The Sacred Combe (18 page)

‘Then how did Hartley make his money?' I asked.

‘Ah. He didn't have to — it just seemed to attach itself to him. He won a hundred pounds in an ingenious bet during his first term at Cambridge, while his father was still counting every shilling. But that was just the beginning. Next came a bestselling satirical pamphlet — he used the anagrammatical pseudonym
Beachcomber
, which others have since borrowed — then a speculative investment in a cotton carding invention that paid off tenfold, and always a stream of influential friends. Within a few years of leaving home, he was wealthy enough to disown his parents and go travelling across Europe.'

‘A nice talent to have,' I said, ruefully. Of course, I had earned a good salary at the bank — more than either of my parents — but money had hardly attached itself to me.

‘Indeed,' he replied. ‘Sadly I have not inherited it. I am a clinger-on, like my namesake. But of course I'm not really a blood-descendant of any of them.'

‘Oh? I didn't realise that.'

‘Hartley's son Samuel — we are now in the next century, the nineteenth — had one surviving daughter, and it was her stepson who began the tradition of inheriting both house and name, and who called his own son Hartley (my great uncle) and his daughter Catherine. There are different kinds of heredity — in my own humble way I am the elder Hartley's thought-descendant, I hope.' As he said this his voice became quiet and solemn, as though his thoughts had run forward to a different subject.

‘I'm afraid I — had a look in the other room,' I said, clumsily. ‘And Juliet has told me a little about Sam. I'm sorry.'

He sat still for a while, breathing audibly in the silence and seeming to shrink slightly into his chair at each breath. ‘Yes,' he murmured at last. ‘Well, there you are. What did
that
young man inherit, and from whom? He too left little enough behind him — rarely wrote so much as a postcard.' A pause, a few more deflating breaths. ‘He saved a great many lives of course, as a rescue volunteer and as a doctor, but no one will remember him for that. The temple
he
erected is the red line on that photograph you saw, through the famous overhang. Those red lines are his works, I suppose. He was too busy living his life to record it or reflect on it.
in medias res
— into the midst of things — that was his motto. But answer me this — why would anyone want to climb the same mountain a hundred times? Why?'

I had no answer. The fire's single flame flicked indecisively between existence and its nameless opposite, while outside the spent wind gave a last exhausted sigh in those branches from which restless jackdaws had long departed.

When I returned to work, the doctor, recovering some of his brightness as though waking from a recurrent bad dream, told me to replace the note where I had found it, since he would leave a mention of its existence and whereabouts in the archives. I had found it, in fact, in the very
Hale's Historia
that was apparently intended for a Mr Blagdon (a colleague, the doctor suggested) but that, like Rose, M'Synder and the scandalous Diderot, had settled in the combe for good.

As dusk fell and I continued the search (by now I was as mindlessly efficient as one of Hartley's profitable carding machines), I reflected on the doctor's words.
Too busy living his life
— that phrase had jangled a memory of something similar: ‘
Lawrence spent most of his short life living
.' I cannot be the only one to have been struck by this odd assertion on the flyleaf of D.H.L.'s Penguin classics. ‘
Nevertheless he produced an amazing quantity of work ...
' it goes on. Is working not living? But I suppose we know what the biographer means: Living, with a capital L. And Samuel Comberbache, the doctor's son, had spent all of his short life doing it. Which begged the question: what the hell was I doing with mine?
I am spending it hunched on a cushion
, I thought, and remembered the glimpsed crow winging effortlessly down the wind.

The other idea whose dimpled impression I contemplated was the doctor's notion of thought-heredity. The stones beside the temple recorded the passage of these precious thoughts down the swift centuries, with each legatee adding his or her own unique infusions of personality to the trickle of ideas that had steadily swelled into something like a creed. And the young doctor, the yellow-haired running man, had inherited everything and dashed it high with his own fierce appetite and energy. He had joined forces with a beautiful and talented wife, had honed his will to a razor on those gleaming ramparts of ice, and then had broken his body — died without issue,
anno MM
.

Rose was the heir to Hartley Stillwell Newton's creed now. She would receive whatever the doctor could pass on with his dry voice and pained smile, turn it in her sharp, wilful young mind, and do with it what she chose.

12

You are more than halfway through my story, and I am still describing the fourth of the seventeen weeks I promised in my opening sentence. Has the combe lived up to those
five unremarkable words
? Has it lived up to the title of the book? Not yet, perhaps. That first sentence was whispering in my head for months before I typed it out and tried to follow it with a second and a third. Months more have passed (
lifting and lowering me
, et cetera) while I try to honour my promise. ‘Be silent,' reads the inscription under the hand of Salvator Rosa, who glowers down at me from the wall as I write, ‘unless what you have to say is better than silence.' You and he and I are all hoping that the best is yet to come.

It was Thursday morning when I heard the piano for the last time — neither Bach nor Chopin this time, but a wandering jazz lead over a minimal, discordant left hand. I listened for a while, almost as delighted by the change in mood as I had been by the black-eyed robin on that white first morning. The shuffling, sporadic rhythm might have robbed the house of its timelessness and pinned it to the post-war era, but did not — the pianist, I thought, could equally be Juliet, or the youthful organ-scholar uncle bound for Arras, or Bach himself on his day off.

I mounted the stairs confidently this time, crossed the landing towards the piano (it was Juliet playing, after all), and was stopped in my tracks by the glimpse of a second piano in an adjoining room — at which was seated a second pianist. The music stopped and both pianists looked round. I glanced from one to the other.

‘Which of us plays better?' asked Juliet, with mock sincerity.

It was a mirror. But I was unsatisfied and went to investigate. It was set in a narrow alcove, stretching from waist-height to the ceiling. On the shelf in front stood a dark greyish vase holding a spray of pine — or rather, I realised, bending over it, the perfect half of a vase standing against the glass.

‘The other half is behind you,' whispered Juliet, playfully. I spun round to see an identical mirrored alcove opposite, beside the window, at which stood an identical vase. Behind it, a thousand more vases and a thousand peering ignorami tunnelled into infinity. ‘It's Greek,' she went on. ‘Very rare. Arnold operated on it with his father's surgical saw — a risky procedure performed without consultation, but luckily Stella saw the funny side.'

I followed her glance round to two small sketch-like portraits hanging behind the piano — an earnest, square-faced man with his hair plastered back, wearing a grey suit, tie and watch chain, and an attractive woman with short, dark, boyish hair like Rose's, feline blue eyes and thin scarlet lips. These were the moderators — the doctor's mountain-climbing parents.

‘I'm sorry I interrupted,' I said, sitting on the low listener's chair. ‘I just came up to listen.'

‘How's the quest for the unholy epistle?' she asked, beginning to play a few experimental chords. I watched her for a while.

‘Am I going to find anything?' I returned at last. ‘Does this letter exist? Rose once suggested it might not.' Juliet smiled down at the keyboard, reinstating a soft treble line.

‘Arnold is man a whose motives are hard to guess,' she said, lowering her voice. ‘He enjoys mystery. When I first came here, fifteen years ago, I felt quite uncomfortable. I thought he was mocking me, teasing me for being unworthy of Sam. But he wasn't really. It was only years later that I learned how to get on with him.'

As she spoke I observed her body in profile — the slight incurves of her lumbar spine and the back of her neck, the forward tilt of her head, the graceful angles and convexities.

‘If he says there's a lost letter,' she went on, turning to me, which made me look away sheepishly, ‘then there
is
a lost letter. And if you want to know something, ask him straight.'

I let her play for a while, and then asked her if she had wanted to be a professional performer.

‘I was, for a while. I performed in a trio while I was at college in London and for a few years afterwards, and gave solo recitals. But I didn't quite have enough' — she performed a little virtuoso run with the lead, of the sort that wins approving moans in jazz bars — ‘consistency.'

‘Do you compose?' I asked, naively.

‘I improvise,' she replied, laughing, ‘and make up themes that I revisit for months, sometimes years.' She shifted to a different time signature — three slow beats in the bar — and lowered her voice again. ‘What you saw downstairs is the only composition I've written down since leaving college. I wasn't sure what would happen to it if I left it swimming up here.' She touched her forehead and played on. ‘I suppose I was afraid that — that the feelings would fade, even that my memories of Sam would fade.'

‘And — have they?' I asked, hesitantly. She glanced at me and gave a short hiss of breath that might have signified dismissal or acceptance. Then she wound the piece down into a descending tangle of notes and stopped.

‘Yes — no — I'm not sure. But the sonata doesn't feel like mine anymore. It belongs to Arnold, or to Sam.'

That day and the next I was searching the reference shelves, beside the oak door in the corner that was, once again, firmly locked. The volumes were heavy and the work more than usually repetitive (bordering on the insane, I thought), so Juliet's reassurance was timely.

Even reference works have their patriarch — surely the great
Encyclopédie
edited by none other than Denis Diderot. The doctor told me that Hartley, despite his adolescent reading and later travels, had a shaky grasp of French when the first crated volumes arrived in seventeen seventy-two — but within a year he was fluent. ‘He was fascinated by the scope and ambition of the
Encyclopédie
,' he said, ‘and its exaltation of reason above custom and superstition. He rapidly drew up his own modified classification of human knowledge and sent it to Diderot, explaining the differences. The reply was appreciative but wearily observed that a new edition was unlikely in the present century.'

There was also a Victorian edition of the
Britannica
(a publication Hartley had shunned), an Edwardian
DNB
, and a vast
OED
from nineteen twenty-eight. Suddenly I glimpsed a ray of hope, and went to the study door. ‘What year did your uncle Hartley die?' I asked, eagerly.

‘Nineteen thirty,' replied the doctor, without looking up, and my heart sank: that was tomorrow accounted for, anyway.

It was the sound of a mechanical lawnmower, like the one my mother used to lean into on our little suburban lawn, that woke me from a happy dream on Saturday morning. My ex-wife and I had been travelling through some warm and expansive country where to her delight and amusement everyone we met was called Samuel or Sarah, except for a couple of Arnolds (my imagination drew the line at Hartley). After waking I lay still for a while reflecting on whether, if I ever did find a second love, as I slept beside her unimaginable body in my second marriage bed I might go on blissfully dreaming of Sarah, just as, in dreams, my home was always the childhood home that my waking eyes had not seen for a decade or more — its successors remaining stubbornly unrecognised by that inscrutable arbiter of significance who rules the sleeping mind. The thought sickened me.

A lawnmower? The impossible sound faded away reassuringly, and I clambered shivering out of bed to open the curtains. Beyond the second curtain of condensation the defiantly un-mowed world glistened under drizzle leaking from a low sky.

It was Saturday, which meant bacon, and M'Synder was just bringing the plates when the lawnmower came back. I opened the front door to find Juliet standing beside the Cortina in a long fitted coat and black beret, leaning casually against it just as she had leant on the folio table. The red-haired boy was at the wheel.

‘I'm off,' she said, over the rasping engine. ‘Just stopped to say goodbye to you both, and to deliver a message.'

Last night Arnold had cooked her one of his famous chestnut roasts, and he was so pleased with the result that he wanted to try it on me tonight at seven-thirty — that was the message.

‘And he promised to tell you the story of Hartley and Sarah and the letter,' she added. ‘Make sure you hold him to it.'

She and M'Synder embraced, and then we kissed with an awkward formality. (I hate kissing women like that — the male sex is divided into those for whom it presents inexplicable difficulties and those for whom it does not. Maybe it's something to do with being too tall or wearing glasses, or maybe we hate it because we like it too much: cool pinpricks of rain from her hat grazed my cheek as I straightened.)