The Sacred Combe (13 page)

‘Of course you do,' he snapped back, ‘you're a lapsed physicist and astronomer.'

‘The radial fins I understand,' I began, ‘and the brass calendars on which the beams of the rising and setting sun will shine. The dark band was of some crystalline stone, perhaps set with glass to scatter the light. But the giant prow —' I paused, frowning.

‘Confinement!' he cried. ‘It is not enough to have a narrow slit in the roof — the confinement must have
depth
. So much depth that you didn't even notice it though you walked right beneath it.'

‘But the winter sun is too low,' I pursued, dissatisfied. ‘It seemed to be streaming through the door, but the door was shut.'

The doctor cocked his eyebrow critically. ‘You did not, perhaps, notice the vertical slit in the buttress at the north end.'

I obeyed the unspoken command to think. ‘Which conceals a narrow strip of mirror,' I suggested, quietly.

He smiled. ‘Imperceptibly curved to produce the sweeping beam. My parents had to replace some of the optics, of course, but they had all the original plans and sections. Once you see them you will quickly grasp the design.'

As the doctor paced back and forth along the carpet, I noticed that on reaching the fireplace he turned his shoe on the same spot every time, and here the fibres were almost worn through by his years of sporadic restlessness. He must have followed my gaze as I watched him approach the abrasion, for he paused on that spot and said, quietly, ‘Confinement again, Mr Browne — limit the damage to one place if you can. There it can be measured, at least, if not mended.' As he turned and walked on his gaze seemed to flicker, just for a moment, towards the locked door in the corner of the room.

The following day was just as windy but grey and much colder, and by the time I walked back to the cottage in the evening the wind was swirling around the combe in long, fearsome gusts whose approach I could hear in the trees well before they washed over me, flinging sharp sleet. Later, as I tried to sleep, one of the plum trees groaned sadly at the onset of each gust and I was reminded of a grim painting in a London gallery — a couple take their wedding vows on a human skull behind which glimmers a four-word inscription:
We Behowlde Ower Ende
.

I stepped outside the next morning and nearly slipped over on a patch of ice. I began to pick my way carefully along the track but soon slipped again, and then again. The freeze had settled itself into the combe like a dragon gloating sleepily on its spoils, silencing the stream and dismaying even the bravest of the birds so that all I could hear were my own tentative footsteps and the last satisfied sighs of the storm circling the valley. Glassy traps lurked malevolently in every chink and hollow of the lane awaiting the careless heel, and my body gradually stiffened with its own nervousness (which is distinct from that of the mind) as though it were itself surrendering to the frost.

The doctor stood at his hearth, wearing a woollen cap with comical earflaps that fastened under his chin — a garb for which he apologised, saying he was fighting off a cold. The fire was stacked high with logs which cracked and spat ferociously as I told him of my difficulties in the lane.

‘Excuse me for a moment,' he said, seeming to have an idea. ‘Pour yourself a coffee while I'm gone.' I heard his slow, steady tread on the stairs, and after a few minutes he returned carrying a pair of leather boots.

‘My father gave me these forty years ago,' he said, examining them fondly, ‘but I disappointed him — didn't follow in those particular footsteps, or boot-steps. They're tricouni-nailed boots for climbing mountains — rather superseded now, I believe, but perfect for an icy lane. He bought them large to accommodate thick socks,' he added, glancing at my feet, ‘so I think you'll be able to squeeze them on. I always kept them oiled — don't ask me why.' He handed me the heavy boots, whose soles were studded with gleaming knobbles of steel.

‘Your father was a mountaineer, then?' I began, as we sat down to our coffee.

‘Yes, and my mother too,' he replied, with a pained nod. ‘My father took it up in the thirties with a couple of Scotsmen he'd met at work. They made or adapted all their own clothes and equipment — stormproof tents, sleeping mats made of tar and cardboard, waxed coats cut short to the waist, plus-fours let out at the knee, alum-treated tam o'shanters — and that's before we even begin on the ropes and ironmongery.'

‘Mainly in Scotland?' I asked, suddenly remembering Meaulnes' improvised doorstop.
Piton
— that was the word: I had seen some in a local history museum in Windermere.

‘Lakeland and north Wales for rock climbing weekends in the summer, and Scotland for what he called “rock and ice” in the winter. Then in nineteen forty he joined the Marines as a medic. His first and last action was the Battle of Crete: two chaotic days of fighting followed by four years in a prison camp.

‘He was allowed to send one postcard each month,' he went on, going to his desk and taking from a drawer a small leatherbound folio. ‘These are the thirty-nine that arrived — the rest were lost on the way.'

The postcards were held in neat slipcases and looked almost as good as new, bearing only the creases or stains they had suffered in their original transit. Each was covered in tiny, meticulous writing accompanied by intricate ink drawings of mountain crags and the routes by which they might be scaled, or the wide vistas commanded by their summits. On the reverse, contrasting starkly with the care and love suffusing these compositions, an array of brutal postmarks was stamped beside the simple, familiar address.

‘It was only when he came home that my mother realised these were excerpts from a book he had been writing — but the finished manuscript did not survive the journey, and he had to start again with only these postcards to guide him.'

‘Did he send no other news of himself, and ask nothing about you and your mother?' I asked, leafing through the cards, which seemed to contain detailed accounts of past climbs, ideas for future expeditions and miniature essays on more abstract subjects, such as ‘the philosophy of risk' and ‘ode to a mountain crow'.

‘I suppose his implication was that as a captive the only news he had was this news of his roaming mind, and that he had no request that my mother was not already doing her best to satisfy. She used to read the cards to me as extra-special bedtime stories.'

‘And the book?'

‘
Rocks and Remembrances
— it was published in nineteen forty-eight and sold a few hundred copies, then became something of a cult hit among climbers in the sixties and seventies. It is still occasionally reprinted by a small publisher in Kendal.'

I warmed my hands around the tall bone-china mug. The fire had settled into a murmuring, vigorous mound of flame, and began at last to radiate heat.

‘And you said your mother climbed too,' I prompted.

‘Ah yes, there was a bold lady,' he said, fondly. ‘My father took her to the Highlands for a holiday before I was born, and she demanded to see what he had climbed. A few hours later they were a thousand feet above the valley, he anxiously taking in the rope while she swarmed up behind him with her skirt hitched up, brightly pointing out handholds that he had missed. I think she just loved to see him in his element. She climbed rather less after the war: my fault, probably.'

‘But your father went back to it?'

The doctor stood up slowly and held his hands out to the fire. ‘Have you ever driven through Glen Coe?' he asked. I had not, but I had crossed part of it once on a long walk with some schoolfriends. ‘In that case you will remember that mountain with the gloriously forbidding name, Buachaille Etive Mòr, the Great Shepherd, which stands at the mouth of the glen, glaring out across the Moor of Rannoch.' I did remember it — a stern, seemingly perpendicular triangle of rock visible for tens of miles.

‘My father was not a demonstrative man,' murmured the doctor, now leaning against the mantelpiece, ‘but he broke into tears and had to stop the old baby Austin when he first saw that mountain again after the war. For the whole hour-long walk across the moor to its foot he couldn't stop crying, as he reminded himself that he was free to walk any way he chose — to stop, to turn around, to go on. When at last he laid his enfeebled hands on the first cold, soaring slab of rhyolite the years rolled away and he crumpled to his knees in a puddle of water. A description of that morning formed the epilogue for which his book was later best known — and he told my mother it was the defining moment of his life.

‘It was light, you see,' he added, grasping his chair and shuffling backwards towards the desk, ‘splintering into a dark space.'

5

I had now passed the study door in my search of the books beneath the gallery, and commenced work on the long history section opposite the windows. It began, appropriately, with an elegant bilingual folio edition of Herodotus, published in Amsterdam in seventeen sixty-three. On each page the columns of weird, curling Greek and stately, regular Latin were like twin indictments of my ignorance.

Did this magisterial patriarch approve of the thousand volumes ranked beneath him, I asked myself — his burgeoning brood? I was often tempted thus to consider the authors represented by a row of books as personalities which might be of diverse ages but which were nevertheless contemporary, contiguous and mutually acquainted. Their reassuring coexistence on the shelf disguised the careful branches of influence that wound through time and space to hold each volume in its own unique position relative to the others. The illusion was perhaps a consequence of
compression
— if each glistening curl of ink pressed onto a page was a tiny separate act of compression, then here was their massed accumulation: a vast web of centuries and continents pressed tightly into a matrix of shelves eight feet square. With a simple stretch, lean or stoop of his creaking young body, Samuel Browne could span the orbit of civilisation.

The next book was a stout translation from the thirties which, on its own, I would have considered a rather magnificent volume, but about whose English text a sheepish air seemed to hang. At the contents page a fine black hair nestled along the spine. I had encountered many such fragments of the restless, Heraclitian world, caught inadvertently in the adamantine crystal of compression — hairs, crumbs, a plane seed carried on a late summer breeze, a flattened midge with a faint brown stain of literary blood — trapped in the wrong domain until some gallant future reader might release them back to the swept floor of their native reality.

It was to the sudden music of Bach yet again — a cantata this time: oboe and voices in a regal dance — that the doctor released me for the evening. Or did not quite release me, since he asked me to join him for a glass of wine in the parlour where he had lit a roaring blaze.

He lit no lamps and we took our seats in the flickering orange glow of burning pine, which threw our magnified, wavering shadows onto the great glistening landscapes behind us (mine onto
Hope
and his onto
Despair
— surely accidental) and softly picked out the plasterwork relief far above. Taboni's homage to truth loomed over us in deep shadow, its subject now a faint but defiant ghost of her former radiant self, a suggestion, a promise of beauty in a window on which night had fallen.

The bottle of wine, having been warmed on the hearth ‘to remind it of sunburnt mirth and the warm south,' stood between us on a little table with a peculiar silver object which as I sat down I identified as the glinting, scaly likeness of a giant walnut shell. The doctor grasped the lid, lifted it with a flourish and peered inside.

‘Roasted almonds!' he murmured. ‘My favourite. M'Synder never disappoints. She and I exhausted the chocolate pennies last week.' He leaned back with a satisfied sigh, holding an almond between his finger and thumb.

‘This morning I gave you the image of Arnold Comberbache aged seven,' he began, ‘listening from his bed in this house to his father's words spoken gravely by his mother, who holds a postcard at the lamp with a steady, long-fingered hand. But I have no corresponding image of you, Mr Browne, and I am curious. Give me one now — an image of your past.'

Overcoming an instinctive flinch of defensiveness, I followed his example and plucked an image from the harmless reaches of childhood. I told him that after my first day at infant school the teacher had declaimed sternly to my mother, ‘This child can read and write, but it cannot hold a pencil!' This was merely a symptom, I explained (to the doctor, I mean), of my failure to grasp the fundamental
chirality
or handedness of the written word: at best I began each line with my left hand and then switched to my right, but often I inadvertently wrote from right to left in mirror-text, or placed correct characters in reverse order, or reverse characters in correct order, or employed some combination of all these eccentricities. The first time I wrote my name, I called myself
Mazenworb
— a name by which my sister still calls me. ‘The symmetry of the temple reminded me of my own unhanded infancy,' I said, ‘before I was broken in to the chiral world.'

‘But of course the temple is handed in one sense,' remarked the doctor, ‘just as a symmetrical keyhole belies the handed lock within. Indeed I suspect celestial motion is one source of our handedness. But tell me more about yourself.'