The Sacred Combe (23 page)

Now her orphan's scar of grief seemed like a memorial to the wrong man, a man whose memorials were everywhere, while the memory of her own beloved parents lay trapped inside her just as their bodies had lain frozen inside a thousand tons of snow. Or so I speculated, shuddering and wrapping the blankets tight as two owls began calling to each other in the woods. I hoped I would see her again, but feared it too.

The next morning I was back at the shelves after my day off in the fresh air. I spent a few hours working through the music section, which I associated with Juliet, who had offered to search it, but also with her brother. The echoes of music that seemed to follow Corvin were produced not by his slender fingers but by the grace of his movements: the one quality that I envied him from our first meeting was that of
physical repose
. He was rarely calculating in his words but never in his movements — his slim body turned and drifted effortlessly without the intervention of thought, making mine, with its creaking knees and big nervous hands, feel like a reluctantly reanimated host. ‘No wonder his wife left him,' you are perhaps thinking, and maybe I am selling myself short: I'm a sound enough physical specimen and those creaking joints can even cut a few dance moves when lubricated by alcohol, but this was another case of suffering by comparison — of being shown up.

At last I reached the poetry shelves and cast my eye along the rippling, intimidating spines. I was by now familiar with the library's chronological system — books were ordered roughly according to the author's first date of publication. ‘Each branch of civilisation follows its own narrative,' the doctor had told me. ‘The letter “A” has no claim to pre-eminence, nor have Zola and Zwingli, as far as I know, any common cause for shame.'

I found Furey on the fourth shelf down, between James Beattie and George Crabbe. I had expected one or two slim volumes — the encyclopaedia had told me he died aged just seventeen — but instead there were nearly a dozen rather stout ones: two copies of
Poems Supposed to Have Been Written by Thomas Dowley
;
The Works of Thomas Furey
in three pristine octavos;
Miscellanies in Prose and Verse by Thomas Furey
;
Furey's Poetical Works with an Essay by Walter Smeat
in two green volumes
; Furey's Dowley Poems
and several others. The boy's letter would not, of course, be hidden among his own verses — unless by some facile double bluff — but I searched anyway.

Since for two centuries Combe Hall's collection had apparently been pruned as it grew, had been compressed and recompressed until the shelves groaned with density just like the knotty espaliers of Meaulnes' orchard, it held multiple editions only if there was a good reason — a
narrative
. What was the story here? On the title page of the first edition of the
Poems
Hartley had written a hurried inscription, now fading: ‘
When we are gone, the words are the last bridge. If our successors keep them well, theirs shall be a boundless realm. Farewell, brilliant foolish boy that I loved.
'

Strange words caught at me as I turned the pages, whispering tangles of consonants that commanded my lips to trace them out —
enthoghteynge
,
upswalynge
,
benymmynge
: if these were the bridge, where could it lead?

As I searched and browsed the different volumes, failing to read a single poem from beginning to end but wondering what all this printing and reprinting, editing and re-editing of the same words was supposed to achieve, I realised that they were
not
the same words. For
enthoghtenyge
Smeat's Victorian edition helpfully substituted
intending
, while another edition confidently plumped for
thinking
. There were many other changes that even I could perceive — lines considered indecent (in other words, those that hit the mark) were missing, metres stumbled, rhymes rang false and the music died.

Whose words were these supposed to be? Furey had never written them (later I discovered that Smeat the distinguished philologist had contended otherwise, but, as the doctor put it to me, is it the editor's job to reverse by clumsy conjecture the stages of a poem's composition?). On the flyleaf of Smeat was written the qualification I had seen before, this time in a different hand, perhaps Stella's: ‘
That ye may know.
'

4

Rab the tanker-driver and Corvin greeted each other like old friends when we ducked into The Croked Hand on Saturday afternoon, and I stayed at the bar with Agnes while they caught up. She leaned across the single ale pump and studied my companion over her reading glasses with a look of amusement.

‘Swinburne,' she said suddenly. ‘Don't you think?' I flashed a confused smile, and she shook her head. ‘Never mind. How's the good doctor this week?'

‘He seems to be well,' I said. ‘I haven't seen much of him, to be honest. He and Corvin spend a lot of time talking, though. I mean, they seem to get on well.'

‘Do they, now?' she murmured, looking him up and down with renewed interest. At that moment he pivoted round and motioned to the back table with his glass.

‘I was telling you about Sam,' he said as we sat down, ‘and I might as well finish the story.' Since Wednesday we had met only briefly, though I had often heard his voice in the doctor's study or glimpsed him swaggering nonchalantly along one of the garden paths. Once I caught the slightly discomfiting wail of a violin in the hands of someone competent but out of practice.

‘After the avalanche,' he began, in the more measured tone that he reserved for narrative, ‘Rose went to live with Pippa's parents, and Sam and Julie got on with their lives in Derbyshire. What else can you do? Lots of people lose their best friends, after all — motorbike accident, drunken misadventure, killed in action. As for the Foresters, they died
doing something they loved
— that's the usual phrase, isn't it? At least he loved it — she preferred downhill.' This last remark, almost a joke, was murmured into his glass. It made me wince inwardly, but this was just Corvin's way — telling it, disregarding all games. Maybe he had learned it in the Navy.

‘And you went to Dartmouth,' I prompted, to fill the gap.

‘Yes — cut my hair and didn't see any family for a while. There was some kind of falling out with Pippa's parents — God knows why. Sam took lots of bookings for courses, I think — lost himself in work, stayed away from the crags unless he got a call-out with the MRT. I think Julie hoped he would give up climbing altogether and find something else to do, turn over a new leaf, but that winter he went up to Scotland to work with the Lochaber team and started climbing a few routes on his own. Nothing difficult, he said, just getting back in touch with the mountains,
doing something he loved
.

‘The following year he began climbing hard routes solo. We don't really know how hard or how many — for the first time he kept secrets from Julie and impatiently dismissed her concerns. He went to Switzerland for a course and stayed on for several weeks without warning, presumably to climb. He starting missing call-outs, and took little interest when Rose came to the combe and refused to leave.

‘What Julie didn't realise was that he was training for something. When he and Adam forced
The Temple
, the climbing fraternity had been surprised to hear that it was Adam who led through the great roof or overhang — the Pediment as it is now called, the
crux
of the route — since Sam was supposed to be the technical genius and Adam the steady hand. Adam had said it was decided by the toss of a coin the night before. The key was a short, clean wall, unclimbable in summer but sometimes glazed with a thin smear of ice emanating from a fracture in the overhang — its only line of weakness. It's what climbers call a
desperate pitch
. Now three years had passed and despite a couple of serious attempts no one had been able to repeat the climb.

‘It was a fine morning in late January,' he went on, in a low voice. ‘A pair of local climbers spotted Sam's body on the snow at the foot of the cliff, three hundred feet below the overhang. He had tried to self-belay but the Pediment is almost impossible to protect, and the belay had ripped out when he fell: his axes were still leashed to his wrists. Julie hadn't even known he was in Scotland.' He took another draught and gazed down at the glass. ‘Of course he knew his anchors were weak, and a fall would probably be fatal.'

‘Did he want to die, then?' I asked.

‘I don't think so.'

‘In that case, why did he do it?' Corvin seemed to acknowledge the question without responding, without suggesting that he did or did not know the answer.

‘That's really as far as the story goes. Decline and fall.'

We drank quite a few rounds of Bachebrook after that. Corvin lounged back in his chair, content to watch me if the conversation dried up, or to eavesdrop on snatches of Gabriel's oratory.

‘What do you do now,' I asked, ‘apart from attending to your “research project” and' — he raised his eyebrows expectantly — ‘drifting?'

‘Well,' he replied, smiling and crossing his arms, ‘if you're going to clobber me with my sister's words, I might as well say that in her letter she wrote, “
Why are shy young men so exhausting?
''' He gave a perfect impression of her low, serious voice.

‘Am I?' I said, slightly put out.

‘Not to me, you idiot,' he laughed. ‘You don't have the hots for
me
, do you?' I blushed, remembering my absurd, misplaced covetousness (yes, even a divorcee can blush). ‘Of course,' he went on, narrowing his eyes as though focusing a beam, ‘you realise we'll have to tell each other everything in the end. We are the future, you and I. Two young men at liberty. Fit, educated, good with heights, and gloriously directionless.'

‘Speak for yourself,' I said, consciously grasping at straws. ‘I happen to be employed.' He laughed.

‘And when you leave the combe? Will the bank take you back?'

‘I fear it might,' I sighed, thinking again of the last volume of Gibbon stoically gathering dust in a South London suburb, and hearing the hum of the vacuum and a faint, ominous rumour of the panic.

‘To answer your original question,' said Corvin brightly, ‘after I abandoned ship I got a job with a “strategic consultancy” full of smooth-talking ex-servicemen. You can imagine the pitch — helping businesses to get the competition on their radar screens, or launch an amphibious assault on their target market, or steer through the minefields of regulation towards the open waters of success. Innocent fun, incomprehensibly well paid but not really my thing. I chucked it in after six months and took up drifting.'

‘And what happens next?'

‘We'll work on that together,' he replied enigmatically, stacking his empty glass on top of mine. ‘Imagination is the key.'

On Monday (week seven, for those counting) I asked after Corvin and the doctor told me he had gone away. ‘The seven-league boots are gone, you see,' he said. ‘That's the only way to tell. He'll be back.'

I advanced mechanically through poetry and drama, gradually approaching the huge fiction collection. I had saved myself the treat of discovering which book commenced the narrative of narratives — which author had been crowned by Hartley or his descendants as the patriarch, the Herodotus of this cocky young literary form. I was dimly aware of several claimants (and unaware of many others). But when I climbed the gallery's small stepladder on Thursday afternoon and reached up to the top shelf I found it began with a few dull reference books: a concise Oxford dictionary, Fowler's
Usage
, Jespersen's
Grammar
, an old
Roget
and a slim volume in golden-yellow cloth with the seductive title
How to Write
. Since every book could teach this lesson by example, I thought, according to its own style, it must be a bold teacher who had no other lesson to offer.

I worked through the first few books and then slid out the thesaurus and turned it spine-downward on the roving shelf. It had smooth, regular page ends, not too thin, and behaved particularly well as I worked the now-hardened pad of my thumb over them, letting the pages curl from the right side to the left in a quick, even succession. These books were all obsolete, I reflected, in that newer and more comprehensive editions were held in the dedicated reference shelves. Indeed they seemed rather out of place on the gallery — a deliberate reminder, perhaps, that literature is not exempt from the requirement for perspiration alongside inspiration.

Suddenly my thumb felt an irregularity — there was a pause in the rhythm and then a little clump of pages flipped across together. I tilted the book and reached my thumb over to investigate, and a folded paper slid out before I could stop it and glided down into the cool air. It swooped over the railing and separated into two papers and then three, and these three demonstrated the different ways leaves have of falling — one tumbling edge over edge, another turning slowly like a record, and the third half-unfolded, spiralling corner-first as though into an invisible plughole. The first landed flat, the second slid to a halt beside the table, and the last came to rest balanced on its edge, one corner quivering.