The Sacred Combe

PROLOGUE

Imagine an English garden on the first day of May. Or rather, imagine two gardens: from our vantage point in this blossoming cherry tree we can examine the ridged crest of the wall that divides them, its ancient coping dimpled by rain-hollows and home to plump veins of moss, intrepid dandelions and the wrinkled, reddish lichens on which peacock butterflies like to sun themselves.

We look up, ignoring a touch of vertigo. Crowding against the blue sky is the massed abundance of blossoms, softly diffusing the sunlight and stirred by an almond-scented breeze. We look down into the garden on the left, where a low, sun-bleached table stands before two chairs on a stone terrace. A wisteria leans grey limbs delicately over the buttress of the wall, its long budding tails biding their time. A robin materialises for a moment on the arm of a chair, then silently darts away. From the terrace a step leads down to a flagged path, beyond which a couple of clipped yews, slightly ragged on top, cast matching shadows on a strip of lawn. For a moment we catch the placid murmur of human voices carrying along the path from some unseen conversation. Then the breeze stirs, and the sound is lost.

We now turn to the garden on the right, which pays a very different homage to Flora. Tall fronds of sorrel and budding stems of ragwort and foxglove stand like colourful ships' masts above a sea of long grass, and arching brambles crowd along the wall. Twenty blue butterflies play on a holly that rears darkly against its own buttress, bristling with a robustness and vigour unknown to its delicate counterpart beyond the wall. Now, as a cloud drifts clear of the sun, an appreciative hum of insects rises from the grasses.

But amidst this riotous concourse of the hosts of nature, the works of humankind survive: two stone busts confront each other from slender plinths, like the forlorn guardians of a treasure already plundered, each waiting for the other to surrender his post. We can see only one of the faces — the nose and one cheek have fallen away. A name is inscribed, perhaps, under yellow lichen.

With a sudden, soft batter of feathers, a magnificent bird alights on the wall. A burly presence, with pinkish plumage set off by a glittering streak of blue on each wing and a long black tail: a jay. It rocks clumsily for a moment on the blunt ridge of stone, finds its balance, then struts a few steps towards us. We hear an odd chuckling, clicking sound which we only connect to the bird with some astonishment. It cocks its big head and seems to fix on us a brilliant, perfectly round, yellow eye with a black pupil. Its beak opens a crack and emits a malevolent croaking rattle. But no, it is not looking at us — it has spied a few tiny twig-tips poking out from a hollowed crook against the trunk of our tree. It advances a few more steps, chuckling.

The robin reappears on a high branch. It hops about, puffs out its feathers, gives three sharp, ticking calls like defiant jabs of a needle. The jay ducks its head a few times, as though in mocking greeting, and steps closer to the nest. For a moment the two birds pause — not looking at each other but alert as only birds can be.

But here come the human voices again, suddenly much nearer: one man speaks softly while a second laughs in protest, over a single slow beat of footfalls on stone: tick, tock, tick. With another batter of feathers the jay is gone, and the robin flits into her precious hollow.

One disadvantage of our otherwise excellent lookout is that from here, directly above the wall, we cannot see whether it possesses, or does not possess, a door.

In a treetop already distant, the jay screams.

1

This is the story of the seventeen weeks I spent in a strange and beautiful place, after I lost my wife and resigned from my job.

Don't misunderstand me: my wife — Sarah, the decisive woman who was my wife, I mean — is in good health. I lost her that summer almost as suddenly and unexpectedly as if she had indeed met with some fatal accident, but it was all quite deliberate. Sarah deliberated, and it was I, not she, who was destined for the thunderbolt.

But this is not her story, and, if I could get away with it, that is the only paragraph I would give her. She chose to be the Woman of Action, and I choose to be the Man of Words. Did you notice those five unremarkable words in my first sentence, ‘a strange and beautiful place'? Look for yourself — they are still there. Sarah, whom I loved, has not touched them; she has never seen the sacred combe.

The day after I discovered the letter on the bed, I took my tent to the Yorkshire Dales — a dependable refuge — and stayed for three days. I spoke to no one, sought answers in my own memories, and found none. The nadir was stepping onto the southbound train at Garsdale Head on a warm, smug, gnat-filled August morning. For the first time in my calm and careful life, I felt panic.

It was very different from grief, or from what I vividly imagine grief to be, since I have never been bereaved — at its centre was a mockery, rather than an ennoblement, of that supernatural entity that I had called our love. But neither was it like that commonplace thunderbolt, the discovery of infidelity — there was none. Sarah's Actions were irreproachable. Her extraordinary disregard for the tawdry conventions of estrangement — the ceasing to communicate, the petty disputes, the first lies, the doomed reconciliations — was, I admitted, nothing less than admirable. I was almost proud of her.

But what I felt instead, as I stepped onto that southbound train, was the panic of a man whose betrayer, in a final act of pity, reveals that the Great Cause is empty, rests on a fallacy, is corrupted, has already failed — and he is the only one who didn't know. I might also write (since I am new to this art of writing an account of oneself, and uncertain in my approach) that what I felt was an urgent, physical sickness for which I could see no cure or treatment. Both statements are true, or at least as true as each other.

This feeling of panic, or of sickness, returns to me sometimes, even now, and in those moments retains all its original intensity. But as the steady months overtake me, lifting and lowering me like waves while they practise their slow sculpture of erosion, I have discovered new and greater causes to serve. This is the story of my discoveries.

I returned to work, hoping for diversion, but a sterile office is an unseemly stage for a panic of the soul. I sat at the focus of my curved bank of computer screens while the prices of the world's goods flashed green and red, ceaseless ruminations of that mighty hive-mind, the market. But for all its supposed wisdom the market offered no advice on the subjects of decisive wives and ruined hopes — the bedraggled Dales sheep, incoherent but magnificently impervious to suffering, had been more helpful.

On the wall over my desk, an air conditioning unit ticked gently at the prompting of a thermostat. An expensive jacket hanging on the back of the nearest chair stirred, swinging a few millimetres to and fro in the flow of odourless air. The time, displayed a hundred times on my screens, once next to each price, advanced another minute. Who had I been, I asked myself, that I could have been satisfied with this? For I had been satisfied — or as satisfied as anyone who tries to make the best of what his time and place seem to offer. Who had I been, and who was I now?

The idea struck me later that week, as I walked from the office to the tube station. In order to fill the horrid vacuum beaten out by the air conditioning and the flashing prices, and at the same time to divert my attention from what I was by now used to calling my panic of the soul, I would simply read a book. For me, a good book would be, not like a window in the cell wall — that was the wrong image: there was no cell, for there were no walls — but like a standard, perhaps, fluttering over a field of battle. And the more stupid and farcical the battle, I told myself, the nobler must be the standard. Finally, since I feared that turning the last page would feel something like stepping onto that southbound train at Garsdale Head, I decided that it must be a very long book.

I enjoy reading stories, or novels, as we adults are supposed to call them, and so it was to fiction, to all those stories that I should have read but had not, that I first turned.
Ulysses
?
Don Quixote
?
War and Peace
? To each of these I considered pledging my allegiance but the colours of their nobility did not suit my obscure purpose — besides, none was long enough.

Proust. The word flashed up in my mind like a cartoon light bulb. Yes, Proust's shelf-buckling novel was long enough. But — the light bulb flickered — perhaps Proust, too, was inappropriate. I had once listened to a discussion about him on Radio Four.
Le temps perdu
. Lost time. Love, loss, memory, despair.
The sweet cheat gone
. I shuddered, and the lightbulb went out. Perhaps one day I would find succour and solace in the words of Proust, or some other high priest at the altar of love, but not yet. I wanted diversion from the sickness, not treatment.

My degree had been in Physics and Philosophy, neither of which subjects I felt inclined to explore further (hence my passage, my descent, into a career in finance). As for the many other provinces of the wide realm of recorded thought, I knew so little about them that I determined to go to a bookshop and choose by appearance, just as any sensible person chooses a bottle of wine.

Accordingly, during an illicit lunchbreak on the following day, I made my way to the Charing Cross Road. In those damp and labyrinthine basements, rich with the mingling smells of ancient drains and mouldering paper, I found several promising candidates. I weighed Vasari's
Lives of the Artists
against Butler's
Lives of the Saints
, flirted with Boswell and Pepys, and almost fell for Kinglake's
Invasion of the Crimea
in nine volumes (but I counted only eight).

At last, with my return to the office long overdue, and as I was about to settle for a tattered set of Churchill's
History of the English-speaking Peoples
, I glanced upward and my gaze lighted on a long, dark mass of uniform volumes on the top shelf of the history section. They were of substantial size and thickness (
demy octavo
, as I now know), occupying at least a foot of shelf space. A timeworn gilt tracery glimmered faintly on their broad spines. I stretched to reach the first volume, which slid out smoothly from its snug abode and tipped its weight into my hand. The cover was a rich, raisin brown textured by fine, diagonal grooves that formed a lattice of tiny squares, like, perhaps, a field that has been ploughed twice by a pair of infinitesimal farmers engaged in a mad quarrel of ownership. The dusty page-ends bore a marbled pattern of dark, bluish strands of ink, which flourished into a mass of vivid colour on the endpapers. A rectangle of pale grazes showed where an
ex libris
had been removed.