The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘Yes, but much less than before. Like De Quincey he experimented with the trials of abstinence, but he decided to steer the course that would make him most productive, with the strong hand of his will on the tiller.’

  ‘And what about the temple?’

  ‘It was built during the middle of that decade, but the references in his diaries are few and obscure — I suppose he was thinking of Furey’s advice. As Beachcomber he wrote some controversial articles about the importance of establishing an alternative to supernatural religion, whether communal or personal, but as Comberbache he kept his own temple private. “Every statement of truth,” he wrote in the diary, “be it mathematics, poetry or the history of man, is a verse of my bible.”

  ‘Those years of health and vigour ended with the sudden appearance of tuberculosis in his early forties, after a visit to London. He was advised to travel to the Mediterranean but his own research left him unconvinced by the medical arguments, and by early seventeen eighty-two he was confined to his bed. That was the year the Dowley controversy reached its climax, and he must have read the claims and counter-claims with wry amusement — but doubtless even had he possessed the strength to write he would have stayed out of it. He died on a day of soft summer rain with his wife and young son at his side, and was buried beside the temple after a secular funeral rite directed by Sarah herself and attended by a few intimate friends.’

  Heavy rain was now singing steadily against the glass behind the thick embroidered curtains. The doctor refilled our glasses and proposed a second toast, this time to Hartley, then after another long silence resumed his story.

  ‘I suppose it is because she survived her husband by thirty-nine years that I feel a special affinity with Sarah now — she too lived three lives. She began the last by completing Samuel’s boyhood education herself, acquiring more important books for the library and executing the rest of their plans for the gardens. She planted the beech in the drive in Hartley’s memory, using the strongest of the saplings he had grown from seeds brought back from Greece — it’s now in its third century and in fine health. With a legacy from the Bostonian uncle she established a school in the nearest town — the Liberty School — which exists to this day. She and Samuel wrote the original textbooks using the Encyclopédie and other works from the library. She illustrated them beautifully.’

  ‘Tell me about Samuel,’ I said. ‘All I know is that the birds wouldn’t sing for him.’

  ‘Ah yes, the first of the Samuels: the dreamer. He was surely the most eccentric of the tribe. What a childhood his must have been! He was born even as the first shelves were being fashioned from the ancient boards of the banqueting table. His early memories would have been of the study piled high with those of the new volumes that his father was feverishly devouring, often reading aloud in whichever language he had to hand; of the old gardens and woods, still wildly overgrown from years of neglect; of the mysterious plans laid out on the new folio table, and then the deliveries of stone and the excavation of the great staircase up the hill. He was educated entirely at home — heaven knows, there were resources enough! — and visiting cousins were his only playmates.

  ‘He matriculated at Jesus College with the poet Samuel Taylor Chadwick. Chadwick was brilliant and effusive and Comberbache shy and solitary, and the two had little to do with each other until the dreamer was caught by the bulldogs climbing through a college window after the curfew following a midnight ramble over the fens. He was in what he called a semi-somnambulistic state and, seeing the constable in possession of his initialled hat, gave his name as Simon Trelasco Chadwick. In the morning this led the dean straight to the real S. T. Chadwick, who despite being unjustly gated was delighted by the other’s confession and the realisation that they shared the same first name and initials: thereafter they became firm friends. Whenever he wanted refuge from his whirlwind of political agitating, drunken parties and looming debts, Chadwick would seek out his nature-loving namesake for peaceful rambles in the country.

  ‘He visited the combe on several occasions during the holidays, and supposedly discovered and experimented with the dusty remnants of Hartley’s supply of laudanum — probably his first recreational use of the drug that would come to dominate his life. I think he never discovered that Hartley and Sarah had known Furey, for whom he wrote (and many times rewrote) his famous Monody.

  ‘Our own Samuel is now considered a minor member of the early Romantics — his poetry has moments of lyrical clarity but is generally rather difficult, perhaps because after taking his degree he rarely left the combe for some twenty years. When his mother died — a few weeks after Keats — he finally married and reinvented himself as master of the Liberty School, where he was much loved until his death in eighteen thirty-seven — the year Victoria came to the throne.’

  ‘And his children?’

  ‘Only one daughter survived infancy. She married a wealthy and deeply conservative widower and let the combe. Her younger stepson, who was my great grandfather, took possession in about eighteen sixty — perhaps the only inspired thing he did in his life.’

  The doctor poured out the last of the wine while I stirred the fire and added another log, which roasted silently for a while, haemorrhaging smoke. I was wondering how to broach the subject of my departure, but he seemed to read my mind and spoke first.

  ‘Do you have any pressing need to return to London,’ he asked, turning suddenly as the log burst into bright, plappering flames, ‘or would you accept an invitation to stay for a few more weeks? I was going to invite you to return for our equinox gathering — or Easter as everyone insists on calling it — but it occurred to me today that you might stay on until then. There are a few specific things I’d like to talk to you about.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said awkwardly, having no idea what answer to give but feeling that something bad and inevitable had just receded.

  ‘I’ll have more time from now on,’ he pursued, ‘because I too reached the end of something today: my book. Giveth and Taketh Away: a life of Thomas Linley the Elder — finished. Linley, in case you didn’t know, was an English composer of the second or third rank. He also happened to be a friend of Hartley and Sarah.’

  ‘Why did you choose him as your subject, if he was —’

  ‘— Unexceptional?’ prompted the doctor. He drew back his mouth into the old pained smile. ‘Linley had many qualities. One may be a worthy man without being a brilliant one. It was his children who were brilliant —’ he paused while a squall of rain rattled faintly against the window ‘— but they died.’

  8

  ‘Death,’ said the doctor sharply from behind his desk the next morning, like a terrible judge pronouncing sentence: ‘the longest and shortest journey, the exit from the self.’ Then he added lightly, ‘Do you think about it much?’

  He had been tidying up, and now a drifting infusoria of dust measured out the slanting girders of sunlight that leaned on their slender transoms like some radiant cargo spilling from a sunken wreck. I hesitated, and then answered, ‘Before, no, but recently, yes.’ Wasn’t death somehow connected with the panic? The mote which strays into a heaven of gold / And into darkness, aimless, wanders home: my own clumsy but earnest words, an echo from adolescence. The doctor shelved the last of his books, advanced to the unlit, swept hearth and stood for a while looking down at the empty grate.

  ‘Will you climb with me to the temple?’ he asked suddenly, squinting into the sunlight. ‘It exists for days like this.’ Sunny days, or death days? I wondered, as we fetched our coats.

  I used to find it difficult to walk slowly. When Sarah had a stress-fracture in her foot and used a crutch for a couple of weeks, I was an impatient companion and needed frequent reminders to slow down. But this was another lesson the combe had taught: if you imagine me always hurrying along the lane chafing my hands it is the fault of my account, for in truth I had become an expert dragger of feet and wanderer along hedgerows.

  ‘I am reconc
iled to the prospect of my own death,’ the doctor pronounced carefully, as we paced the runway side by side. ‘This is important for an old man: I have built my ship. It was difficult, but a little perseverance won through. For anyone with an ounce of imagination it is an alarming proposition — this walking backwards into death with our gaze still fixed on life. But the truth, I believe, is that in death, at the moment of death, whether one was a good man, or a wise or a brave or a loved or a remembered man, and what one has achieved, simply does not matter — ceases to matter. These things matter so long as one is alive — they define the concept of mattering — and then they cease to matter. Therefore there is no panic, no anguish: that is my ship of death.’

  He led me through the stone garden, past the obelisk and out into the meadow. ‘So far so good,’ he went on. ‘But what about those left behind? Can they apply this hypothesis to the deaths of others? Did my wife cease to matter to me on the day she died? Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead — is that the proverb we need? Death is the strangest of partings. In living partings there is a seal of fellowship in the very symmetry of the farewell: ‘Bonne chance,’ says one. ‘And to you,’ says the other. But death is the great asymmetry, the breaking of fellowship, the not knowing what to say. No, the ship of my own death gets me nowhere on the sea of grief.

  ‘Loss: one need hardly elaborate — the word is a perfectly precise expression of the problem. Furey’s death — exasperating, unnecessary, unanswerable — epitomises the concept. But Marcus Aurelius stands firm: “no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come,” he says, “for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? ” Marcus would have us believe that the sense of loss is just another delusion of grief — that nothing is really lost. My mind and heart have proved stubborn adversaries on this question.’ I wondered whether he was thinking about Furey now, or his wife, or the red canvas in the locked room.

  ‘It’s strange,’ I attempted ‘— I was thinking about it only yesterday. I’ve never really felt that sense of loss. I’m still a child in that respect.’ The doctor pursed his lips thoughtfully.

  ‘But a child is often wise,’ he said. ‘How do you imagine it?’

  ‘I imagine that love — or affection, or whatever — finding its object gone, would occupy itself with a kind of fussing over the memory, fondly straightening out the faults and lingering over the characteristics most beloved, so that the love would itself erode the truth and leave you with a neat but basically unfaithful picture, something portable — easy to carry around in your breast pocket. And then,’ I continued, hesitantly, ‘the love would falter, because you can’t really love a — a kind of cartoon, and you’d begin to treat it like any other picture or keepsake. That would be the final reconciliation, the moving on.’ I surprised myself by articulating this thought, which had never before occurred to me. Perhaps that practice I mentioned — practising the telling of my story — was paying off.

  ‘That is not a bad guess,’ said the doctor, as we crossed the bridge and began to climb. ‘Love itself as the healer. I remember my parents in that way, I think — memories faithful to them but unfaithful to the whole truth, and so more bearable because less real. Perhaps Margaret too, once I see past those final pails on the yoke. Of course, the cartoon memory, the keepsake is never quite inanimate — it has a habit of stirring, twitching in the breast pocket when you least expect.’

  The doctor climbed the stair steadily, leading always with the left foot and following with the right. His deepening breaths and the slow tap of his stick were like the stubborn, stoical workings of a clock, last wound God knows when, over the level murmur of winter birdsong. At the top we paused for a while to recover, gazing out at the long, smudged sketch-line of the horizon and the drifts of tiny cloud-balls settled against it. I glanced along the row of stones and for the first time an unmarked hummock at the end caught my eye.

  ‘Here are the times of sunrise, sunset and local noon,’ said the doctor behind me, angling the leather book towards the light of the open door. ‘Noon today is at twenty-four minutes past twelve GMT, when the sun will reach an altitude of twenty-six-and-a-half degrees. It rose at a bearing of one-o-seven, and sets at two-five-three — we are one month or seventeen degrees of azimuth from the equinox.’ He closed the book and looked up at me for a moment, as though making one last check that I was a suitable initiate, before opening the inner door.

  That afternoon I accompanied the doctor all the way to the village, where he handed his finished manuscript to the shopkeeper for recorded delivery. He looked up at the church with fond attention, peered in at the low cottages and waved to a young family crossing the green.

  ‘Shall we pay a visit to the Croked Agnes, since we’re here?’ he murmured as we passed the sign, and without waiting for an answer reached down for the grotesque handle. The bar was deserted, and silent except for the fire sleepily chewing on its embers. The doctor struck the bell, which gave a low, cracked chime, and then put his finger to his lips and motioned downwards with his hand. He lowered himself stiffly to sit on the crosspiece of a bar stool, while I crouched creakily beside him. Footsteps approached from the next room, entered the bar and stopped.

  ‘Arnold Erasmus Hughes Comberbache,’ snapped Agnes’ voice breezily, ‘get up off the floor before you do yourself an injury! And you, Mr Browne, lack even the tenuous excuse of senility.’ We got to our feet and found her already pumping the ale and peering sternly over lopsided glasses like a headmistress (but do headmistresses wear red lipstick?). She nodded towards the copper bed-warmer on the wall whose polished dome had given us away. ‘Chemical symbol see-you,’ she said. ‘Get it? I’ve got every angle covered. No Swinburne with you today?’

  As dusk fell we called at the cottage for baked potatoes with M’Synder, and then went on to the dark, empty house. I lit the parlour fire (there too my practice had paid off) while the doctor, suddenly seeming worn out by the day’s walking, shuffled away to find some music. The first sad bar of Allegri’s Miserere, in which the melody itself seems to bow its head in recognition of what will follow, sounded softly in the gloom as he turned to the side-table and reached not for one of his beloved malt whiskies — uisge beatha, water of life — but the broad-based, slim-necked decanter at the end of the row, gleaming with the unmistakeable reddish tint of brandy: water of death. He poured two glasses and slumped into his chair.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘A student of the theory of loss only. The mind uninterrupted by the heart’s objections.’ It was the first time he had revisited the subject.

  ‘There is one kind of loss that I know about from experience,’ I said suddenly, my chest tightening like a drum skin for the drumming heart. The doctor waited, looking down at the sharp, flickering rim of his glass. ‘My wife left me last year. Without warning. Just — wrote me a letter.’ This last comment sounded ridiculous and I gave a little exhalation of laughter through my teeth. My companion looked up and studied me with interest. He asked how long we had been married, and I told him.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been unhappy,’ he said, and then nodded slowly. ‘But my idea, my picture of you is clearer now. I suppose this was your mystery to hold in reserve against all my silly games. And maybe it explains why I felt I could talk to you in the first place.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Felt I could, but didn’t,’ he murmured, inhaling the heavy vapour and raising the glass to his lips. ‘I understand from Corvin that he has given you an outline of the circumstances of —’ he paused, and his face twitched nervously ‘— of —’ I waited helplessly. ‘Of what happened a few years ago.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. It’s strange, I — can’t talk to him about it really. It seems so pointless because he knows, he was there. With poor Juliet it is even worse. But you — I felt myself wanting to —’ He fell silent as the Miserere’s ghostly treble stepped down again from its famous impossible height.

  ‘I f
eel that my son left me — left all of us — for some particular reason of his own: a reason I cannot imagine. Like your wife, perhaps, except that Sam didn’t write any letters. Just — ran away.’

  ‘But you don’t know that he really wanted that,’ I said. ‘He tried to protect himself. He might not have fallen.’

  ‘He might not have fallen,’ echoed the doctor, weakly. ‘Indeed. That nub of steel raked into a half-inch crack might not have slipped. Might have held. And then — would he have come back to us, his duty done?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered, ‘but yes, I think so.’ Then for a while we sat still and let the despairing voices sing themselves out. When the doctor half-glanced towards the side-table I rose to refill our glasses.

  ‘They call it torquing,’ he murmured, as I sat down. ‘You know, with a “Q”. You slot the pick of your ice-axe into a slanting crack in the rock so that it twists when you pull on the shaft, and that locks it in place. Such a complexity of forces,’ he went on, almost in a whisper, ‘the curved, flexing axe, the unseen, icy interior of the fissure, the hefting, swinging load of the climber hanging over the void.’ He drained the glass and swallowed it down. ‘Will it hold?’ he muttered. ‘Will it slip?’

  One might even ask of a young marriage founded on ignorance the same questions that one asks of a man’s grip on the brilliant life that he holds in a gloved fist: such a complexity of forces.

  9

  So my labours at the combe were finished, but my stay and the changes that it wrought in me were not. I was now the doctor’s guest, and the library’s demands for diligence having been satisfied I began to experience it quite differently: the light was more delicate, the cool, papery taste of the air sweeter — even the silence seemed to occupy a subtly different key. I would stroll in with a Corvin-like spring in my step, stand nonchalantly at the window for a few moments (that was part of the tradition of the place), and then plant myself before some hospitable case and seek out some particular volume that had retained a singular existence in my crowded memory, like the leaf that we can see waving back and forth among a thousand others, flashing its own particular shape and colour and exacting recognition. I would tip the book’s delicious weight into my hand, open it, and browse. It would be crass to compare this newfound freedom to Geoffrey’s at the foot of the Buachaille, but certainly reading, after a couple of gloriously book-free days that weekend (not one page, not a single printed word — alleluia!), had become exciting again. But where should I begin? When I told the doctor about my nagging burden of ignorance, his eyes lit up.