The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘Well of course, Sara’s wonderful,’ said Juliet. ‘But she’s getting older now too — and she’ll always remind him of the past, of Margaret and — and Sam growing up. It’s Rose who forces him to think of the future.’

  ‘M’Synder said Rose’s parents were friends of the family,’ I suggested. It is true that I was curious and hoped for further revelations; but, to be fair to myself, I think I really wanted to understand this strange family because I liked them and wanted to help them — at that moment I wanted to help this lonely, frowning woman who spoke to me, a stranger, as though I deserved her confidence.

  ‘Very close friends of ours,’ she said. ‘Her father was Sam’s climbing partner — in fact it was Adam who introduced him to it while they were students.’

  Was there a note of accusation in her voice? I don’t think so. I considered how to phrase a question about that other accident, their accident, of which I still knew nothing. Perhaps it was the same accident? Juliet spoke again: ‘You must think us rather self-obsessed,’ she said, with a smile. ‘We’re not really — Arnold is dedicated to Rose and to his book, which I honestly believe he’ll finish this year, and I — well, I have my pupils, and the piano.’

  We had walked past the gate to the rose garden, and now turned instead towards the next gate, which led to a part of the garden I had not yet seen. It was a walled enclosure about fifty feet square, paved in stone and filled with statues — sculptures, busts, abstract forms, standing here and there like guests at a garden party, or perhaps like graves.

  ‘They call this the stone garden,’ said Juliet, in a softer voice, since we were sheltered here. We both looked up as a crow whipped past skilfully on the wind overhead. ‘There were parties here, and plays.’ Sure enough, in one corner was a miniature sunken amphitheatre, big enough to seat twenty or thirty people, with a stone bust looming high over the sunken stage — Euripides, perhaps, or more likely Aeschylus (he was the bald one, I think).

  ‘When we got married,’ she went on, wandering from one statue to the next, ‘Sam and I agreed that he would have to share me with my piano, and I would share him with his mountains. But the piano is a more —’ she hesitated, searching for a word ‘— a more temperate possessor — it holds on to the soul and shakes it like a dog’s toy, but the soul is resilient and generous: there is enough for everyone. It is the body that is delicate — indivisible — and the piano makes little claim on that.’ She held up her hands as though to prove they were unharmed.

  ‘But the mountains —’ I murmured, sadly, as we passed either side of a slender obelisk which bore at its tip an iron ring, as though it might be drawn up to heaven.

  ‘The mountains took everything in the end.’

  We reached the high wall and began to walk along it, and suddenly I saw a face staring out from a tangle of bare branches — or rather, not staring, for the eyes were closed as though in contemplation. This face was not of stone but of bronze — a smooth cast with a skin-like sheen and the sharp precision of a real face in every detail. I peered closer. Wasn’t it —

  ‘Keats,’ said Juliet. ‘That was what I wanted to show you. It was another Samuel — Arnold’s ancestor — who got it from the man who made it. He was friends with all of that bunch, apparently. No one knows it’s here, of course.’

  A contemporary cast of the famous life-mask — the one taken by Benjamin Haydon just before the poet published his first collection (Keats was an adolescent fascination of mine, even though I can’t read poetry). And what was written on this calm young face, with its fine nose and broad, fleshy lips preserved as miraculously as the hieroglyphs on that Papyrus of Ani? Health: the cornerstone of all pleasure, Keats later called it, once he felt it slipping away.

  Habeas corpus, I thought, remembering the large, curling print on the pages of Edward Coke. Juliet was right: you must have the body.

  ‘Sam was their only child, I suppose,’ I asked cautiously, as we walked back along the runway. The yews rippled and swayed along their radial of the converging perspective, whose greens and greys were subdued under the wind-hurried sky.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, holding her hair back out of her eyes. ‘And my only husband.’ I glanced at her, and for the first time saw her composure wavering. Her eyes had been watering in the wind and were reddened, and now her clenched jaw slightly changed the shape of her face — she looked almost middle-aged. ‘We were talking about paths not yet passed by,’ she added, quickly. ‘A lot of paths ended at that stupid cliff.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, suddenly wanting to get away, to be back among the long-considered and reconciled-to sorrows of the library.

  11

  My next find, later that afternoon, was a slip of paper bearing a list of purchases neatly written in an unfamiliar hand:

  Extraordinary outgoeings since Whitsun last

  Subscription to St. Matthew’s schoolhouse 2.00.0

  Lackington3.10.0

  Hale’s Historia fr Blagdon, IIvms1.04.0

  Montesquiou’s Sp. Of Laws, IIvms0.10.0

  Smith’s Harmonics0.06.0

  Diderot’s L.B.I.0.18.0

  Fielding’s Tom Jones, VIvms0.12.0

  Widdow Wallis’ balsam fr Hartley2.02.0

  Road workes3.01.0

  Summa 14.03.0

  Below this list had been added, in the same hand but more hastily, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life. Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? Matthew 6. I knocked on the doctor’s door gently, having decided not yet to mention my earlier intrusion into the adjacent room, or my discussion with Juliet. There was a long pause.

  ‘Enter,’ he said at last. He was sitting at the great desk with his arms limp at his sides, leaning back as though in fear of the pen which lay before him on a blank sheet of paper — as though its tarnished nib were the nail of an accusing finger. A couple of books lay open on the desk, on those reverent foam supports that protect the spines.

  ‘Mr Browne,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘My saviour. What have you found?’ His arms still hung at his sides as though paralysed, so I placed the list before him. He frowned, and murmured the names of the authors. ‘Diderot,’ he repeated. ‘L.B.I.’ Then, to my surprise and for the first time in my presence, he gave a peel of cracked laughter. ‘L.B.I.: Les Bijoux Indiscrets! Well, well — you seem to have the knack of uncovering the more salacious moments of my family’s past. Hartley describes that book in his diaries,’ he explained, ‘as one of the treasures of his early adolescence. And when his horrified mother discovered it, Arnold, his father (I’m afraid we are all named after each other, just to confuse you archivists), denied all knowledge. But here is the proof — and for eighteen shillings, no less! Incidentally you will find the book in the fiction section, if you are so inclined, but to be frank the genre has better.’

  He slowly stirred himself at last, rising stiffly from his chair as though he had not moved for hours. ‘And two guineas for a balsam,’ he went on, dragging the chair towards the fire as he had done in the past. ‘That’s almost as good! To cure disobedience, or maybe neurosis. Wise Widdow Wallis, eh?’ He prodded the fire half-heartedly until it yielded a single reluctant flame, then sat down, shaking his head. ‘Too wise for poor Arnold.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve mentioned Hartley’s parents before,’ I said. ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Fetch us some tea, and I’ll tell you,’ he said. I did so, and when I returned he inhaled the green tea’s seaweed-scented steam as though it might nourish and revive him — his own balsam.

  ‘Arnold was a well-intentioned man,’ he began, ‘and, to his younger children at least, a good father — Hartley himself says as much, even though they were not on speaking terms for years at a time. He was a lawyer, like his own father, but a less successful one — less able, less fortunate, or perhaps just less well-connected.’

  ‘And his wife?’

  ‘Hester — equally well-intentioned, I suppose, but rather a har
d, puritanical woman: as much admired by my own uncle Hartley as she was scorned by her eldest son. Her portrait hangs in the dining room — one only has to look at it to sympathise with her husband both for his indecent purchase and his later denial of it.’

  ‘And yet you say the book survived her fury,’ I said, with a smile.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, wryly. ‘I suppose that is odd. Who knows — maybe she felt the need to study it further when her husband was in town, just to make sure it was wholly evil. What an intriguing thought,’ he added, mischievously. ‘That portrait will never be quite the same.’

  He again scrutinised the slip of paper, examining the blank reverse and then turning back to the list. ‘What makes this note particularly interesting, to me at least, is that Arnold left very few written traces of his own life — I have only seen him through the lens of his son’s rebellion. The Diderot and the ironic quotation are fascinating: his own private acts of rebellion. He did not have much money, so left no great marks on the house, though he did at least manage to cling on to it, which I suppose was the important thing. Road workes — that was his contribution to the combe.’

  ‘Then how did Hartley make his money?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah. He didn’t have to — it just seemed to attach itself to him. He won a hundred pounds in an ingenious bet during his first term at Cambridge, while his father was still counting every shilling. But that was just the beginning. Next came a bestselling satirical pamphlet — he used the anagrammatical pseudonym Beachcomber, which others have since borrowed — then a speculative investment in a cotton carding invention that paid off tenfold, and always a stream of influential friends. Within a few years of leaving home, he was wealthy enough to disown his parents and go travelling across Europe.’

  ‘A nice talent to have,’ I said, ruefully. Of course, I had earned a good salary at the bank — more than either of my parents — but money had hardly attached itself to me.

  ‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘Sadly I have not inherited it. I am a clinger-on, like my namesake. But of course I’m not really a blood-descendant of any of them.’

  ‘Oh? I didn’t realise that.’

  ‘Hartley’s son Samuel — we are now in the next century, the nineteenth — had one surviving daughter, and it was her stepson who began the tradition of inheriting both house and name, and who called his own son Hartley (my great uncle) and his daughter Catherine. There are different kinds of heredity — in my own humble way I am the elder Hartley’s thought-descendant, I hope.’ As he said this his voice became quiet and solemn, as though his thoughts had run forward to a different subject.

  ‘I’m afraid I — had a look in the other room,’ I said, clumsily. ‘And Juliet has told me a little about Sam. I’m sorry.’

  He sat still for a while, breathing audibly in the silence and seeming to shrink slightly into his chair at each breath. ‘Yes,’ he murmured at last. ‘Well, there you are. What did that young man inherit, and from whom? He too left little enough behind him — rarely wrote so much as a postcard.’ A pause, a few more deflating breaths. ‘He saved a great many lives of course, as a rescue volunteer and as a doctor, but no one will remember him for that. The temple he erected is the red line on that photograph you saw, through the famous overhang. Those red lines are his works, I suppose. He was too busy living his life to record it or reflect on it. in medias res — into the midst of things — that was his motto. But answer me this — why would anyone want to climb the same mountain a hundred times? Why?’

  I had no answer. The fire’s single flame flicked indecisively between existence and its nameless opposite, while outside the spent wind gave a last exhausted sigh in those branches from which restless jackdaws had long departed.

  When I returned to work, the doctor, recovering some of his brightness as though waking from a recurrent bad dream, told me to replace the note where I had found it, since he would leave a mention of its existence and whereabouts in the archives. I had found it, in fact, in the very Hale’s Historia that was apparently intended for a Mr Blagdon (a colleague, the doctor suggested) but that, like Rose, M’Synder and the scandalous Diderot, had settled in the combe for good.

  As dusk fell and I continued the search (by now I was as mindlessly efficient as one of Hartley’s profitable carding machines), I reflected on the doctor’s words. Too busy living his life — that phrase had jangled a memory of something similar: ‘Lawrence spent most of his short life living.’ I cannot be the only one to have been struck by this odd assertion on the flyleaf of D.H.L.’s Penguin classics. ‘Nevertheless he produced an amazing quantity of work ...’ it goes on. Is working not living? But I suppose we know what the biographer means: Living, with a capital L. And Samuel Comberbache, the doctor’s son, had spent all of his short life doing it. Which begged the question: what the hell was I doing with mine? I am spending it hunched on a cushion, I thought, and remembered the glimpsed crow winging effortlessly down the wind.

  The other idea whose dimpled impression I contemplated was the doctor’s notion of thought-heredity. The stones beside the temple recorded the passage of these precious thoughts down the swift centuries, with each legatee adding his or her own unique infusions of personality to the trickle of ideas that had steadily swelled into something like a creed. And the young doctor, the yellow-haired running man, had inherited everything and dashed it high with his own fierce appetite and energy. He had joined forces with a beautiful and talented wife, had honed his will to a razor on those gleaming ramparts of ice, and then had broken his body — died without issue, anno MM.

  Rose was the heir to Hartley Stillwell Newton’s creed now. She would receive whatever the doctor could pass on with his dry voice and pained smile, turn it in her sharp, wilful young mind, and do with it what she chose.

  12

  You are more than halfway through my story, and I am still describing the fourth of the seventeen weeks I promised in my opening sentence. Has the combe lived up to those five unremarkable words? Has it lived up to the title of the book? Not yet, perhaps. That first sentence was whispering in my head for months before I typed it out and tried to follow it with a second and a third. Months more have passed (lifting and lowering me, et cetera) while I try to honour my promise. ‘Be silent,’ reads the inscription under the hand of Salvator Rosa, who glowers down at me from the wall as I write, ‘unless what you have to say is better than silence.’ You and he and I are all hoping that the best is yet to come.

  It was Thursday morning when I heard the piano for the last time — neither Bach nor Chopin this time, but a wandering jazz lead over a minimal, discordant left hand. I listened for a while, almost as delighted by the change in mood as I had been by the black-eyed robin on that white first morning. The shuffling, sporadic rhythm might have robbed the house of its timelessness and pinned it to the post-war era, but did not — the pianist, I thought, could equally be Juliet, or the youthful organ-scholar uncle bound for Arras, or Bach himself on his day off.

  I mounted the stairs confidently this time, crossed the landing towards the piano (it was Juliet playing, after all), and was stopped in my tracks by the glimpse of a second piano in an adjoining room — at which was seated a second pianist. The music stopped and both pianists looked round. I glanced from one to the other.

  ‘Which of us plays better?’ asked Juliet, with mock sincerity.

  It was a mirror. But I was unsatisfied and went to investigate. It was set in a narrow alcove, stretching from waist-height to the ceiling. On the shelf in front stood a dark greyish vase holding a spray of pine — or rather, I realised, bending over it, the perfect half of a vase standing against the glass.

  ‘The other half is behind you,’ whispered Juliet, playfully. I spun round to see an identical mirrored alcove opposite, beside the window, at which stood an identical vase. Behind it, a thousand more vases and a thousand peering ignorami tunnelled into infinity. ‘It’s Greek,’ she went on. ‘Very rare. Arnold operated on it with his father’s surgical
saw — a risky procedure performed without consultation, but luckily Stella saw the funny side.’

  I followed her glance round to two small sketch-like portraits hanging behind the piano — an earnest, square-faced man with his hair plastered back, wearing a grey suit, tie and watch chain, and an attractive woman with short, dark, boyish hair like Rose’s, feline blue eyes and thin scarlet lips. These were the moderators — the doctor’s mountain-climbing parents.

  ‘I’m sorry I interrupted,’ I said, sitting on the low listener’s chair. ‘I just came up to listen.’

  ‘How’s the quest for the unholy epistle?’ she asked, beginning to play a few experimental chords. I watched her for a while.

  ‘Am I going to find anything?’ I returned at last. ‘Does this letter exist? Rose once suggested it might not.’ Juliet smiled down at the keyboard, reinstating a soft treble line.

  ‘Arnold is man a whose motives are hard to guess,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘He enjoys mystery. When I first came here, fifteen years ago, I felt quite uncomfortable. I thought he was mocking me, teasing me for being unworthy of Sam. But he wasn’t really. It was only years later that I learned how to get on with him.’

  As she spoke I observed her body in profile — the slight incurves of her lumbar spine and the back of her neck, the forward tilt of her head, the graceful angles and convexities.

  ‘If he says there’s a lost letter,’ she went on, turning to me, which made me look away sheepishly, ‘then there is a lost letter. And if you want to know something, ask him straight.’

  I let her play for a while, and then asked her if she had wanted to be a professional performer.

  ‘I was, for a while. I performed in a trio while I was at college in London and for a few years afterwards, and gave solo recitals. But I didn’t quite have enough’ — she performed a little virtuoso run with the lead, of the sort that wins approving moans in jazz bars — ‘consistency.’