The Sacred Combe (3 page)

At each stop I peered out into the darkness, shielding my eyes from the carriage lights, in search of the name of the station. One seemed to have no name, and I suffered a moment of indecision, gripping my suitcase, poised to leap into the darkness. I stayed in my seat. Another few stops, and suddenly there it was — the sign illuminated by a dim lamp. I stepped down into the raw, windy evening, and the train rumbled away.

I started on seeing a shadow at the end of the platform, which I had thought deserted, but then its motionlessness made me sure it was just a post. As I turned towards the gate, however, it moved. It approached, and took the form of a rough-looking, denim-clad teenage boy with tangled red hair.

‘Misser Browne?' he asked, casually. He led me out onto the narrow road, past a rusting, abandoned car that leaned into a ditch. How could the local council permit such an eyesore to remain there, I wondered, right outside the station? To my surprise, the boy opened the sloping boot of this wreck (it was a Ford Cortina, I think) and motioned for me to put my case into it. He then tipped himself into the driver's seat and with a clattering roar the car lurched up onto the road. The passenger door swung open.

The cold interior smelled fiercely of petrol and stale tobacco. I glanced across at the boy, trying to convince myself that he was old enough to drive legally — he smiled to himself in the gloom but said nothing as we drove fast along narrow lanes for several miles. After a while he pushed a cassette into the ancient dashboard and a muffled, metronomic dance-beat accompanied the heaving engine: he smiled again and drove slightly faster. Soon we bore down on a lamplit village green at the foot of a looming bank of hills, and as we passed the church the boy braked hard and turned onto an unsigned track that wound behind the churchyard, straight towards the black hillside. The car bumped and jolted on the grassy ruts and puddles that I could see in the beam of the single working headlight. We did not climb steeply as I had expected, and peering out of the window I realised that we had entered a narrow, steep-sided valley. Leafless hawthorn branches hung across the track from both sides and screeched against the windows as we passed.

I had been unsettled by the post that moved and the abandoned wreck that was not abandoned: I have an adventurous disposition, I think, but now I was failing to make sense of my surroundings. I wanted to speak, to protest, but gripped my seat and said nothing. At last, about half a mile from the village, we reached a lonely stone cottage on the right, with a lamp over the door. The car stopped.

‘Here yer are,' said the boy, in a friendly way. I thanked him and fumbled with my wallet. He shook his head, muttering, ‘I wunna get away with it.' I retrieved my case, and held up my hand as he threw the car into a skilful five-point turn, paused to light a cigarette, and drove away, a dark shape against the bouncing beam of the headlight.

The door of the cottage was opened by a tall, broad-shouldered, smiling woman who could only have been Miss Synder. Her steel-rimmed glasses were almost identical to my own, and her hair, rather greyer on the left and darker on the right, was neatly brushed back from a strong, finely lined forehead. She wore a sort of tunic of thick, plain dark wool with a matching skirt — but the austerity of this costume was, I noticed, relieved by a pair of fluffy blue slippers.

She led me through a small, dark hallway and a low door into what I soon learned to call the parlour. Half a dozen assorted, threadbare rugs lapped and overlapped each other to cover the floor. A black oak table stood against one wall beneath a large brass wall lamp, and two armchairs faced the fireplace, whence a cosy warmth radiated though the air was cool. A cat dropped silently from a broad and well-pawed chair arm and studied me from under the table. Countless pictures covered the darkly papered walls — old photographs, watercolours, engravings, and a number of bold and incongruous charcoal sketches of figures and faces. A heavy, carved bookcase was crammed with paperbacks. Miss Synder took my coat, offered me the un-pawed chair, and brought me a glass of a hot, spicy punch or mulled wine.

She had an air of serenity that allowed her to seem welcoming whilst speaking little and matter-of-factly. My place of employment was Combe Hall, a quarter of a mile further up the lane, at the head of the little valley or combe; I was to present myself there at nine o'clock the next morning; my employer was a Doctor Arnold Comberbache; breakfast was at eight.

After a delicious supper of beef pie and another glass of punch, Miss Synder led me up a dark staircase to my bedroom, which was one of three. It was plainly furnished, dimly lit, and so cold that I could see faint wisps of vapour as I breathed.

‘Usually I only light the parlour fire and the stove,' she said unapologetically, nodding towards a small unlit fireplace in the corner, beside which stood a coal scuttle and a neat pile of kindling. ‘You are very welcome to sit in the parlour of an evening, but it's as you wish.'

Three books stood on a shelf beside the bed — there was something deliberate about their presence, and I stooped to read the spines: J. L. Carr's
A Month in the Country
, the Rev. E. Donald Carr's
A Night in the Snow
, and Stella Gibbons'
Cold Comfort Farm
. I unpacked my case rather hastily and undressed, shivering. The sheets were stony cold as I climbed into bed, but there were two heavy blankets and I soon warmed up. As my body settled and my breathing slowed, I became aware of the exquisite silence. I could hear the microscopic stirring of my cheek against the cool pillow as I breathed, and the slowing pulse of my blood, and nothing else.

I wondered which horrors I had successfully escaped, and which might have followed me to this mysterious retreat.

4

I awoke to see a faint, pre-dawn glimmer around the heavy curtains, and felt a little rush of excitement as I drew the sharp, cold air into my lungs and remembered where I was. To my relief, there was a spluttering shower with hot water in the downstairs bathroom; I also had a tiny basin in my bedroom. The parlour fire was already crackling merrily as Miss Synder brought scrambled eggs, toast and tea, and sat down with me for breakfast.

I asked her how long she had lived at the cottage. ‘At least as long as you imagine,' she replied, cheerfully, but without elaborating. After a while she added, as though to change the subject, ‘I don't get a paper here, and the radio reception is not up to much. It's best in the kitchen,' she confided in a mildly disapproving tone, ‘if you ever want to catch the news.' Then she seemed to remember something, went to the hall and brought back a small electric torch. ‘Always carry this in your coat pocket,' she said, handing it to me. ‘You'll need it in the evenings.'

After breakfast, I drew back the curtains in my bedroom to reveal a misty morning. The window was divided by a single stout mullion into two iron-framed casements which, though fastened shut, exuded coldness. I could see a small, sloping, frosty back garden, with a couple of fine old plum trees and a little greenhouse. Beyond, the hillside mounted steeply into the mist in a sombre wall of bare, twisted trees and dead bracken.

At ten to nine, muffled up in coat, hat and scarf, I slipped the iron door key into my coat pocket and started cautiously along the frozen track. After a few steps I stopped at the sudden, weird sound of a robin, singing from a bony elbow of hawthorn not ten feet away. He fixed his bright, black eye just over my shoulder and sang with astonishing
quietness
— a thin, intimate whisper of beauty that only he and I could hear. The vibrations stirred the tiny feathers of his throat, whose colour, a soft, cinnamon orange, made me think of the noblest tones of ancient tapestries, and so seemed to lend that tiny, fragile, short-lived creature an air of grandeur and wisdom. After a few seconds he flew to the next tree and sang again, a tiny puff of colour leading me into the white morning. I followed along the track, delighted.

I could hear the subdued gurgle of a stream to my left, and occasionally glimpsed its frost-crusted banks over the mossy wall. Blood-red haws lingered on the twigs that hung over the track, and a few dog-roses held up sprays of fat, scarlet hips on groping branches. After I had walked a few hundred yards I caught a sudden smell of wood-smoke on the air, and the robin disappeared up the hillside. I wiped the mist from my glasses and continued.

The track curved to the right and then turned sharply left towards a graceful stone bridge, about eight feet wide and with no parapets, that crossed the stream in a single low span. Above the bridge was a sort of archway of ivy-clad branches, which confused me until I drew nearer and realised that it was a clever illusion: one ash tree on the far left side of the bridge, and another on the near right, each extended a long branch which, though parallel and separate, appeared from the track to meet in a perfect gothic arch over the bridge. How such a thing could have been contrived, I could not imagine.

The smooth slabs of the bridge were slippery, and it was not until I reached the other side that I looked up into the mist before me: I drew an arrow of sharp air into my lungs as the first of my revelations of place found its mark.

The track ended at two stout columns that marked an opening in a very low, curved wall. Beyond this reared the front of a beautiful and ancient house, seen obliquely: I could faintly distinguish vast, mullioned windows of many lights, and three high gables loomed against the sky. In front of the house, to the left as I looked, there towered an enormous beech whose highest branches were lost in the mist. One mighty silver bough, a yard wide at its base, reached low towards the house for a great distance over a bare and moss-darkened expanse of gravel.

I walked through the gateway (there was no gate), gazing always up at the house as I approached. It was not as large as that first glance had painted it: two great windows to the left of the door and one even greater to the right, and these three repeated above with slightly reduced height, and again in a trio of much smaller windows in the gables.

The single oak door was fantastically wide though of modest height, shaped at the top in a low gothic arch that the branches over the bridge had neatly prefigured. Beside it grew the twisted trunk of an ancient Virginia creeper, whose tendrils spread a vast leafless web over the pale yellow stone, around the door and the window high above it. The doorstep was worn into a shallow curve, as though sagging under the weight of years.

I stopped before the step. The air carried a damp, mossy, wintry smell. The silence was broken by the long, hoarse scream of some unfamiliar bird in a distant treetop. The house, the beech and Sam Browne stood together in the mist: substantial in that otherwise ethereal morning — but
they
were ancient and majestic beside my clumsy insignificance, sure of themselves beside my doubt. With the reluctance of an intruder, I lifted the heavy iron knocker and let it fall twice. The sound seemed to wake me from my bewilderment: I stepped back, straightened myself and attempted an enthusiastic smile. After a long pause I heard a heavy latch being lifted and the door swung back to reveal the welcoming but unexpected figure of Miss Synder herself, whom I thought I had left in her cottage just a few minutes before.

‘Hello again,' she said, now serious and businesslike, ‘and welcome to the combe.' She ushered me into a large, dim entrance hall with a chequered stone floor that rang and swished beneath our feet like the floor of a church. The cold air was filled with the rich, sweet scent of pine, and, glancing upward, I saw a huge branch of that tree hanging in space above our heads. It was suspended from the banisters, slightly tilted from the horizontal like a huge hand raised in blessing (or warning, you are thinking, but it seemed optimistic). The only light was from a rectangular lantern window in the distant ceiling, which the branch largely obscured.

Miss Synder laid my coat over her arm and stepped into a deep, shadowy alcove on the left, which, from the sound of her softly knocking on it, evidently contained a door. A man's voice said, ‘Come in,' faintly, and Miss Synder stepped back into the hall, motioned me forward with a reassuring smile, and walked away across the flagstones to another door, through which she disappeared. With a flutter of apprehension in my stomach I stepped forward, felt around in the darkness for the round doorknob, turned it and entered the room beyond.

It was a square room, a study, with a towering ceiling and one of those spectacular front windows filling almost the whole of one wall and admitting a flood of pale light. There was a busy, newly-lit fire in the grate behind a heavy brass guard, and the wall facing me was a wall of books: several thousand, I suppose, on shelves that reached to the ceiling and to which a long, slender ladder was fixed on rails. A man rose from his chair behind a desk on which a few books and papers were neatly arranged, advanced round it and stood before me, gazing at me intently: this was Arnold Comberbache.

He was a man of about seventy, with smooth, taut skin, finely lined only around his eyes, and faintly speckled here and there with liver spots, like an autumn leaf that has turned gold but is still sound. The slightly drawn-back set of his mouth gave him a pained expression that, I was to discover, rarely left him — not physical pain, perhaps, but the pain of having made a mistake, of having to start some task over again. His white hair was combed neatly back, darkening to a steely grey at his collar. He wore a thick herringbone jacket over a pullover, shirt and tie — the fire could not hope to warm that absurdly high space.

I introduced myself and he seemed pleased, perhaps because I had a deceptively scholarly look, with my slim, angular face, steel spectacles and tightly curled hair, and the bulky green jumper knitted by my aunt.