The Sacred Combe (22 page)

‘Oh, I shan't do that,' he replied, draining his glass and reaching for the carafe. ‘Perhaps I'll write it down — leave a coded message that some suitable person might understand. Directions. A grid reference.'

‘Something Uncle Hartley seems to have omitted to do,' I said. ‘But I suppose we are not suitable people, by his measure.' The doctor studied his empty plate in silence for a moment.

‘Indeed we are not,' he said quietly, without looking up. ‘But we are meeting his hostility face to face across the intervening years, and we shall find the letter. We are close now.' The fire shifted and a coal dropped through the grate with a soft clang.

2

Wednesday was the first fine day for over a week, and the combe shone. The robin was waiting for me outside the cottage, looking rather thin and weathered like Corvin but rejoicing now, escorting me along the lane and singing herald-like from every glistening perch, while for the first time he was answered by the cheerful little car alarms of great tits and the shrill wheezings of finches in the woods. The house lay under its morning pall of shadow, but the sun had already brushed its hand reassuringly over the highest branches of the beech: spring itself was not in the air, but the memory of spring had awakened.

‘We're going out!' cried Corvin, striding into the library as I opened a volume of Scottish folksongs. ‘It's been approved: stamped, sealed, ratified, given the nod.' He lounged back against the table — another faint family resemblance — and looked up at me expectantly.

‘What on earth are you wearing?' I asked. ‘You look like a —' Words failed me.

‘A pantisocratist!' he beamed, slapping his thigh on the first syllable. ‘Or should that be pantisocrat? I didn't bring any decent clothes so I'm borrowing some.' He had chosen to borrow a pair of tweed trousers of a particularly bold weave and close cut, a frilled, high-collared shirt, a buff waistcoat and a cravat — the red face and chaotic hair he already possessed. ‘Anyway, life's more fun when you dress up for it. Come on!'

The intricate white map was being steadily consumed, burning away to ashes of wet green turf as the shadow of the house retreated, and the air was full of the fresh, damp smell of thaw. A songthrush hopped about excitedly, a fellow searcher-for-treasure showing off her own long-practised method of indiscriminate Brownian motion.

‘I've known Arnold since my first term at Oxford,' said Corvin, leading me slowly around the water garden where rounded panes of ice still floated in the pools and snow lingered on the stone seats and the twisted boughs of the star-tree. ‘Sam and Julie had married a couple of years earlier, and Sam told me his dad was visiting the Bodleian to celebrate his retirement and would like to meet me — we had a strange encounter in the White Horse. He was dressed something like I am now and talked about the narrative of life. Afterwards, I wondered if I'd dreamt it.'

We crossed the grove, where the vanguard of flattened snowdrops were busy picking themselves up while the next battalion, the tight-budded crocus shoots, sounded the advance.

‘Tell me more about Sam,' I said, as we started up the hillside. ‘If you don't mind, I mean.' Corvin frowned for a moment, but he was just deciding where to begin.

‘He took me climbing on Ben Nevis before the wedding, when I was sixteen. The North-East Buttress. I was terrified — of the climb and of Sam too, I suppose, and trying not to show it. He didn't speak much — just a few words of encouragement when I hesitated. I remember those pale smiling eyes and his quick, effortless handling of the rope on the steeper sections. The sense of joy was infectious — nothing else seemed to matter.

‘Near the top there's a notorious little step called the Mantrap that forced many early climbers into dangerous retreats, especially in winter — Sam's grandfather famously climbed it by standing on his partner's head in nailed boots. Sam made me go up it first, of course — he didn't believe in easy introductions or making allowances.'

‘
In medias res
,' I suggested.

‘Exactly. Funnily enough, I used the same climbing move a few years later when we had a class-alpha fire during exercises in the Gulf, to free a hose caught on a stanchion — the CO was most impressed. But you didn't ask me about that. Sam. Julie had met Sam in London shortly after she gave up performing and started teaching — he was a junior doctor working long hours in the wards and studying mountain medicine on his days off. Blonde, beautiful, with boundless energy — already a brilliant mountaineer but with no time to escape the city.

‘A few years after they were married — about the time I met Arnold in the White Horse — Julie was appointed head of music at a good school in Derbyshire so they moved north. Sam gave up formal medicine, became a freelance first aid instructor and joined the local mountain rescue team. The following year he and Adam Forester — Rose's father — climbed what had been called the ‘last great problem' on Ben Nevis, and named it
The Temple
. They also pioneered tough, long routes in the Alps and elsewhere.'

Corvin now turned off the main path, and after climbing a few steep steps we found ourselves at the foot of one of the colossal redwoods. He patted its giant hairy root as one might pat a favourite horse.

‘Talking of which, how are you with heights?' he asked, with a mischievous smile.

‘Getting better,' I said, thinking of the accursed ladder.

‘Good. Then you won't want to miss this. Look up there.' I craned my neck and gave a groan of dismay: I could see a kind of treehouse hidden in the rich foliage. It must have been sixty or eighty feet above the ground.

‘How on earth —' I murmured.

‘Elevators,' he said, triumphantly. ‘Two of them.' He led me round the back of the tree, where a series of thick, taut ropes were secured to steel rings bolted to the roots. ‘I reckon you're a bit heavier than me, so you have the twelve-stone lift, and I'll have the eight and do a bit of hauling. Sam made all this — it's quite safe if you use it sensibly.'

Eventually I was persuaded to stand on a wooden platform rather smaller than M'Synder's writing plank, attach a steel clip to my belt and hold a fixed line while Corvin did likewise and pushed two levers to release the ropes.

‘Now try pulling yourself up,' he said, grinning, ‘and we'll see what M'Synder's cooking has done to you.' I pulled down on the rope, and to my horror began to rise from the ground as if gravity had given me up. Corvin kept level with me by hauling himself hand over hand, while the ground dropped away and the counterweights — two small bulging sacks — drifted down past us. He assured me the pulleys had a mechanism like that on a seatbelt, which stopped them running too fast. ‘Of course, sometimes the buggers get stuck halfway,' he added casually, ‘and then the real fun begins.'

The treehouse encircled the mighty trunk, and was enclosed on the west side and furnished with a curving table and matching bench; from the windows one peered through foliage up the hillside towards the Temple of Light, whose pointed prow was from here outlined against the sky. On the east side an open balcony commanded a magnificent view down the combe, but a great shaggy branch obscured the garden and all but the highest windows of the house.

‘This is where I like to come sometimes,' announced Corvin simply, leaning his hands confidently on the wooden parapet. ‘Sam built it for Julie but she never quite had the head for it.'

‘It does look like he got a bit carried away.'

‘Like Hartley and his temple?' he said. ‘Or Arnold and the Attic
oenochoe
— the vase?
To surprise by a fine excess
— that is expected here.' He peered down at the bristling chimneys and gables of the house, and the single thin spectre of smoke. ‘You've come at rather a sad time, though — it was a magical place ten years ago. There were big, sprawling gatherings at Christmas or Easter or midsummer: guests would come and go as they pleased — Sam and Julie, my parents, the Foresters, Arnold's eccentric old friends-of-the-family. I would often crash the party with a couple of lucky college friends. We'd stay in those attic rooms' — he pointed at the little gable windows — ‘which are full of amazing old junk, like the musket balls Sam used for the counterweights. Old Meaulnes the gardener — you've heard about him? — would rig up awnings and ancient bunting in the garden, get drunk and recite Baudelaire from the top of a wall, while his son dressed up little Rose as a garden fairy and sent her to spy on us from the bushes. And of course Arnold would preside: the all-seeing Magus, brimming with quiet energy.'

Now his face fell and he looked at me as though deciding whether to go on. ‘Everything changed in May ninety-eight. It was the day before the start of my finals — Julie called me to save me finding out from the newspapers, but I didn't hear the full story until much later. Adam, Pippa and Rose had been cross-country skiing near Chamonix, and by chance Sam was there too, running a course on mountain rescue. The Foresters were caught in a massive freak avalanche set off by an earth tremor. Sam was on the first helicopter to arrive, only minutes later. He spotted Rose's red scarf just under the snow and managed to dig her out, unconscious but alive. During his frantic digging he had struck her face with the edge of his shovel, and by the time he finally resuscitated her they were both covered in blood. The bodies of Adam and Pippa were recovered some time later — they were buried much more deeply but only a few yards apart. In those last minutes they wouldn't have been aware of each other, which could I suppose be considered a small mercy. It's a death better not imagined.'

He stared out along the thawing combe as I kept my well-practised silence, then turned suddenly and put a slim, calloused hand on my shoulder as he showed me the way down.

3

Following our wobbly descent, Corvin offered me a choice of routes back to the house and I selected the path along the meadow and through the rose garden, reversing my first tour of the grounds. There in Rose's walled domain we found Meaulnes, holding a pair of long-handled loppers in a pose of concentrated expectation, as one might hold a partner before the dance begins. As we watched he stooped over a gnarly old bush, amputated a sizeable limb and without looking lobbed it in a high arc into his waiting barrow, which received it with a deep, booming clang. When he saw us he smiled and saluted cheerfully.

‘Hello, old chap,' said Corvin, squinting up at him.

‘Monsieur,' he replied grandly, sweeping off an earthy glove and shaking his hand. ‘Welcome back.' He gave me a respectful nod.

‘I have to say I'm very disappointed in you, old chap,' said Corvin, sternly. Meaulnes' dark brows curled upward in a look of comic horror.

‘Mais pourquoi?' he demanded.

‘Look at this place,' complained the pantisocratist, waving his arms and then planting them on his hips. ‘Everything's dead. Not a single bloody leaf anywhere. And this nasty white stuff all over the place. Let's face it — the whole garden's gone to the rack since I was last here.'

‘But Monsieur,' said Meaulnes, smiling nervously, ‘that was in June! I cannot stop the seasons turning.'

‘So I see,' muttered Corvin contemptuously, before breaking into a broad grin and immediately clapping his hand to his mouth as his chapped lip split again.

Meaulnes asked us if we wanted to help with pruning the orchard that afternoon, and Corvin assented without hesitation. ‘Don't worry,' he said to me gravely, ‘I'll clear it with the old man.' The old man himself served us all fortifying carrot soup, and Meaulnes provided us with boots and gloves from his cobwebbed office. From the tool armoury he selected saws, loppers, secateurs and a long-handled pruning contraption that he balanced on one shoulder as we processed through the kitchen garden with handcart and ladders.

It was an afternoon rich in sensations that crowd back to me now as I recollect. The sky was perfectly cloudless, and the sun peeped over the saddle in the hills and scattered branchy shadows across our faces: Corvin's ruddy and sharp-featured, and Meaulnes' fleshy and pale with dark stubble and heavy-lidded eyes shaded by his cap, expressionless until spoken to, when he would frown and nod his head solemnly as though every word mattered.

I remember the smell of my hard-worked hands when I took them out of the ancient canvas gloves to rub flecks of bark from my eyes — old earth and sweat and something else unnameable — and the dark glint of sap-moistened steel, the blunt rim of a gardeners' mug nestling between my lips as I gulped Meaulnes' sweet tea, and the occasional calls of finches over the setting of ladders, the busy snip-snip and the dropping, gathering and stacking of switches.

The last rays of the hidden sun soon detached themselves from the snowy crest of Fern Top, and rooks gossiped in the beeches as the colourless chill of dusk settled over the combe. In fading light we trundled the laden barrows back to the yard, and the doctor came out onto the terrace in his woollen hat and served us hot cider-brandy punch. We drank a toast to a bumper crop and shook hands, and Meaulnes loped off into the darkness to make his lonely walk home.

That night I lay in the blessed silence of my room thinking again about the three moons and their dark planet, whose last bond was now explained. The jagged red line on Rose's face was another memorial, another record of action like the lines drawn on the photograph: it was not M'Synder or the doctor but Sam who had literally brought her back into the world, had furiously hacked her out of her sudden tomb to confront a strange new life among half-familiar faces. And after one touch of chance (not
il fato
, remember, but the chance of the moment:
il caso
) had unwrapped her scarf as she tumbled over and over and left it strung out towards the light, another had nudged the flashing steel towards her unseen, unseeing face.