The Sacred Combe (29 page)

‘Monsieur Meaulnes is about to initiate a process whose path and consequences are unknown to science,' said the doctor, ‘so hold on to your hats. Let fly, Monsieur!' The gardener stooped and turned a tap on the end of the hose, and after a few seconds the contraption began to move — a long horizontal beam tilting slowly down at one end, then swinging back the other way, then pausing for a while before creeping back slowly, then switching direction again and swinging round smartly. The effect was oddly disquieting: our eyes searched for a whimsical guiding hand where there was none, and for a while nobody spoke.

‘Behold the chaotic pendulum,' said the doctor at last, crossing his arms in satisfaction, ‘here created by the flow of water into a tilting tube. Designed by the late Hartley Comberbache Esquire, executed by Monsieur Meaulnes, and now to be explained to us all by Mr S. Browne, Bachelor of Science, upper second class.'

After a second visit to the temple to witness the sunset and a careful, lantern-lit descent in the deepening gloom (the steep, straight stair neatly enforces seriousness, I thought), curtains were hauled across windows and fires lit. The doctor directed a boisterous game of charades beneath Taboni's angel of truth — Corvin, Meaulnes and I calling out our guesses from the back whilst conducting a scholarly whisky tasting at the long line of decanters. Rose at first refused her turn, then proposed a book, three words, and simply pointed at Meaulnes, standing in his great woolly socks with a glass of whisky in each hand and the brooding sky of
Despair
behind him: he blushed and mumbled something in French (I caught only that ethereal name,
Yvonne de Galais
). Later we reassembled upstairs around the piano, where the opposing mirrors multiplied our small company into a dizzying corridor of merriment and motion punctuated by a thousand priceless vases. Corvin sang one of Linley's arias in a depressingly true countertenor to Juliet's accompaniment — he said this was to excuse him from playing the violin, which the doctor himself picked up instead and sawed out a rather wobbly tune, before Agnes and Juliet gave us a ragtime piano duet quite as chaotic as the ingenious pendulum.

‘Make way!' cried the doctor afterwards, coming along the landing with two long swords in tarnished scabbards and a pair of white shoes. ‘It's time for the hornpipe.' He drew out the blades solemnly and passed them to Corvin, who laid them in a cross in the middle of the floor and then began to limber up as though for a race. ‘Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen,' said the doctor, as Juliet seated herself again at the piano. ‘Sorry my dear,' he added, laying a hand on her shoulder, ‘but I'm for Corvin this time.'

‘Yes, Swinburne,' said Agnes.

‘Le monsieur,' said Meaulnes, nodding gravely.

‘Corvin,' murmured Rose.

‘Well,
I'm
for dear Juliet,' pledged M'Synder, suddenly appearing on the stairs. ‘And so's Mr Browne! In't that right?'

Juliet played the opening bars of the familiar sailor's hornpipe melody at a very slow tempo, like a child learning her first tune, and a thousand Corvins began to move. Straightaway I thought: forget the singing, the plotting courses, the running, the swimming, the drifting, the mysterious projects —
this
is what he was born to do. Juliet began to play a little faster and he was able to warm into the more energetic leaps and kicks, his limbs billowing to left and right while his body hung motionless in space or swayed to one side and the other like the mast of a keeling ship. The doctor and Agnes cheered and clapped. Juliet played faster. The movements became smaller and more precise, now limited to the feet only with occasional leaps from one quadrant to another, landing right on the beat. Juliet played faster still — brilliantly, impossibly fast, leaning slightly into the keyboard, frowning with concentration and effort but with lips parted in a half-smile, and the pointed toes of Corvin's dancing shoes moved faster than sight, until at last he stumbled against the hilt of one of the swords, dropped to one knee in submission to his sister, and then rose slowly to his feet while we all cheered and congratulated them both.

‘I'm sorry old friend,' murmured Juliet to the piano, stroking the lid soothingly. ‘Did that hurt?'

Corvin stood for a moment breathing hard and wiped his glowing face on his sleeve, then as his sister began to play a new dance he offered Rose a gallant bow and invited her to join him. She blushed and hesitated, and I felt a little twinge of yearning for her, a simple yearning of the old, pre-marriage, pre-divorce kind, of the kind that Meaulnes felt for her and that she felt for this laughing dancer. And he? For whom did he yearn as he raised his crossed arms again and shifted weight nimbly from one foot to the other? For none of us, certainly: for someone else, perhaps — I will not pretend to know.

Any hangover is rich with soulful promise whose crop, however, can be reaped only in solitude. That other part of the mind, its industrial machinery, lies idle, clogged with dehydration and lassitude, and the soul (why not call it that?) has free play: for a few precious and painful hours the hungover man is a mystic.

I spent the first of these hours lying in bed with the sheet thrown back and the cold morning air and birdsong wafting through the casement. My underpants, I noticed with a rakish smile, were on inside-out after my hasty sartorial operations on the riverbank. This recollection half-revived me and I bumbled downstairs to toast and coffee and a scalding shower, and then stepped out into the lane to share with the robin and the red squirrel my sluggish reflections on the pleasures of private study on the one hand, and the inescapable necessity to provide for oneself on the other.

‘Was that spring we had,' murmured Corvin at the library window that afternoon, ‘or just a dream of spring?' The morning had been cool and cloudy and now heavy spots of rain began to darken the terrace and scud down the ancient glass: nature's unhelpful restatement, it seemed, of what a thousand poets have already told us — that radiant beauty must not last. The windows were all fastened now, and M'Synder's spiced soup was back in demand.

During that week the doctor busied himself with his publisher's suggested revisions to
Giveth and Taketh Away
and Rose spent hours shut in her room, presumably working on her drawings. Juliet went to London to meet her parents, who were visiting from the ‘tumbledown house' in Provence to which they had moved on retiring a few years before. Corvin said he was too busy to accompany her: ‘Tell them I'll come to the T.H. in May,' he said from the library doorway as she and I stood in the dining room. ‘I have some important work to finish here.'

‘What work?' she asked, but the door closed with a soft click. She sighed and turned to go, then glanced back across the table to give me one last beautiful frown as a parting gift.

14

So began my thirteenth week at the sacred combe, but surely we, like Rose, are not superstitious. My interdisciplinary studies were by now going so well that I overlooked the fact that my stay was exceeding the scope of the doctor's invitation. It was a week of cold, hostile rains that hammered flat the early shoots of daffodils, tormented the muddy lane and force-fed the bloated stream with tributaries tumbling noisily off the hills.

On Friday morning I entered the library with a borrowed satchel under my arm to find Corvin seated by a merry blaze at Sarah's end of the room, wearing for the third time his Chadwickian high collar and waistcoat, with one ankle tucked up onto his knee and his hands behind his head.

‘How's our visiting scholar this morning?' he asked, slowly circling the toe of his shoe. ‘Would he like to play a game with me? My mind is feeling simultaneously agile and indolent today.'

‘I was planning to work on my Gibbon,' I said warily, pushing back my wet hair and taking off my rain-spattered glasses to wipe them.

‘Oh, but Gibbon is a patient fellow,' he returned dismissively, ‘and I'm not. Brew us some strong coffee and I'll set up the game.' I returned from the kitchen to find two chairs arranged symmetrically before the fire, and between them a table bearing a large backgammon board. ‘My gift to Arnold from the Gulf,' said Corvin as he laid out the counters. ‘I bought it in the market in Basra. As it happens, he dislikes the element of chance and prefers chess and draughts. I like the element of chance: I find it instructive. But we often buy gifts for ourselves inadvertently, don't we? Take a seat.' We played — I needed reminding of the rules, but in the first game, to my surprise, I gammoned him. He flashed an inscrutable smile and reset the board. Later he won a few games but I kept throwing doubles and won the match comfortably.

‘So — you win the right to choose,' he said, clearing the board and folding it shut. ‘Will you listen or tell?'

‘I'll listen,' I replied, trying to keep up. ‘But even I've realised what day it is today — why should I believe a word you say?'

‘Because I'll begin my story at noon,' he replied, slipping a small pocket watch from his waistcoat and eyeing it significantly, ‘so if I tell a single lie, the joke's on me.'

The wind was rising, wrinkling puddles along the terrace and flinging the rain this way and that. I could once again hear the restless tap-tapping of the wind-dial behind the locked door, but if Corvin heard it he made no comment. At noon he began to tell his story — the story of his life — ‘heavily abridged,' he said, ‘like all stories.'

He spoke for perhaps an hour at a time, dividing his past into chapters between which I was to study or rest or eat my lunch — ‘while I make up the next bit,' he added mischievously to himself, as though I was not supposed to hear. He reached the present year, even the present day, as dusk was falling, and seemed quite ready to continue the narrative when the doctor knocked at the door (odd to knock at one's own door, I thought) and shuffled in from the study.

‘
O critics, cultured critics!
' he said, grimacing and waving his manuscript. ‘I've finished the accursed revisions. Come dine with me and do your worst — burlesque me, boil me down, do whatever you like with me!' I tried to comment constructively on the passages that he read out across the table, while Corvin seemed preoccupied and kept largely silent as the wind boomed and moaned around the combe.

‘Now you have the past,' he resumed as if there had been no interruption, as we returned to our seats in the library after dinner. ‘But in recent weeks I've also been thinking about the future. You've been trying not to, I suspect, but don't worry — I have ideas enough for both of us.'

‘Such as?' I asked, remembering his strange words in The Croked Hand as he stacked his empty glass on top of mine.

‘Well, I'm going to write a book. There — I've said it. I've been thinking about it for quite some time now — even while I was in the Gulf. But you've helped to show me how it might be done.' Is that all? I thought. One more mumbling book to add to these thousands? Is that really the
noblest and best path
he can imagine? But I envied his — yes, his decisiveness.

‘What kind of book?'

‘A book about this place — about the combe and its history. It deserves one, surely. Of course I'll change the names — that gives me more freedom to invent.'

‘Why would you need to invent anything? Why not just tell the truth?'

‘I don't know, old chap,' he replied in low voice, leaning towards me. ‘Maybe I've had enough of this bloody creed of truth — I have a craving to make something up, but I want to do it
by the book
, as it were. The key was to come up with a suitable narrative voice, and I think I have.'

‘Go on,' I prompted, frowning.

‘An outsider. An earnest young fellow with a slightly mincing gait, wandering eyes and a tendency to wear ill-fitting clothes — of course, he won't describe himself that way: a narrator must be slightly egotistical to be convincing. He'll tell the story of the combe as revealed to him during his visit.'

‘And what then?'

‘If people buy my book, I'll write another one.'

‘And if they don't?'

‘I'll write another one anyway.'

‘And if they don't buy that one?'

‘Oh, then I'll study medicine,' he replied, waving his hand impatiently, ‘or computer programming, or banking. What was your job title?'

‘I was a quantita—' I never could get that word out, and tried again: ‘a quantitata— a quantittertatter— a
quantitative
analyst.
Quant
, for short.' He shrugged.

‘That'll do, if all else fails.'

‘And what were your ideas for me?' At this he raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips and looked heartily amused. But before he could answer we were interrupted by a tearing, splintering crash that shook the very fabric of the house — suddenly not so sure of itself after all. For a moment Corvin's face remained frozen in that expression of mirth, now painfully inappropriate, before we both leapt to our feet.

‘Hello!' came a thin, wavering voice from the study. ‘Man overboard, hello!' We rushed in to a scene of alien disorder: cold air swept into the room from the great window, the doctor lay twisted on the floor by the side table surrounded by broken glass and porcelain, and spots of rain were landing one by one on the leather of the hallowed desk.