The Sacred Combe (11 page)

1

I worked steadily by day in a trance of diligence, and by night I dreamed.

In one dream, of which I was slightly ashamed in the morning, I saw Rose sitting naked under the star-tree, a slender white ‘T' like Reni's
Crucifixion
— arms outstretched along the back of the seat, toes pointed towards me, head tipped back so that I saw the triangular outline of her jaw against the shadows. I approached slowly, stood over her like a clumsy, bespectacled vampire in the moonlight, my gaze wandering over her body, waiting, I suppose, for her reaction — her censure or sanction. I leaned and saw her sharp, unscarred face, of course it was unscarred: it was I who bore the scar. Then I saw the flecks of frost on the eyelashes, on the glistening teeth, and lurched backward, two steps, three, then stepped back into nothing and fell.

In another dream, I turned from swimming ranks of books to see the doctor emerge silently from the fireplace, knitting his veined hands and wearing the drawn smile — that sad smile of having made a mistake; he stared past me, behind me, did not see the scar that I again felt clawing, dragging on my face. I said something but he did not hear. He moved closer, and his eyes began to change; his smile thinned and hardened; his hands were shaking, the knuckles white, the fingers twisted, deformed. Of course he was grieving for that young uncle who shared my name; I wanted to take his arm, lead him away, but lamplight glistened over the varnished canvas, over his grieving face. I was startled by a weird shock of sound — those sword-thrusts of Bach strings, perhaps, but rough and distorted so they were almost like the screams of birds.

In yet another dream, I was hurrying through my old university library, glancing into each stall, searching for Sarah. We were to be married that day, and I had spent too long walking in the rain in the meadows, and now my clothes were soaked and we were late. My search took me to every library I knew in the city, with obstructive librarians and locked doors at every turn. I was shivering in my wet clothes but had no time to change them. Finally I wondered, with the knocking dread that is, thankfully, rarely felt outside dreams, whether she might be ‘at the combe' — no, I thought, surely not there. I awoke to find the blankets slipped off my shoulder and rain or sleet softly feathering the windowpanes.

So much for dreams. Winter had established itself in the combe with the same air of serene permanence that characterised M'Synder in her parlour. The bright hips of the dog-rose had surely hung over the lane, each burdened by a gleaming white pouch of water in which the whole sky was imprisoned upside down, and would go on hanging, for as long as those numberless pictures, that seemed not to mind whether they hung quite straight, would cover the dark parlour walls. Drifts of last season's leaves surely belonged in every sheltered nook just as the lapping, rucking rugs belonged under the well-pawed armchair. And surely the only transformation that the birches knew was to present a fine reddish spray of twigs to the low sun but a black stencil to the early dusk, just as the parlour might be transformed by the fleeting presence of Rose, but would always be M'Synder's domain.

The idea of spring seemed fanciful; summer, impossible. I was cold for most of my waking hours — cold on the stairs, in the lane, in the library, in the
facilitates
. The fires in the parlour and the doctor's study acquired unexpected significance as radiant cores of comfort — the only other refuge was my double-blanketed bed, but there I had to rely on trapping my own treacherous radiance, which would eagerly seize any chance to escape, just when I was most vulnerable.

During that second week my search brought me to some of the most spectacular books in Combe Hall's collection. Architecture, archaeology, anthropology — words whose ponderous length befits the huge books by which those fields were represented, and the delicate task of searching them. The largest of all was a century-old facsimile, in a single tabletop-sized volume, of the British Museum's seventy-foot
Papyrus of Ani
, one of the surviving copies of
The Book of the Dead
. Here the act of preservation was explicit — a sort of reverent plaster cast of a fragile miracle of survival — but this monster was merely a cartoonish exemplar of the numerous analogous acts pressed together on every shelf in this chill museum of the dead.

Yes, the exemplar's subject was fitting. What, after all, did these books, for all their insistence on singularity, have in common? Perhaps the simplest characteristic of all: death. Their authors were all dead. Strictly speaking, a few might yet be clinging to life — I envisaged a retired don whose brilliant first thesis had been published in the thirties and acquired by the doctor's parents, now hunched in a high-backed chair in a different kind of common room in the same city, writing arthritic letters to eminent ex-students and flirting with the nurses in precise, anatomical Latin — but a few more years would finish them. (Who would be the very last? Perhaps the doctor should write a congratulatory letter to mark the occasion.) Notwithstanding these few premature burials the library was a graveyard: a graveyard where the dead ceaselessly delivered their solemn lectures whether or not any among the living chose to attend.

The older part of the archaeology collection, presumably once owned by the elder Hartley, recipient of letters and contriver of temples, was built around Montfaucon's seminal
Antiquity Explained and Represented in Sculptures
in six volumes, and included massive first editions of Robert Adam and Piranesi over which I lingered for longer than was absolutely necessary (piously remembering the doctor's direction that I need not search like a robot).

I was in the armchair one morning, hunched over the latter volume across whose yellowed pages the sunshine was gloriously splashed, so that every etched detail was stark, when I heard a soft tread and glanced up to see the doctor standing at the table.

‘Good morning, Mr Browne,' he said, in his dry, precise voice. ‘Found some picture books?' I started to get up but he raised his hand. ‘Stay, and allow me to peer over your shoulder. My eyes are word-weary.'

I had been examining one of the etchings of the Colosseum — the one in which its outer wall bulges towards the viewer and spreads to left and right with meticulously, mysteriously distorted perspective.

‘Have you noticed,' he began, after scrutinising the image, ‘that the lap of the seated hominid is the perfect support for a large and heavy book?'

‘Though tending to encourage bad posture,' I replied, straightening my aching back.

‘Indeed. Turn the page.'

The next three images depicted the ruins of the Villa Adriana at Tivoli. The first showed the surviving half of a domed temple, overgrown with vegetation; the second, sunlight slanting into a gloomy space; the third, a precarious vault rent by gaping, leafy holes through which light filtered to the dappled floor.

‘The Temple of Light,' I murmured.

‘Have you seen it yet?' whispered the doctor, sharply. I shook my head, still gazing down at the commingling of sunlight — our own and that which Piranesi had trapped in this prism of yellowed paper — two slivers of the same star, now reunited in a dazzling collision in the lap of a divorced ex-banker, aged twenty-five years, in a cold, silent room.

‘I suggest you follow my ancestor's example,' he said, already walking away, ‘and carry whatever inspiration you might have drawn from these books up the hillside: visit the temple today.'

2

The day was bright but not so still as that of my first tour of the gardens, and I went back for my coat and hat. Gazing up from the terrace to where the hill met the sky, I could see only a rampart of distant treetops. I turned right, instead of left, along the back of the house, past the high kitchen windows to where another flight of steps descended to the lawn. Between the north side of the house and a row of outbuildings with black wooden gates lay a broad passage, where a scattering of damp needles, sawdust and chippings was all that remained of the yuletide bough. Through the open gate of one shed could be seen a massive wood stack and coal store.

An archway in the main garden wall led me to a spacious yard behind the outbuildings, which now presented a neat row of doors and windows, like a miniature terrace of cottages. Along the side of the yard stood a row of water butts and several heaps of branches and decaying vegetation, and trolleys, barrows and ladders stood or leaned here and there. I peeped through each of the windows: one revealed a broad bench strewn with old newspaper, broken fragments of terracotta and sprinklings of compost, with teetering stacks of pots behind; another displayed a jumbled mass of ironmongery and smooth ash wood — an inquisitor's paradise of shears, forks, saws, dibbers, hoes, rakes and other tools whose names and purposes I could not guess. The last window looked into a tiny gardener's office, with a chair and table, a little fireplace heaped high with ashes, stacks of notebooks and shelves lined with jars, bottles, a kettle and a few old books.

My attention was then caught by the faint, unmistakeable sound of a spade striking stony soil, and I walked back along these outbuildings to a doorway in another high wall. The wooden door was wedged open with a small, tapered angle of rusty metal whose broad end was bent over and pierced by a circular hole — a distinctive object that held my gaze for a moment as I tried in vain to recall where I had seen one before. Then I stepped into a realm whose finely ordered productivity gave it unexpected kinship with the library itself: it was the kitchen garden.

An ordered garden seems to impose the same nagging burden of responsibility as an ordered library: those beds, having been carefully planned and raised ought to be tended, their crops harvested and made good use of, just as a case of books ought to be read. The gifts of the earth ought to be cherished even as the slow-crafted gifts of the dead, and just as the sight of a genuine reader in a library is morally comforting (a mere letter-searcher is not enough), so is the sight of a gardener tending his crop.

And here indeed, watched by an assistant, was Meaulnes, just where he ought to be — setting his boot on a long spade, turning the soil in four neat cuts between taut lines of cord, stepping back, digging and turning again. The assistant did not actively assist — it was an elaborate scarecrow, complete with rake, watering can and drooping hat. I advanced along the brick-paved path between the pairs of beds, some of which were bare and dug over, while others bore defiant ranks of winter-hardy cabbages and leeks, or frailer crops under neat rows of upturned buckets and glinting glass cloches. Along the south-facing wall stood two iron-framed glasshouses in need of repainting and a line of old brick incubators with lids of dewy glass. The giant gardener saw me and stopped, leaning on his spade.

‘Morning,' I called, brightly but not too brightly. He nodded. ‘I'm exploring,' I said as I reached him, ‘and there's a lot to explore — a surprise behind every door.' I suppose this comment was intended to provoke him, but he just nodded again. A small squadron of starlings swept over the wall and he watched them grimly as they saw us, aborted their mission, swerved and vanished.

‘I will be glad to answer any questions you have about the gardens, Monsieur Browne,' he said quickly, looking over my head. ‘It is good to have a visitor to appreciate them.'

I was wrong-footed by this civility, and smiled awkwardly. ‘There don't seem to be many visitors.'

‘Not any more,' he replied, stepping over his cord and driving in the spade to begin the next row.

‘Were there once?' I asked, but the question was cut off by the next fall of the spade, and I did not repeat it.

‘Happy exploring, Monsieur,' he said. I thanked him and moved on, towards another door at the far end of the garden. This, I noticed, had the same distinctive hinges and latch as the first, decorated by curls of iron like representations of wind or smoke.

Wondering to what golden age of visitors Meaulnes had alluded, I now entered a small, square orchard with rickety espaliers of apple or pear and other short, gnarly trees, all now bare and grey. Rows of shrivelled and nibbled apples lined the path, which led to another door opening on the beech grove that Rose had showed me. I picked my way through the dewy mast and the first tiny, peeping, deluded bulb-shoots to the bridge over the eddying stream.

I crossed over carefully (remember — no parapets) and began to climb the stepped path that slanted up the hillside. Diverse and beautiful trees reared up on both sides, and I soon passed between the two giant Wellingtonia redwoods that could be seen from far down the valley. These dwarfed a weird cypress with long weeping tresses and a low, dark, tangled conifer that sprawled fifty feet along the slope. I continued upward through a stand of pale firs and another of scaly Scots pines, catching occasional glimpses down through the silvery crowns of the beech grove to the house, the lawn and the crisscrossing garden walls.

I soon reached a junction over which a sinister eucalypt crouched, with curved, ghostly-white boughs like heaped whalebones. One path traversed left around the hill and another climbed up to the right. Keen to gain height, I began up the right-hand, northward fork, but then remembered the doctor saying that the temple faced south, turned back and took the level path (my first choice, I later learned, was the public right of way that joined the ridge-top path at the wooden post). As I stepped over the slippery roots extended by small, mossy oaks and sycamores, a flicker of movement caught my eye and I saw a squirrel scamper along a branch — not the fat London variety but a little brownish creature with tufty ears and a wispy, off-white tail — my first red squirrel.