The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  Exalted it might be, but this collection was not so much used by the present owner, and not so well organised as the rest. The doctor had told me that Stella, and before her Catherine and Samuel, had been the great readers (and writers) of poetry and fiction, while he himself, as I had observed, mounted the stairs only occasionally, perhaps to fetch a bundle of scripts or libretti, or some sheet music of Mozart, which seemed to be relevant to his book.

  ‘I suppose I thought my mother would have found the letter if it were up there,’ he had muttered apologetically the day before. ‘So I approved of the scheme of your search and, alas! perhaps encouraged it, thus falling headlong into my uncle’s trap. I’m afraid you have paid the price.’

  Now I wandered along the narrow gallery, agonising over whether to start at the left-hand extremity or the right. I had reached the end of the shorter walkway, next to Hartley’s portrait, when I heard the soft click of a latch, followed by a dull jarring impact as a door swung open and struck the alcove. After a few shuffling footsteps, the intruder, who had entered from the dining room, emerged from under the gallery directly beneath my feet. I saw a shock of curly brown hair, and then, as he padded rather haltingly to the window, the back of a slim young man in a silk dressing gown. He stood there for a while with hands on his hips, quietly humming a tune in which I thought I recognised that same four-note theme that Meaulnes had whistled in the drive.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, and he spun round.

  ‘Holy Jesus, we have a bogey at six o’clock!’ he cried, glancing around wildly and snatching up the only available weapon — a cushion from the sill.

  ‘I’m the archivist,’ I pleaded, ducking behind the railing, ‘working for Doctor Comberbache.’

  ‘Well done,’ he said, now in a muffled voice as though speaking pained him. He dropped the cushion and raised a hand gingerly to his mouth. ‘You managed to say the name with a straight face. Actually my sister left a letter for me, and she mentioned you.’ I frowned.

  ‘Oh, you mean Juliet!’ I said, comprehending and straightening up. ‘She mentioned you too. The — erm — drifting brother.’

  ‘I’ll give her drifting. Corvin is my name.’

  It was only when I climbed down to meet him that I noticed the state of his face, which was burned bright red. His lips were chapped and badly split and the skin around his eyes and nostrils was raw and dry. His hair corkscrewed out crazily as though he had been the victim of some slapstick explosion. He was my age or a little older, and narrowed his brown eyes as he shook my hand with an easy, unconscious firmness.

  ‘Sorry for appearing in this dishevelled condition,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in Scotland — in the mountains. Bit of a storm up there. Can’t shave at the moment — my whole face would come off.’

  ‘You weren’t camping in this weather?’ I said.

  ‘Bivouacking,’ he replied. ‘Bothies, caves, hollow trees — whatever I could find.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘A week longer than expected. Now come and have a coffee or something.’ In the kitchen he poured a whole pint of milk into a beer glass and sipped at it while I made my coffee on the hob. ‘I’m building myself up,’ he explained. ‘Lost over a stone — got in a bit of a mess up there and ran out of provisions. Whereas you’ve had a full month of M’Synder! You’re carrying it well, though.’

  We sat in the library, Corvin wheeling two chairs round to face the great window and propping his slippered feet on the sill (as if he owned the place, I thought). The square lawn was by now a vast white map on which the intersecting courses of birds and squirrels lay painstakingly charted, as though it mattered whether a blackbird turned left or right in its vain search for an edible morsel, as though the straight, purposeful line of the fox were a pioneering passage that would ever after have borne his name, if he had only had one. Around the perimeter, on the buried paths, the straight, loping gait of Meaulnes was trodden and re-trodden like a decorative border. What name would we inscribe with flourishes along the terrace as the title of the piece? A night in the snow? I don’t think the Reverend would mind.

  ‘I hope you find this letter,’ said Corvin, gently wiping milk from his damaged lips and producing a tin of Vaseline from his dressing-gown pocket. ‘I want to read it myself.’

  ‘Everyone knows about it, then,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied indistinctly, dabbing the Vaseline and contorting his face like a clown applying make-up. His slim fingers were the only thing about his appearance that reminded me of Juliet, but the knuckles were marked by scabs and grazes, as though he had been breaking rocks. ‘It’s the Comberbache family legend: the scandalous last letter of Thomas Furey.’

  Here was the key fact that the doctor had chosen to withhold, casually tossed in my lap by his son’s wife’s brother. Furey: another outlandish name, but half-familiar. Wasn’t he a poet? Perhaps the doctor had thought I’d guess the name from the date and circumstances, but I was too ignorant — and of course I can’t read poetry. In any case, either Corvin was unaware of the rules of the game or he simply disregarded them.

  ‘The doctor’s given me some background,’ I said, coolly. ‘It sounds fascinating.’

  ‘Oh, all the ingredients are there,’ he went on. ‘Sex, drugs, lies, Chaucerian poetry. Just don’t tell the tabloids — Arnold really wouldn’t like that.’ I knew about the drugs, but nothing else: didn’t Chaucer belong to a rather different era? Then I remembered that Hartley had described the boy’s ballad as unintelligible. I would consult the encyclopaedia of English literature, and then perhaps I would dare to cast myself on the poetry shelves’ mercy.

  I was weighing my next comment when a movement drew our eyes to the end of the lawn. The doctor emerged from the rhododendron gate and walked slowly and stiffly along the icy perimeter path towards the house. He was wearing a three-quarter-length coat and Wellingtons, and carrying a walking stick of which, however, he made only light use. In the other leather-gloved hand he dangled the grey woollen cap with the earflaps. It was the first time I had seen him outside the house.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ said Corvin. ‘Or rather, the pilgrim returns.’

  The doctor stopped to knock old snow off a couple of shrubs with his stick, looked back up at the hills and the leaden sky with the familiar squinting smile, then turned to the house and noticed us at the window. He slowly raised the stick in greeting.

  M’Synder roasted another pheasant that evening, and the dining room once again assumed its formal guise, lit by tall candles and a well-stocked fire. Corvin had dressed in dark pressed trousers and a white shirt which lent a comic intensity to his glowing, windburnt face. He did not seem to feel the cold.

  ‘Corvin,’ said the doctor, ‘perhaps you would do us the honour of saying Grace.’

  ‘Certainly,’ he replied. Like Rose, he left a moment’s silence, lifting his hands solemnly from his knife and fork. ‘Ready?’ he said suddenly. ‘Go!’ With that he snatched up the cutlery and began to attack his food. The doctor shook his head indulgently and followed suit.

  Corvin, I now learned, was two years my senior, had studied history at Oxford, and had then trained at Dartmouth and served in the Royal Navy for four years (a fact perhaps not entirely incidental to Rose’s ambition, I thought).

  ‘Believe it or not,’ said the doctor to me, ‘the clownish figure seated opposite you was the navigation officer onboard the first minesweeper to enter the port of Umm Qasr during the invasion of Iraq. The lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds of men depended on him. Now he tests his skills in the highlands.’

  ‘And is found wanting,’ added Corvin ruefully. ‘I had a relapse of that incurable disease, complacency.’

  ‘What were you doing up there?’ I asked. ‘Just walking?’

  ‘Walking was a means to an end,’ he replied. ‘I was working on a little research project I began last summer. Boring stuff, really — nothing much to say about it.’

  ‘Research project!’ scoffe
d the doctor. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. My suspicion,’ he said confidingly to me, ‘is that Corvin has found some sort of cave miles from civilisation — in an indeducible location, one might say — and is busy converting it into a luxurious hermitage — without troubling to notify the landowner, of course. But he will tell me nothing.’ The young man ate voraciously, responding with only a wry smile. ‘I hope you are not intending to carry your secret to the grave,’ added the doctor. ‘What a waste that would be!’

  ‘Oh, I shan’t do that,’ he replied, draining his glass and reaching for the carafe. ‘Perhaps I’ll write it down — leave a coded message that some suitable person might understand. Directions. A grid reference.’

  ‘Something Uncle Hartley seems to have omitted to do,’ I said. ‘But I suppose we are not suitable people, by his measure.’ The doctor studied his empty plate in silence for a moment.

  ‘Indeed we are not,’ he said quietly, without looking up. ‘But we are meeting his hostility face to face across the intervening years, and we shall find the letter. We are close now.’ The fire shifted and a coal dropped through the grate with a soft clang.

  2

  Wednesday was the first fine day for over a week, and the combe shone. The robin was waiting for me outside the cottage, looking rather thin and weathered like Corvin but rejoicing now, escorting me along the lane and singing herald-like from every glistening perch, while for the first time he was answered by the cheerful little car alarms of great tits and the shrill wheezings of finches in the woods. The house lay under its morning pall of shadow, but the sun had already brushed its hand reassuringly over the highest branches of the beech: spring itself was not in the air, but the memory of spring had awakened.

  ‘We’re going out!’ cried Corvin, striding into the library as I opened a volume of Scottish folksongs. ‘It’s been approved: stamped, sealed, ratified, given the nod.’ He lounged back against the table — another faint family resemblance — and looked up at me expectantly.

  ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ I asked. ‘You look like a —’ Words failed me.

  ‘A pantisocratist!’ he beamed, slapping his thigh on the first syllable. ‘Or should that be pantisocrat? I didn’t bring any decent clothes so I’m borrowing some.’ He had chosen to borrow a pair of tweed trousers of a particularly bold weave and close cut, a frilled, high-collared shirt, a buff waistcoat and a cravat — the red face and chaotic hair he already possessed. ‘Anyway, life’s more fun when you dress up for it. Come on!’

  The intricate white map was being steadily consumed, burning away to ashes of wet green turf as the shadow of the house retreated, and the air was full of the fresh, damp smell of thaw. A songthrush hopped about excitedly, a fellow searcher-for-treasure showing off her own long-practised method of indiscriminate Brownian motion.

  ‘I’ve known Arnold since my first term at Oxford,’ said Corvin, leading me slowly around the water garden where rounded panes of ice still floated in the pools and snow lingered on the stone seats and the twisted boughs of the star-tree. ‘Sam and Julie had married a couple of years earlier, and Sam told me his dad was visiting the Bodleian to celebrate his retirement and would like to meet me — we had a strange encounter in the White Horse. He was dressed something like I am now and talked about the narrative of life. Afterwards, I wondered if I’d dreamt it.’

  We crossed the grove, where the vanguard of flattened snowdrops were busy picking themselves up while the next battalion, the tight-budded crocus shoots, sounded the advance.

  ‘Tell me more about Sam,’ I said, as we started up the hillside. ‘If you don’t mind, I mean.’ Corvin frowned for a moment, but he was just deciding where to begin.

  ‘He took me climbing on Ben Nevis before the wedding, when I was sixteen. The North-East Buttress. I was terrified — of the climb and of Sam too, I suppose, and trying not to show it. He didn’t speak much — just a few words of encouragement when I hesitated. I remember those pale smiling eyes and his quick, effortless handling of the rope on the steeper sections. The sense of joy was infectious — nothing else seemed to matter.

  ‘Near the top there’s a notorious little step called the Mantrap that forced many early climbers into dangerous retreats, especially in winter — Sam’s grandfather famously climbed it by standing on his partner’s head in nailed boots. Sam made me go up it first, of course — he didn’t believe in easy introductions or making allowances.’

  ‘In medias res,’ I suggested.

  ‘Exactly. Funnily enough, I used the same climbing move a few years later when we had a class-alpha fire during exercises in the Gulf, to free a hose caught on a stanchion — the CO was most impressed. But you didn’t ask me about that. Sam. Julie had met Sam in London shortly after she gave up performing and started teaching — he was a junior doctor working long hours in the wards and studying mountain medicine on his days off. Blonde, beautiful, with boundless energy — already a brilliant mountaineer but with no time to escape the city.

  ‘A few years after they were married — about the time I met Arnold in the White Horse — Julie was appointed head of music at a good school in Derbyshire so they moved north. Sam gave up formal medicine, became a freelance first aid instructor and joined the local mountain rescue team. The following year he and Adam Forester — Rose’s father — climbed what had been called the ‘last great problem’ on Ben Nevis, and named it The Temple. They also pioneered tough, long routes in the Alps and elsewhere.’

  Corvin now turned off the main path, and after climbing a few steep steps we found ourselves at the foot of one of the colossal redwoods. He patted its giant hairy root as one might pat a favourite horse.

  ‘Talking of which, how are you with heights?’ he asked, with a mischievous smile.

  ‘Getting better,’ I said, thinking of the accursed ladder.

  ‘Good. Then you won’t want to miss this. Look up there.’ I craned my neck and gave a groan of dismay: I could see a kind of treehouse hidden in the rich foliage. It must have been sixty or eighty feet above the ground.

  ‘How on earth —’ I murmured.

  ‘Elevators,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Two of them.’ He led me round the back of the tree, where a series of thick, taut ropes were secured to steel rings bolted to the roots. ‘I reckon you’re a bit heavier than me, so you have the twelve-stone lift, and I’ll have the eight and do a bit of hauling. Sam made all this — it’s quite safe if you use it sensibly.’

  Eventually I was persuaded to stand on a wooden platform rather smaller than M’Synder’s writing plank, attach a steel clip to my belt and hold a fixed line while Corvin did likewise and pushed two levers to release the ropes.

  ‘Now try pulling yourself up,’ he said, grinning, ‘and we’ll see what M’Synder’s cooking has done to you.’ I pulled down on the rope, and to my horror began to rise from the ground as if gravity had given me up. Corvin kept level with me by hauling himself hand over hand, while the ground dropped away and the counterweights — two small bulging sacks — drifted down past us. He assured me the pulleys had a mechanism like that on a seatbelt, which stopped them running too fast. ‘Of course, sometimes the buggers get stuck halfway,’ he added casually, ‘and then the real fun begins.’

  The treehouse encircled the mighty trunk, and was enclosed on the west side and furnished with a curving table and matching bench; from the windows one peered through foliage up the hillside towards the Temple of Light, whose pointed prow was from here outlined against the sky. On the east side an open balcony commanded a magnificent view down the combe, but a great shaggy branch obscured the garden and all but the highest windows of the house.

  ‘This is where I like to come sometimes,’ announced Corvin simply, leaning his hands confidently on the wooden parapet. ‘Sam built it for Julie but she never quite had the head for it.’

  ‘It does look like he got a bit carried away.’

  ‘Like Hartley and his temple?’ he said. ‘Or Arnold and the Attic oenoc
hoe — the vase? To surprise by a fine excess — that is expected here.’ He peered down at the bristling chimneys and gables of the house, and the single thin spectre of smoke. ‘You’ve come at rather a sad time, though — it was a magical place ten years ago. There were big, sprawling gatherings at Christmas or Easter or midsummer: guests would come and go as they pleased — Sam and Julie, my parents, the Foresters, Arnold’s eccentric old friends-of-the-family. I would often crash the party with a couple of lucky college friends. We’d stay in those attic rooms’ — he pointed at the little gable windows — ‘which are full of amazing old junk, like the musket balls Sam used for the counterweights. Old Meaulnes the gardener — you’ve heard about him? — would rig up awnings and ancient bunting in the garden, get drunk and recite Baudelaire from the top of a wall, while his son dressed up little Rose as a garden fairy and sent her to spy on us from the bushes. And of course Arnold would preside: the all-seeing Magus, brimming with quiet energy.’

  Now his face fell and he looked at me as though deciding whether to go on. ‘Everything changed in May ninety-eight. It was the day before the start of my finals — Julie called me to save me finding out from the newspapers, but I didn’t hear the full story until much later. Adam, Pippa and Rose had been cross-country skiing near Chamonix, and by chance Sam was there too, running a course on mountain rescue. The Foresters were caught in a massive freak avalanche set off by an earth tremor. Sam was on the first helicopter to arrive, only minutes later. He spotted Rose’s red scarf just under the snow and managed to dig her out, unconscious but alive. During his frantic digging he had struck her face with the edge of his shovel, and by the time he finally resuscitated her they were both covered in blood. The bodies of Adam and Pippa were recovered some time later — they were buried much more deeply but only a few yards apart. In those last minutes they wouldn’t have been aware of each other, which could I suppose be considered a small mercy. It’s a death better not imagined.’