The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘Was that spring we had,’ murmured Corvin at the library window that afternoon, ‘or just a dream of spring?’ The morning had been cool and cloudy and now heavy spots of rain began to darken the terrace and scud down the ancient glass: nature’s unhelpful restatement, it seemed, of what a thousand poets have already told us — that radiant beauty must not last. The windows were all fastened now, and M’Synder’s spiced soup was back in demand.

  During that week the doctor busied himself with his publisher’s suggested revisions to Giveth and Taketh Away and Rose spent hours shut in her room, presumably working on her drawings. Juliet went to London to meet her parents, who were visiting from the ‘tumbledown house’ in Provence to which they had moved on retiring a few years before. Corvin said he was too busy to accompany her: ‘Tell them I’ll come to the T.H. in May,’ he said from the library doorway as she and I stood in the dining room. ‘I have some important work to finish here.’

  ‘What work?’ she asked, but the door closed with a soft click. She sighed and turned to go, then glanced back across the table to give me one last beautiful frown as a parting gift.

  14

  So began my thirteenth week at the sacred combe, but surely we, like Rose, are not superstitious. My interdisciplinary studies were by now going so well that I overlooked the fact that my stay was exceeding the scope of the doctor’s invitation. It was a week of cold, hostile rains that hammered flat the early shoots of daffodils, tormented the muddy lane and force-fed the bloated stream with tributaries tumbling noisily off the hills.

  On Friday morning I entered the library with a borrowed satchel under my arm to find Corvin seated by a merry blaze at Sarah’s end of the room, wearing for the third time his Chadwickian high collar and waistcoat, with one ankle tucked up onto his knee and his hands behind his head.

  ‘How’s our visiting scholar this morning?’ he asked, slowly circling the toe of his shoe. ‘Would he like to play a game with me? My mind is feeling simultaneously agile and indolent today.’

  ‘I was planning to work on my Gibbon,’ I said warily, pushing back my wet hair and taking off my rain-spattered glasses to wipe them.

  ‘Oh, but Gibbon is a patient fellow,’ he returned dismissively, ‘and I’m not. Brew us some strong coffee and I’ll set up the game.’ I returned from the kitchen to find two chairs arranged symmetrically before the fire, and between them a table bearing a large backgammon board. ‘My gift to Arnold from the Gulf,’ said Corvin as he laid out the counters. ‘I bought it in the market in Basra. As it happens, he dislikes the element of chance and prefers chess and draughts. I like the element of chance: I find it instructive. But we often buy gifts for ourselves inadvertently, don’t we? Take a seat.’ We played — I needed reminding of the rules, but in the first game, to my surprise, I gammoned him. He flashed an inscrutable smile and reset the board. Later he won a few games but I kept throwing doubles and won the match comfortably.

  ‘So — you win the right to choose,’ he said, clearing the board and folding it shut. ‘Will you listen or tell?’

  ‘I’ll listen,’ I replied, trying to keep up. ‘But even I’ve realised what day it is today — why should I believe a word you say?’

  ‘Because I’ll begin my story at noon,’ he replied, slipping a small pocket watch from his waistcoat and eyeing it significantly, ‘so if I tell a single lie, the joke’s on me.’

  The wind was rising, wrinkling puddles along the terrace and flinging the rain this way and that. I could once again hear the restless tap-tapping of the wind-dial behind the locked door, but if Corvin heard it he made no comment. At noon he began to tell his story — the story of his life — ‘heavily abridged,’ he said, ‘like all stories.’

  He spoke for perhaps an hour at a time, dividing his past into chapters between which I was to study or rest or eat my lunch — ‘while I make up the next bit,’ he added mischievously to himself, as though I was not supposed to hear. He reached the present year, even the present day, as dusk was falling, and seemed quite ready to continue the narrative when the doctor knocked at the door (odd to knock at one’s own door, I thought) and shuffled in from the study.

  ‘O critics, cultured critics! ’ he said, grimacing and waving his manuscript. ‘I’ve finished the accursed revisions. Come dine with me and do your worst — burlesque me, boil me down, do whatever you like with me!’ I tried to comment constructively on the passages that he read out across the table, while Corvin seemed preoccupied and kept largely silent as the wind boomed and moaned around the combe.

  ‘Now you have the past,’ he resumed as if there had been no interruption, as we returned to our seats in the library after dinner. ‘But in recent weeks I’ve also been thinking about the future. You’ve been trying not to, I suspect, but don’t worry — I have ideas enough for both of us.’

  ‘Such as?’ I asked, remembering his strange words in The Croked Hand as he stacked his empty glass on top of mine.

  ‘Well, I’m going to write a book. There — I’ve said it. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time now — even while I was in the Gulf. But you’ve helped to show me how it might be done.’ Is that all? I thought. One more mumbling book to add to these thousands? Is that really the noblest and best path he can imagine? But I envied his — yes, his decisiveness.

  ‘What kind of book?’

  ‘A book about this place — about the combe and its history. It deserves one, surely. Of course I’ll change the names — that gives me more freedom to invent.’

  ‘Why would you need to invent anything? Why not just tell the truth?’

  ‘I don’t know, old chap,’ he replied in low voice, leaning towards me. ‘Maybe I’ve had enough of this bloody creed of truth — I have a craving to make something up, but I want to do it by the book, as it were. The key was to come up with a suitable narrative voice, and I think I have.’

  ‘Go on,’ I prompted, frowning.

  ‘An outsider. An earnest young fellow with a slightly mincing gait, wandering eyes and a tendency to wear ill-fitting clothes — of course, he won’t describe himself that way: a narrator must be slightly egotistical to be convincing. He’ll tell the story of the combe as revealed to him during his visit.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘If people buy my book, I’ll write another one.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’

  ‘I’ll write another one anyway.’

  ‘And if they don’t buy that one?’

  ‘Oh, then I’ll study medicine,’ he replied, waving his hand impatiently, ‘or computer programming, or banking. What was your job title?’

  ‘I was a quantita—’ I never could get that word out, and tried again: ‘a quantitata— a quantittertatter— a quantitative analyst. Quant, for short.’ He shrugged.

  ‘That’ll do, if all else fails.’

  ‘And what were your ideas for me?’ At this he raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips and looked heartily amused. But before he could answer we were interrupted by a tearing, splintering crash that shook the very fabric of the house — suddenly not so sure of itself after all. For a moment Corvin’s face remained frozen in that expression of mirth, now painfully inappropriate, before we both leapt to our feet.

  ‘Hello!’ came a thin, wavering voice from the study. ‘Man overboard, hello!’ We rushed in to a scene of alien disorder: cold air swept into the room from the great window, the doctor lay twisted on the floor by the side table surrounded by broken glass and porcelain, and spots of rain were landing one by one on the leather of the hallowed desk.

  It was that mighty low branch of Hartley’s beech tree, big as a big tree in its own right and heavy with sap and glowing shoots — it had pitched up and down, up and down all evening as the gusts swirled and howled around the house, and had buckled at last and fallen. As it struck the gravel it had keeled sideways like a ship run aground, and one quivering spar had lunged through the study window just as the doctor set his teacup on the mantelpiece. He had
cowered back from the flying glass and stonework and lost his balance, wrenching his one good knee and banging his head as he fell heavily against the side table.

  Now we all sat in the parlour: Corvin and I hot and breathless from our efforts to move the furniture away from the window and cover the worst of the breach with an old tent canvas, and the doctor pale-faced, wrapped in a blanket with a neat dressing on his forehead and a bag of frozen peas on his knee.

  ‘Well,’ he said, wincing as he shifted in his chair, his mouth now fixed in the pained smile as though the wind had changed on him (I suppose it had).

  ‘Well,’ echoed Corvin with a sigh, ‘it could have been worse.’

  15

  Telling M’Synder and Rose about the accident had been my job, and of course my reassurances could not prevent them hurrying back with me to the house. M’Synder went straight in to see the casualty but Rose stood for a while in the drive, staring at the fallen branch and the tree’s gaping wound, the scattered debris and the wrecked window whose stonework hung precariously like a Piranesi vault. She said nothing, but for a moment those iridescent green eyes were wide with alarm and disorientation, as though she saw something I had missed. An inscription, perhaps: ‘et in arcadia ego.’

  ‘It could have been worse,’ I parroted meekly, glancing up at the tree still thrashing and moaning over the house. She eyed me sharply as if to say ‘what would you know?’ and hurried inside. We found M’Synder standing over the doctor, asking solicitous questions but at the same time slowly surveying the neat bandage, the blanket, the leg raised on a cushion, and the mug of cocoa. She looked up at Corvin with reluctant approbation, and then turned to the dying fire and peered into the scuttle.

  ‘I’ll fill ’er up,’ she said, seizing it resolutely and stumping out of the room.

  Meaulnes made a welcome appearance the next morning, and he and I cleared several fallen branches out of the lane so that when the patient’s stubbornness at last relented, a four-wheel-drive ambulance was able to churn its way up the combe before noon and carry him away for treatment.

  ‘Suspect mild concussion and a cruciate ligament injury,’ he murmured to the paramedics as they carried his stretcher through the hall, ‘compounded by osteoarthritis. Oh, my dear Mr Browne, please taketh and giveth away the manuscript to the post office — it’s already overdue.’ He was still muttering as they loaded him into the ambulance: ‘A prod from old Hartley, you think? No, it was just that Second Law doing its work — I’ve been entropised. Prognosis: patient to be back on his feet in a week, but unlikely to cope with stairs, especially if staircase is long or steep or lacks handrail. Consider stairlift or bungalow. Next patient, please.’

  Rose accompanied him to the hospital, while the rest of us continued clearing up and M’Synder made arrangements for a stonemason and glazier to fix the window. The weather turned bright, the sharp April sunlight picking out bristling shoots of vivid green along the banks of the lane and in the trees arching and swaying over it. Rose returned and reported that all was as the doctor had predicted, and he would be home in two days to rest.

  ‘We’ll have to make up a bed on the ground floor,’ she said. ‘In the parlour, I suppose.’ I rather enjoyed her new persona as mistress of the house, fierce and sensible, snapping directions to me and Meaulnes and even M’Synder, but she seemed to draw the line at cheery, self-assured Corvin, in whose company she shrank once again into artful adolescence.

  The doctor’s eyes, when he returned early the following week, had lost their sparkle. He sat rather glumly in his wheelchair and stared at the bed we had carried downstairs and positioned across the parlour window.

  ‘You’ve all been very kind,’ he murmured awkwardly. ‘Now, I wonder if I might have a little peace, and a little Bach. Composed for connoisseurs,’ he added with a bitter smile, ‘for the refreshment of their spirits — that’s what I need.’

  Corvin seemed uncomfortable with the doctor’s new predicament. He was a man of many talents, dressing wounds among them, but he was not a patient nurse.

  ‘Since Arnold wants a few days’ peace and quiet,’ he said breezily the next day, ‘and since I’m not a very peaceful or quiet housemate, how would you like to come up to Ben Nevis with me this weekend? I could take you up that North-East Buttress.’ Rose looked up from her sketchbook frowning, but said nothing. ‘I am reliably informed that the storms washed away most of the snow, and now the fine weather has dried the rock nicely — the ridge routes are in summer condition, more or less. Trust me: you’ll love it.’

  ‘What was that nasty step called?’ I said doubtfully, adjusting my glasses and trying to look delicate. ‘The Man-eater?’ Corvin was having none of my vacillation.

  ‘The Mantrap!’ he cried, leaping to his feet, then glancing guiltily at the door and lowering his voice. ‘Guess who’s going up that first, ladder-monkey!’

  He led me up to the vast attic, where one whole room was filled with climbing equipment — coils of rope, straps and strange clusters of ironmongery hanging from nails on the rafters like giant multicoloured bats above dark Jacobean chests full of the same. He looked me up and down and smiled.

  ‘Let’s get you kitted up.’

  So I boarded a train for the first time in three months: left the sacred combe far behind but carried perhaps its rarest curiosity — Corvin — on the seat beside me as we darted through the lamb-speckled wonders of Cumbria and the southern uplands of Scotland. It was a long journey, and we talked. I told him everything, I think, just as he had predicted — or at least everything that you have yourself read in this account (as to what remains untold, about my marriage or anything else, you and he are free to speculate).

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said at one point, slipping a notebook from his pocket and writing a few lines. ‘I always carry one of these on the train.’ I talked more, and he wrote a few more lines.

  Upon reaching Fort William at dusk we clambered over a low hill that obscured the comforting lights and sounds of the town, and then stumbled and cursed our way across a lumpy, scratchy moor to the banks of a river which produced a blank, eerie noise in the darkness. Further up the valley a vague shadow loomed against the sky. Corvin searched about judiciously and, having found a flat, mossy platform sat down on a boulder beside it.

  ‘Welcome to our humble abode,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Make yourself at home.’

  ‘Won’t the sound of the river keep us awake?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, the ear is accommodative,’ he replied, opening his rucksack and pulling out a small sleeping bag. ‘In half an hour you’ll hear nothing.’

  He was right, and after sleeping soundly I opened my eyes to a blue April sky thronged with benevolent clouds.

  ‘Still or sparkling?’ asked Corvin, carrying our two water bottles from the riverbank. A reckless, rootless feeling came over me as we tied our boots and packed away the sleeping bags — it was like that moment of looking back at the patch of flattened grass as you leave a campsite with the tent on your back, but this heather had suffered not even the imprint of a tent, nothing attached to the ground — we simply stood up and walked away. The human instinct to settle was for a moment troubled by an even older one — the one that had got humanity to wherever he settled in the first place — then it passed and we were just two lads out for a walk.

  As we trooped up the path the mountain drew nearer — the dark alter ego of that friendly, rounded Ben Nevis of family holidays and the Three Peaks Challenge, its monstrous grey buttresses looming forward from the distant, corniced edge of the plateau hanging sharp against the sky. Snow lay thick in the famous gullies and was scattered liberally across the higher slopes. An air of menace hung about the last of the buttresses, a jutting silhouette at the head of the valley, soaring a thousand feet straight to the summit.

  ‘Which one are we going up?’ I asked, trying to identify the least threatening of the many ridges and spurs. Corvin smiled and looked straight ahead towards the last.

  �
��Just think of it as a series of ladders,’ he said, ‘one on top of the other. And here you have no books to worry about — you can hold on with both hands.’

  When we stopped for a sip of water deep under the shadow of the first cliffs, I gazed up and tried to recall the photograph in the locked room, which showed the mountain under much heavier snow.

  ‘Where’s The Temple?’ I murmured. Corvin nodded towards the steepest cliff of them all, crossed by overhanging faults like a suit of armour with plates stacked one upon the other. One overhang was deeper and darker than all the others. ‘The Pediment,’ I mouthed silently, craning my neck. Corvin followed my gaze with narrowed eyes, the wind flicking at his long corkscrews of hair.

  ‘Do you feel it?’ he whispered. ‘The pull, up towards the sky? The lure of the unattainable?’ I did feel something — a premonition of vertigo, a kind of panic in my stomach that reminded me of something else. I took a slow breath.

  ‘Sometimes you have to admit defeat without a fight,’ I said, serenely. Which fights, I wondered, were left to me?

  ‘And sometimes not,’ replied Corvin. ‘Consideremus.’ We stood in reverent silence for a moment, then he turned and bounded on up the path. We passed the lonely climbers’ hut with its wind turbine thrumming away uselessly, and later crossed beneath the looming bulk of our own buttress — behind which, to my relief, there was an easier way up.

  ‘At the lower grades, mountaineering is wonderfully pragmatic,’ said my guide, pointing out the way. ‘It’s all about finding the line of least resistance.’

  ‘And at the higher grades?’ His lips twisted into a grim smile as he glanced back along the cliffs.

  ‘You’ve seen what that’s about.’

  He led me across a steep, slabby hillside back towards the buttress, which we joined on a broad platform above the lowest cliffs. Already the valley was far below and the climbers’ hut a tiny squarish speck, but the mountain seemed to loom above us higher and steeper than ever. There were no more easy ways up.