The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  I hope you are grateful — I have just toiled a second time up that hill, numbed my hands and soaked my boots a second time in my imagination, just to show you this: the combe as a porcelain bowl brimming with fire.

  That was right for the first glance, but the details require a different simile: surely the mist laps like a golden lagoon around the snowy bay of the hilltops, and to the east lies in a blazing ocean over the frozen blue seabed county hidden beneath, its curls and ripples vanishing away into a horizon as sharp as that of any sea. We stand squinting, you and I, at the prow of this lumpy, snowy Argo, and turn our gaze to the west, to the drowned combe and the white lighthouse-cairn of white Grey Man, and suddenly there is a tiny rayed pinprick of reflected light — not from the cairn but from a little spur of land below, an insignificant wrinkle in that snowy brow, just peeping above the vaporous sea.

  If the freeze had gently pushed the doctor and me closer together as though we were seeking warmth in each other, had persuaded us to relax the rules of our game, to answer a few questions, at least, without their being asked, now the silent profundity of snowfall seemed to wrap M’Synder and me in a blanket of easy fellowship. She, perhaps encouraged by my repeat visit to church, began to soften her businesslike attitude and treated me more like the son of an old friend, or a rarely seen nephew visiting from overseas. That weekend I split a few dozen logs for her (dangerous work for the clumsy and short-sighted) and then lent my height to the substantial task she called ‘the annual shuffle’.

  With the cassette player chirping away merrily (M’Synder shared my father’s enthusiasm for country and western music), our two little glasses of American beer on the mantelpiece and Dolly the cat curled up on the chair arm, sleepily batting my hand with her paw if I held it out for her (‘Gimme five,’ I would say), the parlour defied the monochrome grandeur of the world outside. First we took down all the pictures and stacked them on the table for dusting and polishing. Then I attacked the naked walls with a feather duster, dislodging cocoons, sleepy spiders, dusty strands of webs and traces of soot, and M’Synder brought down a box of additional pictures (‘the subs bench’) which now had a chance to make their case to her discriminating eye. The figure drawings I had noticed on my arrival were by Rose, of course, and M’Synder gave these particular attention.

  ‘This un’s new,’ she said of one large picture, standing it on the table beneath the brass lamp. ‘My Christmas present. What d’you think?’ It was a charcoal drawing of a man (overalls, boots — surely Meaulnes) wielding an axe, seen half from behind. Rose had caught the moment before contact — the dark smear of the axe-head inches above the balanced log, the man’s body in relaxed, effortless motion. His back and shoulders were the focus of the piece — the clothes and skin stripped away to reveal a brutal écorché of overlapping muscles that seemed vulnerable and wretched, as though he had been flogged, even as they perpetrated a violence of their own.

  ‘I think it’s superb,’ I said warmly, flexing my own aching shoulders, ‘although rather brutal.’

  ‘Brutal?’ she returned, dismissively. ‘Life isn’t all flowers and pretty landscapes.’ She held it out to me. ‘It can go right over the fireplace: top spot. As for these’ — she pointed to a pair of yellowed engravings that had occupied that position — ‘they can go back in the box.’

  Occasionally I peered out of the fogged window and imagined the doctor studying, tutoring, examining, alone in his chill university, or patiently remembering his earlier, happier lives.

  A half-hearted thaw began on the damp, gusty Monday of my third week in the combe, and by Wednesday morning a few sheltered drifts and shovelled heaps of snow were all that remained around the house and along the lane. Only the hilltops were still a brilliant white, like clouds anchored to the earth.

  I let myself in and passed through the empty study to the library, as the doctor had bidden me do if the door was standing open. Something caught my eye: a book on the near corner of his desk, with a slip of paper secured by a rubber band. The note was brief and written in a bold hand, and I had read it without thinking: ‘Arnie,’ it read, ‘Here is the book, you forgetful old fish. Forfeit: no whisky for a fortnight. See you next week.’ It was signed only with an elegant, inky squiggle like the hoofprint of a deer or goat.

  I stood frowning for a while at the library table, fingertips again on the mahogany, listening to the silence. Yes, it is possible to remember silence — I remember it vividly as I write this. (Is silence a sensation? Discuss.) As I listened, I made adjustments to my conception of the doctor as a recluse resigned to the Boethian consolations of intellect and memory: now he was somebody’s ‘Arnie’ as well.

  Politics: that was my next station stop. On the warped and stiffened flyleaf of the first English translation of Machiavelli were scrawled the words ‘That ye may know’ in the hand I now recognised as Hartley’s: I supposed he was not a fan. Here too were Hobbes, Paine, Bentham and the rest, applying their formidable minds to the formidable problems of our coexistence. As for the doctor, he might occasionally receive playful notes but he did not, as far as I knew, read a newspaper. That birch-fringed hillside of Hart Top that by geological chance had shouldered into the combe from the north not only condemned the house to blue shade on winter mornings, but also screened it from the village, the county, the world — and while the sun would peep over indulgently by ten o’clock, the world and its afflictions might easily be forgotten. What were his politics? Did he vote? I could not guess.

  And young Browne? The hunched ignoramus — what of his views on the coexistence of man with man? Since my last years at grammar school I had reluctantly accepted the obligation to contribute to the democratic process, and the corresponding burden of near-helplessness in the face of other people’s problems (as if one’s own life and impending death did not provide enough of that). I had tried to discuss politics with my friends, had voted conscientiously when called to do so, and had even joined a ‘caucus’ at university (that was where I met Sarah). But fear not — you will find no polemic here. The new and greater causes I promised are of a different nature.

  7

  Thursday afternoon. The sun came out and I sat for a while with hands in my coat pockets and crossed ankles on the ‘sunniest seat’ — the bench against the south side of the house. Somewhere a crow cawed with momentary urgency and was comforted by another. A few ivy leaves nodded unconcerned in the faintly hostile breeze. Clouds drifted.

  When I had sat outside our flat in south London (there too was a bench), the purposeful hum of traffic and the sight of passers-by on determined errands had imbued the passage of time with a kind of illusory productivity: a general bustling productivity to which I need not contribute personally. If time or silence had lain heavy in the flat I could flick on the radio or the television, which instantly discharged the tension of ennui by the same process — the babbling thumbs-up of other people’s activity. And the long hours of my occasional insomnia had been comforted by distant sirens and the softly waxing and waning booms of car stereos.

  The combe, by contrast, was an unforgiving place for the inactive. There were no casual distractions to cheapen the currency of time: even the clock in M’Synder’s serene parlour seemed to me to tick with the gentle, rising inflection of a repeated question (well? well? well?), and the silent clocks in the silent house did not have to say anything to make themselves understood. I was lucky to have an explicit purpose here, I thought, and one towards which measurable progress could easily be made (more easily than, for example, in the writing of a book about a man named Linley, whoever he might be).

  With a soft batter of feathers, a large gaudy bird took possession of the wall in front of me: sandy pink, complementary electric blue, streaks of unequivocal black and white. My short-sightedness makes me a hopeless birdwatcher, but this brilliant apparition scorned any suggestion of doubt. I could even make out the round yellow eye, which stared at me unblinking as the bird ducked its head low and chuckled knowi
ngly. There was a suggestion of judgement in this gesture, and I was struck by a vivid flash of perspective on the circumstances of my life, a kind of aerial view such as this bird might have were it really omniscient, simultaneously taking in the then-presence and now-absence of Sarah, the manager who could understand me wanting to ‘give something back’, the tedious irony of the ignoramus turning the pages of thousands of books without reading them, and, letter found or letter not found, my impending release from the sacred combe into the profane world.

  I shuddered in an eddy of breeze, got up, glanced with hollow defiance at the mocking jay and hurried back along the terrace.

  As I stepped up into the dining room and turned to close the door I heard a clear trickle of sound from within the house — the notes of a piano, not a recording but the real thing. Did the doctor play, or had Rose perhaps returned? I tiptoed to the hall door and opened it. I suppose music unlocks the inherent mystical potential of a door — that moment of opening a door on music, of the muffled, the indistinct suddenly stripped naked to the ear, is perhaps a sharper demonstration than Paul’s ‘through a glass, darkly, but then face to face’, a more perfect metaphor for revelation. Now I stood listening at the foot of the stairs, my hand on the great black oak newel, as the piece, Bach’s Goldberg aria (yes, always Bach), came to its cool, stately end. I held my breath during the moment’s silence that followed, and then the pianist leapt headlong into the energetic first variation, filling the high, cold, resonant space with a beaded spray of sound.

  Emboldened by this allegro mezzo forte, I advanced up the stairs until I could peer through the gallery banisters to the large, bright room into which the landing opened. There in the pool of light from a huge window (correspondent to the parlour window below) stood a walnut grand piano. Paintings in heavy, plain wood frames hung on whitewashed walls, a battered violin case lay on a side-table, and the doctor sat in a low chair with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, listening.

  I too listened. It is fortunate that I was unobserved, for I think my face hung in the slack, goggle-eyed, infantile expression (well captured in a certain photograph of me aged nine months, and in a certain miniature of Keats) that always disguises my mind’s finest moments. How can the piano be played like that? The two hands commanded by one will and yet expressing two distinct truths, living two lives as they resolutely trace their invisible paths over the blank, inauspicious keyboard, perhaps crossing now and then like the paths of souls. But souls are never so sure of themselves — are they?

  Seated at the piano, with her back to me: a woman, not Rose. Honey-brown hair half-trapped in the collar of her cardigan, half tumbling over her shoulder. The doctor’s eyes were still closed; I silently retreated down the stairs and returned to the library and the pages of John Stuart Mill, bursting with fearsome, Bachian prose but hopelessly devoid of those loose, yellowing sheets that I always imagined awaiting me, expecting me, in the next volume.

  The woman’s accomplishment (I could still hear it faintly) terrified me. And yet I expected nothing less from the combe, where mediocrity was apparently unknown. She played the whole work, including all the rarely performed repeats, while I continued my unskilled labour (in case you think me a Bach scholar worthy of the combe myself, remember I have had time to research such details retrospectively for this account). Later, some time after five o’ clock, I heard voices and the doctor swept in from his study, followed by the maestra herself.

  ‘Ah, Mr Browne,’ he said, as I balanced the current object of my search, Böhm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of His System, eighteen ninety-eight, open in my left hand. ‘Your perseverance shames me. Mr Browne,’ he added, turning back to the woman, ‘has volunteered to search for the missing document. And small return he gets for his efforts, I’m afraid.’

  She stepped forward, extended her hand and murmured, ‘Juliet.’ A small, slight woman in her early forties — cool blue eyes gazing from a faint net of lines; a wide, attractive mouth; three slender vertical furrows worn into the centre of her brow. She wore grey jeans, brogues, a blue shirt and two (or was it three?) cardigans.

  ‘Juliet will be staying for a week,’ said the doctor, absent-mindedly taking the book from my hand and leafing through it, ‘so we can hope for further recitals.’

  Since he did not explain their relationship, I speculated. My first impression was of a nervous intimacy between them that might easily account for the note to ‘Arnie’, although she now displayed none of its playfulness (‘you can hope all you like,’ she might have replied to his last comment, but instead just smiled wearily). If she were his daughter, surely he would have mentioned her before, or would say so now. But she was much too young to be his — what do old gentlemen have these days? Partner? Companion? Or perhaps not — there was just enough suavity in his words and gestures to make it seem possible. Strange, but possible.

  ‘I listened from the stairs,’ I said. ‘It was wonderful.’

  ‘Come and join us for a drink,’ said the doctor, warmly but maintaining the calm, calculated tone that meant the game had, after the unexpected confidences of the previous week, recommenced in earnest.

  We were back on the sherry: I suppose its cool, sharp formality suited the doctor’s mood or purpose (there was never a choice). Juliet’s gaze rested fondly for a moment on the Taboni, as though she had not seen it for while.

  ‘Are you a professional pianist?’ I asked, right on cue.

  ‘A teacher,’ she replied. ‘I was a music mistress at a secondary school for many years — now I am just a plain old piano teacher.’ She spoke quietly but with an engaging, almost conspiratorial warmth.

  ‘A music mistress,’ murmured the doctor, replacing the decanter. ‘A mistress to music, or, alternatively, music itself as a mistress. Splendid — it should be the name of a yacht or a racehorse.’

  ‘What do you think of the combe?’ she asked. ‘Arnold says you’ve been here for a few weeks.’ He gazed through his sherry into the fire, just as he had when I had first spoken to Rose.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s given me a conflict of interest,’ I replied. ‘The sooner I find the letter, the sooner I’ll have to leave, and go back to London — and I’m rather inclined to stay as long as possible.’ The doctor smiled wryly at his glass. Juliet nodded.

  ‘I believe he thought the bloody abominable cold would motivate you to get the job done quickly — perhaps he miscalculated the hardiness of the urbanite.’ She set down her glass and gently pressed and kneaded her charmed fingers to warm them. Their tips were slender and pointed and seemed to turn up slightly, as though from the years of pressing those inauspicious keys.

  ‘Or the extent of his antipathy towards his own life,’ suggested the doctor, casually. Juliet asked what I did in London, and I went through the miserable ‘lapsed banker’ alibi again.

  ‘I have a brother about your age,’ she said. ‘He’s drifting too. It’s the burden of too much choice — isn’t that what people say?’

  ‘Not a very heroic burden,’ I said, seeing that unblinking yellow eye in my mind.

  ‘Of course, it’s different for the likes of us,’ she added, turning to the doctor. ‘We made our choices years ago.’ He grimaced and sighed.

  ‘Each man has,’ he began, slowly, as though quoting from memory, ‘at each moment in his life, certain possibilities in his future, certain paths that he has not yet passed by, but could still follow. The number and variety of these paths are for a young man at his liberty great but not infinite. He must perhaps choose the noblest and best that he can imagine, and think how he might follow it, and act on those thoughts.’

  ‘Abe Lincoln?’ guessed Juliet.

  ‘Hartley Comberbache,’ he replied, draining his glass. ‘In the diary of seventeen sixty-two, when he was about Mr Browne’s age. Note that he makes no less than three demands of his young man at liberty: imagination, reason and action. But is the young man equal to the task? That’s the question.’

  ‘Yes,’ I
answered, grimly. ‘That is the question.’ Not yet passed by — those words lingered in my mind. There was hope in them, I thought. What paths had I not yet passed by?

  ‘Our paths,’ added the doctor, breaking the silence, ‘— mine especially — are indeed shorter, fewer and less varied. But we console ourselves by advising the young. Rose, at least, seems to have plenty of ideas.’

  ‘She always did,’ said Juliet. ‘The first time I met her she said she wanted to be — what was it? A poacher! “My ambition”, she called it. Each time I saw her she would have a new one.’

  ‘I should clarify for Mr Browne’s benefit,’ added the doctor, ‘that this was when Rose was a very young child, before she was in my charge. She is not quite so capricious now.’

  ‘Ah, so you are claiming that influence,’ said Juliet. ‘Well, it is a fair claim. But really,’ she went on, drily, ‘to think of you as a father-figure to that poor girl, at your age. She’ll be tired of life before she’s lived it.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he replied, with his grimace-smile. ‘Rose is more than a match for me, and you know it.’

  While they were turned to each other I caught myself gazing at Juliet’s face, fascinated by those three sculpted frown lines. If the doctor’s natural expression was one of pained comprehension hers was of jaded perplexity, as though she had almost given up trying to comprehend. I’m afraid I felt rather attracted to her even then, before I got to know her (yet more light splintering into a dark space?), which in turn made me feel a surprising flicker of male affinity with the doctor, a man with nearly half a century on me; I even detected a shameless whisper of covetousness. Juliet did not, of course, accompany me on the bracing walk back to the cottage for supper: only the swift, hushing phantom of a barn owl marked my passage.