The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  Thus I deliberately acknowledged the existence of the profane world, and, I suppose, the nonsensical story-so-far of my own life. The trance of diligence was like Hartley’s opium trance in that it did not hide my predicament, and that tantalising adjustment of the disordered residue came in fits and starts that often left me restless and doubting.

  But let me try a different metaphor: a man can redirect the course of his life by a simple act of will, but it is more likely to be changed by collisions — collisions with events, with accident or illness, with the unpredictable contents of books, or, most propitiously, with the lives of others. And I had not been so bounced about for years (maybe that’s what I meant by the vacuum). I suppose I felt like a pinball charged with momentum just as it had been about to fall between the paddles, and now I wanted more. As I dropped my father’s attractive but unhelpful letter into the drawer, I remembered The Croked Hand.

  Monday evening was clear and still, and the rising moon beamed from a shoal of tiny clouds over the village as I made my way down the lane after supper. The low light struck a gentle relief across the graveyard, highlighting the weathered profiles of the stones and lovingly drawing out their shadows in charcoal over the faintly iridescent tufts of silver grass. Around the village green, unseen lights yellowed the edges of curtains and narrow shafts of coal smoke rose straight from chimneys without troubling the chill, clean air below. I thought I heard the distant clatter of a railway, carrying across the silent miles of fields and hedgerows and deserted farmyards.

  At the door I struggled again with the brass hand, but at last felt the upturned thumb give way stiffly to lift the latch. The door opened into an unlit porch (not a vestibule, I thought), half-filled by a bulging cocoon of coats hanging on the inner door, and I stepped forward into a public house rather smaller than M’Synder’s parlour. The air was warm and heavy with pipe and cigarette smoke, and the pale ruins of a huge fire glimmered beneath a long mantel loaded with books and old trophies. There were four round tables — three small ones and a larger one nestling in the bow window — and pictures of village sports teams and odd bits of brass crowded the walls and the sides of the low, crooked ceiling beams.

  At one table sat a man with white curly hair and a plump red face — something like Dylan Thomas had he lived to sixty — and at another sat a younger man, furtive and wiry in scruffy work clothes. Each had a partially consumed pint and his smoking paraphernalia arranged solemnly before him. A woman laid her own cigarette carefully on an ashtray on the bar, slipped down from a barstool and looked me up and down. She too was at least sixty, I suppose, but wore jeans and boots to show off a good figure, half-moon reading glasses on a chain, and lipstick that she just about carried off.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said in a husky, theatrical drawl, and it was only when she turned to the bar that I saw the long iron-grey plait and recognised her as the mysterious organist who never emerged from her shadowy nest at the side of the church. ‘What can I get you, young man?’ she asked. ‘Cup of cocoa?’

  So I spent a strange couple of hours outside the combe, or rather in a kind of alternative combe, for The Croked Hand was a sanctuary too, and a cul-de-sac of sorts. Agnes, the landlady, was not only the organist but the church warden too (surely M’Synder was a more likely candidate for that role), and had inherited the pub from her parents. The older patron was introduced to me as The Borrowed Man, because, as he cheerfully explained, he was terminally ill and living on borrowed time. ‘I’m six months in the red,’ he added proudly, draining his glass, ‘and I don’t intend to pay it back.’ The younger man was a tattooed Scot named Rab, who drove milk tankers but had been in the army (‘Aye, Tank Regiment,’ he said, drily).

  ‘And you?’ asked Agnes. ‘Just passing through?’

  ‘I’m working for Doctor Comberbache up at the Hall,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said quickly, her eyes twinkling. ‘I remember now — the Man from London. Paperwork isn’t it?’ I nodded. ‘Legal stuff?’

  ‘Not exactly —’

  ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘don’t let him work you too hard — we’re not all scribbling recluses!’ Her manner recalled the note I had seen in the doctor’s study, with the hoofprint signature. Agnes, Agnus: it could have been a lamb’s hoof, after all.

  The two men had a couple of pints’ headstart on me, and took turns telling me things they had already told each other too many times. The borrowed man, whose real name was Gabriel, was friendly at first but gradually subsided into a silent slump, while Rab started surly but became talkative. Both accepted my shyness and lack of wit as qualifications, as mere paraphernalia laid on the table alongside their own failings and their tobacco. The eye of the jay could not reach me here.

  ‘Had a wife,’ said Rab in summary, studying his bitten-down thumbnails as he rolled another cigarette, ‘had a kid, drove a tank, did some time. Now I sit and drink piss wi’ a borrowed man.’

  ‘Watch that,’ warned Agnes, raising a finger. The ale was called Bachebrook, supposedly because it had once been watered down from the combe’s stream, which bore that name and passed behind the pub. ‘Nothing wrong with it these days,’ she added. ‘I test it regularly for strength, freshness and flavour.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ said the borrowed man, mournfully. At ten past nine a stumping tread stopped outside the door. ‘Harry o’clock,’ muttered Rab, looking at his watch and kicking an empty chair into the space by the fire. Agnes opened the door for an ancient man with one leg, who stood his crutches against the chimneypiece, sat down heavily without a word and gazed into the fire through huge round glasses. Agnes brought him half a pint, which he drank in small sips over the course of about five minutes, then reached for the crutches, stood up on his one wobbling leg and shuffled out.

  ‘Tractor accident,’ explained Rab.

  ‘Nineteen eighty-eight,’ added the borrowed man. ‘And he was an old bastard then.’

  ‘Hasn’t missed his half-pint since — isn’t that right Agnes?’

  ‘Yes, although we did have to carry it over the green a few times when he was poorly.’

  ‘But he doesn’t talk?’ I asked. They all looked at each other mysteriously.

  ‘Och, sometimes he talks,’ murmured the Scot, flicking his cigarette-end into the fire. But during my stay in the combe I never heard Harry utter a word.

  15

  The last case beneath the gallery, tucked into the corner and part-obscured by the curtain of the side window, was quite out of sequence in my ‘journey through civilisation’ — it was filled with books about climbing mountains.

  ‘This is the only section that postdates the prudish prune in its entirety,’ the doctor had said on Monday morning, ‘so I think it can be safely passed over.’

  ‘What was here before, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Exactly what I was wondering,’ he replied, frowning. ‘I suspect my father made some rather drastic cuts among the worst of the theology department. We must hope that Hartless had enough heart to spare those delicate volumes the keeping of the scandal — I think it is a safe assumption.’

  I had been reluctant to interrupt my ruthless campaign of diligence, but had accepted the doctor’s argument and transferred my search to the slender, full-height column of books between the side window and Sarah’s fireplace, which contained volumes of letters, diaries and memoirs. The collection continued to fascinate me: here, after all, was another miracle of compression — hundreds of lives trying to make sense of themselves, turned in upon themselves but each thrusting out a hand and waving a pen towards the rest of humanity. But the search! The search was by now testing my last resources of patience, curiosity and pride. I had completely worn away the prints on my thumbs, which were now hard, shiny talons, and I began to feel pricking, twitching pains along my fingers as my body protested against the repeated commands of my will — or rather, I reflected mutinously, the commands of the doctor’s will. For how much longer would I obey?

  On th
e fourth shelf, on Tuesday morning, I noticed the diary of Hartley himself in three inconspicuous black volumes (‘three lives,’ the doctor had said), and, rushing rather roughly through the preceding books in my eagerness to see it, I lost my grip on the second volume of John Evelyn, a heavy quarto published in eighteen eighteen, which fell twelve feet onto a standing lamp, which in turn toppled with a crash upon the hearth fender. Meanwhile I had instinctively snatched for the book and almost lost my balance, and now clung to the ladder like a very cross child stuck up a tree.

  ‘Everything alright?’ asked the doctor calmly from his study door.

  ‘I dropped one,’ I snapped.

  ‘Biblioclast! Well, I’m glad to see you’re human.’ He approached the site of the disaster and stooped stiffly to pick up the projectile: the spine was torn halfway down and the front cover bent. ‘From fine to fair in one fell swoop — or should that be one swooping fall? This would now be described as a reading copy, I believe.’

  Looking down at this gentle and learned old man (for so he seemed at that moment) I felt my allegiance return. My labours were rewarded, just as his advertisement had promised. ‘I am sorry,’ I said, creeping rather unsteadily down the ladder.

  ‘Think nothing of it, Mr Browne,’ he said, handing the book up to me. ‘Reading copies are all I need in my library.’ At the door he turned and added, ‘No need to search that next diary, by the way — it has already been well thumbed!’

  I had a quick look anyway, of course. There was no inscription, only a short editor’s preface: ‘This private diary was my father’s property and then my mother’s, but I do not see how it can rightly be mine. I therefore half humbly and half proudly offer it to the reading nation, the value of plain truth being universal. Samuel T. Comberbache, 1825.’

  The first volume covered his youth and travels, and the second his London career and subsequent decline, from seventeen sixty-two to August seventeen seventy. Presumably the opening pages of the third would shed more light on the letter and its aftermath, but I took the doctor’s parting comment as clarification that this would contravene the rules of the game, and passed over it.

  The frosts returned and became heavier during that fifth week, accompanied first by mists that lingered all day and night, and then by sleet and chill breezes that slid malevolently down the hill from the north. I worked with the library’s chandeliers blazing all day while beyond the windows the garden lay under a gloomy pall of freezing fog, as though morning had forgotten to break. Whenever I had to venture outside I wore the nailed boots and all my warm clothes.

  M’Synder was an uncomplicated companion in the evenings, confining her conversation to the worsening weather, the chores she had done or that needed doing and the critical appraisal of her own excellent cooking. Occasionally she could be drawn into other subjects, and one evening after two glasses of punch she surprised me with a confidence about her own past — the first since she had told me about answering the advert in the post office. We had been talking about Rose, whose latest letter from boarding school had arrived that morning.

  ‘I’ll tell you a funny thing, Mr Browne,’ she said, thoughtfully stroking the cat after supper. ‘I’ll tell you because I’m not ashamed of it: my husband left me because I couldn’t have children. Of course, at first we didn’t know which of us was to blame — the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me, and he refused to be tested. At least, he refused to be tested by a doctor — in the end he had the bright idea of testing himself on another woman and came up trumps, so it was “goodbye Sara”.’ She looked steadily down at the indifferent cat. The clock ticked.

  ‘What a — medieval thing to do,’ I said, uncomfortably.

  ‘Well, swapping us was the best thing he could do by then,’ she went on, ‘and it served me right for marrying him. He always was a hard man. Uncompromising. Dunna ask me why I fell for that sort.’ Decisive, I thought, like someone I once knew. Not like me — I couldn’t even decide whether at last to tell my own parallel story. I kept silent. ‘I took back my own name,’ she added. ‘Funnily enough he was a Brown, like you.’ Oh God, I thought, you must be joking.

  ‘Ee?’ I asked, grimly.

  ‘Nope,’ she replied, smiling. ‘That’s why I’m especially fond of yours.’

  By Friday the combe was glazed with mingled frost and sleet, and the stream had frozen thickly for the second time. The snow came that night, this time not cluster by cluster straight down but swirling and stinging, plastering walls and windows and the windward halves of tree trunks and streaming past my torchbeam in twisting strands over the lane. By the morning it had drifted to the window ledges on one side of the cottage.

  I fought my way outside and tried to repeat my previous ascent to the snowy Argo, but the sleet scoured and needled my face and I turned back soon after the tree line. I sat in the parlour and read A Night in the Snow, a brief and microscopically detailed story of survival that in other circumstances might have seemed comical: ‘I continued my tremendous glissade head downward, lying on my back,’ writes the earnest Reverend. ‘The pace I was going in this headlong descent must have been very great, yet it seemed to me to occupy a marvellous space of time ...’ I glanced out of the window at the steep hillside looming into the storm, and shuffled my chair closer to the fire.

  As dusk fell and the wind whistled on, I went upstairs to fetch my notebook. From the landing I thought I could hear slow, heavy footsteps in the snow, and wiped the slush of condensation from the stingingly cold window to peer into the lane. A dark, long-legged figure was trudging past towards the house, stooping into the blizzard and carrying a huge rucksack. A hood was drawn close around his face, but as I watched he seemed to look up at the window and slowly raised a gloved hand, the fist clenched in triumph or in determination. I raised my own hand in reply. It was as though the fading running man, the doctor’s son, had turned away from death-without-issue and was fighting his way back into the sacred combe.

  PART 3

  THE

  ROUNDELAY

  See three tiny figures, black against a blue-white canvas of shaded snow: their skis make them look like upside-down ‘T’s. Now see them close up: man, woman, child, poling gracefully, effortlessly along a vast, gently sloping shelf of snow between the rippling, yawning, sinister glacier below, and the cliffs towering behind.

  Then the child falls over. Just tips harmlessly onto her side like a beginner. The woman waves a pole wildly to keep her own balance, then looks back and stops. The man has stopped too, troubled by a momentary feeling of drunkenness that has now gone.

  ‘What was that?’ asks the woman, her voice dull in the still, cold, early-morning air. The child is struggling to her feet. The man lifts his visor and looks up.

  Curls of steam — not steam, of course, but snow — are rising silently into the morning sun near the summit. The precipitous upper slopes look blurred, and he squints, trying to focus. Comprehension and adrenaline strike him just before the first sound, which is the deep, sonorous crack of one massive object disengaging from another.

  Which way? Onward, or back? ‘Quick,’ he snaps, waving his arm. ‘Move.’ The others understand: they have heard it now, and propel themselves past him and along the slope. As he follows, he sees a new fracture flickering across the middle of the next gully: the whole face is giving way. ‘Stop,’ he shouts. ‘Back. Back.’

  His wife has often parodied his use of cricketing metaphors, and he murmurs one now automatically: ‘Caught between the wickets.’

  1

  See one tiny figure, black against the speckled white and grey of a snow-filled valley, his steady progress between the roundish smoke-puffs of trees the only movement, and his faint, crunching footsteps the only sound. Now see him close up, hands and sleeves tucked into the pockets of his long coat, trousers folded neatly into his socks above the heavy boots tied with double bows, head held high and vapour playing over his lips as he talks to himself in a low voice. What is he saying? He is
saying these very words — he is me, practising the telling of my own story as I go along.

  I paused before the bridge and looked up at those ivy-clad, now snow-clad ash trees whose long boughs seemed to meet in an arch. ‘The two appear perfectly united,’ I said to myself, still practising, ‘in that ancient and celebrated junction that for millennia has borne the weight of civilisation upon its shoulders. But come a little closer, look from a different angle, and — ha-ha! — it was all just an illusion: you see two bent and lonely forms, separated by a river of ice.’ There is a bridge, you say — but she threw it down.

  When the cordons of habit are withdrawn, the unruly forces of the mind strike out in new directions. Our own thoughts can seem almost as unfamiliar to us as our new surroundings: reason itself begins to turn in our grasp. With this in mind, I had said nothing to M’Synder about the stooping apparition in the lane but had waited for some verification of the visitor’s substance. None came on Sunday, except that I thought I could just make out the dimpled remnant of his footprints in the shifting snow.

  Now it was Monday, the footprints were gone, and when the doctor opened the door he made no mention of a new guest in the house. I began to suspect I really had imagined him, invoked him from the relics laid out in the locked room, and wondered whether the mental challenges of my occupation and circumstances were exacting tolls beyond my meagre budget.

  I worked hard that day nevertheless, and early the following morning I finished searching the great corner bookcase by the window, opposite the one where my labours had begun five weeks before. I estimated that I had searched about nine thousand volumes on nearly five hundred feet of shelves: now only the gallery — the works of the imagination, exalted above all others — remained. I edged up the spiral stair to survey the field.