The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘Good!’ he cried. ‘Very good! You have crossed the first and highest hurdle. The next one is much easier — you must transform this sensation of burden, of weakness, into something more productive. Think of it as the engine of ignorance, driving you forward. What else motivates the aging student of Combe College? Ignorance is not a state from which you might one day be delivered; it should not be a reason to be dissatisfied with the present or to nurture false hopes of future wisdom; it should be a steady force, a driver of exploration and discovery.

  ‘There is always time for an increment of learning — at least, for as long as learning matters. I would have liked to emphasise this to Furey, who lamented his ignorance of Latin and Greek. At sixteen he considered it too late to learn — perhaps he had some foreknowledge of brevity, of living too fast and moiling himself out. He told his mother that had he known his classicals, he could have done anything — as it was, he assured her, his name would live three hundred years.’

  I asked which of Furey’s poems I should read, and in which edition. He dismissed most of the volumes on the gallery as curiosities and brought from the study an enormous Complete Works dated nineteen seventy. ‘Furey finally got the editor he deserved,’ he said. ‘This fellow had the best springs on his bicycle, and brings us the words more or less undamaged along the winding lane of years. The edition was never reprinted, however, and is now extremely rare. Recently I saw the pre-Raphaelite painting of Furey used as the cover of an English anthology from which his poems were entirely absent: perhaps his own estimate of his longevity will prove to be just about right.’

  So I read the poems, slowly and with difficulty, and occasionally I seemed to hear the music that Hartley had described, and to glimpse the visions that it carried. As Furey anticipated, the dupes — the Dowleians, as they came to be called — were not really taken in by his clumsy parchment forgeries: they simply disbelieved the alternative. And who could blame them? Those whisperings of music seemed to be echoing across a gulf so wide that it must be measured not in mere centuries, but in worlds. The only miracles worthy of the name, I thought, are miracles of imagination.

  I followed up the Furey with Hartley’s diary and a collection of his published essays, which were full of astute predictions. Next I plunged into the translated Herodotus with periodic diversions of Gilbert White. The former inspired me to work through a Greek primer in the evenings, hunched behind the writing-plank, assiduously writing out all the exercises in my notebook despite M’Synder’s teasing, while the latter sent me out into the garden in fine weather with my binoculars round my neck, stalking blurry silhouettes as they flitted from tree to tree. Izaak Walton had me peering into the stream with sinister intentions, and Stephen Graham (he of the leaf skeletons) enlarged the compass of my walks in the hills.

  And then there was more poetry: after the fiendish spelling and vocabulary of the goode prieste Dowleie, the lines of Chadwick and Keats rolled off the page like smoke. I developed the habit (try not to laugh) of rocking gently from side to side as my eyes swept slowly back and forth, and this seemed to raise me further from my incapacity — I imagined myself in a little boat, bobbing over the surface of the poem where before I had floundered up to my neck. I moved on to Hardy and Lawrence and Dylan Thomas, and began to enjoy and so, presumably, to understand.

  One of those productive late winter days — a day of damp stone and rolling clouds — was settling itself into a chill, whispering, moonless dusk as I walked with coat unbuttoned to the cottage for dinner. While I was washing the dishes M’Synder returned from the coal shed with the news that it was a ‘proper starry night,’ and I decided to go out. ‘Wrap up,’ she said, ‘and take this.’ She handed me a small dented hipflask which produced a promising sloshing sound. ‘There’s somethin’ in it, the good Lord knows what. Prob’ly been in there for years, but none the worse for that.’

  Stars, if anything, have the ability to surprise by a fine excess. Just when you think you’ve seen all they have to offer, you find yourself gazing up, whilst tipsily tripping guy ropes on an unlit campsite or lying back on the deck of an overnight ferry, at a spectacle that both memory and imagination have failed drastically to anticipate. So it was now as I felt my way cautiously, with arms extended to ward off the dog-rose, along the pitch-black lane beneath the darkest sky in England. The Milky Way scorned its name — what resemblance to milk in that swirling cincture of knot and filament, that dizzying interweaving of the diamond-sharp and the diffuse, blazing out between dark curls of interstellar dust?

  I soon found myself standing in the middle of the lawn, encircled by a panorama in black silhouette — the gables and tall chimneys to the east and the shaggy spars of the cedar to the west connected on both sides by the gently sinuous, finely-bristled crest of the hills. Behind this comforting cardboard cut-out world, the terrible shimmering precipice of the universe yawned like death. I fumbled with the flask and tasted something metallic and fiery at its narrow threaded neck, then paced slowly over the faint, feathery radiance of new-formed frost and felt for the gap in the hedge and the archway beyond.

  The memory of my dream, of stepping back into nothingness, guided my cautious feet as I negotiated the straight-edged, glimmering, answering precipices of the pools. I sat back on the revered seat and assumed Rose’s crucifixion pose, letting my hips slip forward until my skull rested on the cold stone. I rolled it a little from side to side and the frozen stars seemed to come alive, flashing and flickering in their countless thousands as the invisible net of branches moved across them, winking in and out of existence like all the world’s souls being born and living and dying before my eyes.

  For what it’s worth, I know the names of the stars — what a strange little hoard of knowledge wrapped and stacked in some otherwise desolate aisle of my brain! Hundreds of peevish little names for giant faraway things, meaningless, useless to all but boasting amateur astronomers, failing to lighten the burden of the mystery: I’ll resist the temptation to reel off a list. Names and familiar shapes seemed to dissolve now in that glittering sea of light, rippling gently in a night breeze of ether as I felt on sleepy retinas the soft prickle of photons reaching their journey’s end.

  Suddenly I felt my shoulders stiffening with the cold, and realised my buttocks and thighs were already numb. I stood up rather dizzily, waited a moment for my head to clear, and started for the cottage whose cosy blankets would not exact such a heavy price in return for their embrace.

  10

  March arrived, and I chose a bright, vaporous morning to check in on the wonders unfolding silently in the grove. Shards of pale sunlight angled between the beeches and fell across the thousands of crocuses, some standing, some tipped over, like the empty goblets left scattered about after a vast nocturnal fairy debauch, stained with purple fairy-wine or golden dregs of mead.

  It was quiet: even the songbirds seemed to be having a lie-in, and only the restless flapping and slapping of pigeon wings filtered down from the treetops as I wandered below. Along the garden’s west wall forsythia buds had begun to open in little dewy puffs of daring yellow on wintry tangles of twigs. As I rounded the corner into the orchard I heard a familiar batter of feathers and glimpsed a flash of pink and white-on-black disappearing over the next wall, and my eye came to rest on one recently deserted branch vibrating violently in the mist.

  ‘The arboreal spring,’ said a loud, familiar voice, making me spin round. It was Corvin, standing in an alcove with his ankles casually crossed, hands in the pockets of a leather jacket. ‘The evidence of things not seen.’

  ‘You made me jump,’ I said, feebly.

  ‘Then I consider myself avenged. Look up — what do you see?’ I tipped my head back: a venturous bough from the nearest beech basked in faint sunlight, high above the hunched apples and pears. When I looked down he was holding something out in his slender fingers — a seed, like a stunted, shrivelled chestnut with three brittle edges. ‘Evidence. It’s impossible that this seed knows how
to make a tree, but it does know — that’s the plain truth.’

  ‘It seems impossible, you mean.’ He glanced up at the bough and shrugged, as though the distinction were unimportant.

  ‘It’s the same with Furey. The Dowleians were quite justified in their conclusions: it was indeed impossible that some teenage wag wrote the Dowley poems, poorly educated as he was, and with so little time. Nevertheless he did write them. Congratulations on finding the letter — I knew you would.’

  We walked together into the kitchen garden, where rows of hardy vegetables bore testament to Meaulnes’ patient labours. I told Corvin that the doctor had invited me to stay until Easter.

  ‘Oh bravo, that man!’ he said in an odd, merry voice, turning on one heel and taking the longer path round the edge of the beds. ‘One more fold of the map, eh? Just when you seemed to have walked off the edge? Everyone you’d begun to get to know but thought you might not see again — Rose, Juliet, Frizzo the Clown’ — here he indicated himself — ‘all coming back for one last blast with Uncle Arnold and his shy apprentice. How comforting. And then what?’ I hesitated, rather bewildered by this outburst. ‘Well, never mind that,’ he said in a softer tone. ‘What have you and he found to talk about, anyway?’

  ‘Plenty,’ I said. ‘There was his book, and the story of his ancestors, and then poetry, and truth, and beauty — those sorts of things.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he answered, returning my smile.

  ‘And,’ I added, stopping beside the glasshouse and frowning so that he stopped and frowned too, ‘I’ve been accompanying him to the temple. One day we talked for hours about death.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he replied, solemnly. ‘Poor Arnold quoting Marcus Aurelius again, was he?’ He walked slowly on, brushing the pointed toe of his boot along glistening hands of rhubarb. ‘“It is no greater hardship to be taken to pieces than to be put together.” That was my favourite — a couple of years ago Juliet was just about ready to put it to the test by battering him over the head with his bloody Marcus Aurelius. But we each have our methods, and good luck to him.’

  So another name was added to the rolls of Combe College for this brief crocus-bloom term. Corvin appropriated the study for his own obscure purposes, while the doctor and I sat reading on either side of Sarah’s fireplace. One morning I arrived to find the fire lit for the first time.

  ‘Fires in libraries make me nervous,’ said the doctor, ‘and you would not have noticed any warmth on the ladder. But I think we might risk a little comfort now that we are close enough both to supervise and to reap the benefit.’ When we rose for coffee he unhooked the two heavy drapes of chain mail that served as fireguards and arranged them meticulously. ‘Armour against the fiery darts of entropy,’ he murmured, turning away reluctantly, ‘and their insidious Second Law.’

  On this retreat from our retreat, in the whitewashed kitchen whose cool air smelled faintly of parsnips and onions, he seemed for a few moments to recall the existence of the outside world — the profane world, my world.

  ‘Very few people know that we exist — do you remember me telling you that?’ He pressed down the wad of coffee with an ancient, tarnished spoon and slowly revolved the two halves of the percolator in his hands, engaging the thread.

  ‘I do.’ I struck a match for him and the whistling gas caught with a satisfying woomf.

  ‘After all, why should they know or care? But when you go home, if you tell people about the combe, I wonder if you could do me a favour.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Don’t tell them where it is. We have no secrets, but neither do we promote our existence to the world. Of course, they might guess our whereabouts from what you tell them — I don’t mind that as long as — as long as you don’t make it too easy for them. And the temple — tell them about that if you must, but — just don’t tell quite everything. Let it remain sacred. What do you say?’

  ‘I’ll say nothing at all, if you prefer,’ I answered, thinking first of the three sketchy letters I had already dispatched and then of my rather extensive notebook.

  ‘Oh, no, that wouldn’t be fair. We have no secrets, after all. No gates, no KEEP OUT.’

  ‘Just a few trees thoughtfully planted,’ I suggested.

  ‘Something like that.’

  In the afternoon, as I laboured to translate a few sentences of Thucydides with the help of Uncle Samuel’s school lexicon, whose sad inscription read ‘presented to S.S.C. for showing excellent promise in scholarship, April 1913’, the doctor inserted into the slow duet of our breathing a deep sigh, and looked up frowning from his notebook.

  ‘Mr Browne,’ he said, after watching me for a moment, ‘you are a man not only of improving classical tastes, I suppose, but also of sound financial sense.’ He waved aside my doubtful expression and went on: ‘As you might have noticed, we Comberbaches are neither a proliferative family nor a particularly long-lived one. To put it bluntly, I don’t know how much time I have left and the future of the combe is in doubt.’ I was flattered by his assumption that I was qualified to advise him, that during those three years the fabled wisdom of the markets had flashed and flickered its way into my unreceptive brain.

  ‘Who will inherit it?’ I asked. ‘Rose?’

  ‘Rose is adamant she does not want it. Or rather, she only wants the cottage, which M’Synder — who owns it now — wishes to leave to her when she herself goes to the great cottage in the sky. Decades away, of course. You might say I have been disbequeathed.’

  ‘What about Juliet?’

  ‘She doesn’t want it either. She has her reasons, which I understand. No,’ he went on, lowering his voice and glancing round towards the study door, ‘it is the clown, Corvin — he is my heir, if I may put it so grandly. This is not a large house, as ancestral seats go, but neither he nor I have nearly enough to pay the tax bill. If I die, Corvin must sell the combe. Then I suppose the peerless temple will become what you once thought it to be — a folly for some latter-day lord of the manor.’

  ‘What about the paintings?’ I suggested. ‘The Taboni — couldn’t that be sold as a last resort?’

  ‘The Taboni is worth something, but, I think, not enough. The dear boy would find himself ripping out the whole history of the house in order to keep the walls and the slates. That is the point, perhaps, but I’m not interested in the political debate.’

  ‘You have recently come into another source of wealth that might be — liquidated,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘Have I?’ said he, narrowing his eyes.

  ‘Of course. Thomas Furey’s last letter, in which he admits to having forged the Dowley poems and more besides, would be a sensation. I’m no expert, but I guess the American collections would want it, would give it a price. Corvin could offer it to the British Library in lieu of tax.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ he sniffed. ‘It’s a private letter.’

  ‘But to whom does it rightly belong?’ I asked. ‘Wasn’t that the first Samuel’s argument for publishing his father’s diary?’

  ‘The value of plain truth being universal,’ murmured the doctor, frowning. Then he breathed in sharply. ‘No, it’s out of the question.’

  11

  Much to M’Synder’s consternation, Corvin persuaded me to join him on some cross-country runs over the hills and down into the various secluded valleys that cut into them from the east. One evening as we huffed and puffed up the muddy lane I heard again the sound of my mother’s old lawnmower, and we turned to see a single round headlight bobbing after us through the dusk. We waited outside the cottage, standing in our mud-spattered shorts like two sweaty, steaming, curly-haired schoolboys, until the familiar car lurched to a halt. A slim figure got out, indistinct behind the headlight’s glare, lifted a small case from the boot and stepped forward.

  ‘Hi,’ said Rose, glancing sharply at Corvin as though she hadn’t expected him, but recovering quickly. ‘Wow, you boys turned out in your Sunday best,’ she added, looking us up and down. ‘I feel h
onoured.’ She herself was wearing a long printed skirt and prim dark jacket. Corvin bowed and took her case as the car swung into its turn and gave a coy farewell toot.

  ‘I’ll be takin’ that,’ said M’Synder sternly at the door, looking down at Corvin’s sodden trainers and barring his way. ‘What have you done to my respectable lodger?’ He bowed again without speaking, the lamplight showing off a big black beauty-spot of mud on his cheek, then jogged away into the dusk leaving us only the fading tick, tock, tick of his feet pounding the track.

  ‘I talked them into giving me early release,’ said Rose later, when I was once again respectable, scrubbed, pink-cheeked, damp-haired and fragrant in my smart pullover. ‘A week of private study before the holidays.’

  ‘Oh well, our Mr Browne knows all about that,’ said M’Synder, winking at me. ‘He’d be teacher’s pet for sure, if there was a teacher. Bunched over his notebook all evening, copyin’ out little squiggles that nobody reads, in a language that nobody speaks.’

  ‘Well,’ I began, valiantly casting about for a riposte, ‘I suppose the word squiggle comes from squirm, which comes from worm, which comes from the Old English wyrm, which is surely related to the Latin vermis, which is in turn related to the Greek rhomox. So you speak the language, for one.’ M’Synder looked unconvinced.