The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘Letters?’ I repeated, automatically.

  ‘Irrelevant!’ he cried. ‘Stop deducing — it will get you nowhere. Diligence is everything.’

  ‘What is on the gallery, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Works of the imagination,’ he replied, solemnly. ‘Art, music, poetry, drama, fiction — in that order.’ He drained his glass and moved towards the door. ‘It is your decision, of course,’ he said. ‘You are doing a fine job.’

  That evening at M’Synder’s fireside I finished reading A Month in the Country, a short, puzzling novel with whose narrator I seemed to have much in common (albeit my demons seemed comic, where his were tragic: but I was used to that). I had seen nothing of Rose since the night before, and I could not help noticing that each time she was absent when she might have been present I felt what I have called my wholesome disinterest falter.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll be out when you finish at the house,’ said M’Synder, who sat opposite me, changing the batteries of a torch. ‘Fridays, I go to Evensong in the village — I’ll be back at about seven o’clock to cook supper.’ She had a little box of loose batteries on her lap, and tried different combinations in the torch, each time shining it up into her face to check the brightness.

  ‘You’re welcome to come along, of course,’ she added quietly, fixing a discerning gaze down into the torch beam. She flicked the switch, satisfied, and closed the box.

  ‘I’d love to come,’ I said. ‘That is, if you don’t mind sitting next to a doubting Thomas.’

  I will not now describe my Friday labours over the engineering and architecture collection, lest my account become as repetitive as the task itself. It is enough to state that I made further progress in the search, but did not find the letter.

  M’Synder cooked another of her delicious spicy soups for lunch, which she, the doctor and I ate together in the dining room. From where I sat, I could see Meaulnes, the gardener, standing at the southern edge of the lawn with arms crossed and feet planted far apart, studying the deep border between him and the wall. He was wearing his boots, dungarees and cap as before, and seemed oblivious of the fine drizzle that had just filled the air. As I watched he flung out one great arm, like a conductor about to begin. Then he slowly raised the other and swept it from left to right, following it with his turning head, which he nodded rhythmically. Then he dropped the first arm and pointed down at the soil, while the second shot out straight with the palm outward.

  ‘Something in the garden?’ asked the doctor, noticing my attentive gaze.

  ‘It’s the gardener,’ I replied. ‘He seems to be doing a sort of dance by the flowerbed.’ The doctor and M’Synder chuckled knowingly.

  ‘He’s probably just mapping out the spring planting,’ explained the former. ‘He thinks with his limbs, you see — he inherited that eccentricity from his father.’

  ‘But mangled it up, somehow,’ added M’Synder, drily.

  That afternoon I heard the sound of ringing voices in the hall and, going to investigate, found the doctor and M’Synder talking to Meaulnes, who towered over them by so much that I found myself smiling at the sight. They were all looking up at the suspended pine branch, which by now appeared rather dry and bald, having dropped, during the course of the week, thousands of long needles onto the floor below.

  ‘Ah, Mr Browne,’ said the doctor, brightly. ‘You are just in time to see the lowering of our yuletide bough.’

  Meaulnes, who had removed his boots and wore thick woollen socks to which clung pieces of leaf and twig, padded up the carpeted stairs (I hardly noticed that he took three at a time). He crouched for a while on the landing and then stood up holding two coils of thin rope. The branch quivered and sent down a shower of needles.

  ‘Keep clear,’ he called, and the heavy base of the branch began slowly to descend. When it reached the needle-covered flagstones, Meaulnes threw down the ropes, walked round to the other side of the gallery and lowered the branch to the floor. I had been so engrossed in this spectacle that I noticed only now that the others had vanished. Meaulnes padded back down the stairs and stooped over the branch to untie the ropes.

  ‘I’ve never seen a Christmas tree like this one,’ I said, stepping forward to help.

  ‘You seem very young,’ began Meaulnes in a slow, deep, heavily-accented murmur, without looking at me, ‘to be an ar-chiv-ist.’ He dwelled on each syllable derisively. I was taken aback by the change in his manner, now that we were alone.

  ‘More of a filing assistant, really,’ I said, trying to sound breezy. He snorted, thrust his feet into his enormous boots, lifted the base of the branch and dragged it towards the front door, which I opened for him. It took him three great heaves to get it through, then he nodded at me, either in thanks or, it seemed to me at the time, as some vague threat, and staggered away across the drive. Over the steady, grinding hiss of the branch on the gravel came the sound of his whistling, and I paused at the open door to listen. It was an odd tune — a simple theme of four notes, the first pair suspending, the second pair resolving, repeated with wavering variations. It stuck in my head all afternoon.

  13

  The evening was cold and damp with chilly puffs of breeze that produced short, wavering hisses in the leafless trees. M’Synder wielded the torch she had serviced the night before, and walked with the heavy, metronomic gait of a woman whose joints are not what they once were, but who is used to walking everywhere nonetheless. We were soon past the single light of the cottage and following the lane through the thin woods and rough fields that covered the lower reaches of the combe. A couple of sheep bleated in the darkness, and an owl hooted loudly, theatrically, nearby.

  Ten minutes past the cottage (that may seem to imply proximity, but ten minutes’ brisk walk along a dark, narrow and winding lane seemed then, to a city-dweller like me, to emphasise the combe’s isolation) I saw coloured lights ahead — the lighted church windows beneath the faint silhouette of its short, square tower.

  ‘Are the doctor’s forbears buried here?’ I asked, as we passed the low wall of the churchyard. The torch beam flickered over a couple of weathered headstones — one era idly, irreverently fingering another.

  M’Synder left a moment’s silence and then replied, ‘Some of them,’ in that tone at once suggestive and final, that she, Rose and the doctor seemed all to have perfected to confound me.

  The service was led by a plump, red-haired man in his forties, who read his part painstakingly from the lectern as though he were a novice. There was a choir of four men, two women and three boys, and a muffled-up congregation of about a dozen which half-filled the tiny nave. In the shadows of the south transept stood an ancient harmonium, played by a woman with long silver hair in a plait, whose face I did not see.

  M’Synder recited the creed and the responses in her soft but certain voice, while I kept guiltily quiet until the congregation’s hymn, which I began to sing half-heartedly and then rather enjoyed. My immediate impression of the service was that it was something worthwhile: an act of reflection and appreciation that seemed appropriate after a week’s work. The countless invocations of a fairytale God were like a string of loose obstacles left stupidly in an otherwise sound path — I stubbed my toes against them, stumbled over them, silently derided them, but kept my feet. It was better than no path at all.

  Afterwards, M’Synder said she had to pay a visit to a friend who was now too old to come to church. I took a turn around the little triangular green before returning up the lane, and one ancient stone cottage attracted my notice. It stood at the end of a short terrace of similar dwellings, from which it was set slightly back and separated by a narrow walled gap. I called it a cottage, but what I noticed was that it was really a cottage-and-a-half — a tiny, improbable annex was built against it. This annex, not more than twelve feet wide, had its own low door beside a lovely bow-window, and another tiny window above. All the curtains were closed. I peered at a sign hanging over the door, trying to make out the faded letters in th
e lamplight: it looked like ‘The Croked Hand’.

  My Dales rambles had introduced me to the pleasures of intruding into small country pubs out of season. Often it is a genuine intrusion, into a family meal, a game, a blazing row, and yet legitimised by the timeless tradition of hospitality that the hosts have chosen to uphold as their profession — the intruder is welcomed, accommodated, entertained or left in peace as he desires, as long as he pays his bill of a few pounds. Some of my fondest and loneliest memories are of such intrusions, but I will keep them to myself.

  I reached down for the door handle in the shadows, and then jerked back my hand as it met with something unexpected: another hand. The handle was a large brass hand with ice-cold, contorted fingers; I grasped it and tried to turn it; I pushed and pulled it; then with a last glance at the closed curtain I hurried back to the church and along the dark and unsigned lane.

  Saturday morning was my first opportunity to explore the surrounding country in daylight. I had thought of going for a walk over the hills, and threw back my curtains to reveal a windy morning with reassuring blue breaks in the scudding clouds. I met Rose on the stairs, already dressed but wet-haired and smelling of scented soap. I mentioned my plan for the day and she casually offered to join me: ‘I know all the paths,’ she said.

  Just a few yards from the cottage, one such path led between the garden wall and a tiny rill that tumbled down the hillside and passed under the track to join the main stream. The path climbed steeply through a birch wood, where great thick brackets of fungus grinned on the slim, mossy trunks and sinister clusters of red toadstools crowded between the roots. The trees soon thinned and we began to zig and zag up the bracken-covered flank of the rill’s little valley. After ten minutes I was warm, for Rose set a keen pace, and I was glad to see a sort of stone seat at the turn of the next switchback, which seemed like a good excuse for a pause.

  Already the main track traced a fine, snaking line far below us, and this spot commanded a lofty view over the cottage, half-hidden by trees but betrayed by its little white streamer of smoke, and along the narrow valley towards the house. Arnold’s trees — the dark masses of pines and cedars, and the bare, ghostly crowns of the great beeches — were clearly visible in the valley and on the hillside beyond but, surprisingly, Combe Hall itself was out of sight.

  ‘I thought we’d be able to see the house from here,’ I said, as I caught my breath. Rose studied me critically, showing no signs of exertion.

  ‘It doesn’t like to be seen,’ she replied. It was not the first time she had spoken of the house as though it had a personality — as though it were alive. ‘We’ll be in the wind shortly,’ she added, as I pushed up the sleeves of my jumper.

  Soon the gradient eased and the wind indeed began to build as we came up onto the plateau. The bracken gave way to gorse and heather through which the path wound faintly before a final incline brought us to a junction with the broad ridge-top path. We followed it for a hundred yards to a pile of stones.

  ‘This is the summit of Fern Top,’ declared Rose over the cold north-westerly. ‘Nine hundred and eighty-one feet.’ I wrapped my scarf more tightly and pulled down my hat. To the east lay the lowland regions of the county, faintly and intricately lined and gently wrinkled like one of M’Synder’s faded rugs, stretching twenty miles or more to another vague band of hills on the horizon. To the west and still looming over us stood the broad but slightly pointed summit of Grey Man, marked by a great cairn standing black against the sky. We started along the path towards it, right into the teeth of the wind. A couple of grouse burst into the air with their cackling cry: ‘Go back, go back, go back!’

  The cairn was further than it looked, set half a mile back on the bleak, reddish moor and standing at the centre of a bog of rippled peat that was now half-frozen, and squelched and crunched alternately beneath our boots. It was a true beehive cairn, tall and regular, and I noticed a few shrivelled and frozen flowers carefully jammed between two of the stones as though in remembrance — but I said nothing.

  The path turned to the south, and after a few hundred yards we passed a short, sun-bleached wooden post indicating a path on the left.

  ‘That’s the way down into the arboretum,’ said Rose. ‘The path crosses the bridge in the beech grove, then skirts the meadow and joins the lane right in front of the house.’

  ‘But it’s a public footpath,’ I said. Rose laughed.

  ‘It is,’ she replied. ‘It runs right through the middle of the grounds — haven’t you looked at the map?’ I had not. ‘We had a big family group wander down last summer during a thunderstorm — they asked me if we had a teashop. Since then — no one.’

  ‘Does the path go past the temple?’ I asked, cautiously. She looked at me without expression.

  ‘No. You can’t see the temple from any of the paths, public or private. Only the buzzards can see it.’ She looked up and I noticed the wheeling predators for the first time. ‘One for sorrow,’ she counted, ‘two for joy, three for brazen, four for coy: five. Five remembers.’

  ‘Six forgets?’ I guessed, stupidly.

  ‘There are only five,’ she muttered, turning abruptly to walk on.

  Our own path now descended steeply to a low saddle in the ridge, crossed by a rough track that climbed up from the combe and then wound down out of sight into another valley to the west.

  ‘So that’s where the gardener lives,’ I said, pointing down the track as we climbed a stile. Rose nodded curtly, and I told her about my odd meeting with him in the hall. Then I added, ‘Not your favourite person, I gather.’ She paused after the second stile, sheltered by the dry-stone wall and a twisted hawthorn.

  ‘I used to be fond of him, when I was a child,’ she said. ‘We had fun in the holidays.’ She said nothing for a while, as though recollecting, and then continued: ‘When I was thirteen he made me a forty-foot swing in one of the beech trees in the grove, but Arnold told him to take it down. And of course he knows all the roses — when they’ll flower and when they’ll die.’ Then she frowned and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid he bores me now — he takes things too seriously.’

  He loved her as a little sister, I hypothesised to myself, but his love changed, became complex and demanding, and now she scorns him for it: a classic case. Poor fool — he must be nearly twice her age.

  14

  We continued round to the long, flat, third summit, Hart Top, and then dropped off the plateau and down through the woods, crossing the stream by a plank bridge. Rose went straight to her room when we returned to the cottage, leaving me to help M’Synder unpack a box of groceries that had been delivered from the village. Later, as we two drank tea by the fire after dark, she thudded down the stairs, called out that she was going up to the house, and slammed the door.

  At dinner, I tried to tease a little more information from my blue-slippered landlady. Had Arnold always lived in the combe? I asked.

  ‘I believe he moved away when he qualified as a doctor,’ she replied, after her customary pause, ‘about nineteen sixty, and then moved back after his mother died in seventy-five. That was when I came to the combe.’ I remembered his gold ring and wanted to ask, ‘Did he ever marry?’ but the words faltered on my lips and M’Synder led the conversation elsewhere:

  ‘Thirty-nine years old, I was,’ she murmured, wistfully. ‘Rather old, you’re thinking — young, I’m thinking — I’d never seen a house like the Hall. Never heard of it, though I lived but twenty miles away.’ Did she ever marry? That was my next unaskable question. Then I had some questions for myself: Why does it matter whether she or Arnold married? Can a person not live his or her life unsupported by that crutch? Is she, decisive Sarah, directing my thoughts even now?

  ‘There was an advertisement in the post office,’ M’Synder went on, then smiled. ‘A bit like yours, I s’pose. Mine offered a post for six months. I stayed on for a while — another six months sneaked by, then six years, then another six followed, then a decade or two. You canna stop
’em.’ She sat back in her chair and sighed, while the old clock ticked quietly in the corner. ‘And now here I am, getting old.’

  She looked straight at me, and for a moment I could think of no reply. Then I just said, ‘A beautiful place to live.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so, Mr Browne,’ she whispered, her narrowed eyes twinkling behind the steel frames, ‘since if my example is anything to go by — and Rose’s, for that matter — you might be staying here longer than you expect.’

  I slept deeply that night, and daylight was already spilling from behind the curtains when I was woken by hurried footsteps, voices and the alien sound of a car door banging shut. I got up, threw on my coat, which I used as a dressing gown, and went out to the little landing. I heard the roar of an engine and caught a hint of exhaust fumes mingled with the usual smell of toast, then through the raindrops on the landing window saw the old Cortina bumping away down the lane. I tramped sleepily down the stairs as M’Synder was shutting the front door.

  ‘Morning, Mr Browne,’ she said, cheerfully. ‘You just missed Rose.’ The boots, the red scarf, the little felt hat — they were all gone. ‘The new term starts tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know,’ I said, looking at the empty peg next to the one where my old woolly hat and scarf were hanging.

  ‘Breakfast’s almost ready,’ said M’Synder, and I followed her into the parlour.