The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘Squiggle from rhomox,’ laughed Rose, taking her seat beside me. ‘That’s pushing it. You’d do better to remind her that it’s the language of the New Testament — although that was Common, not Attic Greek.’

  ‘It’s all Gree— oh, never mind,’ muttered M’Synder, helping herself to the salt.

  The constant sight of Rose’s jagged scar, for which, according to Corvin, she had always refused reconstructive surgery, troubled me even more now that I knew its precise origin — I could not rid my mind of imaginings of the avalanche, of the idea of being trapped, buried alive, hearing the faint, desperate thuds of a steel edge. The scarf she had just hung on the hook in the hall — was it the same one? Why not, let it be — the longest of those red lines drawn against the terror of oblivion.

  ‘Doctor Comberbache will certainly make sure you keep your word, and do your studyin’,’ said M’Synder pointedly, serving us slices of forced rhubarb crumble with custard.

  ‘Oh, I’ll be sketching, mostly,’ replied Rose. ‘You know, making studies. That’s what I meant.’

  ‘Hm. Well, per’aps you should show Mr Browne the pictures in your room — he’s quite the connoisseur, y’know.’ Rose turned to me just as the doctor had at the door of the temple.

  ‘Alright,’ she said.

  I suppose I had imagined that Rose’s room would be similar to my own — plain and squarish, but instead it was long and narrow, with a bed jammed across the far end and furniture crowded along each side so that there was barely room to walk between. Laden shelves leaned precariously over the bed and a small writing desk stood at a window overlooking the lane, the ragged hedge and the stream beyond. But of course it is the pictures that I remember most — swarming over the walls, stacked under the bed, leaning against the wardrobe and pinned to its doors.

  ‘Do you consider it a kind of communication, like writing?’ I asked, looking from one to the next. I was thinking of Furey trapped in his garret, dreaming of recognition: they were the same age. Rose stood with her arms folded, watching me. She shrugged at my question.

  ‘Communion is a better word — between my own selves, maybe,’ she replied. ‘It allows me to orientate myself. It allows me to — listen to my past and address my future.’

  ‘Alas, not the reverse!’ I said. ‘So, a kind of diary in pictures? But you paint for other people as well, don’t you?’

  ‘It allows of that too,’ she answered, simply.

  Two pictures in particular caught my eye. One was a bold watercolour hanging by the door — a pink rose against a wash of dappled green, with the petals torn away on one side. The tones of those remaining deepened from a pale base to a narrow fringe of scarlet pressing up against the massed green tint of the background, defying the tendency of watery things to merge and diffuse, maintaining an edge.

  ‘My self-portrait,’ she said, with one eyebrow raised. ‘It was painted a couple of years ago, so perhaps you don’t recognise me.’

  ‘I do,’ I said, smiling. The other was a vivid portrait in crayon on grey paper, hanging over the bed: a man of about thirty in half-profile, executed in two colours — chocolate brown for the shadows and cool sky blue for the highlights. A neat, handsome man with dark hair clipped short and a ruminative curl to his lips, looking out of the side of the picture and perhaps nodding slowly: ready to act, but in no hurry. I stepped closer and leaned to read some words written in crayon across the bottom corner: ‘Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, nor altar heap’d with flowers.’

  ‘Your father?’ I said, and she nodded curtly.

  ‘It was done from a photograph.’

  On the day before the equinox the slow, resonant clip of Juliet’s footsteps rang once again in the hall and the company was complete for what Frizzo the Clown had called the last blast.

  ‘Mr Browne!’ she said, pausing in mid-stride when she passed me in the dining room. Her hair was still half-caught in the collar of her cardigan, and the three slender frown lines deepened over the cool eyes. ‘Still here? What have these co-conspirators done to you? Shouldn’t you be earning a living, meeting friends and family, living a normal life?’ My lips were parted to answer when Corvin swept in behind me.

  ‘Move along, there,’ he said, briskly ushering me forward into the library. ‘Don’t dawdle. Oh, hello sis,’ he added, looking over his shoulder, ‘great to see you!’

  12

  Rose knocked softly on my door before dawn and told me to get dressed quickly. Venus hung like a white lamp over the mouth of the combe as we hurried up the lane to the house, whose door stood open. All the doors were open — I could see straight through to the lawn, silver with dew. Juliet was waiting in the dim hall with another woman in a brimmed hat: it was Agnes. The doctor was slowly making his way down the stairs — I was half expecting some sort of ceremonial robe, but he wore simple brown cords and the Aran jumper, and now reached for his usual waxed coat. Smiles and nods were exchanged but nobody spoke.

  Corvin appeared in the dining room in his wild-haired pantisocratic guise, carrying a tray of little steaming glasses — coffee with a dash of something stronger, one mouthful — and then we filed down the garden steps and across the lawn.

  Venus had lost her radiance by the time our slow procession reached the top of the temple stair — she was now just a dull white speck of paint, smudged by my own faulty optics, on the greenish continuum between the blue twilight above and the deep amber glow seeping up from the eastern horizon.

  We shuffled into the dark temple; the door was closed with a soft click and everyone took their seats around the circle of the sanctum. Boy-girl-boy on one side, I noticed, girl-boy-girl on the other, just like a dinner party. A faint orange light rested on the centre of the brass calendar on the western curve, in the gap between the doctor and Juliet.

  ‘Friends,’ said the doctor at last, breaking the morning’s silence. As he smiled and nodded to each of us in turn, a rayed point of light opened like a tiny golden flower on the polished silver boss that marked the equinox — opened wider, brighter, and brighter still, until the whole chamber was bathed in a warm light. All of us were turned towards it except the doctor and Juliet, whose faces were illuminated from one side only: but both were smiling.

  ‘In nomine nostra,’ he began, ‘consideremus.’

  By the time we finished breakfast the garden was bathed in equinoctial sunshine that burned off the dew and breathed its seductive magic on a thousand buds and shoots. Chaffinches skipped about on the terrace, showing off their spring plumage and roguishly snatching breadcrumbs from under each other’s noses. There was a faint warmth in the air, so that for the first time one might open a door or a window and feel no compulsion to close it. Indeed, was it not warmer outside than in? Meaulnes emerged from the kitchen garden with his shirt sleeves rolled up and collar open, and a quiet gardener’s joy in his big white face. He helped us to carry a table and chairs out onto the terrace, before busying himself with assembling a mysterious contraption in the middle of the lawn.

  ‘Who’s coming for a dip?’ demanded Corvin, gazing up at the sky from where he lay on the grass, with arms and legs spread in a pantisocratic star.

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Rose.

  ‘Sis?’

  ‘Not likely,’ said Juliet absently, frowning at a page of Early Music Today. ‘Take Mr Browne.’ All eyes turned to me.

  ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Where do we go?’

  Rose fetched three faded towels from upstairs and tossed one each to Corvin and me, and we trooped out towards the meadow. The bathing pool was a rounded inlet of the stream where the water was deep and clear and a few weed fronds waved in refracted sunlight. I was nervously pondering questions of propriety when Corvin kicked off his shoes, pulled his shirt over his head to reveal a compact, muscular torso, dropped his trousers and underpants together and dived headlong into the pool. He emerged at the far side with a cry of delight.

  ‘You’re next, Mr Browne,’ said Rose, firmly. I foll
owed Corvin’s example as quickly as I could while she looked on with a vague sardonic smile — the knotted combination of my trousers and pants got stuck on one ankle for a long, desperate moment, and then I was free and plunged in after him.

  ‘Good for you, old chap,’ he said, calmly treading water as my lungs shuddered with rapid involuntary gasps for air. ‘How’s that for clearing out the cobwebs?’ I was still getting my bearings when I heard another neat splash, and turned to see Rose’s head emerge from her own dive, her eyes shining with the shock of cold. For a few seconds we trod water in a triangle, three gasping, vivid, youthful, slick-haired heads from which three blurry white ghosts of nakedness hung suspended, kicking the void. Rose’s proud eyes were fixed on Corvin; his, amused and curious, on me, and mine flitted from one to the other as I wrestled alternately with the challenges of determined disinterest and unwanted inferiority. One of the combe’s several triangles, I later thought.

  ‘Look!’ said Corvin suddenly, cupping his hands together and lifting them above the surface. ‘I’ve caught a fish.’ As Rose glanced down he squeezed a powerful spray of water into her face. She surged forward and pushed him under, and then I felt his iron grasp on my ankle, pulling me down. Now we were all wrestling, hands pushing and grasping on cold, slippery, vague bodies, feet kicking, mouths gasping. I recall an arm flung up, Grecian contours falling from a slim cord of muscle to a white, faintly stubbled armpit to a glimpsed breast; the instep of a kicking foot skimming down my thigh; white fingers raked through dark hair and a burst of laughter with eyes closed tight against the spray. Then the moment was over and we were back in our triangle of heads, breathing hard.

  ‘I’ve had it,’ gasped Rose, and turned to the bank.

  ‘Two minutes is about the limit if you’re not used to it,’ said Corvin to me.

  ‘I know,’ I said, my teeth starting to chatter. ‘All systems pr-preparing to sh-shut down.’ I glimpsed the long backs of Rose’s legs shining in the sun as she towelled herself furiously, and then I staggered up the slippery bank myself. My skin flushed and burned as blood seethed back out from the protected core. A blackbird’s song, one of the season’s first, erupted from a nearby chestnut tree, and soft grass tickled my toes. Corvin was the last to get dressed.

  ‘Alive!’ he cried triumphantly towards the wooded hillside, holding his towel above his head like a trophy so that the muscles of his back slid and swelled. ‘Alive and alight!’

  13

  Brimming with heat and health we skipped back to the house, where many lights of the great library windows had been thrown open on reluctant hinges and a fine, joyous music poured out across the lawn.

  ‘This is Linley, Mr Browne!’ cried the doctor, pointing towards the sound. ‘Thomas Linley the Younger, the brilliant son!’ He closed his eyes as a choir burst into song.

  The music filled the house, whose doors were all thrown open (all save one). Delicious smells, laughter and the clatter of pots wafted from the kitchen, and Agnes was laying the dining table for eight.

  ‘Will you help me to carry some drinks?’ she asked, and led me to the empty parlour. She opened the cabinet, seized two glasses in each hand and then turned and studied me quizzically. Not so bad to be old, I thought, at least to have had time to think, to be one step ahead of the young. ‘Does my presence here seem so strange to you?’ she whispered, with a wry smile in a face that was all wrinkles and make-up. ‘Yours seems strange to me, O man from London, so we are even.’ A rattle of laughter spilled over from elsewhere in the house, and she smiled again. ‘There is a happiness here, is there not? A man’s heart is accommodative ...’ She trailed off and frowned. ‘Something is missing though, isn’t it? Listen.’ We faced off in silence for a few seconds, our hands full of empty glasses. ‘Only outsiders can ask the question,’ she said. ‘What’s a party with no children?’

  ‘All hands on deck!’ called the doctor’s voice. ‘Miraculum demonstrabitur !’ Agnes winked at me and we poured the drinks and carried them out to the terrace.

  Meaulnes stood proudly beside his contraption, to which a hosepipe snaked across the lawn from the side of the house, while the seven of us lined up along the top of the steps.

  ‘Monsieur Meaulnes is about to initiate a process whose path and consequences are unknown to science,’ said the doctor, ‘so hold on to your hats. Let fly, Monsieur!’ The gardener stooped and turned a tap on the end of the hose, and after a few seconds the contraption began to move — a long horizontal beam tilting slowly down at one end, then swinging back the other way, then pausing for a while before creeping back slowly, then switching direction again and swinging round smartly. The effect was oddly disquieting: our eyes searched for a whimsical guiding hand where there was none, and for a while nobody spoke.

  ‘Behold the chaotic pendulum,’ said the doctor at last, crossing his arms in satisfaction, ‘here created by the flow of water into a tilting tube. Designed by the late Hartley Comberbache Esquire, executed by Monsieur Meaulnes, and now to be explained to us all by Mr S. Browne, Bachelor of Science, upper second class.’

  After a second visit to the temple to witness the sunset and a careful, lantern-lit descent in the deepening gloom (the steep, straight stair neatly enforces seriousness, I thought), curtains were hauled across windows and fires lit. The doctor directed a boisterous game of charades beneath Taboni’s angel of truth — Corvin, Meaulnes and I calling out our guesses from the back whilst conducting a scholarly whisky tasting at the long line of decanters. Rose at first refused her turn, then proposed a book, three words, and simply pointed at Meaulnes, standing in his great woolly socks with a glass of whisky in each hand and the brooding sky of Despair behind him: he blushed and mumbled something in French (I caught only that ethereal name, Yvonne de Galais). Later we reassembled upstairs around the piano, where the opposing mirrors multiplied our small company into a dizzying corridor of merriment and motion punctuated by a thousand priceless vases. Corvin sang one of Linley’s arias in a depressingly true countertenor to Juliet’s accompaniment — he said this was to excuse him from playing the violin, which the doctor himself picked up instead and sawed out a rather wobbly tune, before Agnes and Juliet gave us a ragtime piano duet quite as chaotic as the ingenious pendulum.

  ‘Make way!’ cried the doctor afterwards, coming along the landing with two long swords in tarnished scabbards and a pair of white shoes. ‘It’s time for the hornpipe.’ He drew out the blades solemnly and passed them to Corvin, who laid them in a cross in the middle of the floor and then began to limber up as though for a race. ‘Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the doctor, as Juliet seated herself again at the piano. ‘Sorry my dear,’ he added, laying a hand on her shoulder, ‘but I’m for Corvin this time.’

  ‘Yes, Swinburne,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Le monsieur,’ said Meaulnes, nodding gravely.

  ‘Corvin,’ murmured Rose.

  ‘Well, I’m for dear Juliet,’ pledged M’Synder, suddenly appearing on the stairs. ‘And so’s Mr Browne! In’t that right?’

  Juliet played the opening bars of the familiar sailor’s hornpipe melody at a very slow tempo, like a child learning her first tune, and a thousand Corvins began to move. Straightaway I thought: forget the singing, the plotting courses, the running, the swimming, the drifting, the mysterious projects — this is what he was born to do. Juliet began to play a little faster and he was able to warm into the more energetic leaps and kicks, his limbs billowing to left and right while his body hung motionless in space or swayed to one side and the other like the mast of a keeling ship. The doctor and Agnes cheered and clapped. Juliet played faster. The movements became smaller and more precise, now limited to the feet only with occasional leaps from one quadrant to another, landing right on the beat. Juliet played faster still — brilliantly, impossibly fast, leaning slightly into the keyboard, frowning with concentration and effort but with lips parted in a half-smile, and the pointed toes of Corvin’s dancing shoes moved faster than sigh
t, until at last he stumbled against the hilt of one of the swords, dropped to one knee in submission to his sister, and then rose slowly to his feet while we all cheered and congratulated them both.

  ‘I’m sorry old friend,’ murmured Juliet to the piano, stroking the lid soothingly. ‘Did that hurt?’

  Corvin stood for a moment breathing hard and wiped his glowing face on his sleeve, then as his sister began to play a new dance he offered Rose a gallant bow and invited her to join him. She blushed and hesitated, and I felt a little twinge of yearning for her, a simple yearning of the old, pre-marriage, pre-divorce kind, of the kind that Meaulnes felt for her and that she felt for this laughing dancer. And he? For whom did he yearn as he raised his crossed arms again and shifted weight nimbly from one foot to the other? For none of us, certainly: for someone else, perhaps — I will not pretend to know.

  Any hangover is rich with soulful promise whose crop, however, can be reaped only in solitude. That other part of the mind, its industrial machinery, lies idle, clogged with dehydration and lassitude, and the soul (why not call it that?) has free play: for a few precious and painful hours the hungover man is a mystic.

  I spent the first of these hours lying in bed with the sheet thrown back and the cold morning air and birdsong wafting through the casement. My underpants, I noticed with a rakish smile, were on inside-out after my hasty sartorial operations on the riverbank. This recollection half-revived me and I bumbled downstairs to toast and coffee and a scalding shower, and then stepped out into the lane to share with the robin and the red squirrel my sluggish reflections on the pleasures of private study on the one hand, and the inescapable necessity to provide for oneself on the other.