The Sacred Combe (15 page)

And young Browne? The hunched ignoramus — what of his views on the coexistence of man with man? Since my last years at grammar school I had reluctantly accepted the obligation to contribute to the democratic process, and the corresponding burden of near-helplessness in the face of other people's problems (as if one's own life and impending death did not provide enough of that). I had tried to discuss politics with my friends, had voted conscientiously when called to do so, and had even joined a ‘caucus' at university (that was where I met Sarah). But fear not — you will find no polemic here. The
new and greater causes
I promised are of a different nature.

7

Thursday afternoon. The sun came out and I sat for a while with hands in my coat pockets and crossed ankles on the ‘sunniest seat' — the bench against the south side of the house. Somewhere a crow cawed with momentary urgency and was comforted by another. A few ivy leaves nodded unconcerned in the faintly hostile breeze. Clouds drifted.

When I had sat outside our flat in south London (there too was a bench), the purposeful hum of traffic and the sight of passers-by on determined errands had imbued the passage of time with a kind of illusory productivity: a general bustling productivity to which I need not contribute personally. If time or silence had lain heavy in the flat I could flick on the radio or the television, which instantly discharged the tension of ennui by the same process — the babbling thumbs-up of other people's activity. And the long hours of my occasional insomnia had been comforted by distant sirens and the softly waxing and waning booms of car stereos.

The combe, by contrast, was an unforgiving place for the inactive. There were no casual distractions to cheapen the currency of time: even the clock in M'Synder's serene parlour seemed to me to tick with the gentle, rising inflection of a repeated question (well? well? well?), and the silent clocks in the silent house did not have to say anything to make themselves understood. I was lucky to have an explicit purpose here, I thought, and one towards which measurable progress could easily be made (more easily than, for example, in the writing of a book about a man named Linley, whoever he might be).

With a soft batter of feathers, a large gaudy bird took possession of the wall in front of me: sandy pink, complementary electric blue, streaks of unequivocal black and white. My short-sightedness makes me a hopeless birdwatcher, but this brilliant apparition scorned any suggestion of doubt. I could even make out the round yellow eye, which stared at me unblinking as the bird ducked its head low and chuckled knowingly. There was a suggestion of
judgement
in this gesture, and I was struck by a vivid flash of perspective on the circumstances of my life, a kind of aerial view such as this bird might have were it really omniscient, simultaneously taking in the then-presence and now-absence of Sarah, the manager who could understand me wanting to ‘give something back', the tedious irony of the ignoramus turning the pages of thousands of books without reading them, and, letter found or letter not found, my impending release from the sacred combe into the profane world.

I shuddered in an eddy of breeze, got up, glanced with hollow defiance at the mocking jay and hurried back along the terrace.

As I stepped up into the dining room and turned to close the door I heard a clear trickle of sound from within the house — the notes of a piano, not a recording but the real thing. Did the doctor play, or had Rose perhaps returned? I tiptoed to the hall door and opened it. I suppose music unlocks the inherent mystical potential of a door — that moment of opening a door on music, of the muffled, the indistinct suddenly stripped naked to the ear, is perhaps a sharper demonstration than Paul's ‘
through a glass, darkly, but then face to face'
, a more perfect metaphor for revelation. Now I stood listening at the foot of the stairs, my hand on the great black oak newel, as the piece, Bach's Goldberg aria (yes, always Bach), came to its cool, stately end. I held my breath during the moment's silence that followed, and then the pianist leapt headlong into the energetic first variation, filling the high, cold, resonant space with a beaded spray of sound.

Emboldened by this
allegro mezzo forte
, I advanced up the stairs until I could peer through the gallery banisters to the large, bright room into which the landing opened. There in the pool of light from a huge window (correspondent to the parlour window below) stood a walnut grand piano. Paintings in heavy, plain wood frames hung on whitewashed walls, a battered violin case lay on a side-table, and the doctor sat in a low chair with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, listening.

I too listened. It is fortunate that I was unobserved, for I think my face hung in the slack, goggle-eyed, infantile expression (well captured in a certain photograph of me aged nine months, and in a certain miniature of Keats) that always disguises my mind's finest moments. How can the piano be played like that? The two hands commanded by one will and yet expressing two distinct truths, living two lives as they resolutely trace their invisible paths over the blank, inauspicious keyboard, perhaps crossing now and then like the paths of souls. But souls are never so sure of themselves — are they?

Seated at the piano, with her back to me: a woman, not Rose. Honey-brown hair half-trapped in the collar of her cardigan, half tumbling over her shoulder. The doctor's eyes were still closed; I silently retreated down the stairs and returned to the library and the pages of John Stuart Mill, bursting with fearsome, Bachian prose but hopelessly devoid of those loose, yellowing sheets that I always imagined awaiting me, expecting me, in the next volume.

The woman's accomplishment (I could still hear it faintly) terrified me. And yet I expected nothing less from the combe, where mediocrity was apparently unknown. She played the whole work, including all the rarely performed repeats, while I continued my unskilled labour (in case you think me a Bach scholar worthy of the combe myself, remember I have had time to research such details retrospectively for this account). Later, some time after five o' clock, I heard voices and the doctor swept in from his study, followed by the
maestra
herself.

‘Ah, Mr Browne,' he said, as I balanced the current object of my search, Böhm-Bawerk's
Karl Marx and the Close of His System
, eighteen ninety-eight, open in my left hand. ‘Your perseverance shames me. Mr Browne,' he added, turning back to the woman, ‘has volunteered to search for the missing document. And small return he gets for his efforts, I'm afraid.'

She stepped forward, extended her hand and murmured, ‘Juliet.' A small, slight woman in her early forties — cool blue eyes gazing from a faint net of lines; a wide, attractive mouth; three slender vertical furrows worn into the centre of her brow. She wore grey jeans, brogues, a blue shirt and two (or was it three?) cardigans.

‘Juliet will be staying for a week,' said the doctor, absent-mindedly taking the book from my hand and leafing through it, ‘so we can hope for further recitals.'

Since he did not explain their relationship, I speculated. My first impression was of a nervous intimacy between them that might easily account for the note to ‘Arnie', although she now displayed none of its playfulness (‘you can hope all you like,' she might have replied to his last comment, but instead just smiled wearily). If she were his daughter, surely he would have mentioned her before, or would say so now. But she was much too young to be his — what do old gentlemen have these days? Partner? Companion? Or perhaps not — there was just enough suavity in his words and gestures to make it seem possible. Strange, but possible.

‘I listened from the stairs,' I said. ‘It was wonderful.'

‘Come and join us for a drink,' said the doctor, warmly but maintaining the calm, calculated tone that meant the game had, after the unexpected confidences of the previous week, recommenced in earnest.

We were back on the sherry: I suppose its cool, sharp formality suited the doctor's mood or purpose (there was never a choice). Juliet's gaze rested fondly for a moment on the Taboni, as though she had not seen it for while.

‘Are you a professional pianist?' I asked, right on cue.

‘A teacher,' she replied. ‘I was a music mistress at a secondary school for many years — now I am just a plain old piano teacher.' She spoke quietly but with an engaging, almost conspiratorial warmth.

‘A music mistress,' murmured the doctor, replacing the decanter. ‘A mistress to music, or, alternatively, music itself as a mistress. Splendid — it should be the name of a yacht or a racehorse.'

‘What do you think of the combe?' she asked. ‘Arnold says you've been here for a few weeks.' He gazed through his sherry into the fire, just as he had when I had first spoken to Rose.

‘I'm afraid it's given me a conflict of interest,' I replied. ‘The sooner I find the letter, the sooner I'll have to leave, and go back to London — and I'm rather inclined to stay as long as possible.' The doctor smiled wryly at his glass. Juliet nodded.

‘I believe he thought the bloody abominable cold would motivate you to get the job done quickly — perhaps he miscalculated the hardiness of the urbanite.' She set down her glass and gently pressed and kneaded her charmed fingers to warm them. Their tips were slender and pointed and seemed to turn up slightly, as though from the years of pressing those inauspicious keys.

‘Or the extent of his antipathy towards his own life,' suggested the doctor, casually. Juliet asked what I did in London, and I went through the miserable ‘lapsed banker' alibi again.

‘I have a brother about your age,' she said. ‘He's drifting too. It's the burden of too much choice — isn't that what people say?'

‘Not a very heroic burden,' I said, seeing that unblinking yellow eye in my mind.

‘Of course, it's different for the likes of us,' she added, turning to the doctor. ‘We made our choices years ago.' He grimaced and sighed.

‘
Each man has
,' he began, slowly, as though quoting from memory, ‘
at each moment in his life, certain possibilities in his future, certain paths that he has not yet passed by, but could still follow. The number and variety of these paths are for a young man at his liberty great but not infinite. He must perhaps choose the noblest and best that he can imagine, and think how he might follow it, and act on those thoughts
.'

‘Abe Lincoln?' guessed Juliet.

‘Hartley Comberbache,' he replied, draining his glass. ‘In the diary of seventeen sixty-two, when he was about Mr Browne's age. Note that he makes no less than three demands of his young man at liberty: imagination, reason and action. But is the young man equal to the task? That's the question.'

‘Yes,' I answered, grimly. ‘That is the question.' Not yet passed by — those words lingered in my mind. There was hope in them, I thought. What paths had I not yet passed by?

‘Our paths,' added the doctor, breaking the silence, ‘— mine especially — are indeed shorter, fewer and less varied. But we console ourselves by advising the young. Rose, at least, seems to have plenty of ideas.'

‘She always did,' said Juliet. ‘The first time I met her she said she wanted to be — what was it? A poacher! “My ambition”, she called it. Each time I saw her she would have a new one.'

‘I should clarify for Mr Browne's benefit,' added the doctor, ‘that this was when Rose was a very young child, before she was in my charge. She is not quite so capricious now.'

‘Ah, so you are claiming that influence,' said Juliet. ‘Well, it is a fair claim. But really,' she went on, drily, ‘to think of you as a father-figure to that poor girl, at your age. She'll be tired of life before she's lived it.'

‘Nonsense,' he replied, with his grimace-smile. ‘Rose is more than a match for me, and you know it.'

While they were turned to each other I caught myself gazing at Juliet's face, fascinated by those three sculpted frown lines. If the doctor's natural expression was one of pained comprehension hers was of jaded perplexity, as though she had almost given up trying to comprehend. I'm afraid I felt rather attracted to her even then, before I got to know her (yet more light splintering into a dark space?), which in turn made me feel a surprising flicker of male affinity with the doctor, a man with nearly half a century on me; I even detected a shameless whisper of covetousness. Juliet did not, of course, accompany me on the bracing walk back to the cottage for supper: only the swift, hushing phantom of a barn owl marked my passage.

8

The next morning was one of those on which the doctor was unaccountably absent from his study (I could not believe he slept late), but after an hour Juliet slipped quietly into the library wrapped in a shawl and cradling a big mug of coffee. I was kneeling on a cushion, searching the last of the economics books.

‘I wondered if you'd like a hand,' she said over the mug, sitting back against the folio table. ‘I could work through a few shelves if you like — maybe the music section.'

I hesitated. My heart leapt at the thought of such intriguing company after my weeks of working alone, but something made me unsure. ‘It's kind of you,' I said, awkwardly, ‘but —'

‘You don't want me stealing the prize,' she suggested, laughing.