The Sacred Combe (26 page)

He led me through the stone garden, past the obelisk and out into the meadow. ‘So far so good,' he went on. ‘But what about those left behind? Can they apply this hypothesis to the deaths of others? Did my wife cease to matter to me on the day she died?
Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead
— is that the proverb we need? Death is the strangest of partings. In living partings there is a seal of fellowship in the very symmetry of the farewell: ‘Bonne chance,' says one. ‘And to you,' says the other. But death is the great asymmetry, the breaking of fellowship, the not knowing what to say. No, the ship of my own death gets me nowhere on the sea of grief.

‘Loss: one need hardly elaborate — the word is a perfectly precise expression of the problem. Furey's death — exasperating, unnecessary,
unanswerable
— epitomises the concept. But Marcus Aurelius stands firm: “
no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come,
” he says, “
for how can he be deprived of what he does not
possess?
” Marcus would have us believe that the sense of loss is just another delusion of grief — that nothing is really lost. My mind and heart have proved stubborn adversaries on this question.' I wondered whether he was thinking about Furey now, or his wife, or the red canvas in the locked room.

‘It's strange,' I attempted ‘— I was thinking about it only yesterday. I've never really felt that sense of loss. I'm still a child in that respect.' The doctor pursed his lips thoughtfully.

‘But a child is often wise,' he said. ‘How do you imagine it?'

‘I imagine that love — or affection, or whatever — finding its object gone, would occupy itself with a kind of fussing over the memory, fondly straightening out the faults and lingering over the characteristics most beloved, so that the love would itself erode the truth and leave you with a neat but basically unfaithful picture, something
portable
— easy to carry around in your breast pocket. And then,' I continued, hesitantly, ‘the love would falter, because you can't really love a — a kind of cartoon, and you'd begin to treat it like any other picture or keepsake. That would be the final reconciliation, the moving on.' I surprised myself by articulating this thought, which had never before occurred to me. Perhaps that practice I mentioned — practising the telling of my story — was paying off.

‘That is not a bad guess,' said the doctor, as we crossed the bridge and began to climb. ‘Love itself as the healer. I remember my parents in that way, I think — memories faithful to them but unfaithful to the whole truth, and so more bearable because less real. Perhaps Margaret too, once I see past those final pails on the yoke. Of course, the cartoon memory, the keepsake is never quite inanimate — it has a habit of stirring, twitching in the breast pocket when you least expect.'

The doctor climbed the stair steadily, leading always with the left foot and following with the right. His deepening breaths and the slow tap of his stick were like the stubborn, stoical workings of a clock, last wound God knows when, over the level murmur of winter birdsong. At the top we paused for a while to recover, gazing out at the long, smudged sketch-line of the horizon and the drifts of tiny cloud-balls settled against it. I glanced along the row of stones and for the first time an unmarked hummock at the end caught my eye.

‘Here are the times of sunrise, sunset and local noon,' said the doctor behind me, angling the leather book towards the light of the open door. ‘Noon today is at twenty-four minutes past twelve GMT, when the sun will reach an altitude of twenty-six-and-a-half degrees. It rose at a bearing of one-o-seven, and sets at two-five-three — we are one month or seventeen degrees of azimuth from the equinox.' He closed the book and looked up at me for a moment, as though making one last check that I was a suitable initiate, before opening the inner door.

That afternoon I accompanied the doctor all the way to the village, where he handed his finished manuscript to the shopkeeper for recorded delivery. He looked up at the church with fond attention, peered in at the low cottages and waved to a young family crossing the green.

‘Shall we pay a visit to the Croked Agnes, since we're here?' he murmured as we passed the sign, and without waiting for an answer reached down for the grotesque handle. The bar was deserted, and silent except for the fire sleepily chewing on its embers. The doctor struck the bell, which gave a low, cracked chime, and then put his finger to his lips and motioned downwards with his hand. He lowered himself stiffly to sit on the crosspiece of a bar stool, while I crouched creakily beside him. Footsteps approached from the next room, entered the bar and stopped.

‘Arnold Erasmus Hughes Comberbache,' snapped Agnes' voice breezily, ‘get up off the floor before you do yourself an injury! And you, Mr Browne, lack even the tenuous excuse of senility.' We got to our feet and found her already pumping the ale and peering sternly over lopsided glasses like a headmistress (but do headmistresses wear red lipstick?). She nodded towards the copper bed-warmer on the wall whose polished dome had given us away. ‘Chemical symbol
see-you
,' she said. ‘Get it? I've got every angle covered. No Swinburne with you today?'

As dusk fell we called at the cottage for baked potatoes with M'Synder, and then went on to the dark, empty house. I lit the parlour fire (there too my practice had paid off) while the doctor, suddenly seeming worn out by the day's walking, shuffled away to find some music. The first sad bar of Allegri's
Miserere
, in which the melody itself seems to bow its head in recognition of what will follow, sounded softly in the gloom as he turned to the side-table and reached not for one of his beloved malt whiskies —
uisge beatha
, water of life — but the broad-based, slim-necked decanter at the end of the row, gleaming with the unmistakeable reddish tint of brandy: water of death. He poured two glasses and slumped into his chair.

‘So,' he said. ‘A student of the theory of loss only. The mind uninterrupted by the heart's objections.' It was the first time he had revisited the subject.

‘There is one kind of loss that I know about from experience,' I said suddenly, my chest tightening like a drum skin for the drumming heart. The doctor waited, looking down at the sharp, flickering rim of his glass. ‘My wife left me last year. Without warning. Just — wrote me a letter.' This last comment sounded ridiculous and I gave a little exhalation of laughter through my teeth. My companion looked up and studied me with interest. He asked how long we had been married, and I told him.

‘I'm sorry to hear that you've been unhappy,' he said, and then nodded slowly. ‘But my idea, my picture of you is clearer now. I suppose this was your mystery to hold in reserve against all my silly games. And maybe it explains why I felt I could talk to you in the first place.'

‘Did you?'

‘Felt I could, but didn't,' he murmured, inhaling the heavy vapour and raising the glass to his lips. ‘I understand from Corvin that he has given you an outline of the circumstances of —' he paused, and his face twitched nervously ‘— of —' I waited helplessly. ‘Of what happened a few years ago.'

‘Yes.'

‘Yes. It's strange, I — can't talk to him about it really. It seems so pointless because he knows, he was there. With poor Juliet it is even worse. But you — I felt myself wanting to —' He fell silent as the
Miserere
's ghostly treble stepped down again from its famous impossible height.

‘I feel that my son left me — left all of us — for some particular reason of his own: a reason I cannot imagine. Like your wife, perhaps, except that Sam didn't write any letters. Just — ran away.'

‘But you don't know that he really wanted that,' I said. ‘He tried to protect himself. He might not have fallen.'

‘He might not have fallen,' echoed the doctor, weakly. ‘Indeed. That nub of steel raked into a half-inch crack might not have slipped. Might have held. And then — would he have come back to us, his duty done?'

‘I don't know,' I answered, ‘but yes, I think so.' Then for a while we sat still and let the despairing voices sing themselves out. When the doctor half-glanced towards the side-table I rose to refill our glasses.

‘They call it torquing,' he murmured, as I sat down. ‘You know, with a “Q”. You slot the pick of your ice-axe into a slanting crack in the rock so that it twists when you pull on the shaft, and that locks it in place. Such a complexity of forces,' he went on, almost in a whisper, ‘the curved, flexing axe, the unseen, icy interior of the fissure, the hefting, swinging load of the climber hanging over the void.' He drained the glass and swallowed it down. ‘Will it hold?' he muttered. ‘Will it slip?'

One might even ask of a young marriage founded on ignorance the same questions that one asks of a man's grip on the brilliant life that he holds in a gloved fist: such a complexity of forces.

9

So my labours at the combe were finished, but my stay and the changes that it wrought in me were not. I was now the doctor's guest, and the library's demands for diligence having been satisfied I began to experience it quite differently: the light was more delicate, the cool, papery taste of the air sweeter — even the silence seemed to occupy a subtly different key. I would stroll in with a Corvin-like spring in my step, stand nonchalantly at the window for a few moments (that was part of the tradition of the place), and then plant myself before some hospitable case and seek out some particular volume that had retained a singular existence in my crowded memory, like the leaf that we can see waving back and forth among a thousand others, flashing its own particular shape and colour and exacting recognition. I would tip the book's delicious weight into my hand, open it, and browse. It would be crass to compare this newfound freedom to Geoffrey's at the foot of the Buachaille, but certainly reading, after a couple of gloriously book-free days that weekend (not one page, not a single printed word — alleluia!), had become exciting again. But where should I begin? When I told the doctor about my nagging burden of ignorance, his eyes lit up.

‘Good!' he cried. ‘Very good! You have crossed the first and highest hurdle. The next one is much easier — you must transform this sensation of burden, of weakness, into something more productive. Think of it as the engine of ignorance, driving you forward. What else motivates the aging student of Combe College? Ignorance is not a state from which you might one day be delivered; it should not be a reason to be dissatisfied with the present or to nurture false hopes of future wisdom; it should be a steady force, a driver of exploration and discovery.

‘There is always time for an increment of learning — at least, for as long as learning
matters
. I would have liked to emphasise this to Furey, who lamented his ignorance of Latin and Greek. At sixteen he considered it too late to learn — perhaps he had some foreknowledge of brevity, of living too fast and moiling himself out. He told his mother that had he
known his classicals
, he could have done anything — as it was, he assured her, his name would live three hundred years.'

I asked which of Furey's poems I should read, and in which edition. He dismissed most of the volumes on the gallery as curiosities and brought from the study an enormous
Complete Works
dated nineteen seventy. ‘Furey finally got the editor he deserved,' he said. ‘This fellow had the best springs on his bicycle, and brings us the words more or less undamaged along the winding lane of years. The edition was never reprinted, however, and is now extremely rare. Recently I saw the pre-Raphaelite painting of Furey used as the cover of an English anthology from which his poems were entirely absent: perhaps his own estimate of his longevity will prove to be just about right.'

So I read the poems, slowly and with difficulty, and occasionally I seemed to hear the music that Hartley had described, and to glimpse the visions that it carried. As Furey anticipated, the dupes — the Dowleians, as they came to be called — were not really taken in by his clumsy parchment forgeries: they simply disbelieved the alternative. And who could blame them? Those whisperings of music seemed to be echoing across a gulf so wide that it must be measured not in mere centuries, but in worlds. The only miracles worthy of the name, I thought, are miracles of imagination.

I followed up the Furey with Hartley's diary and a collection of his published essays, which were full of astute predictions. Next I plunged into the translated Herodotus with periodic diversions of Gilbert White. The former inspired me to work through a Greek primer in the evenings, hunched behind the writing-plank, assiduously writing out all the exercises in my notebook despite M'Synder's teasing, while the latter sent me out into the garden in fine weather with my binoculars round my neck, stalking blurry silhouettes as they flitted from tree to tree. Izaak Walton had me peering into the stream with sinister intentions, and Stephen Graham (he of the leaf skeletons) enlarged the compass of my walks in the hills.

And then there was more poetry: after the fiendish spelling and vocabulary of the goode prieste Dowleie, the lines of Chadwick and Keats rolled off the page like smoke. I developed the habit (try not to laugh) of rocking gently from side to side as my eyes swept slowly back and forth, and this seemed to raise me further from my incapacity — I imagined myself in a little boat, bobbing over the surface of the poem where before I had floundered up to my neck. I moved on to Hardy and Lawrence and Dylan Thomas, and began to enjoy and so, presumably, to understand.