‘Excuse me for a moment,’ he said, seeming to have an idea. ‘Pour yourself a coffee while I’m gone.’ I heard his slow, steady tread on the stairs, and after a few minutes he returned carrying a pair of leather boots.
‘My father gave me these forty years ago,’ he said, examining them fondly, ‘but I disappointed him — didn’t follow in those particular footsteps, or boot-steps. They’re tricouni-nailed boots for climbing mountains — rather superseded now, I believe, but perfect for an icy lane. He bought them large to accommodate thick socks,’ he added, glancing at my feet, ‘so I think you’ll be able to squeeze them on. I always kept them oiled — don’t ask me why.’ He handed me the heavy boots, whose soles were studded with gleaming knobbles of steel.
‘Your father was a mountaineer, then?’ I began, as we sat down to our coffee.
‘Yes, and my mother too,’ he replied, with a pained nod. ‘My father took it up in the thirties with a couple of Scotsmen he’d met at work. They made or adapted all their own clothes and equipment — stormproof tents, sleeping mats made of tar and cardboard, waxed coats cut short to the waist, plus-fours let out at the knee, alum-treated tam o’shanters — and that’s before we even begin on the ropes and ironmongery.’
‘Mainly in Scotland?’ I asked, suddenly remembering Meaulnes’ improvised doorstop. Piton — that was the word: I had seen some in a local history museum in Windermere.
‘Lakeland and north Wales for rock climbing weekends in the summer, and Scotland for what he called “rock and ice” in the winter. Then in nineteen forty he joined the Marines as a medic. His first and last action was the Battle of Crete: two chaotic days of fighting followed by four years in a prison camp.
‘He was allowed to send one postcard each month,’ he went on, going to his desk and taking from a drawer a small leatherbound folio. ‘These are the thirty-nine that arrived — the rest were lost on the way.’
The postcards were held in neat slipcases and looked almost as good as new, bearing only the creases or stains they had suffered in their original transit. Each was covered in tiny, meticulous writing accompanied by intricate ink drawings of mountain crags and the routes by which they might be scaled, or the wide vistas commanded by their summits. On the reverse, contrasting starkly with the care and love suffusing these compositions, an array of brutal postmarks was stamped beside the simple, familiar address.
‘It was only when he came home that my mother realised these were excerpts from a book he had been writing — but the finished manuscript did not survive the journey, and he had to start again with only these postcards to guide him.’
‘Did he send no other news of himself, and ask nothing about you and your mother?’ I asked, leafing through the cards, which seemed to contain detailed accounts of past climbs, ideas for future expeditions and miniature essays on more abstract subjects, such as ‘the philosophy of risk’ and ‘ode to a mountain crow’.
‘I suppose his implication was that as a captive the only news he had was this news of his roaming mind, and that he had no request that my mother was not already doing her best to satisfy. She used to read the cards to me as extra-special bedtime stories.’
‘And the book?’
‘Rocks and Remembrances — it was published in nineteen forty-eight and sold a few hundred copies, then became something of a cult hit among climbers in the sixties and seventies. It is still occasionally reprinted by a small publisher in Kendal.’
I warmed my hands around the tall bone-china mug. The fire had settled into a murmuring, vigorous mound of flame, and began at last to radiate heat.
‘And you said your mother climbed too,’ I prompted.
‘Ah yes, there was a bold lady,’ he said, fondly. ‘My father took her to the Highlands for a holiday before I was born, and she demanded to see what he had climbed. A few hours later they were a thousand feet above the valley, he anxiously taking in the rope while she swarmed up behind him with her skirt hitched up, brightly pointing out handholds that he had missed. I think she just loved to see him in his element. She climbed rather less after the war: my fault, probably.’
‘But your father went back to it?’
The doctor stood up slowly and held his hands out to the fire. ‘Have you ever driven through Glen Coe?’ he asked. I had not, but I had crossed part of it once on a long walk with some schoolfriends. ‘In that case you will remember that mountain with the gloriously forbidding name, Buachaille Etive Mòr, the Great Shepherd, which stands at the mouth of the glen, glaring out across the Moor of Rannoch.’ I did remember it — a stern, seemingly perpendicular triangle of rock visible for tens of miles.
‘My father was not a demonstrative man,’ murmured the doctor, now leaning against the mantelpiece, ‘but he broke into tears and had to stop the old baby Austin when he first saw that mountain again after the war. For the whole hour-long walk across the moor to its foot he couldn’t stop crying, as he reminded himself that he was free to walk any way he chose — to stop, to turn around, to go on. When at last he laid his enfeebled hands on the first cold, soaring slab of rhyolite the years rolled away and he crumpled to his knees in a puddle of water. A description of that morning formed the epilogue for which his book was later best known — and he told my mother it was the defining moment of his life.
‘It was light, you see,’ he added, grasping his chair and shuffling backwards towards the desk, ‘splintering into a dark space.’
5
I had now passed the study door in my search of the books beneath the gallery, and commenced work on the long history section opposite the windows. It began, appropriately, with an elegant bilingual folio edition of Herodotus, published in Amsterdam in seventeen sixty-three. On each page the columns of weird, curling Greek and stately, regular Latin were like twin indictments of my ignorance.
Did this magisterial patriarch approve of the thousand volumes ranked beneath him, I asked myself — his burgeoning brood? I was often tempted thus to consider the authors represented by a row of books as personalities which might be of diverse ages but which were nevertheless contemporary, contiguous and mutually acquainted. Their reassuring coexistence on the shelf disguised the careful branches of influence that wound through time and space to hold each volume in its own unique position relative to the others. The illusion was perhaps a consequence of compression — if each glistening curl of ink pressed onto a page was a tiny separate act of compression, then here was their massed accumulation: a vast web of centuries and continents pressed tightly into a matrix of shelves eight feet square. With a simple stretch, lean or stoop of his creaking young body, Samuel Browne could span the orbit of civilisation.
The next book was a stout translation from the thirties which, on its own, I would have considered a rather magnificent volume, but about whose English text a sheepish air seemed to hang. At the contents page a fine black hair nestled along the spine. I had encountered many such fragments of the restless, Heraclitian world, caught inadvertently in the adamantine crystal of compression — hairs, crumbs, a plane seed carried on a late summer breeze, a flattened midge with a faint brown stain of literary blood — trapped in the wrong domain until some gallant future reader might release them back to the swept floor of their native reality.
It was to the sudden music of Bach yet again — a cantata this time: oboe and voices in a regal dance — that the doctor released me for the evening. Or did not quite release me, since he asked me to join him for a glass of wine in the parlour where he had lit a roaring blaze.
He lit no lamps and we took our seats in the flickering orange glow of burning pine, which threw our magnified, wavering shadows onto the great glistening landscapes behind us (mine onto Hope and his onto Despair — surely accidental) and softly picked out the plasterwork relief far above. Taboni’s homage to truth loomed over us in deep shadow, its subject now a faint but defiant ghost of her former radiant self, a suggestion, a promise of beauty in a window on which night had fallen.
Th
e bottle of wine, having been warmed on the hearth ‘to remind it of sunburnt mirth and the warm south,’ stood between us on a little table with a peculiar silver object which as I sat down I identified as the glinting, scaly likeness of a giant walnut shell. The doctor grasped the lid, lifted it with a flourish and peered inside.
‘Roasted almonds!’ he murmured. ‘My favourite. M’Synder never disappoints. She and I exhausted the chocolate pennies last week.’ He leaned back with a satisfied sigh, holding an almond between his finger and thumb.
‘This morning I gave you the image of Arnold Comberbache aged seven,’ he began, ‘listening from his bed in this house to his father’s words spoken gravely by his mother, who holds a postcard at the lamp with a steady, long-fingered hand. But I have no corresponding image of you, Mr Browne, and I am curious. Give me one now — an image of your past.’
Overcoming an instinctive flinch of defensiveness, I followed his example and plucked an image from the harmless reaches of childhood. I told him that after my first day at infant school the teacher had declaimed sternly to my mother, ‘This child can read and write, but it cannot hold a pencil!’ This was merely a symptom, I explained (to the doctor, I mean), of my failure to grasp the fundamental chirality or handedness of the written word: at best I began each line with my left hand and then switched to my right, but often I inadvertently wrote from right to left in mirror-text, or placed correct characters in reverse order, or reverse characters in correct order, or employed some combination of all these eccentricities. The first time I wrote my name, I called myself Mazenworb — a name by which my sister still calls me. ‘The symmetry of the temple reminded me of my own unhanded infancy,’ I said, ‘before I was broken in to the chiral world.’
‘But of course the temple is handed in one sense,’ remarked the doctor, ‘just as a symmetrical keyhole belies the handed lock within. Indeed I suspect celestial motion is one source of our handedness. But tell me more about yourself.’
I told him that my father was an architect, a quiet, inventive man who had suffered frequent lacunae of unemployment; that my mother was currently a technician at an independent girls’ school; that my confident elder sister and I had attended a good grammar school, and that my nervous younger brother had deliberately failed his Eleven Plus to avoid separation from a friend, but was now vice-captain of the Cambridge University chess team.
The doctor, slowly crunching almonds and nodding attentively, seemed pleased by this feeble sketch and wanted more. In my stumbling way I told him a little about my student years: how university, for all its failings, had dazzled me with possibilities of a better, richer life — intellectual, aesthetic, sensual — when I was too timid and ignorant to seize them. Crawling before a footmark’d stair — the words of one of my more imaginative friends at the time. Then just when I felt I had built of myself someone worthy of participation in its mysteries, the university had examined me like a sceptical GP, given me a piece of paper declaring me fit to work, and sent me back to London to earn a living. ‘I feel I’m still waiting for the new term to start, but it never will.’
‘It could,’ said the doctor. ‘But perhaps, like me, you feel no allegiance to any particular field.’ I nodded. ‘My solution,’ he went on, ‘has been to build my own university: the venerable Combe College. I am its student, tutor and examiner all at once. I am its hopeless buffoon and its most brilliant scholar; its enthusiastic novice and its half-senile veteran; I am also, unfortunately, its bursar. M’Synder makes a fine catering manager, young Meaulnes is adequate as clerk of works, and you, for now, are its archivist.
‘The quality of its library compensates for the deficiencies of its teaching. The profound problem of indolence is neatly solved by placing all potential distractions on the syllabus: if the student wishes to lay aside his main task — perhaps I didn’t tell you I’m writing a book, a biography of an unexceptional man named Linley — if he wishes instead to spend a morning hunting orchids in the meadow or an afternoon spreading old photographs across the dining table, or perhaps a single uninterrupted hour in Bach’s paradise, he does so freely on the understanding that he will be rigorously examined on that topic.’
‘But are you always such a rigorous examiner of yourself ?’ I asked, puzzled by the concept. Was it so easy to be one’s own tutor?
‘If in doubt,’ he replied, lowering his voice to a reverential whisper, ‘the examiner can refer a paper to the external moderators.’
‘And who are they?’
‘Hartley the Elder and his wife Sarah, ably assisted by my parents.’ Then he added, in a murmur like embers shifting, ‘and, of course, my wife.’
I said nothing, and after a moment’s silence he sat up suddenly, began refilling our glasses and said, ‘I had forgotten that you are such a young man. I was expecting someone much older. I suppose you are barely thirty.’ I told him my age and he slapped his knees in wonder. ‘Well, well,’ he added, with a sigh. ‘At your age, I — ’ he paused, resting his head against the chair-back and gazing up towards the shadowy painting ‘ — I was still living the first of my three lives — I mean, the life before I met Margaret.’
‘I saw her memorial stone,’ I said, ‘up at the temple.’
‘Yes. All the moderators are there: that is their court of arbitration.’ Then he turned his pained smile to me and said, apologetically, ‘Perhaps by engineering your isolation here — your confinement — I just wanted to make sure of a sympathetic companion: dilated like an eye in the dark.’
‘You weren’t the engineer,’ I replied, smiling nervously. ‘I had my own godforsaken combe in London, though quite different to yours.’ The doctor gazed at me thoughtfully, tipping his glass this way and that, as though weighing its contents.
‘It was cancer, of course,’ he said, turning back to the fire. ‘Ovarian cancer: that miraculous originator of new life exacting its price. We shared twenty years together, and now I have lived twenty more without her — twenty-one, it is now. Three lives.’
‘Where did you meet?’ I asked.
‘She was a patient, I am ashamed to say,’ he replied, distractedly. ‘Nineteen sixty-four.’ He told me the city in which he had been practising — it was where I had changed trains on my journey from London. ‘One meets a lot of people, of course, just when they are down on their luck: when their true characters are laid bare. I liked that. Margaret was only in for hayfever, though.’ Even as he answered I could tell that his thoughts dwelled on the end of those twenty years, not their beginning, and now he broke off.
‘We had plenty of time to say our farewells,’ he said at length, quietly as though to himself. ‘We were loving and wise. At the end — the very end, we thought — she reached a kind of resignation, a state of beauty. But she did not die then: death is not obedient to our wishes or considerate of justice. She died a week later, in pain, confusion and fear.
‘I carry those two last memories of her like pails on a yoke — I have no power to choose between them. Sometimes the first predominates, and I can be happy even as her absence echoes through the house. At other times the second haunts me and I am miserable.’
I just nodded — as I wrote before, I have never been bereaved. But I did think of Sarah’s quick heels on the station steps, and my own contradictory memories.
6
It was midmorning on Friday when a bluish note crept into the grey light that washed those thousand fat spines of the history section. I turned, walked to one of the great windows, and stood watching with my hands in my trouser pockets.
Snow. Snow was falling in big clusters dark against the heavy, luminous sky like the German parachutes Geoffrey saw over Crete, but falling faster, falling thickly and straight down for the air was still, silently falling on the Hall and its perfect acre and the combe that held them as in a half-closed hand: steadily mottling away the colour from the lawns and the drifts of leaves and the mossy tops of walls, mottling away the miniature tectonic ridges in the dark stream of ice and the
beech leaves frozen into the ponds, alighting on Meaulnes’ sweet peas and hardy leeks, and on feathers and shivering squirrel fur, and cluster by cluster mottling away the names and the round stones of the dead.
A cobalt dusk was deepening when the flakes at last became smaller and fewer and then ceased suddenly, their work done: the world transformed. As I closed the curtains I glimpsed the dark figure of Meaulnes invading that pristine realm, brushing snow off the more delicate shrubs with massive gloved hands which he banged together to warm them. Later M’Synder and I tramped and creaked our way by torchlight to a thinly attended evensong, along the ghostly white ribbon of the lane, and returned beneath a blaze of stars, stepping in our own crisp footprints.
I rose early, surprising the reluctant dawn, and was excited to see that more snow had fallen but dismayed by a heavy mist enveloping the bowed plum trees. It was as though the elements had determined to do away with the world altogether — first silencing it with frost, then bleaching and blanketing it with snow, and now erasing with mist the last stubborn pencil lines of the birches and the division between earth and sky.
After tucking a borrowed map and compass and a few homemade biscuits into my jacket, I laced the nailed boots tightly and clattered out onto the swept doorstep — Sarah’s quick heels echoed again, and, more distant but just as sadly, my own little rugby boots on the pavilion steps. I plunged resolutely up Rose’s path into the foggy fairyland of the woods, where the heavily burdened trees found consolation in dropping snow down the back of my neck if I brushed against them, neatly complementing the sensation produced by my snow-filled boots. ‘The man needs gaiters!’ said Geoffrey’s cheery voice in my head. ‘I rustled up three splendid pairs from an old canvas horse-rug.’
Above the woods the snow was knee-deep, and my eyes had nothing to focus on except a few reassuring periscopes of bracken that guided me onward. I was hot and breathless by the time the slope eased — then, just as it had when I had climbed above the pines on the last steps to the temple, the sky seemed to open over me. A golden glow kindled in the mist to my right and, as I climbed higher, coalesced into the gleaming eye of the sunrise. Now an outcrop loomed up to my left and I laboured up it in a welter of sweat and tumbling snow, planted my boots firmly on its little summit and looked out.
The Sacred Combe Page 10