The Sacred Combe (14 page)

I told him that my father was an architect, a quiet, inventive man who had suffered frequent lacunae of unemployment; that my mother was currently a technician at an independent girls' school; that my confident elder sister and I had attended a good grammar school, and that my nervous younger brother had deliberately failed his Eleven Plus to avoid separation from a friend, but was now vice-captain of the Cambridge University chess team.

The doctor, slowly crunching almonds and nodding attentively, seemed pleased by this feeble sketch and wanted more. In my stumbling way I told him a little about my student years: how university, for all its failings, had dazzled me with possibilities of a better, richer life — intellectual, aesthetic, sensual — when I was too timid and ignorant to seize them.
Crawling before a footmark'd stair
— the words of one of my more imaginative friends at the time. Then just when I felt I had built of myself someone worthy of participation in its mysteries, the university had examined me like a sceptical GP, given me a piece of paper declaring me fit to work, and sent me back to London to earn a living. ‘I feel I'm still waiting for the new term to start, but it never will.'

‘It could,' said the doctor. ‘But perhaps, like me, you feel no allegiance to any particular field.' I nodded. ‘My solution,' he went on, ‘has been to build my own university: the venerable Combe College. I am its student, tutor and examiner all at once. I am its hopeless buffoon and its most brilliant scholar; its enthusiastic novice and its half-senile veteran; I am also, unfortunately, its bursar. M'Synder makes a fine catering manager, young Meaulnes is adequate as clerk of works, and you, for now, are its archivist.

‘The quality of its library compensates for the deficiencies of its teaching. The profound problem of indolence is neatly solved by placing all potential distractions on the syllabus: if the student wishes to lay aside his main task — perhaps I didn't tell you I'm writing a book, a biography of an unexceptional man named Linley — if he wishes instead to spend a morning hunting orchids in the meadow or an afternoon spreading old photographs across the dining table, or perhaps a single uninterrupted hour in Bach's paradise, he does so freely on the understanding that he will be rigorously examined on that topic.'

‘But are you always such a rigorous examiner of yourself ?' I asked, puzzled by the concept. Was it so easy to be one's own tutor?

‘If in doubt,' he replied, lowering his voice to a reverential whisper, ‘the examiner can refer a paper to the external moderators.'

‘And who are they?'

‘Hartley the Elder and his wife Sarah, ably assisted by my parents.' Then he added, in a murmur like embers shifting, ‘and, of course, my wife.'

I said nothing, and after a moment's silence he sat up suddenly, began refilling our glasses and said, ‘I had forgotten that you are such a young man. I was expecting someone much older. I suppose you are barely thirty.' I told him my age and he slapped his knees in wonder. ‘Well, well,' he added, with a sigh. ‘At your age, I — ' he paused, resting his head against the chair-back and gazing up towards the shadowy painting ‘ — I was still living the first of my three lives — I mean, the life before I met Margaret.'

‘I saw her memorial stone,' I said, ‘up at the temple.'

‘Yes. All the moderators are there: that is their court of arbitration.' Then he turned his pained smile to me and said, apologetically, ‘Perhaps by engineering your isolation here — your confinement — I just wanted to make sure of a sympathetic companion: dilated like an eye in the dark.'

‘You weren't the engineer,' I replied, smiling nervously. ‘I had my own godforsaken combe in London, though quite different to yours.' The doctor gazed at me thoughtfully, tipping his glass this way and that, as though weighing its contents.

‘It was cancer, of course,' he said, turning back to the fire. ‘Ovarian cancer: that miraculous originator of new life exacting its price. We shared twenty years together, and now I have lived twenty more without her — twenty-one, it is now. Three lives.'

‘Where did you meet?' I asked.

‘She was a patient, I am ashamed to say,' he replied, distractedly. ‘Nineteen sixty-four.' He told me the city in which he had been practising — it was where I had changed trains on my journey from London. ‘One meets a lot of people, of course, just when they are down on their luck: when their true characters are laid bare. I liked that. Margaret was only in for hayfever, though.' Even as he answered I could tell that his thoughts dwelled on the end of those twenty years, not their beginning, and now he broke off.

‘We had plenty of time to say our farewells,' he said at length, quietly as though to himself. ‘We were loving and wise. At the end — the very end, we thought — she reached a kind of resignation, a state of beauty. But she did not die then: death is not obedient to our wishes or considerate of justice. She died a week later, in pain, confusion and fear.

‘I carry those two last memories of her like pails on a yoke — I have no power to choose between them. Sometimes the first predominates, and I can be happy even as her absence echoes through the house. At other times the second haunts me and I am miserable.'

I just nodded — as I wrote before, I have never been bereaved. But I did think of Sarah's quick heels on the station steps, and my own contradictory memories.

6

It was midmorning on Friday when a bluish note crept into the grey light that washed those thousand fat spines of the history section. I turned, walked to one of the great windows, and stood watching with my hands in my trouser pockets.

Snow. Snow was falling in big clusters dark against the heavy, luminous sky like the German parachutes Geoffrey saw over Crete, but falling faster, falling thickly and straight down for the air was still, silently falling on the Hall and its perfect acre and the combe that held them as in a half-closed hand: steadily mottling away the colour from the lawns and the drifts of leaves and the mossy tops of walls, mottling away the miniature tectonic ridges in the dark stream of ice and the beech leaves frozen into the ponds, alighting on Meaulnes' sweet peas and hardy leeks, and on feathers and shivering squirrel fur, and cluster by cluster mottling away the names and the round stones of the dead.

A cobalt dusk was deepening when the flakes at last became smaller and fewer and then ceased suddenly, their work done: the world transformed. As I closed the curtains I glimpsed the dark figure of Meaulnes invading that pristine realm, brushing snow off the more delicate shrubs with massive gloved hands which he banged together to warm them. Later M'Synder and I tramped and creaked our way by torchlight to a thinly attended evensong, along the ghostly white ribbon of the lane, and returned beneath a blaze of stars, stepping in our own crisp footprints.

I rose early, surprising the reluctant dawn, and was excited to see that more snow had fallen but dismayed by a heavy mist enveloping the bowed plum trees. It was as though the elements had determined to do away with the world altogether — first silencing it with frost, then bleaching and blanketing it with snow, and now erasing with mist the last stubborn pencil lines of the birches and the division between earth and sky.

After tucking a borrowed map and compass and a few homemade biscuits into my jacket, I laced the nailed boots tightly and clattered out onto the swept doorstep — Sarah's quick heels echoed again, and, more distant but just as sadly, my own little rugby boots on the pavilion steps. I plunged resolutely up Rose's path into the foggy fairyland of the woods, where the heavily burdened trees found consolation in dropping snow down the back of my neck if I brushed against them, neatly complementing the sensation produced by my snow-filled boots. ‘The man needs gaiters!' said Geoffrey's cheery voice in my head. ‘I rustled up three splendid pairs from an old canvas horse-rug.'

Above the woods the snow was knee-deep, and my eyes had nothing to focus on except a few reassuring periscopes of bracken that guided me onward. I was hot and breathless by the time the slope eased — then, just as it had when I had climbed above the pines on the last steps to the temple, the sky seemed to open over me. A golden glow kindled in the mist to my right and, as I climbed higher, coalesced into the gleaming eye of the sunrise. Now an outcrop loomed up to my left and I laboured up it in a welter of sweat and tumbling snow, planted my boots firmly on its little summit and looked out.

I hope you are grateful — I have just toiled a second time up that hill, numbed my hands and soaked my boots a second time in my imagination, just to show you this:
the combe as a porcelain bowl brimming with fire
.

That was right for the first glance, but the details require a different simile: surely the mist laps like a golden lagoon around the snowy bay of the hilltops, and to the east lies in a blazing ocean over the frozen blue seabed county hidden beneath, its curls and ripples vanishing away into a horizon as sharp as that of any sea. We stand squinting, you and I, at the prow of this lumpy, snowy Argo, and turn our gaze to the west, to the drowned combe and the white lighthouse-cairn of white Grey Man, and suddenly there is a tiny rayed pinprick of reflected light — not from the cairn but from a little spur of land below, an insignificant wrinkle in that snowy brow, just peeping above the vaporous sea.

If the freeze had gently pushed the doctor and me closer together as though we were seeking warmth in each other, had persuaded us to relax the rules of our game, to answer a few questions, at least, without their being asked, now the silent profundity of snowfall seemed to wrap M'Synder and me in a blanket of easy fellowship. She, perhaps encouraged by my repeat visit to church, began to soften her businesslike attitude and treated me more like the son of an old friend, or a rarely seen nephew visiting from overseas. That weekend I split a few dozen logs for her (dangerous work for the clumsy and short-sighted) and then lent my height to the substantial task she called ‘the annual shuffle'.

With the cassette player chirping away merrily (M'Synder shared my father's enthusiasm for country and western music), our two little glasses of American beer on the mantelpiece and Dolly the cat curled up on the chair arm, sleepily batting my hand with her paw if I held it out for her (‘Gimme five,' I would say), the parlour defied the monochrome grandeur of the world outside. First we took down all the pictures and stacked them on the table for dusting and polishing. Then I attacked the naked walls with a feather duster, dislodging cocoons, sleepy spiders, dusty strands of webs and traces of soot, and M'Synder brought down a box of additional pictures (‘the subs bench') which now had a chance to make their case to her discriminating eye. The figure drawings I had noticed on my arrival were by Rose, of course, and M'Synder gave these particular attention.

‘This un's new,' she said of one large picture, standing it on the table beneath the brass lamp. ‘My Christmas present. What d'you think?' It was a charcoal drawing of a man (overalls, boots — surely Meaulnes) wielding an axe, seen half from behind. Rose had caught the moment before contact — the dark smear of the axe-head inches above the balanced log, the man's body in relaxed, effortless motion. His back and shoulders were the focus of the piece — the clothes and skin stripped away to reveal a brutal
écorché
of overlapping muscles that seemed vulnerable and wretched, as though he had been flogged, even as they perpetrated a violence of their own.

‘I think it's superb,' I said warmly, flexing my own aching shoulders, ‘although rather brutal.'

‘Brutal?' she returned, dismissively. ‘Life isn't all flowers and pretty landscapes.' She held it out to me. ‘It can go right over the fireplace: top spot. As for these' — she pointed to a pair of yellowed engravings that had occupied that position — ‘they can go back in the box.'

Occasionally I peered out of the fogged window and imagined the doctor studying, tutoring, examining, alone in his chill university, or patiently remembering his earlier, happier lives.

A half-hearted thaw began on the damp, gusty Monday of my third week in the combe, and by Wednesday morning a few sheltered drifts and shovelled heaps of snow were all that remained around the house and along the lane. Only the hilltops were still a brilliant white, like clouds anchored to the earth.

I let myself in and passed through the empty study to the library, as the doctor had bidden me do if the door was standing open. Something caught my eye: a book on the near corner of his desk, with a slip of paper secured by a rubber band. The note was brief and written in a bold hand, and I had read it without thinking: ‘
Arnie,
' it read, ‘
Here is the book, you forgetful old fish. Forfeit: no whisky for a fortnight. See you next week.
' It was signed only with an elegant, inky squiggle like the hoofprint of a deer or goat.

I stood frowning for a while at the library table, fingertips again on the mahogany, listening to the silence. Yes, it is possible to remember silence — I remember it vividly as I write this. (Is silence a sensation? Discuss.) As I listened, I made adjustments to my conception of the doctor as a recluse resigned to the Boethian consolations of intellect and memory: now he was somebody's ‘Arnie' as well.

Politics: that was my next station stop. On the warped and stiffened flyleaf of the first English translation of Machiavelli were scrawled the words ‘
That ye may know
' in the hand I now recognised as Hartley's: I supposed he was not a fan. Here too were Hobbes, Paine, Bentham and the rest, applying their formidable minds to the formidable problems of our coexistence. As for the doctor, he might occasionally receive playful notes but he did not, as far as I knew, read a newspaper. That birch-fringed hillside of Hart Top that by geological chance had shouldered into the combe from the north not only condemned the house to blue shade on winter mornings, but also screened it from the village, the county, the world — and while the sun would peep over indulgently by ten o'clock, the world and its afflictions might easily be forgotten. What were his politics? Did he vote? I could not guess.