The Sacred Combe (30 page)

It was that mighty low branch of Hartley's beech tree, big as a big tree in its own right and heavy with sap and glowing shoots — it had pitched up and down, up and down all evening as the gusts swirled and howled around the house, and had buckled at last and fallen. As it struck the gravel it had keeled sideways like a ship run aground, and one quivering spar had lunged through the study window just as the doctor set his teacup on the mantelpiece. He had cowered back from the flying glass and stonework and lost his balance, wrenching his one good knee and banging his head as he fell heavily against the side table.

Now we all sat in the parlour: Corvin and I hot and breathless from our efforts to move the furniture away from the window and cover the worst of the breach with an old tent canvas, and the doctor pale-faced, wrapped in a blanket with a neat dressing on his forehead and a bag of frozen peas on his knee.

‘Well,' he said, wincing as he shifted in his chair, his mouth now fixed in the pained smile as though the wind had changed on him (I suppose it had).

‘Well,' echoed Corvin with a sigh, ‘it could have been worse.'

15

Telling M'Synder and Rose about the accident had been my job, and of course my reassurances could not prevent them hurrying back with me to the house. M'Synder went straight in to see the casualty but Rose stood for a while in the drive, staring at the fallen branch and the tree's gaping wound, the scattered debris and the wrecked window whose stonework hung precariously like a Piranesi vault. She said nothing, but for a moment those iridescent green eyes were wide with alarm and disorientation, as though she saw something I had missed. An inscription, perhaps: ‘
et in arcadia ego.
'

‘It could have been worse,' I parroted meekly, glancing up at the tree still thrashing and moaning over the house. She eyed me sharply as if to say ‘what would you know?' and hurried inside. We found M'Synder standing over the doctor, asking solicitous questions but at the same time slowly surveying the neat bandage, the blanket, the leg raised on a cushion, and the mug of cocoa. She looked up at Corvin with reluctant approbation, and then turned to the dying fire and peered into the scuttle.

‘I'll fill 'er up,' she said, seizing it resolutely and stumping out of the room.

Meaulnes made a welcome appearance the next morning, and he and I cleared several fallen branches out of the lane so that when the patient's stubbornness at last relented, a four-wheel-drive ambulance was able to churn its way up the combe before noon and carry him away for treatment.

‘Suspect mild concussion and a cruciate ligament injury,' he murmured to the paramedics as they carried his stretcher through the hall, ‘compounded by osteoarthritis. Oh, my dear Mr Browne, please taketh and giveth away the manuscript to the post office — it's already overdue.' He was still muttering as they loaded him into the ambulance: ‘A prod from old Hartley, you think? No, it was just that Second Law doing its work — I've been entropised. Prognosis: patient to be back on his feet in a week, but unlikely to cope with stairs,
especially if staircase is long or steep or lacks handrail
. Consider stairlift or bungalow. Next patient, please.'

Rose accompanied him to the hospital, while the rest of us continued clearing up and M'Synder made arrangements for a stonemason and glazier to fix the window. The weather turned bright, the sharp April sunlight picking out bristling shoots of vivid green along the banks of the lane and in the trees arching and swaying over it. Rose returned and reported that all was as the doctor had predicted, and he would be home in two days to rest.

‘We'll have to make up a bed on the ground floor,' she said. ‘In the parlour, I suppose.' I rather enjoyed her new persona as mistress of the house, fierce and sensible, snapping directions to me and Meaulnes and even M'Synder, but she seemed to draw the line at cheery, self-assured Corvin, in whose company she shrank once again into artful adolescence.

The doctor's eyes, when he returned early the following week, had lost their sparkle. He sat rather glumly in his wheelchair and stared at the bed we had carried downstairs and positioned across the parlour window.

‘You've all been very kind,' he murmured awkwardly. ‘Now, I wonder if I might have a little peace, and a little Bach.
Composed for connoisseurs,
' he added with a bitter smile,
‘for the refreshment of their spirits
— that's what I need.'

Corvin seemed uncomfortable with the doctor's new predicament. He was a man of many talents, dressing wounds among them, but he was not a patient nurse.

‘Since Arnold wants a few days' peace and quiet,' he said breezily the next day, ‘and since I'm not a very peaceful or quiet housemate, how would you like to come up to Ben Nevis with me this weekend? I could take you up that North-East Buttress.' Rose looked up from her sketchbook frowning, but said nothing. ‘I am reliably informed that the storms washed away most of the snow, and now the fine weather has dried the rock nicely — the ridge routes are in summer condition, more or less. Trust me: you'll love it.'

‘What was that nasty step called?' I said doubtfully, adjusting my glasses and trying to look delicate. ‘The Man-eater?' Corvin was having none of my vacillation.

‘The Mantrap!' he cried, leaping to his feet, then glancing guiltily at the door and lowering his voice. ‘Guess who's going up that first, ladder-monkey!'

He led me up to the vast attic, where one whole room was filled with climbing equipment — coils of rope, straps and strange clusters of ironmongery hanging from nails on the rafters like giant multicoloured bats above dark Jacobean chests full of the same. He looked me up and down and smiled.

‘Let's get you kitted up.'

So I boarded a train for the first time in three months: left the sacred combe far behind but carried perhaps its rarest curiosity — Corvin — on the seat beside me as we darted through the lamb-speckled wonders of Cumbria and the southern uplands of Scotland. It was a long journey, and we talked. I told him everything, I think, just as he had predicted — or at least everything that you have yourself read in this account (as to what remains untold, about my marriage or anything else, you and he are free to speculate).

‘Don't mind me,' he said at one point, slipping a notebook from his pocket and writing a few lines. ‘I always carry one of these on the train.' I talked more, and he wrote a few more lines.

Upon reaching Fort William at dusk we clambered over a low hill that obscured the comforting lights and sounds of the town, and then stumbled and cursed our way across a lumpy, scratchy moor to the banks of a river which produced a blank, eerie noise in the darkness. Further up the valley a vague shadow loomed against the sky. Corvin searched about judiciously and, having found a flat, mossy platform sat down on a boulder beside it.

‘Welcome to our humble abode,' he said, cheerfully. ‘Make yourself at home.'

‘Won't the sound of the river keep us awake?' I asked.

‘Oh, the ear is accommodative,' he replied, opening his rucksack and pulling out a small sleeping bag. ‘In half an hour you'll hear nothing.'

He was right, and after sleeping soundly I opened my eyes to a blue April sky thronged with benevolent clouds.

‘Still or sparkling?' asked Corvin, carrying our two water bottles from the riverbank. A reckless, rootless feeling came over me as we tied our boots and packed away the sleeping bags — it was like that moment of looking back at the patch of flattened grass as you leave a campsite with the tent on your back, but this heather had suffered not even the imprint of a tent, nothing attached to the ground — we simply stood up and walked away. The human instinct to settle was for a moment troubled by an even older one — the one that had got humanity to wherever he settled in the first place — then it passed and we were just two lads out for a walk.

As we trooped up the path the mountain drew nearer — the dark alter ego of that friendly, rounded Ben Nevis of family holidays and the
Three Peaks Challenge
, its monstrous grey buttresses looming forward from the distant, corniced edge of the plateau hanging sharp against the sky. Snow lay thick in the famous gullies and was scattered liberally across the higher slopes. An air of menace hung about the last of the buttresses, a jutting silhouette at the head of the valley, soaring a thousand feet straight to the summit.

‘Which one are we going up?' I asked, trying to identify the least threatening of the many ridges and spurs. Corvin smiled and looked straight ahead towards the last.

‘Just think of it as a series of ladders,' he said, ‘one on top of the other. And here you have no books to worry about — you can hold on with both hands.'

When we stopped for a sip of water deep under the shadow of the first cliffs, I gazed up and tried to recall the photograph in the locked room, which showed the mountain under much heavier snow.

‘Where's
The Temple
?' I murmured. Corvin nodded towards the steepest cliff of them all, crossed by overhanging faults like a suit of armour with plates stacked one upon the other. One overhang was deeper and darker than all the others. ‘The Pediment,' I mouthed silently, craning my neck. Corvin followed my gaze with narrowed eyes, the wind flicking at his long corkscrews of hair.

‘Do you feel it?' he whispered. ‘The pull, up towards the sky? The lure of the unattainable?' I did feel something — a premonition of vertigo, a kind of panic in my stomach that reminded me of something else. I took a slow breath.

‘Sometimes you have to admit defeat without a fight,' I said, serenely. Which fights, I wondered, were left to me?

‘And sometimes not,' replied Corvin. ‘
Consideremus
.' We stood in reverent silence for a moment, then he turned and bounded on up the path. We passed the lonely climbers' hut with its wind turbine thrumming away uselessly, and later crossed beneath the looming bulk of our own buttress — behind which, to my relief, there was an easier way up.

‘At the lower grades, mountaineering is wonderfully pragmatic,' said my guide, pointing out the way. ‘It's all about finding the line of least resistance.'

‘And at the higher grades?' His lips twisted into a grim smile as he glanced back along the cliffs.

‘You've seen what
that's
about.'

He led me across a steep, slabby hillside back towards the buttress, which we joined on a broad platform above the lowest cliffs. Already the valley was far below and the climbers' hut a tiny squarish speck, but the mountain seemed to loom above us higher and steeper than ever. There were no more easy ways up.

‘This is where we rope up,' he said, shrugging off his rucksack and laying his slim fingers on the wall of rock that barred our way. ‘We'll use running belays. Put on your harness and helmet and screw your courage to the sticking place.'

We barely spoke a word to each other on the journey south. Corvin dashed off a few more notes and gazed out of the train window while I read my book — Borges — and relived the strange new euphoria of pleasure and fear I had experienced on the shattered side of a mountain.

After a couple of hours in one particularly busy carriage, Corvin bumped my knee gently with his own. ‘I like trains,' he declared in a level murmur without turning his head, as though we were birdwatchers in the presence of a rare flock. ‘But sometimes I lose the knack of them, and feel a silent rant against humanity rise up within me.' He paused for a moment, perhaps checking that no one else had heard him, then continued in his low monotone: ‘‘‘Look at yourselves!” the rant says, “Reading your tawdry papers and thumbing your gadgets! Overwhelmed by cleverness and anxiety, good intentions and a terminal loss of imagination, fooled by sly convention, crippled by the woes of specialised competence and the joys of generalised ignorance, like circus animals when the crowds have lost interest. Come away, you silly oxen! The combe awaits you! There is no guard to bribe, no gate to keep the riff-raff out! Come away! Do not go gentle into that
London Lite
!''' He again fell silent for a few seconds. ‘Then I recover myself, open my senses, observe the ever-renewing gallery of expressions on preoccupied faces, notice a familiar book in an unlikely hand, catch a coded fragment of lovers' talk or the friendly words exchanged by strangers, maybe meet someone's idly wandering gaze and look away. Yes, I like trains.' He opened his notebook and said no more.

We had to run for the branch-line's last service of the night, and then made our way perhaps ten miles in darkness, across fields, over stiles and fences and through black woods to the mouth of the combe. Corvin knew the way, of course, and I followed, panting and sweating as I tried to keep up.

16

At breakfast I asked M'Synder how the doctor was feeling, but she only smiled reassuringly and said, ‘I think I'll let you go and see for yourself.' In the lane I met Corvin pounding down from the house in his running shorts and a dress shirt with cuffs flapping open.

‘Doctor alright?' I asked as he shot past.

‘Never better!' he called over his shoulder, and was gone.

On reaching the house I knocked at the open parlour door, and then peered cautiously round it to find the bed gone and the chairs back in their usual places.