The Sacred Combe (32 page)

‘What is that tune?' I asked suddenly. ‘I keep hearing it.' Corvin's slender brows dropped into a playful frown.

‘That? I think I picked it up from Meaulnes. Old chap,' he called, twisting round, ‘what's that tune you're always warbling at?' The gardener bunched his lips and gave a rendition for us on the spot, in a delicate, trilling tone of which even the old blackbird might have been proud.

‘That one?' he said. ‘It came from mon père. He used to sing, you remember, but I cannot.
L'amour est mort
— these were the words, I think.' Corvin's frown deepened.

‘
My love is dead
,' said Juliet to her open book, and we all turned to her. ‘
Gone to his death bed, all under the sallow tree
.' She looked up and gave a sad little smile, then got up without another word and wandered away across the lawn.

‘What
is
that?' I had heard it, or read it, before.

‘It's the refrain from Furey's famous roundelay,' murmured Corvin, thoughtfully. ‘Arnold once told me that Sarah Louise had set it to music, and sung it at Hartley's funeral, but the tune was lost. You don't think — where did your father get that song, old chap?'

Meaulnes shrugged. ‘Not from France, I think. Maybe from the old caretaker of Madame Stella? Who knows?' He returned to his watering, whistling softly.

‘What is a roundelay anyway?' I asked.

‘Just a song with a repeated refrain,' said Corvin. ‘I rather fancy it represents the interplay between life and literature' — then his hazel-brown eyes lit up — ‘but is life the verse, and literature the repeating refrain, or is it the other way round?' I thought for a moment.

‘I suppose that depends on whether you believe more in the possibilities of life or those of literature in making sense of it.'

‘Exactly! Men of action and men of words. Isn't it grand? A motif for a book, surely, or part of a book.' He looked around for Juliet, and then saw her sitting motionless on a bench in the cedar's dark shadow. ‘
L'amour est mort
, indeed,' he murmured. ‘Love is dead — a characteristically elegant mistranslation by a Frenchman. But love, it seems, is not dead after all.'

Juliet left the combe the next day, promising to return at the midsummer that I would never see.

18

I was blessed by
il caso
with one week in the combe for each year of Furey's life, and now I had reached the last. The weather stayed fine, but I felt another shift of mood and tone as Corvin and I walked in the gardens — we sighed and smiled knowingly like friends at the end of a long holiday, revisiting the settings of a tantalising near-happiness across which the shadow of impending departure had already fallen. He brought me to the beech grove early on the Friday morning to see the reflected stars of dew glittering red and green on the soft, indigo sea of bluebells that had now welled up from this endlessly fertile tract of sacred ground.

‘Here's a question for you,' he said as we crossed the bridge. ‘Is it a worse crime to use a dead man's words without acknowledging his authorship, or to attribute to him words that he never wrote or said?' We followed a faint path downstream.

‘I'm not sure,' I replied. ‘I suppose you should avoid both.'

‘There the creed agrees with you, of course. Whereas the world of literature has declared the first sin deadlier than the second, which it simply calls historical fiction. I incline to the opposite view. But for a novelist the passage between these two pitfalls gets rather narrow and tortuous in places.'

Some way off in a clearing behind the kitchen garden, we could see Meaulnes standing with a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, contemplating a great sawn section of the fallen bough that stood on end, as tall as him. He began circling it slowly, his big dark head on one side.

‘You just have to make a choice,' I suggested, as we passed a weeping willow that blocked the view. ‘Limit yourself either to absolute truth or absolute fiction.' I knew this was wrong — after all, didn't I judge any collection of words according to whether I
believed
them? Corvin stopped and turned, letting the damp willow fronds brush over his face.

‘You'll have to remind me,' he answered mockingly: ‘what exactly is absolute fiction, and where can I find some?'

The telltale dimpling of frogspawn interrupted monochrome reflections of branch and sky in the long pools of the water garden that afternoon. It was during one of those chilly grey interludes with which spring loves to tease us that the doctor's heir, standing effortlessly on one leg opposite the fatal stone seat and sketching the scene rather badly in his notebook, again took up his thread.

‘At the very least,' he said, scrawling an imagined seated figure onto his drawing, ‘I have to make sure my narrator is a submissive sort of chap. He will observe whilst interfering as little as possible.'

‘The husk of my physics education makes me sceptical,' I replied. ‘An observer always interferes.'

‘Quite so — there must be assumptions, approximations. Even then, numerous problems remain. For example, I might sit this lanky fellow beneath the star-tree on a particular night and have him contemplate infinity. In truth, the seat was empty all night — not even an insomniac bird landed on it, only a hard frost that had no choice in the matter — and we don't mind that. But what if there was a full moon that night, and I have done away with it to protect the celestial display? Now I have not only sketched a fiction onto a truth, but poked my pen into the very workings of the solar system! It's outrageous!'

‘But your whole book is just a picture,' I objected, impatiently. ‘Ink on paper: everything in it has been created, the solar system included.'

‘You flatter me,' he muttered, flipping the notebook shut. ‘I do what I can with what I have.'

And what
did
he have? He waited until evening to answer that question — we were walking the perimeter of the meadow, whose trees and grasses glowed like a bed of old embers in the half-light of a half-sun slipping behind the pass at the end of the combe.

‘Symbols!' he hissed suddenly. ‘Those are my chief weapons! My book will be crammed with them, even if I'm not sure what they all represent.' He flashed an impish smile. ‘That way I'll make my readers write most of the book for me.'

‘Wouldn't that make it — well, pretentious, by definition?' I said, taking the bait. ‘Surely you must know what you want to symbolise first.'

‘Not at all — it's natural for the symbol to come first. It appeals to me precisely because it seems to represent something, then it gradually leads me back to the source. One came to me in a vivid dream last year, and I've only just worked out what it stands for.'

‘Go on,' I prompted, impatiently.

‘It stands for everything that I will try and fail to write about: the unwritten, inaccessible truth. It's an acknowledgment, an apology to my reader.
Even after a tetralogy
(and I won't be writing one of those),
almost everything is still left to say
.'

The sun was gone now, and beyond the meadow the faint line of the garden wall led the eye to a knot of trees, a peeping chimney, the yellow glimmer of a lighted window.

‘And what's the symbol?'

‘Ah — you'll see. Suitably horticultural. I'll put it somewhere prominent.'

19

My story has been a gentle one — like most stories, if you count the ones that just happen without being told. Perhaps you hoped that Rose and I would fall in love and drive poor Meaulnes to some desperate act of jealous violence; or that Juliet would be persuaded to replace one Samuel with another; or perhaps you deduced a fundamental reason for the failure of my marriage that pointed to Corvin as my salvation. But no. For my part I have indeed come to love each of them — I have felt in these few weeks affections sharper and stranger than those born of years of friendship in the profane world — but none of them need a Samuel Browne. There is only one vacant seat in the sacred combe and that will never be filled, so my puerile fantasies (and yours) remain just that.

Now I climb the temple stair for the last time. It is Saturday evening, and a dove calls sleepily from her roost as I leave the trees behind and climb the last few curving steps into the celestial realm. There is the ninth stone at the end of the row, set neat and clean in the nibbled turf:

Samuel Taylor Comberbache 1967 – 2000

There are no flowers, no discordant trinkets from the Heraclitian world. I turn and look out; from this lonely promontory I cannot look down into the combe, but only out and away, over the treetops to the long, long line of the horizon until I'm ready to rotate my gaze and the rayed handle and the direction of my thoughts — to open the black door.

I think of Thomas Furey: I am touched again by that yawning vertigo on the bridge of time as I scan the sweeping whip-line of the world, a world whose furthest and finest possibilities are always unimagined, but a world in which we can at least be sure that at the same moment on Good Friday in the year seventeen seventy, opium addict Hartley Comberbache looked up sharply from the abyss of his own destruction and remembered that life was good, and teenage apprentice Thomas Furey sat down in his native city to write the famous will that would set him on the road to London, and an even younger Mozart, glowing with friendship for a sweet English boy named Linley, walked out of the Sistine Chapel and wrote from memory the score of Allegri's closely guarded
Miserere
, whose theme would be borrowed centuries later by a young widow for a piano sonata she would play once only, because it brought tears to the eyes of an old man she had come to love.

The sweep of the world, did I say? Oh, but our eyes can see further than that: now we have lenses and mirrors and the
Hubble Deep Field
. Look upon these works! Look upon them! The names of the stars are not useless — in the face of such terror why not resort to our best defence, the defence of language — why not give a name to each and every one?
Stephan's Quintet
is better than a blank panic, just as new verse is better than wailed refrain.

But as the sun sinks in a silent rage I think too of the truth unnamed and unwritten, unwritten by Furey, or Gibbon, or the doctor's father: Geoffrey's epilogue might have described his tearful return to the mountains but it said nothing of his experiences at the camp — of the starving Russians on the other side of the fence, to whom he once threw a loaf of bread, the effect of which in the Russians' yard was so horrifying that he never did it again though they died before his eyes — or the best friend who didn't believe it for one instant when an anonymous letter told him that his wife was living with another man. Truth unwritten, truth written and lost, truth forgotten, truth half-remembered, truth that never wrote so much as a postcard.

I think of cool mahogany under my fingertips; a few petals tumbled on frozen loam; a wraith of coal smoke as I kneel on a faded rug; a rattle of rugby boots on the pavilion steps. I feel the gentle lifting and unfolding of compressed memories from an archive at once inauspicious and expectant, like a piano's keyboard or like a library whose books are all blank unless you slide out the right one and watch the pages fill up with words. There is more unwritten truth inside me than the bony-fingered sideshow of my present self can comprehend — a greater store of life on which to build an undecided future: I was wrong to feel shown up, and I laugh now at the galloping hooves. Why panic about an innocent delusion, innocently encouraged? I have followed my curiosity and healed myself by accident. By accident I have joined the thriving culture of separation — could, if required, speak of my ‘ex' casually and without bitterness. That chapter of my life has folded itself up and disappeared as though the combe were a conjuror's hand, and only my undecided future remains. But it is not here. I can't stay any longer — what good is a combe except for a writer? And, to be frank, what good is a writer at all? I suppose doubts attended even my wife, but it was not her business to communicate them: if decisive Corvin is to unpack the old Russian doll of a man writing a book about a man writing a book about a man writing a book, will he really find something startling and precious hiding in the core? Or will we be left, you and I, with just a very little man writing a very little book? Yes, in the combe I have discovered a new cause to serve — or rather a cause has been assigned to me — but like all causes it rests upon an assumption.

I mistook the identity of the principal, of course — it was not the kindly, shuffling doctor but Corvin who granted confidences, unlocked doors, set out the board and counters and laid down those rules that he himself was free to disregard. I deliver myself now into the hands of this clown, this ruddy-faced pantisocratist, as I delivered him into yours. And yet at the same time he delivers himself into mine.

Night falls. The clouds in the west are like stretched silk: stretched, perhaps, between the wings of my soul where now a soft, sad music of voices rises, that perfect resonance at last, summoned out of my own self — a fuzz of tears behind the eyes, nothing more or less than a shuddering presentiment of brevity, appalling and final like an arrow that finds the heart through the back. Time sears and saps like the icy water of a bathing pool from which there is no climbing out. I think of Thomas Furey and turn at last to the black door of this Temple of Light from whose ruthless prow no benevolent saints or angels look down, to offer up my miserere prayer to a different kind of god.