The Sacred Combe (17 page)

The second picture completed a kind of memorial diptych: it was a figure painting of a man running away into the canvas, barefoot, one leg planted down on the void, the other flung out behind him, the muscular lower back revealed by a shirt billowing up, loose flapping trousers, yellow hair tossed up by motion, and a bare arm extended with its relaxed, empty hand turned into shadow. The figure was executed in quick broad, strokes, and traces of the background, a blank red, showed through here and there, as though the man were indeed fading, receding into the canvas. In the corner was the small, blocky signature I recognised as Rose's.

A few smaller frames hung in the alcoves, some holding collages of short newspaper articles —
Lost Walkers Rescued ‘In Nick Of Time'
;
Climber Found Safe After Night On Ledge
;
Rescued Schoolboys ‘Had Given Up Hope'
;
Avalanche Man In Stable Condition
; and many more. None mentioned the names of the rescuers, but I guessed that all these stories had at least one anonymous participant in common; there were also several group photos of mountain rescue teams —
Lochaber
,
Edale
,
Ogwen Valley
.

On the mantelpiece stood a wedding photograph like the final superfluous
QED
: the laughing younger Juliet was to the older almost what the son was to the pained, mistaken father. I turned back to the haunting diptych. Here then was the planet, the focus of all those bending thoughts: son, husband and — how did Rose fit in? That I still did not know, but I felt sure that she too was bound to the others by these pale eyes smiling out from the not-so-distant past, this running man who had escaped them all.

The wind whistled on outside. The view from the window was dominated by the great beech, from the base of its monolithic trunk to the swaying net of branches that filled the sky. The jackdaws were here too, a dozen or so, grimly clinging on like sailors sent aloft. I turned back to the table and lifted the cover of the folder. On the first page was written the single word
Requiescat
in a large, plain hand, and, in much smaller letters below,
For Sam, from J.
I turned a few pages: it was a handwritten music manuscript.

Glancing again at the open door, I froze at the sight of Juliet herself, standing at the window with her back to me, gazing across the windswept lawn — waiting for me, I thought. I closed the folder and stepped quietly back into the library.

10

‘He died five years ago today,' she said, softly, reassuringly, as I approached. ‘On his birthday. On Ben Nevis.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said, in the stupid, helpless way that is after all quite fitting.

‘I'm sorry that Arnold didn't tell you,' she replied. ‘He still can't talk about it — about Sam, I mean. I suppose he ended up making quite a mystery of it all.'

‘It's alright — I mean, I understand.'

Juliet frowned. ‘Not fully, I expect — not yet. How about you close that door,' she said, pointing at the doctor's shrine to her husband, ‘and we'll go for a walk in the garden. I could do with being blown about a bit.'

Cold air billowed into the dining room as she opened the terrace door, tinkling the crystals of the chandelier. ‘Here goes,' she said, adjusting her scarf. We went the way Rose had taken me, through the gate to the long, straight promenade she had called the runway.

‘Arnold told me about the notices in the old books,' she said, her voice raised over the unsympathetic wind. She smiled and shook her head disapprovingly. ‘I've no idea what possessed you to answer one and come here, but I'm glad you did — he seems to have taken to you. He's a lot more cheerful than usual.'

It had never before occurred to me, despite his odd remark about ‘engineering' my stay, that the doctor might simply want company. Was there a letter, after all? And if so, was it really lost? ‘M'Synder seems to look after him pretty well,' I said, laying those questions carefully aside.

‘Well of course, Sara's wonderful,' said Juliet. ‘But she's getting older now too — and she'll always remind him of the past, of Margaret and — and Sam growing up. It's Rose who forces him to think of the future.'

‘M'Synder said Rose's parents were friends of the family,' I suggested. It is true that I was curious and hoped for further revelations; but, to be fair to myself, I think I really wanted to understand this strange family because I liked them and wanted to help them — at that moment I wanted to help this lonely, frowning woman who spoke to me, a stranger, as though I deserved her confidence.

‘Very close friends of ours,' she said. ‘Her father was Sam's climbing partner — in fact it was Adam who introduced him to it while they were students.'

Was there a note of accusation in her voice? I don't think so. I considered how to phrase a question about that other accident,
their
accident, of which I still knew nothing. Perhaps it was the same accident? Juliet spoke again: ‘You must think us rather self-obsessed,' she said, with a smile. ‘We're not really — Arnold is dedicated to Rose and to his book, which I honestly believe he'll finish this year, and I — well, I have my pupils, and the piano.'

We had walked past the gate to the rose garden, and now turned instead towards the next gate, which led to a part of the garden I had not yet seen. It was a walled enclosure about fifty feet square, paved in stone and filled with statues — sculptures, busts, abstract forms, standing here and there like guests at a garden party, or perhaps like graves.

‘They call this the stone garden,' said Juliet, in a softer voice, since we were sheltered here. We both looked up as a crow whipped past skilfully on the wind overhead. ‘There were parties here, and plays.' Sure enough, in one corner was a miniature sunken amphitheatre, big enough to seat twenty or thirty people, with a stone bust looming high over the sunken stage — Euripides, perhaps, or more likely Aeschylus (he was the bald one, I think).

‘When we got married,' she went on, wandering from one statue to the next, ‘Sam and I agreed that he would have to share me with my piano, and I would share him with his mountains. But the piano is a more —' she hesitated, searching for a word ‘— a more temperate possessor — it holds on to the soul and shakes it like a dog's toy, but the soul is resilient and generous: there is enough for everyone. It is the body that is delicate —
indivisible
— and the piano makes little claim on that.' She held up her hands as though to prove they were unharmed.

‘But the mountains —' I murmured, sadly, as we passed either side of a slender obelisk which bore at its tip an iron ring, as though it might be drawn up to heaven.

‘The mountains took everything in the end.'

We reached the high wall and began to walk along it, and suddenly I saw a face staring out from a tangle of bare branches — or rather, not staring, for the eyes were closed as though in contemplation. This face was not of stone but of bronze — a smooth cast with a skin-like sheen and the sharp precision of a real face in every detail. I peered closer. Wasn't it —

‘Keats,' said Juliet. ‘That was what I wanted to show you. It was another Samuel — Arnold's ancestor — who got it from the man who made it. He was friends with all of that bunch, apparently. No one knows it's here, of course.'

A contemporary cast of the famous life-mask — the one taken by Benjamin Haydon just before the poet published his first collection (Keats was an adolescent fascination of mine, even though I can't read poetry). And what was written on this calm young face, with its fine nose and broad, fleshy lips preserved as miraculously as the hieroglyphs on that
Papyrus of Ani
? Health:
the cornerstone of all pleasure
, Keats later called it, once he felt it slipping away.

Habeas corpus
, I thought, remembering the large, curling print on the pages of Edward Coke. Juliet was right: you must have the body.

‘Sam was their only child, I suppose,' I asked cautiously, as we walked back along the runway. The yews rippled and swayed along their radial of the converging perspective, whose greens and greys were subdued under the wind-hurried sky.

‘Yes,' she replied, holding her hair back out of her eyes. ‘And my only husband.' I glanced at her, and for the first time saw her composure wavering. Her eyes had been watering in the wind and were reddened, and now her clenched jaw slightly changed the shape of her face — she looked almost middle-aged. ‘We were talking about paths not yet passed by,' she added, quickly. ‘A lot of paths ended at that stupid cliff.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said, suddenly wanting to get away, to be back among the long-considered and reconciled-to sorrows of the library.

11

My next find, later that afternoon, was a slip of paper bearing a list of purchases neatly written in an unfamiliar hand:

Extraordinary outgoeings since Whitsun last

Subscription to St. Matthew's schoolhouse 2.00.0

Lackington3.10.0

Hale's Historia fr Blagdon, IIvms1.04.0

Montesquiou's Sp. Of Laws, IIvms0.10.0

Smith's Harmonics0.06.0

Diderot's L.B.I.0.18.0

Fielding's Tom Jones, VIvms0.12.0

Widdow Wallis' balsam fr Hartley2.02.0

Road workes3.01.0

Summa 14.03.0

Below this list had been added, in the same hand but more hastily,
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life. Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? Matthew 6.
I knocked on the doctor's door gently, having decided not yet to mention my earlier intrusion into the adjacent room, or my discussion with Juliet. There was a long pause.

‘Enter,' he said at last. He was sitting at the great desk with his arms limp at his sides, leaning back as though in fear of the pen which lay before him on a blank sheet of paper — as though its tarnished nib were the nail of an accusing finger. A couple of books lay open on the desk, on those reverent foam supports that protect the spines.

‘Mr Browne,' he said, with a sigh. ‘My saviour. What have you found?' His arms still hung at his sides as though paralysed, so I placed the list before him. He frowned, and murmured the names of the authors. ‘Diderot,' he repeated. ‘L.B.I.' Then, to my surprise and for the first time in my presence, he gave a peel of cracked laughter. ‘L.B.I.:
Les Bijoux Indiscrets
! Well, well — you seem to have the knack of uncovering the more salacious moments of my family's past. Hartley describes that book in his diaries,' he explained, ‘as one of the treasures of his early adolescence. And when his horrified mother discovered it, Arnold, his father (I'm afraid we are all named after each other, just to confuse you archivists), denied all knowledge. But here is the proof — and for eighteen shillings, no less! Incidentally you will find the book in the fiction section, if you are so inclined, but to be frank the genre has better.'

He slowly stirred himself at last, rising stiffly from his chair as though he had not moved for hours. ‘And two guineas for a
balsam
,' he went on, dragging the chair towards the fire as he had done in the past.
‘That's almost as good! To cure disobedience, or maybe neurosis. Wise Widdow Wallis, eh?' He prodded the fire half-heartedly until it yielded a single reluctant flame, then sat down, shaking his head. ‘Too wise for poor Arnold.'

‘I don't think you've mentioned Hartley's parents before,' I said. ‘What were they like?'

‘Fetch us some tea, and I'll tell you,' he said. I did so, and when I returned he inhaled the green tea's seaweed-scented steam as though it might nourish and revive him — his own
balsam
.

‘Arnold was a well-intentioned man,' he began, ‘and, to his younger children at least, a good father — Hartley himself says as much, even though they were not on speaking terms for years at a time. He was a lawyer, like his own father, but a less successful one — less able, less fortunate, or perhaps just less well-connected.'

‘And his wife?'

‘Hester — equally well-intentioned, I suppose, but rather a hard, puritanical woman: as much admired by my own uncle Hartley as she was scorned by her eldest son. Her portrait hangs in the dining room — one only has to look at it to sympathise with her husband both for his indecent purchase and his later denial of it.'

‘And yet you say the book survived her fury,' I said, with a smile.

‘Yes,' he replied, wryly. ‘I suppose that is odd. Who knows — maybe she felt the need to study it further when her husband was in town, just to make sure it was wholly evil. What an intriguing thought,' he added, mischievously. ‘That portrait will never be quite the same.'

He again scrutinised the slip of paper, examining the blank reverse and then turning back to the list. ‘What makes this note particularly interesting, to me at least, is that Arnold left very few written traces of his own life — I have only seen him through the lens of his son's rebellion. The Diderot and the ironic quotation are fascinating: his own private acts of rebellion. He did not have much money, so left no great marks on the house, though he did at least manage to cling on to it, which I suppose was the important thing.
Road workes
— that was his contribution to the combe.'