The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  8

  The next morning was one of those on which the doctor was unaccountably absent from his study (I could not believe he slept late), but after an hour Juliet slipped quietly into the library wrapped in a shawl and cradling a big mug of coffee. I was kneeling on a cushion, searching the last of the economics books.

  ‘I wondered if you’d like a hand,’ she said over the mug, sitting back against the folio table. ‘I could work through a few shelves if you like — maybe the music section.’

  I hesitated. My heart leapt at the thought of such intriguing company after my weeks of working alone, but something made me unsure. ‘It’s kind of you,’ I said, awkwardly, ‘but —’

  ‘You don’t want me stealing the prize,’ she suggested, laughing.

  ‘I suppose it is something like that — I’ve come so far.’ I indicated the thousands of volumes I had already searched. ‘And if I don’t find this thing, I want to know who to blame.’

  ‘Well, you won’t know that,’ she replied. ‘You won’t know whether you somehow missed it or Arnold sent you on a wild goose chase.’

  I looked straight into her frowning blue eyes. ‘I will,’ I said. ‘That’s the whole point.’ She smiled and shrugged, and then wandered over to the portrait of Sarah.

  ‘She looks so grave and virtuous,’ she said, after a while. ‘It’s hard to imagine her part in the story.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘Hasn’t he told you? What a peculiar man he is! But he’ll tell it so much better than I.’ She strolled slowly across in front of the windows, peering down at the planted border and clutching the mug to her breast like a hot water bottle. Then with a last ‘Happy hunting!’ she left the room.

  Later I heard the piano again — something chaotic and fiendishly hard that apparently stretched even her abilities, for several times she stopped abruptly or pounded out an angry discord. When I crossed the dining room to fetch my lunch she was sitting with a musician’s perfect posture at the head of the table, slowly turning an orange on a plate.

  ‘What was that you were playing?’ I asked, when I returned with my bread and cheese.

  ‘Trying to play,’ she corrected, brightly. She sliced into the orange and breathed in the sweet scent. ‘Chopin’s Scherzo number one in B minor — my nemesis.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was Bach this time,’ I said, with a smile.

  ‘Ah, so Arnold hasn’t spared you his obsession. He prefers not to listen to Chopin, so I wait until he’s out of the house.’

  ‘He’s gone to the village?’ I asked, trying to hide my curiosity. Her frown lines deepened.

  ‘You have seen the temple, I believe.’ I nodded. ‘He’s probably there.’

  Saturday dawned grey. I went for a morning walk down to the village — half a dozen guttering tails of smoke, the sounds of a dog barking, a car failing to start, a wood pigeon cooing unimaginatively from the church tower where it sat immovable like a plump gargoyle — and bought a few provisions for M’Synder from the tiny shop. A heavy middle-aged woman was seated at the counter, eating an apple, reading a newspaper. A perfectly normal person in a normal village shop. Had she ever been to Combe Hall?

  When I returned, M’Synder, her mouth pursed in concentration, her glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, was sitting in her armchair with the plank of an old bookshelf resting across its arms, writing a letter. The cassette player droned gently and Dolly the cat, finding her habitual perch unavailable, sat sulkily upright on the seat of the other chair, and narrowed her eyes defensively at me as I entered. I resisted the lure of the fire’s warmth, reluctant to disturb this peaceful scene, and after a few pleasantries went up to my cold bedroom and set about lighting my own fire for the first time.

  It went out. I tried again, and one side began merrily crackling while the other slumped apologetically, barely singed. I delicately slid a vigorously flaming jenga-stick of kindling out of one side and inserted it into the other, where the ripple of flame faded and died with a derisive curl of white smoke. I transferred a second stick with the same result, and now the good side began to waver reprovingly. I knelt there on aching knees for half an hour, patiently insinuating matches and twists of paper, remembering the Jack London story that my father had read to my sister and me, and that had haunted me for months afterwards and earned him a telling-off from my mother, who in a rare misjudgement had thought me too young for it. Of course, I was now in a cosy English cottage where even the air pressing on the casements was several degrees above freezing (whereas Jack had specified ‘one hundred and seven degrees of frost’), but that modification seemed appropriate to my prevailing ineptitude. Anyway, I got it going in the end.

  I leaned at the sill for a while but nothing much was happening in the garden: there were no passers-by. So I stood my plain wooden chair by the fire and sat down — no cup of tea, no whisky, no cigarette, no newspaper, no radio. Fire, of course, still occupied in the combe the place that the television has now claimed for itself in the profane world — the centre of domestic gravity towards which all chairs are turned. But a fire gives no babbling thumbs-up — if not fed it will die; it is compelling precisely because it is dying all the time, using up its resources, measuring time by turning to ashes.

  If you stare time in the face for long enough, you will begin to think about something — it is your mind’s way of blinking, of admitting defeat. Soon I was thinking about Juliet, and the doctor, and, with an odd sense that she completed the trinity, I was thinking about Rose.

  I knew something about each of them, but only what they had chosen to reveal — they all exhibited themselves half in shadow, like moons in a Voyager photograph, leaving me to pencil in the natural curve, to speculate. But of course we are all used to that, since every relationship is based on mutual speculation, from the passing acquaintance to that long, circling sizing-up called marriage. This circling of each other — of anyone we meet — begins very early in life, as soon as we discover that each trembling confidence inspires a new misunderstanding (only the insane persist). I am not saying that we all lie to each other, as some have claimed: it is quite possible to circle honestly.

  My five years of circling Sarah began, ironically, with a cognitive master stroke. As you know I first noticed her, speaking rarely but with humour and what seemed like good sense, at the political debates I attended. It was only when I saw her in a different setting, politely, efficiently selling tickets at the theatre, that she acquired a kind of three-dimensional significance in my thoughts, and I sent her a valentine’s card — just a sheet of red paper folded over, with a leaf drawn in black ink on the front and the words of Handel’s aria Ombra mai fu neatly inscribed inside (words written not by Handel, of course, but by a librettist named Minato — to each his due). A red envelope in her pigeonhole — the only one, I remember noticing with mixed feelings (per voi risplenda il Fato — a fine jest, in retrospect). She (and now at last I come to the point) immediately guessed it was from me. I have no idea how, since we had barely met. It seemed a good omen — but omens, like il fato — fate — are pure fiction.

  A jackdaw’s sharp call, like a foot lifted off a creaking board, roused me from this train of thought and I jammed a log angrily onto the little fire: ‘Not here,’ I muttered. ‘Not here.’ I reeled my errant thoughts back into the combe.

  The doctor, Juliet and Rose: they were like moons, too, I realised, in that they each seemed wrapped in a chill, airless solitude, and yet were united by some invisible bond, some dark planet that eluded me. I have mentioned the odd presence of the doctor’s ancestors — Hartley, twisted round in his chair, and the rest — but there was something else, something nearer, nearer even than the doctor’s two last memories of his wife, some heavy focus bending their thoughts just as Einstein showed mass to bend space itself. ‘Haunted by memory’ — those had been Rose’s words.

  I was soon to be enlightened.

  9

  Law books are a strange breed. Colleges and univer
sities abound in separate ‘law libraries’ as though the books, or perhaps the students, are not quite eligible for admittance to the main collections. One such journal-crammed oubliette, never locked at night, used to host our bleary-eyed conferences in the small hours before a physics hand-in. There were always a couple of law students hiding behind barricades of books from which they had perhaps resolved never to venture forth, like hibernating toads that settle and snuggle themselves inch by inch into some heap of decaying matter.

  Combe Hall had pronounced this same customary sentence on its own law collection, banishing it to the shelves of the folio table which stood apart in the centre of the room like St Helena or Alcatraz. It was here that my fourth week began — sitting on a cushion with my back to the shelves, since my knees would no longer countenance kneeling.

  Here were some books that predated even Hartley, books that had belonged to his grandfather Nathaniel, who bought the house in seventeen hundred and eight. These had been the inherited nucleus of the collection, beginning with Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England in two volumes, published in sixteen eighty-one. The tops of the spines were broken and the top edges of the boards scuffed and split after repeated careless extractions from a low shelf: proud, distinctive battle scars of which I had now seen hundreds of different varieties. Many grand private libraries are, I suspect, padded out with books of a rather lower mileage.

  I could hear the wind, very strong and turbulent that day, as a blank wash of noise in the beeches and as a more immediate and expressive whistling and buffeting around the house, as each gust searched the stonework and batted harmlessly against the ancient glass. It was during one of these buffetings that I heard a sharper sound, quiet but very near — inside the glass, I thought. Something small falling onto a hard surface. A twig clawing at a window, perhaps, but I had seen none. A few minutes later during another gust I heard it again — a tapping sound (gently rapping, I thought, rapping at my chamber door). I stood up and searched the room with my eyes: nothing had moved. Then my gaze fell on the locked door nearby, and it came again, very faintly this time, but I was sure: it was something behind the door.

  I had, I recalled, left the doctor in his study. I smiled impulsively at the idea of a door cleverly concealed in his enormous bookcase and giving access to some secret laboratory beyond (mainstay of many a gothic tale). On second thoughts, a concealed door seemed quite possible. If it was the doctor, perhaps he made himself audible now as a signal, as part of the game — perhaps I was to be admitted, to advance another square on the unseen board.

  In that spirit, I knocked gently at the door. There was no answer, except for another gentle, almost inaudible metallic flutter. I turned the heavily sprung doorknob and this time, to my surprise, the door yielded.

  ‘Hello?’ I said quietly, slowly pushing it open and stepping over the threshold. The consistently closed curtains had been drawn back, but there was nobody in the room, and no connecting door. A large table stood against that wall, draped with crimson velvet and bearing a few carefully arranged objects: a coil of yellow nylon rope, a pair of gloves, some kind of harness to which small metal blocks and screws were attached by steel loops, and, crossed in the centre, two fearsome tools like miniature pickaxes with crooked shafts and long serrated picks. These were heavily scratched and knocked about, and one of the picks was slightly twisted as though it had been subjected to a violent strain. At the end of the table lay a slim leather folder, and on the floor stood a pair of heavy boots like ski-boots with long metal spikes — crampons — strapped to the soles. These boots were not decades old like the ones I had borrowed.

  On the panelled wall above the table hung a huge monochrome photograph of a snow-covered mountain, in a frame perhaps six feet wide. As I peered closer I noticed that it was marked with dozens of fine red lines drawn onto the complex rampart of cliffs, each labelled above or below by a name in tiny, neat handwriting. Some were prosaic and topographical (Left Edge, Central Gully Right-Hand, Route II Direct), others poetic or humorous (Pointless, Appointment with Fear, Riders on the Storm, Big Bad Ben). Each name was followed by a roman numeral and an Arabic digit separated by a comma — these, I guessed, indicated the difficulty of the climb. One name in particular, written in proud capitals, caught my eye: THE TEMPLE, IX,8 (FA 07.2.97). This denoted a line that breached the middle of a terrifying snowless precipice, rising straight between two slender pilasters of rock and then crossing the black shadow of an overhang (like a monstrous pediment, I supposed) and continuing up ice and steep snow to the summit plateau. IX was the highest numeral I could see. Below the photograph was written the name of the mountain (somewhat surprising, given its alpine grandeur: Ben Nevis) and in the corner were scrawled a few words in pencil: To Sam. in medias res. From Adam ’96.

  I started on hearing the tapping, fluttering noise again just behind me, and as I wheeled round my eye caught a flicker of movement over the fireplace. An ornate brass arrow pivoted back and forth on the wall like the hand of a deranged clock. N, E, S, W — it was a wind-dial, connected to the vane on the roof. I glanced at the open door, my body still charged with the silent tension of intrusion — but it seemed right that I should see all this, that I should know.

  Two more pictures hung side-by-side opposite the window. The first was an enlarged photograph of a young man’s face: the pale, aquamarine glitter of his eyes narrowed against a fierce mountain sun; windburnt skin, a strong, unshaven jaw, wisps of yellow hair falling over the mirror sunglasses that were pushed back on his head, and the broad smile, in whose shape I could recognise the doctor’s grimace, but which was untouched by pain or regret or anything beyond the moment. He held up a gloved fist clenched in triumph.

  The second picture completed a kind of memorial diptych: it was a figure painting of a man running away into the canvas, barefoot, one leg planted down on the void, the other flung out behind him, the muscular lower back revealed by a shirt billowing up, loose flapping trousers, yellow hair tossed up by motion, and a bare arm extended with its relaxed, empty hand turned into shadow. The figure was executed in quick broad, strokes, and traces of the background, a blank red, showed through here and there, as though the man were indeed fading, receding into the canvas. In the corner was the small, blocky signature I recognised as Rose’s.

  A few smaller frames hung in the alcoves, some holding collages of short newspaper articles — Lost Walkers Rescued ‘In Nick Of Time’ ; Climber Found Safe After Night On Ledge; Rescued Schoolboys ‘Had Given Up Hope’ ; Avalanche Man In Stable Condition; and many more. None mentioned the names of the rescuers, but I guessed that all these stories had at least one anonymous participant in common; there were also several group photos of mountain rescue teams — Lochaber, Edale, Ogwen Valley.

  On the mantelpiece stood a wedding photograph like the final superfluous QED: the laughing younger Juliet was to the older almost what the son was to the pained, mistaken father. I turned back to the haunting diptych. Here then was the planet, the focus of all those bending thoughts: son, husband and — how did Rose fit in? That I still did not know, but I felt sure that she too was bound to the others by these pale eyes smiling out from the not-so-distant past, this running man who had escaped them all.

  The wind whistled on outside. The view from the window was dominated by the great beech, from the base of its monolithic trunk to the swaying net of branches that filled the sky. The jackdaws were here too, a dozen or so, grimly clinging on like sailors sent aloft. I turned back to the table and lifted the cover of the folder. On the first page was written the single word Requiescat in a large, plain hand, and, in much smaller letters below, For Sam, from J. I turned a few pages: it was a handwritten music manuscript.

  Glancing again at the open door, I froze at the sight of Juliet herself, standing at the window with her back to me, gazing across the windswept lawn — waiting for me, I thought. I closed the folder and stepped quietly back into the library.

  10

  ‘
He died five years ago today,’ she said, softly, reassuringly, as I approached. ‘On his birthday. On Ben Nevis.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, in the stupid, helpless way that is after all quite fitting.

  ‘I’m sorry that Arnold didn’t tell you,’ she replied. ‘He still can’t talk about it — about Sam, I mean. I suppose he ended up making quite a mystery of it all.’

  ‘It’s alright — I mean, I understand.’

  Juliet frowned. ‘Not fully, I expect — not yet. How about you close that door,’ she said, pointing at the doctor’s shrine to her husband, ‘and we’ll go for a walk in the garden. I could do with being blown about a bit.’

  Cold air billowed into the dining room as she opened the terrace door, tinkling the crystals of the chandelier. ‘Here goes,’ she said, adjusting her scarf. We went the way Rose had taken me, through the gate to the long, straight promenade she had called the runway.

  ‘Arnold told me about the notices in the old books,’ she said, her voice raised over the unsympathetic wind. She smiled and shook her head disapprovingly. ‘I’ve no idea what possessed you to answer one and come here, but I’m glad you did — he seems to have taken to you. He’s a lot more cheerful than usual.’

  It had never before occurred to me, despite his odd remark about ‘engineering’ my stay, that the doctor might simply want company. Was there a letter, after all? And if so, was it really lost? ‘M’Synder seems to look after him pretty well,’ I said, laying those questions carefully aside.