The Sacred Combe (7 page)

9

We breakfasted together — Rose, M'Synder and I — but there was little conversation and Rose quickly disappeared into her room. The doctor was similarly taciturn when he opened the door to me at nine o'clock, and I was soon on the ladder, running my eyes along the occupants of the fifth shelf.

He did not appear for coffee, which I made myself, or for lunch, which was provided in the shape of a fresh loaf, cheese which in that house had no need of artificial refrigeration, and a bowl of apples. I began to think that he had gone out — but whither, and how? Did he drive a car? I had not seen or heard one. During a break from the search, as I strolled about the library, swinging my arms and flexing my stiff ankles, I noticed again the third door, which I had not yet seen opened. It would lead to a room in the front corner of the house, beside the doctor's study. I approached it, listened for a moment and then guiltily turned the handle: it was locked.

As the daylight was beginning to fade, the doctor at last appeared from his study, looking weary. He gave me a little wave of acknowledgment, turned on the lights, sat down in what seemed to be his favourite chair, beneath the portrait of Sarah, and watched me. I leafed through the second volume of William Porterfield's
A Treatise on the Eye
, stopping at each of the folding plates to check that it was not a letter in disguise. My assiduity was motivated by a dull dread that in a moment's carelessness I might miss the prize, and then spend many weeks of pointless labour discovering (or rather not discovering) my mistake. It was heightened now by the thought that a book about the eye would make an amusing hiding place — I could not prevent my mind making such connections, even though I knew they were, according to this idea of a riddle with no solution, mere distractions.

‘I would have assigned Rose to the search,' said the doctor, suddenly, ‘had I trusted her to be diligent. Diligence is everything in this task, I'm afraid.'

‘Why should you trust me any more than her?' I asked, turning my head. He smiled, allowing me to guess his reply before he uttered it.

‘Because you are of that pattern of persons who buy their own copies of Gibbon and reach the seventh volume.' This was, of course, an assumption on his part. I might have come across his advertisement by chance, whilst idly (or hopelessly) thumbing pages, or indeed a friend might have found it. But, as you know, I did find it just as he imagined, in the full flow of careful reading, and diligence is indeed one of my few virtues. Is there not something unjust about a reckless assumption that proves correct?

‘What prompts a young banker-
cum
-astronomer to embark on a study of roman history?' he asked idly, as though to himself.

‘I'm interested in many things,' I replied, sliding Porterfield back into place.

At half past five he reappeared to dismiss me for the evening, this time without musical accompaniment, and I walked back to the cottage. After just two days of work, my mind was swimming from the thousands of glimpses I had had into hitherto unknown, unconsidered wells of knowledge and endeavour — just by leafing through a few hundred books. Too much uncomprehended information crowded the front of my memory: sprawling tables of genera, subgenera and species; diagrams of the foot or the inner ear; names of towns, rivers, forests that were perhaps not far away but that nevertheless I would never see; and countless half-read snatches of prose — a tale of a morning ride on a steaming horse now turned to dust, the key to some tiny skill I would never possess, the flavour of some plant I would never taste. The thin, ignorant narrative of my own life seemed diminished, or, to be more precise,
shown up
. Steady on, Browne, I thought — no man can know or see everything. But I did not feel consoled.

I was, at least, relieved to reach the cottage and the welcoming serenity of M'Synder's parlour. The table was laid for two, and after ten minutes — during which I merely sat watching the fire, for I could not think of reading — M'Synder entered with a steaming pot of stew.

‘No luck yet, then,' she said, cheerily.

‘No,' I replied, joining her at the table, ‘and it's more tiring than I expected.' Then, as we began to eat, I said, ‘Rose is out this evening, then?' M'Synder nodded, chewing slowly. Encouraged by that serenity in her that I have twice mentioned, I took the plunge:

‘How did she come to be the doctor's ward?'

M'Synder looked at me carefully and neatly dabbed her thin mouth with her napkin. ‘Her parents were friends of the family,' she replied, at last. What family? I wondered. I thought she would say no more, but she added, softly, ‘They were both killed in an accident when Rose was ten. She lived with her mother's parents for a year or so, but then she came to the combe for a visit and refused to leave. To cut a long story short, she has remained here ever since.'

Is that how she got the scar, I asked myself, in the accident that killed her parents? ‘What a dreadful age to suffer such a tragedy,' I said. ‘Old enough to truly suffer it.'

‘The poor child was much changed by it,' said M'Synder, gravely. ‘Much changed. She had no brothers or sisters, and came to despise her only remaining family. Doctor Comberbache has helped to bring her back to the world.'

I thought of saying that she too must have helped, but it seemed somehow unnecessary, and the conversation ended there. That night, as I crossed the threshold of sleep, I felt my hands slip away from the rungs of the ladder and my body slowly begin to tip backward,
just the way it would
, and I awoke with a furious, instinctive convulsion of fear.

The next day was crisp and cloudless, with a heavy frost and just a few thin ghosts of mist hanging over the stream. The robin joined me on my walk but again turned back before the bridge, perhaps to regain the dazzling sunshine, for the house was still submerged in shadow. At the leftmost window, that of the locked room, I noticed the ghostly grey baffle of daylight on closed curtains.

Shortly after lunch, my search progressed to the tenth shelf down, which was the first that I could reach without the help of the ladder. I had removed this instrument of torture, and was standing on tiptoes on the oaken terra firma, reading the spines, when Rose strode into the library.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Browne,' she said, walking to a window. At breakfast I had asked her to call me Samuel, or Sam, but she had frowned oddly, as though my first name were distasteful to her, and declined the offer. ‘Here at last is a day that will do the garden justice,' she said. ‘Would you like to see it?'

‘Yes, indeed,' I replied. I had been admiring her clothes — I had never seen anyone dress as Rose dressed. Today she was wearing a short, closely tailored jacket of deep red velvet over a white shirt, with tight greenish cords and her splendid brown boots. She was anything but immaculate: the jacket's threadbare elbows were almost worn through, the trousers bore a patch, and a long smear of mud ran up the inside of one boot. What struck me was the unaffected timelessness that she carried as lightly as the doctor and M'Synder. To all these and to the combe itself, as to the sun whose light now slanted pitilessly, gloriously, onto Rose's scarred face, the era seemed to be of less consequence than the season or the time of day.

‘Come on, then,' she said, turning into the shadow. ‘We'll be back before Arnold notices you're skiving.' She led me into the dining room and opened the tall, glazed door onto the garden.

10

We stepped out onto the stone-flagged terrace from which a broad flight of steps descended to the lawn. There was no need for coats in the windless sunshine, which felt warmer than the house, and we stood blinking for a moment, enjoying the sensation.

‘The lawn is exactly one hundred feet square,' said Rose, starting along the terrace in front of the towering library windows. ‘This garden is nothing if not precise.'

A suitably precise stripe of frost survived along the south edge of the lawn, in the shadow of the massive, ivy-clad wall. Rose ignored a narrow flight of steps that led down into this chilly domain, and turned left around the corner of the house. A sun-bleached bench stood on a dais against the chimneybreast, just high enough to clear the wall's winter shadow.

‘We call that the sunniest seat,' said Rose, pointing, ‘because it is.' She turned to a gate a little further along the wall — a gate that had beckoned me from the library's smaller side window. It swung open smoothly, and closed behind us with a soft, resonant clang. We were now standing on a long, straight walk that followed the wall. It was flanked on one side by a broad planted border against the wall, and on the other by a row of evenly spaced but slightly ragged conical yews, behind which could be glimpsed a lower wall of weathered brick. Rose held out her arms towards the two opposite points of converging perspective.

‘This is the runway,' she said. ‘Two hundred and twenty-two feet and two inches. I run it in nine-point-three seconds — Arnold could only manage nine-point-six.' I raised my eyebrows at this. ‘In nineteen fifty-seven, I think,' she added, with a quick, rare smile.

We followed the runway for about twenty yards, past flowering camellias and hellebores, then turned off between the yews to another gate.

‘This is my garden,' she said, imperiously, as we entered. Narrow, curving rose beds were arranged in perfect, intersecting ellipses like the orbits of comets. ‘Or rather,' she added, more softly, ‘I've adopted it. There are eighty-one varieties. Last week I could have shown you a flower — a
Zephirine
on the east wall — but it died.'

We walked around the edge of the immaculate but flowerless garden, towards a gate on the opposite side. ‘See, there it lies,' she murmured quickly, as we passed a few limp petals on the ground.

‘You must have a full-time gardener, to maintain all this,' I said, realising that I had not yet seen one from the house.

‘Ah-ha,' she breathed mysteriously, opening the next gate.

We emerged into a sort of meadow nestling in the bottom of the valley, with scots pines and fine pollarded chestnuts standing here and there in a sea of rough grass. A low iron fence marked its far boundary, behind which rose the wooded slopes of Hart Top. To the right, beyond the end of the garden wall, the trees grew thicker and the meadow sloped gently down to the stream. Rose led me in this direction.

We were about to pass the end of the wall when I caught sight of something lying on the grass around the corner: it was an enormous pair of wellington boots. The next few paces gradually revealed the long, horizontal pair of legs to which these boots were attached, then a long body in green dungarees, and finally a raised, black-haired head wearing a flat cap, and a pair of long arms outstretched along the ground towards a flowerbed.

I looked at Rose, who had also noticed this recumbent giant and arched her eyebrows coolly. The man saw us with a jerk of his head, and then, as we stood watching, began to raise himself from the ground in a series of slow deliberate movements: it was like watching the erection of some monumental tower — the great beams of his limbs sliding into place one by one. At last he stood upright — a full seven feet upright — and touched his cap.

‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,' he said, in a deep, solemn voice. ‘Il fait beau, n'est ce pas?'

‘Here is your gardener, Mr Browne,' said Rose. ‘This is Moan. Moan, this is Mr Browne, the archivist.' I was so surprised by being so-called that I scarcely considered whether the man's name was spelt ‘Moan' or ‘Mown' — the latter seemed appropriate to his profession. He touched his cap again, but did not smile.

‘Lying down on the job again?' asked Rose, sharply. The gardener knitted his heavy brows.

‘I am pinching out the little sweet peas.' He motioned to a row of tiny seedlings along the front of the flower bed.

‘Well, don't let us interrupt,' she replied, walking on. I followed, smiling up at him as I passed. He responded with a weird, mournful nod, his grey eyes intent on mine, and then began slowly to dismantle himself back down towards the ground, as though the earth itself were the only bed long enough to bear him.

‘I wouldn't like to argue with him,' I whispered to Rose.

‘This is the grove,' she said, pointedly ignoring my remark. The stream meandered between a dozen tall beeches, whose fallen leaves and mast crackled beneath our feet. Beyond a stone bridge — a narrower relation of the one in front of the house — a faint path led across the level grove and mounted obliquely up the wooded hillside in a flight of broad, earthy steps. But Rose turned away from the stream and led me through another gate, back towards the house.

We entered a grand but slightly dilapidated water garden, following a row of stepping stones across a long, formal lily pond, its surface now covered in fallen beech leaves. Sunlight filtered down through distant branches onto mossy statues and dry, leaf-filled fountains in alcoves along either side. Rose stood before a seat of carved stone and raised her face to the sky.

‘This is the star-tree,' she whispered. Above us stretched a fine net of branches from an ancient hazel that crouched behind the seat. It was some weirdly contorted variety whose bare twigs curled and twisted like no others I had seen.

‘Why do you call it that?' I asked.