The Sacred Combe (25 page)

I found a new path leading around the far side of Grey Man, and the dim sky was growing dimmer by the time I joined the old grassy track that climbed into the combe from the west. As I neared the stiles at the top of the little pass and remembered Rose leading me over them, the giant figure of Meaulnes appeared ahead, loping up towards me. Droplets of water bobbed and swung from the peak of his cap and hung like improbable pearls on his fleshy earlobes. I told him I had finished my work for the doctor, and would be leaving soon. His answer came out as a sort of sombre couplet:

‘That, my friend, is what they all say. Some of them leave, some of them stay.' We shook hands — it was like grasping the oversized hand of one of Rodin's seven-foot burghers — and went our separate ways.

7

There was no answer to my knock in the study's dark alcove. I was about to check the library by way of the dining room when through the open parlour door I glimpsed the silver crown of the doctor's head peeping above the back of his favourite chair. The fire was lit and an unopened bottle of wine stood in its usual place on the hearth.

‘Is that my missing champion — Mr Browne?' came his dry, contented voice, though he did not stir. ‘Vanquisher of prunes, keeper of promises, deliverer of the goods?' I stepped forward and stood with my rain-chilled back to the fire while he beamed up at me. He pointed to Taboni's merciless angel of truth, who glowed an eerie white in the yellow lamplight. ‘She shines a little brighter today, don't you think?'

It took me a while to dry out and warm up, but the doctor fussed over me and stoked the fire and soon we were both settled with glasses of the silky, tawny wine — an old claret laid down by his father.

‘Here's to young Thomas Furey,' he said solemnly, raising his glass, ‘an English poet.' I murmured the name back to him, and felt again the odd haunting, the vertigo on that narrow bridge over the centuries. Tinted firelight veered and curled in the wine's dark prism.

‘Hartley,' began the doctor after a long, deliberate silence, ‘whom we left slumped in the stagnant wreck of his study, read the letter through twice and then hobbled slowly, dizzily over to the fire. His fire burned all year — feeling cold was a side-effect of the opium, or rather the lack of it: only the next dose could warm him. For several minutes he weighed the possibility of tossing the letter into the flames, but instead, after reading it a third time (and perhaps remembering the man he believed himself to be), he mounted the stairs to his wife's chamber and handed it to her in silence before returning to the study.

‘He subsequently fell ill with some fever — all too common for him — and she nursed him for several weeks. From his bed he sent urgent enquiries after Furey and discovered he was dead and buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. The fever lingered, but when at last it began to recede Hartley found himself propelled forward as though from a run-up into a new dawn of health and vitality. He threw back dusty curtains, cleared his desk, and even climbed up to the summit of Grey Man to watch the sunrise. “
Welcome back, O
Life
!
”
he wrote. “
Now I have strength enough to write both my names.
” An odd statement, I always thought, but the letter explains it. He and Sarah named the wrongs they had done each other (his list was long!), and forgave each other though perhaps not themselves. He begged her to tell him everything Furey had said to her in London, and she obliged, more or less.

‘The next morning he ordered stacks of newspapers and journals and pored over the big questions of the day, and that autumn
Beachcomber
leapt back onto the journalistic stage. Over the next few years his articles addressed diverse subjects — the urgent American question, the abolition of slavery, the economic potential and social implications of mechanisation, and freedom of speech and religion, to name but a few — and became famous for their forceful prose. But he saved his best writing for private correspondence, holding long exchanges with many celebrated figures including the aforementioned Wilkes, Sharp the abolitionist, Arkwright the industrialist, and radical thinkers from Smith and Hume in Edinburgh to Diderot and d'Holbach in Paris. Not even your friend Gibbon escaped! These letters, lost and forgotten now, were the influential works to which I once referred. It was an exciting time for thinkers — a surge in the fitful Western progression — and Hartley was at the heart of it, always questioning, suggesting, encouraging, whether in public or private: writing both his names.

‘Meanwhile in the combe he steadily accumulated his library, simply as a by-product of his insatiable thirst for knowledge — a personal slagheap of processed words. But of course he recognised its worth — if Sarah questioned his expenditure he would call it the jewel of his estate. “
The collection's true value increases as the square of its number,
” he wrote. “But who else will use it?” she asked, to which he replied, “I refuse admission to no one.”'

‘Was he still taking opium?' I was thinking of his gaunt appearance in the portrait.

‘Yes, but much less than before. Like De Quincey he experimented with the trials of abstinence, but he decided to steer the course that would make him most productive, with the strong hand of his will on the tiller.'

‘And what about the temple?'

‘It was built during the middle of that decade, but the references in his diaries are few and obscure — I suppose he was thinking of Furey's advice. As Beachcomber he wrote some controversial articles about the importance of establishing an alternative to supernatural religion, whether communal or personal, but as Comberbache he kept his own temple private. “
Every statement of truth,
” he wrote in the diary,
“
be it mathematics, poetry or the history of man, is a verse of my bible.
”

‘Those years of health and vigour ended with the sudden appearance of tuberculosis in his early forties, after a visit to London. He was advised to travel to the Mediterranean but his own research left him unconvinced by the medical arguments, and by early seventeen eighty-two he was confined to his bed. That was the year the Dowley controversy reached its climax, and he must have read the claims and counter-claims with wry amusement — but doubtless even had he possessed the strength to write he would have stayed out of it. He died on a day of soft summer rain with his wife and young son at his side, and was buried beside the temple after a secular funeral rite directed by Sarah herself and attended by a few intimate friends.'

Heavy rain was now singing steadily against the glass behind the thick embroidered curtains. The doctor refilled our glasses and proposed a second toast, this time to Hartley, then after another long silence resumed his story.

‘I suppose it is because she survived her husband by thirty-nine years that I feel a special affinity with Sarah now — she too lived three lives. She began the last by completing Samuel's boyhood education herself, acquiring more important books for the library and executing the rest of their plans for the gardens. She planted the beech in the drive in Hartley's memory, using the strongest of the saplings he had grown from seeds brought back from Greece — it's now in its third century and in fine health. With a legacy from the Bostonian uncle she established a school in the nearest town — the Liberty School — which exists to this day. She and Samuel wrote the original textbooks using the
Encyclopédie
and other works from the library. She illustrated them beautifully.'

‘Tell me about Samuel,' I said. ‘All I know is that the birds wouldn't sing for him.'

‘Ah yes, the first of the Samuels: the dreamer. He was surely the most eccentric of the tribe. What a childhood his must have been! He was born even as the first shelves were being fashioned from the ancient boards of the banqueting table. His early memories would have been of the study piled high with those of the new volumes that his father was feverishly devouring, often reading aloud in whichever language he had to hand; of the old gardens and woods, still wildly overgrown from years of neglect; of the mysterious plans laid out on the new folio table, and then the deliveries of stone and the excavation of the great staircase up the hill. He was educated entirely at home — heaven knows, there were resources enough! — and visiting cousins were his only playmates.

‘He matriculated at Jesus College with the poet Samuel Taylor Chadwick. Chadwick was brilliant and effusive and Comberbache shy and solitary, and the two had little to do with each other until the dreamer was caught by the bulldogs climbing through a college window after the curfew following a midnight ramble over the fens. He was in what he called a semi-somnambulistic state and, seeing the constable in possession of his initialled hat, gave his name as Simon Trelasco Chadwick. In the morning this led the dean straight to the real S. T. Chadwick, who despite being unjustly gated was delighted by the other's confession and the realisation that they shared the same first name and initials: thereafter they became firm friends. Whenever he wanted refuge from his whirlwind of political agitating, drunken parties and looming debts, Chadwick would seek out his nature-loving namesake for peaceful rambles in the country.

‘He visited the combe on several occasions during the holidays, and supposedly discovered and experimented with the dusty remnants of Hartley's supply of laudanum — probably his first recreational use of the drug that would come to dominate his life. I think he never discovered that Hartley and Sarah had known Furey, for whom he wrote (and many times rewrote) his famous
Monody
.

‘Our own Samuel is now considered a minor member of the early Romantics — his poetry has moments of lyrical clarity but is generally rather difficult, perhaps because after taking his degree he rarely left the combe for some twenty years. When his mother died — a few weeks after Keats — he finally married and reinvented himself as master of the Liberty School, where he was much loved until his death in eighteen thirty-seven — the year Victoria came to the throne.'

‘And his children?'

‘Only one daughter survived infancy. She married a wealthy and deeply conservative widower and let the combe. Her younger stepson, who was my great grandfather, took possession in about eighteen sixty — perhaps the only inspired thing he did in his life.'

The doctor poured out the last of the wine while I stirred the fire and added another log, which roasted silently for a while, haemorrhaging smoke. I was wondering how to broach the subject of my departure, but he seemed to read my mind and spoke first.

‘Do you have any pressing need to return to London,' he asked, turning suddenly as the log burst into bright, plappering flames, ‘or would you accept an invitation to stay for a few more weeks? I was going to invite you to return for our equinox gathering — or Easter as everyone insists on calling it — but it occurred to me today that you might stay on until then. There are a few specific things I'd like to talk to you about.'

‘That's very kind of you,' I said awkwardly, having no idea what answer to give but feeling that something bad and inevitable had just receded.

‘I'll have more time from now on,' he pursued, ‘because I too reached the end of something today: my book.
Giveth and Taketh Away:
a
life of Thomas Linley the Elder
— finished. Linley, in case you didn't know, was an English composer of the second or third rank. He also happened to be a friend of Hartley and Sarah.'

‘Why did you choose him as your subject, if he was —'

‘— Unexceptional?' prompted the doctor. He drew back his mouth into the old pained smile. ‘Linley had many qualities. One may be a worthy man without being a brilliant one. It was his children who were brilliant —' he paused while a squall of rain rattled faintly against the window ‘— but they died.'

8

‘Death,' said the doctor sharply from behind his desk the next morning, like a terrible judge pronouncing sentence: ‘the longest and shortest journey, the exit from the self.' Then he added lightly, ‘Do you think about it much?'

He had been tidying up, and now a drifting infusoria of dust measured out the slanting girders of sunlight that leaned on their slender transoms like some radiant cargo spilling from a sunken wreck. I hesitated, and then answered, ‘Before, no, but recently, yes.' Wasn't death somehow connected with the panic?
The mote which strays into a heaven of gold / And into darkness, aimless, wanders home:
my own clumsy but earnest words, an echo from adolescence. The doctor shelved the last of his books, advanced to the unlit, swept hearth and stood for a while looking down at the empty grate.

‘Will you climb with me to the temple?' he asked suddenly, squinting into the sunlight. ‘It exists for days like this.' Sunny days, or death days? I wondered, as we fetched our coats.

I used to find it difficult to walk slowly. When Sarah had a stress-fracture in her foot and used a crutch for a couple of weeks, I was an impatient companion and needed frequent reminders to slow down. But this was another lesson the combe had taught: if you imagine me always hurrying along the lane chafing my hands it is the fault of my account, for in truth I had become an expert dragger of feet and wanderer along hedgerows.

‘I am reconciled to the prospect of my own death,' the doctor pronounced carefully, as we paced the runway side by side. ‘This is important for an old man: I have built my ship. It was difficult, but a little perseverance won through. For anyone with an ounce of imagination it is an alarming proposition — this
walking backwards into death with our gaze still fixed on life
. But the truth, I believe, is that in death, at the moment of death, whether one was a good man, or a wise or a brave or a loved or a remembered man, and what one has achieved, simply does not matter — ceases to matter. These things matter so long as one is alive — they define the concept of mattering — and then they cease to matter. Therefore there is no
panic
, no anguish: that is my ship of death.'