The Sacred Combe (10 page)

‘It doesn't like to be seen,' she replied. It was not the first time she had spoken of the house as though it had a personality — as though it were alive. ‘We'll be in the wind shortly,' she added, as I pushed up the sleeves of my jumper.

Soon the gradient eased and the wind indeed began to build as we came up onto the plateau. The bracken gave way to gorse and heather through which the path wound faintly before a final incline brought us to a junction with the broad ridge-top path. We followed it for a hundred yards to a pile of stones.

‘This is the summit of Fern Top,' declared Rose over the cold north-westerly. ‘Nine hundred and eighty-one feet.' I wrapped my scarf more tightly and pulled down my hat. To the east lay the lowland regions of the county, faintly and intricately lined and gently wrinkled like one of M'Synder's faded rugs, stretching twenty miles or more to another vague band of hills on the horizon. To the west and still looming over us stood the broad but slightly pointed summit of Grey Man, marked by a great cairn standing black against the sky. We started along the path towards it, right into the teeth of the wind. A couple of grouse burst into the air with their cackling cry: ‘Go back, go back, go back!'

The cairn was further than it looked, set half a mile back on the bleak, reddish moor and standing at the centre of a bog of rippled peat that was now half-frozen, and squelched and crunched alternately beneath our boots. It was a true beehive cairn, tall and regular, and I noticed a few shrivelled and frozen flowers carefully jammed between two of the stones as though in remembrance — but I said nothing.

The path turned to the south, and after a few hundred yards we passed a short, sun-bleached wooden post indicating a path on the left.

‘That's the way down into the arboretum,' said Rose. ‘The path crosses the bridge in the beech grove, then skirts the meadow and joins the lane right in front of the house.'

‘But it's a public footpath,' I said. Rose laughed.

‘It is,' she replied. ‘It runs right through the middle of the grounds — haven't you looked at the map?' I had not. ‘We had a big family group wander down last summer during a thunderstorm — they asked me if we had a teashop. Since then — no one.'

‘Does the path go past the temple?' I asked, cautiously. She looked at me without expression.

‘No. You can't see the temple from any of the paths, public or private. Only the buzzards can see it.' She looked up and I noticed the wheeling predators for the first time. ‘One for sorrow,' she counted, ‘two for joy, three for brazen, four for coy: five. Five remembers.'

‘Six forgets?' I guessed, stupidly.

‘There are only five,' she muttered, turning abruptly to walk on.

Our own path now descended steeply to a low saddle in the ridge, crossed by a rough track that climbed up from the combe and then wound down out of sight into another valley to the west.

‘So that's where the gardener lives,' I said, pointing down the track as we climbed a stile. Rose nodded curtly, and I told her about my odd meeting with him in the hall. Then I added, ‘Not your favourite person, I gather.' She paused after the second stile, sheltered by the dry-stone wall and a twisted hawthorn.

‘I used to be fond of him, when I was a child,' she said. ‘We had fun in the holidays.' She said nothing for a while, as though recollecting, and then continued: ‘When I was thirteen he made me a forty-foot swing in one of the beech trees in the grove, but Arnold told him to take it down. And of course he knows all the roses — when they'll flower and when they'll die.' Then she frowned and shook her head. ‘I'm afraid he bores me now — he takes things too seriously.'

He loved her as a little sister, I hypothesised to myself, but his love changed, became complex and demanding, and now she scorns him for it: a classic case. Poor fool — he must be nearly twice her age.

14

We continued round to the long, flat, third summit, Hart Top, and then dropped off the plateau and down through the woods, crossing the stream by a plank bridge. Rose went straight to her room when we returned to the cottage, leaving me to help M'Synder unpack a box of groceries that had been delivered from the village. Later, as we two drank tea by the fire after dark, she thudded down the stairs, called out that she was going up to the house, and slammed the door.

At dinner, I tried to tease a little more information from my blue-slippered landlady. Had Arnold always lived in the combe? I asked.

‘I believe he moved away when he qualified as a doctor,' she replied, after her customary pause, ‘about nineteen sixty, and then moved back after his mother died in seventy-five. That was when I came to the combe.' I remembered his gold ring and wanted to ask, ‘Did he ever marry?' but the words faltered on my lips and M'Synder led the conversation elsewhere:

‘Thirty-nine years old, I was,' she murmured, wistfully. ‘Rather old, you're thinking — young, I'm thinking — I'd never seen a house like the Hall. Never heard of it, though I lived but twenty miles away.' Did
she
ever marry? That was my next unaskable question. Then I had some questions for myself: Why does it matter whether she or Arnold married? Can a person not live his or her life unsupported by that crutch? Is she, decisive Sarah, directing my thoughts even now?

‘There was an advertisement in the post office,' M'Synder went on, then smiled. ‘A bit like yours, I s'pose. Mine offered a post for six months. I stayed on for a while — another six months sneaked by, then six years, then another six followed, then a decade or two. You canna stop 'em.' She sat back in her chair and sighed, while the old clock ticked quietly in the corner. ‘And now here I am, getting old.'

She looked straight at me, and for a moment I could think of no reply. Then I just said, ‘A beautiful place to live.'

‘I'm glad you think so, Mr Browne,' she whispered, her narrowed eyes twinkling behind the steel frames, ‘since if my example is anything to go by — and Rose's, for that matter — you might be staying here longer than you expect.'

I slept deeply that night, and daylight was already spilling from behind the curtains when I was woken by hurried footsteps, voices and the alien sound of a car door banging shut. I got up, threw on my coat, which I used as a dressing gown, and went out to the little landing. I heard the roar of an engine and caught a hint of exhaust fumes mingled with the usual smell of toast, then through the raindrops on the landing window saw the old Cortina bumping away down the lane. I tramped sleepily down the stairs as M'Synder was shutting the front door.

‘Morning, Mr Browne,' she said, cheerfully. ‘You just missed Rose.' The boots, the red scarf, the little felt hat — they were all gone. ‘The new term starts tomorrow.'

‘Oh, I didn't know,' I said, looking at the empty peg next to the one where my old woolly hat and scarf were hanging.

‘Breakfast's almost ready,' said M'Synder, and I followed her into the parlour.

The rain grew heavier, and an easterly wind blustered up the valley and flung squalls like handfuls of rice against the windows. Undeterred, M'Synder donned a long raincoat, Wellington boots and a plastic rain bonnet, tucked her old pumps into her shoulder bag and ventured out to church. Before leaving she directed me to half a pie that I could warm up for my lunch, since she was paying some visits and would not be back until the evening.

I stood at the parlour window, looking across the sodden little garden to the swaying birches, then stooped and peered up the hill, which faded into a drifting oblivion of rain and cloud. Or was it just the condensation on the streaming glass? A loud pop from the fire made me start. I could go out, I thought — could spend the day in a reassuring battle against reassuring elemental foes — but I will not. I will stay here and think.

The four volumes of Gibbon had stood untouched in the bedroom since my arrival. I fetched one now and pulled a chair up close to the fire. The book lay on my lap. I gently circled my hands on its finely textured cover and thought of those infinitesimal ploughmen. For three months, I reflected, this book had stood in my little flat in south London, above the table at which previously Sarah and I had shared our busy, happy, now-incomprehensible lives. And yet before that, before its undocumented journey to a shop on the Charing Cross Road, it had watched over the library of Combe Hall, a quarter of a mile from where I now sat, for nearly two centuries. It had known the doctor's grandmother Catherine and his great- uncle Hartley when they were squabbling Victorian children — had perhaps been read by their stern, ambitious father in preference to Dickens. It had heard the doctor's uncle Samuel playing the piano before he went up to Cambridge, and Stella's weeping when the telegram arrived. It had, I suddenly realised, seen the object of my search — the precious letter itself — when the smug and wizened Hartley, perhaps tipsy with the bishop's port, slipped it into its enduring hiding place.

I lifted the book to my nostrils and breathed the faint scent of its pages, still unmistakeably Gibbon though I had since smelt a thousand other books. I almost hoped that the scent, which was, after all, quite literally, the accumulated and concentrated essence drawn by the paper from all those lost years, might carry some clue as to the letter's whereabouts, or might at least evoke whatever it was here that excited, inspired,
quickened
me. Instead, it reminded me of my divorce.

I wonder what you, the reader, make of my story so far. You are perhaps frustrated by the superficiality of my relations with the inhabitants of the combe — a few words here, a few there, separated by hours of monotonous solitude. That my first few weeks followed this pattern (yes, I'm afraid there is more to come, but I'll try to be concise) probably reflects my character: I do not easily make new friends. I made none at the bank, and, during the two years I inhabited that last flat with Sarah, though I said hundreds of friendly hellos to our neighbours, who seemed interesting, even attractive people, I never invited them in for a drink, nor was I invited. If I knew their names, it was only from sorting the post in the hall. Sarah was just as bad: we used to joke about it, as we spent yet another Friday evening at home, and it seemed just that — a harmless joke — in those distant days when we had each other to share it.

It was not funny anymore: now, those few words here and there and those hours of solitude were the basic elements of my life. My marriage, whose long threads had been woven so deeply into my memories, into my present concerns and actions, and into my foolish hopes for the future, had been withdrawn from me: had been cut out swiftly with skilful scissors. My first reactions had been panic and flight, but now, alone in a stranger's cottage in a strange county, I began to feel something else: a slow movement, an
adjustment
, of the remaining parts of my life.

I now remembered more fondly the Christmas game of chess with my reticent brother; I quite naturally counted among my few friends the robin in the lane, with his noble cinnamon breast; I shivered at the thought of the doctor, alone and remembering in his cold, majestic, terrible house. With a chunk of my life torn away, the disordered residue began to expand to fill the gap, began to acquire new significances as it touched, yes, some
wing of my soul
that had previously been engaged and unreceptive, but that now reached out tenderly.

Here in the combe I felt immersed in and saturated by novelty, as I had not felt, for example, when I fled to the Yorkshire Dales. There, if I opened a gate into an unfamiliar field, or the door of some cosy, crowded pub, or crawled into my little tent, all I found was myself — the seeds of my panic, whispering malevolently, ‘What matter where, if I be still the same?' But in the combe it was different: when I first looked up at those vast, improbable windows looming out of the mist, when I first stepped into the cool, silent cathedral of books, or when I took Rose's cold hand in the doctor's parlour, my panic seemed to give way as though ceding me to a superior power. Of course, my stubborn self was still there — it was I who saw and touched — but in the combe I barely recognised him.

The rain hammered on, and I still had not opened the Gibbon. I put it back in my room and fetched a notebook instead. As I rumbled more coal onto the fire, a gust of wind sent a little wraith of smoke out into the room. I breathed the moment of acridity and the cosy, dissipating fire-smell that followed, and then began to write a rough account of my days in the combe — an account which, as I now try to tell my story in full, sits before me as my guide.