, perhaps to regain the dazzling sunshine, for the house was still submerged in shadow. At the leftmost window, that of the locked room, I noticed the ghostly grey baffle of daylight on closed curtains.

  Shortly after lunch, my search progressed to the tenth shelf down, which was the first that I could reach without the help of the ladder. I had removed this instrument of torture, and was standing on tiptoes on the oaken terra firma, reading the spines, when Rose strode into the library.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Browne,’ she said, walking to a window. At breakfast I had asked her to call me Samuel, or Sam, but she had frowned oddly, as though my first name were distasteful to her, and declined the offer. ‘Here at last is a day that will do the garden justice,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see it?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I replied. I had been admiring her clothes — I had never seen anyone dress as Rose dressed. Today she was wearing a short, closely tailored jacket of deep red velvet over a white shirt, with tight greenish cords and her splendid brown boots. She was anything but immaculate: the jacket’s threadbare elbows were almost worn through, the trousers bore a patch, and a long smear of mud ran up the inside of one boot. What struck me was the unaffected timelessness that she carried as lightly as the doctor and M’Synder. To all these and to the combe itself, as to the sun whose light now slanted pitilessly, gloriously, onto Rose’s scarred face, the era seemed to be of less consequence than the season or the time of day.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she said, turning into the shadow. ‘We’ll be back before Arnold notices you’re skiving.’ She led me into the dining room and opened the tall, glazed door onto the garden.

  10

  We stepped out onto the stone-flagged terrace from which a broad flight of steps descended to the lawn. There was no need for coats in the windless sunshine, which felt warmer than the house, and we stood blinking for a moment, enjoying the sensation.

  ‘The lawn is exactly one hundred feet square,’ said Rose, starting along the terrace in front of the towering library windows. ‘This garden is nothing if not precise.’

  A suitably precise stripe of frost survived along the south edge of the lawn, in the shadow of the massive, ivy-clad wall. Rose ignored a narrow flight of steps that led down into this chilly domain, and turned left around the corner of the house. A sun-bleached bench stood on a dais against the chimneybreast, just high enough to clear the wall’s winter shadow.

  ‘We call that the sunniest seat,’ said Rose, pointing, ‘because it is.’ She turned to a gate a little further along the wall — a gate that had beckoned me from the library’s smaller side window. It swung open smoothly, and closed behind us with a soft, resonant clang. We were now standing on a long, straight walk that followed the wall. It was flanked on one side by a broad planted border against the wall, and on the other by a row of evenly spaced but slightly ragged conical yews, behind which could be glimpsed a lower wall of weathered brick. Rose held out her arms towards the two opposite points of converging perspective.

  ‘This is the runway,’ she said. ‘Two hundred and twenty-two feet and two inches. I run it in nine-point-three seconds — Arnold could only manage nine-point-six.’ I raised my eyebrows at this. ‘In nineteen fifty-seven, I think,’ she added, with a quick, rare smile.

  We followed the runway for about twenty yards, past flowering camellias and hellebores, then turned off between the yews to another gate.

  ‘This is my garden,’ she sai
d, imperiously, as we entered. Narrow, curving rose beds were arranged in perfect, intersecting ellipses like the orbits of comets. ‘Or rather,’ she added, more softly, ‘I’ve adopted it. There are eighty-one varieties. Last week I could have shown you a flower — a Zephirine on the east wall — but it died.’

  We walked around the edge of the immaculate but flowerless garden, towards a gate on the opposite side. ‘See, there it lies,’ she murmured quickly, as we passed a few limp petals on the ground.

  ‘You must have a full-time gardener, to maintain all this,’ I said, realising that I had not yet seen one from the house.

  ‘Ah-ha,’ she breathed mysteriously, opening the next gate.

  We emerged into a sort of meadow nestling in the bottom of the valley, with scots pines and fine pollarded chestnuts standing here and there in a sea of rough grass. A low iron fence marked its far boundary, behind which rose the wooded slopes of Hart Top. To the right, beyond the end of the garden wall, the trees grew thicker and the meadow sloped gently down to the stream. Rose led me in this direction.

  We were about to pass the end of the wall when I caught sight of something lying on the grass around the corner: it was an enormous pair of wellington boots. The next few paces gradually revealed the long, horizontal pair of legs to which these boots were attached, then a long body in green dungarees, and finally a raised, black-haired head wearing a flat cap, and a pair of long arms outstretched along the ground towards a flowerbed.

  I looked at Rose, who had also noticed this recumbent giant and arched her eyebrows coolly. The man saw us with a jerk of his head, and then, as we stood watching, began to raise himself from the ground in a series of slow deliberate movements: it was like watching the erection of some monumental tower — the great beams of his limbs sliding into place one by one. At last he stood upright — a full seven feet upright — and touched his cap.