The Sacred Combe (21 page)

As dusk fell and the wind whistled on, I went upstairs to fetch my notebook. From the landing I thought I could hear slow, heavy footsteps in the snow, and wiped the slush of condensation from the stingingly cold window to peer into the lane. A dark, long-legged figure was trudging past towards the house, stooping into the blizzard and carrying a huge rucksack. A hood was drawn close around his face, but as I watched he seemed to look up at the window and slowly raised a gloved hand, the fist clenched in triumph or in determination. I raised my own hand in reply. It was as though the fading running man, the doctor's son, had turned away from death-without-issue and was fighting his way back into the sacred combe.

1

See one tiny figure, black against the speckled white and grey of a snow-filled valley, his steady progress between the roundish smoke-puffs of trees the only movement, and his faint, crunching footsteps the only sound. Now see him close up, hands and sleeves tucked into the pockets of his long coat, trousers folded neatly into his socks above the heavy boots tied with double bows, head held high and vapour playing over his lips as he talks to himself in a low voice. What is he saying? He is saying these very words — he is me, practising the telling of my own story as I go along.

I paused before the bridge and looked up at those ivy-clad, now snow-clad ash trees whose long boughs seemed to meet in an arch. ‘The two appear perfectly united,' I said to myself, still practising, ‘in that ancient and celebrated junction that for millennia has borne the weight of civilisation upon its shoulders. But come a little closer, look from a different angle, and — ha-ha! — it was all just an illusion: you see two bent and lonely forms, separated by a river of ice.' There is a bridge, you say — but she threw it down.

When the cordons of habit are withdrawn, the unruly forces of the mind strike out in new directions. Our own thoughts can seem almost as unfamiliar to us as our new surroundings: reason itself begins to turn in our grasp. With this in mind, I had said nothing to M'Synder about the stooping apparition in the lane but had waited for some verification of the visitor's substance. None came on Sunday, except that I thought I could just make out the dimpled remnant of his footprints in the shifting snow.

Now it was Monday, the footprints were gone, and when the doctor opened the door he made no mention of a new guest in the house. I began to suspect I really had imagined him, invoked him from the relics laid out in the locked room, and wondered whether the mental challenges of my occupation and circumstances were exacting tolls beyond my meagre budget.

I worked hard that day nevertheless, and early the following morning I finished searching the great corner bookcase by the window, opposite the one where my labours had begun five weeks before. I estimated that I had searched about nine thousand volumes on nearly five hundred feet of shelves: now only the gallery — the works of the imagination, exalted above all others — remained. I edged up the spiral stair to survey the field.

Exalted it might be, but this collection was not so much used by the present owner, and not so well organised as the rest. The doctor had told me that Stella, and before her Catherine and Samuel, had been the great readers (and writers) of poetry and fiction, while he himself, as I had observed, mounted the stairs only occasionally, perhaps to fetch a bundle of scripts or libretti, or some sheet music of Mozart, which seemed to be relevant to his book.

‘I suppose I thought my mother would have found the letter if it were up there,' he had muttered apologetically the day before. ‘So I approved of the scheme of your search and, alas! perhaps encouraged it, thus falling headlong into my uncle's trap. I'm afraid you have paid the price.'

Now I wandered along the narrow gallery, agonising over whether to start at the left-hand extremity or the right. I had reached the end of the shorter walkway, next to Hartley's portrait, when I heard the soft click of a latch, followed by a dull jarring impact as a door swung open and struck the alcove. After a few shuffling footsteps, the intruder, who had entered from the dining room, emerged from under the gallery directly beneath my feet. I saw a shock of curly brown hair, and then, as he padded rather haltingly to the window, the back of a slim young man in a silk dressing gown. He stood there for a while with hands on his hips, quietly humming a tune in which I thought I recognised that same four-note theme that Meaulnes had whistled in the drive.

‘Good morning,' I said, and he spun round.

‘Holy Jesus, we have a bogey at six o'clock!' he cried, glancing around wildly and snatching up the only available weapon — a cushion from the sill.

‘I'm the archivist,' I pleaded, ducking behind the railing, ‘working for Doctor Comberbache.'

‘Well done,' he said, now in a muffled voice as though speaking pained him. He dropped the cushion and raised a hand gingerly to his mouth. ‘You managed to say the name with a straight face. Actually my sister left a letter for me, and she mentioned you.' I frowned.

‘Oh, you mean Juliet!' I said, comprehending and straightening up. ‘She mentioned you too. The — erm — drifting brother.'

‘I'll give her drifting. Corvin is my name.'

It was only when I climbed down to meet him that I noticed the state of his face, which was burned bright red. His lips were chapped and badly split and the skin around his eyes and nostrils was raw and dry. His hair corkscrewed out crazily as though he had been the victim of some slapstick explosion. He was my age or a little older, and narrowed his brown eyes as he shook my hand with an easy, unconscious firmness.

‘Sorry for appearing in this dishevelled condition,' he said. ‘I've been in Scotland — in the mountains. Bit of a storm up there. Can't shave at the moment — my whole face would come off.'

‘You weren't camping in this weather?' I said.

‘Bivouacking,' he replied. ‘Bothies, caves, hollow trees — whatever I could find.'

‘How long for?'

‘A week longer than expected. Now come and have a coffee or something.' In the kitchen he poured a whole pint of milk into a beer glass and sipped at it while I made my coffee on the hob. ‘I'm building myself up,' he explained. ‘Lost over a stone — got in a bit of a mess up there and ran out of provisions. Whereas you've had a full month of M'Synder! You're carrying it well, though.'

We sat in the library, Corvin wheeling two chairs round to face the great window and propping his slippered feet on the sill (as if he owned the place, I thought). The square lawn was by now a vast white map on which the intersecting courses of birds and squirrels lay painstakingly charted, as though it mattered whether a blackbird turned left or right in its vain search for an edible morsel, as though the straight, purposeful line of the fox were a pioneering passage that would ever after have borne his name, if he had only had one. Around the perimeter, on the buried paths, the straight, loping gait of Meaulnes was trodden and re-trodden like a decorative border. What name would we inscribe with flourishes along the terrace as the title of the piece?
A night in the snow
? I don't think the Reverend would mind.

‘I hope you find this letter,' said Corvin, gently wiping milk from his damaged lips and producing a tin of Vaseline from his dressing-gown pocket. ‘I want to read it myself.'

‘Everyone knows about it, then,' I said.

‘Of course,' he replied indistinctly, dabbing the Vaseline and contorting his face like a clown applying make-up. His slim fingers were the only thing about his appearance that reminded me of Juliet, but the knuckles were marked by scabs and grazes, as though he had been breaking rocks. ‘It's the Comberbache family legend: the scandalous last letter of Thomas Furey.'

Here was the key fact that the doctor had chosen to withhold, casually tossed in my lap by his son's wife's brother.
Furey
: another outlandish name, but half-familiar. Wasn't he a poet? Perhaps the doctor had thought I'd guess the name from the date and circumstances, but I was too ignorant — and of course I can't read poetry. In any case, either Corvin was unaware of the rules of the game or he simply disregarded them.

‘The doctor's given me some background,' I said, coolly. ‘It sounds fascinating.'

‘Oh, all the ingredients are there,' he went on. ‘Sex, drugs, lies, Chaucerian poetry. Just don't tell the tabloids — Arnold really wouldn't like that.' I knew about the drugs, but nothing else: didn't Chaucer belong to a rather different era? Then I remembered that Hartley had described the boy's ballad as unintelligible. I would consult the encyclopaedia of English literature, and then perhaps I would dare to cast myself on the poetry shelves' mercy.

I was weighing my next comment when a movement drew our eyes to the end of the lawn. The doctor emerged from the rhododendron gate and walked slowly and stiffly along the icy perimeter path towards the house. He was wearing a three-quarter-length coat and Wellingtons, and carrying a walking stick of which, however, he made only light use. In the other leather-gloved hand he dangled the grey woollen cap with the earflaps. It was the first time I had seen him outside the house.

‘Speak of the devil,' said Corvin. ‘Or rather, the pilgrim returns.'

The doctor stopped to knock old snow off a couple of shrubs with his stick, looked back up at the hills and the leaden sky with the familiar squinting smile, then turned to the house and noticed us at the window. He slowly raised the stick in greeting.

M'Synder roasted another pheasant that evening, and the dining room once again assumed its formal guise, lit by tall candles and a well-stocked fire. Corvin had dressed in dark pressed trousers and a white shirt which lent a comic intensity to his glowing, windburnt face. He did not seem to feel the cold.

‘Corvin,' said the doctor, ‘perhaps you would do us the honour of saying Grace.'

‘Certainly,' he replied. Like Rose, he left a moment's silence, lifting his hands solemnly from his knife and fork. ‘Ready?' he said suddenly. ‘Go!' With that he snatched up the cutlery and began to attack his food. The doctor shook his head indulgently and followed suit.

Corvin, I now learned, was two years my senior, had studied history at Oxford, and had then trained at Dartmouth and served in the Royal Navy for four years (a fact perhaps not entirely incidental to Rose's ambition, I thought).

‘Believe it or not,' said the doctor to me, ‘the clownish figure seated opposite you was the navigation officer onboard the first minesweeper to enter the port of Umm Qasr during the invasion of Iraq. The lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds of men depended on him. Now he tests his skills in the highlands.'

‘And is found wanting,' added Corvin ruefully. ‘I had a relapse of that incurable disease, complacency.'

‘What were you doing up there?' I asked. ‘Just walking?'

‘Walking was a means to an end,' he replied. ‘I was working on a little research project I began last summer. Boring stuff, really — nothing much to say about it.'

‘Research project!' scoffed the doctor. ‘You'll have to do better than that. My suspicion,' he said confidingly to me, ‘is that Corvin has found some sort of cave miles from civilisation — in an
indeducible
location, one might say — and is busy converting it into a luxurious hermitage — without troubling to notify the landowner, of course. But he will tell me nothing.' The young man ate voraciously, responding with only a wry smile. ‘I hope you are not intending to carry your secret to the grave,' added the doctor. ‘What a waste that would be!'