The Sacred Combe (9 page)

‘This library has traditionally been organised according to the books' contents,' he said, sharply, ‘not their market value.' He cautiously descended the stairs with a slim volume under his arm, and added, in a softer voice, ‘They are very precious — you are right. Be gentle with them, won't you?' Then he walked out without waiting for a reply, and closed the door.

12

It was almost five o' clock by the time I slid the last book back onto the bottom shelf with a satisfied stroke of the palm of my hand. I rose creakily to my feet and stepped back: over four days I had searched — diligently, painstakingly searched, as promised — sixty-four feet of books. The hunted letter was not there.

I stepped onto the long carpet and looked up at Hartley Comberbache, still half-turned from his work, frozen in a moment of indecision — never our most glorious moments — his lips parted, his dark eyes intent on mine, holding my gaze even as I moved my head so the reflected lamplight glistened softly over the varnished canvas. I wanted to take his arm and raise him gently from his desk, untwist that wrought-up body, lead him away, pour him a drink, make him smile. What was he working on — what words might not have been written if I could really have taken his arm? And would it have mattered?

Two piercing sword-thrusts of strings burst into the silence. It was Bach again: this time the violin concerto in A minor. The doctor was already standing in the doorway, holding a tumbler in each hand.

‘Finished the first case?' he asked. I nodded, by now accepting his uncanny timing, and he handed me one of the whiskies. ‘To be honest, Mr Browne,' he said, drawing back his mouth and cocking an eyebrow, ‘I didn't think you'd find it in that one.' I gave a protesting laugh and threw back the spirit with a flourish, while he sipped at his mischievously.

‘Why not?' I demanded, my throat burning.

‘Reasoning can only work against us,' he reminded me. ‘It was just a hunch. Now, where next?' I eyed the left-hand end of the gallery, next to Hartley's portrait and above the door to the dining room. ‘I might as well explain,' he added, before I could reply, ‘that if you want continuity in your journey through civilisation, I think you might leave the gallery until the end. Here —' he turned to the case to the right of the door, beneath the gallery ‘— you will find engineering, architecture, and archaeology. Advancing to the right will take you through foreign travel and topography, and then —' he moved to the other side of the staircase and the study door ‘— ancient history, European, British, American history, politics, philosophy and — a man's last resort — religion.' He turned. ‘Here in the folio table resides the law collection — five hundred volumes, remember I am descended from a lawyer to Queen Anne — and along the far wall you will find biography and letters.'

‘Letters?' I repeated, automatically.

‘Irrelevant!' he cried. ‘Stop deducing — it will get you nowhere. Diligence is everything.'

‘What
is
on the gallery, then?' I asked.

‘Works of the imagination,' he replied, solemnly. ‘Art, music, poetry, drama, fiction — in that order.' He drained his glass and moved towards the door. ‘It is your decision, of course,' he said. ‘You are doing a fine job.'

That evening at M'Synder's fireside I finished reading
A Month in the Country
, a short, puzzling novel with whose narrator I seemed to have much in common (albeit my demons seemed comic, where his were tragic: but I was used to that). I had seen nothing of Rose since the night before, and I could not help noticing that each time she was absent when she might have been present I felt what I have called my wholesome disinterest falter.

‘Tomorrow I'll be out when you finish at the house,' said M'Synder, who sat opposite me, changing the batteries of a torch. ‘Fridays, I go to Evensong in the village — I'll be back at about seven o'clock to cook supper.' She had a little box of loose batteries on her lap, and tried different combinations in the torch, each time shining it up into her face to check the brightness.

‘You're welcome to come along, of course,' she added quietly, fixing a discerning gaze down into the torch beam. She flicked the switch, satisfied, and closed the box.

‘I'd love to come,' I said. ‘That is, if you don't mind sitting next to a doubting Thomas.'

I will not now describe my Friday labours over the engineering and architecture collection, lest my account become as repetitive as the task itself. It is enough to state that I made further progress in the search, but did not find the letter.

M'Synder cooked another of her delicious spicy soups for lunch, which she, the doctor and I ate together in the dining room. From where I sat, I could see Meaulnes, the gardener, standing at the southern edge of the lawn with arms crossed and feet planted far apart, studying the deep border between him and the wall. He was wearing his boots, dungarees and cap as before, and seemed oblivious of the fine drizzle that had just filled the air. As I watched he flung out one great arm, like a conductor about to begin. Then he slowly raised the other and swept it from left to right, following it with his turning head, which he nodded rhythmically. Then he dropped the first arm and pointed down at the soil, while the second shot out straight with the palm outward.

‘Something in the garden?' asked the doctor, noticing my attentive gaze.

‘It's the gardener,' I replied. ‘He seems to be doing a sort of dance by the flowerbed.' The doctor and M'Synder chuckled knowingly.

‘He's probably just mapping out the spring planting,' explained the former. ‘He thinks with his limbs, you see — he inherited that eccentricity from his father.'

‘But mangled it up, somehow,' added M'Synder, drily.

That afternoon I heard the sound of ringing voices in the hall and, going to investigate, found the doctor and M'Synder talking to Meaulnes, who towered over them by so much that I found myself smiling at the sight. They were all looking up at the suspended pine branch, which by now appeared rather dry and bald, having dropped, during the course of the week, thousands of long needles onto the floor below.

‘Ah, Mr Browne,' said the doctor, brightly. ‘You are just in time to see the lowering of our yuletide bough.'

Meaulnes, who had removed his boots and wore thick woollen socks to which clung pieces of leaf and twig, padded up the carpeted stairs (I hardly noticed that he took three at a time). He crouched for a while on the landing and then stood up holding two coils of thin rope. The branch quivered and sent down a shower of needles.

‘Keep clear,' he called, and the heavy base of the branch began slowly to descend. When it reached the needle-covered flagstones, Meaulnes threw down the ropes, walked round to the other side of the gallery and lowered the branch to the floor. I had been so engrossed in this spectacle that I noticed only now that the others had vanished. Meaulnes padded back down the stairs and stooped over the branch to untie the ropes.

‘I've never seen a Christmas tree like this one,' I said, stepping forward to help.

‘You seem very young,' began Meaulnes in a slow, deep, heavily-accented murmur, without looking at me, ‘to be an ar-chiv-ist.' He dwelled on each syllable derisively. I was taken aback by the change in his manner, now that we were alone.

‘More of a filing assistant, really,' I said, trying to sound breezy. He snorted, thrust his feet into his enormous boots, lifted the base of the branch and dragged it towards the front door, which I opened for him. It took him three great heaves to get it through, then he nodded at me, either in thanks or, it seemed to me at the time, as some vague threat, and staggered away across the drive. Over the steady, grinding hiss of the branch on the gravel came the sound of his whistling, and I paused at the open door to listen. It was an odd tune — a simple theme of four notes, the first pair suspending, the second pair resolving, repeated with wavering variations. It stuck in my head all afternoon.

13

The evening was cold and damp with chilly puffs of breeze that produced short, wavering hisses in the leafless trees. M'Synder wielded the torch she had serviced the night before, and walked with the heavy, metronomic gait of a woman whose joints are not what they once were, but who is used to walking everywhere nonetheless. We were soon past the single light of the cottage and following the lane through the thin woods and rough fields that covered the lower reaches of the combe. A couple of sheep bleated in the darkness, and an owl hooted loudly, theatrically, nearby.

Ten minutes past the cottage (that may seem to imply proximity, but ten minutes' brisk walk along a dark, narrow and winding lane seemed then, to a city-dweller like me, to emphasise the combe's isolation) I saw coloured lights ahead — the lighted church windows beneath the faint silhouette of its short, square tower.

‘Are the doctor's forbears buried here?' I asked, as we passed the low wall of the churchyard. The torch beam flickered over a couple of weathered headstones — one era idly, irreverently fingering another.

M'Synder left a moment's silence and then replied, ‘Some of them,' in that tone at once suggestive and final, that she, Rose and the doctor seemed all to have perfected to confound me.

The service was led by a plump, red-haired man in his forties, who read his part painstakingly from the lectern as though he were a novice. There was a choir of four men, two women and three boys, and a muffled-up congregation of about a dozen which half-filled the tiny nave. In the shadows of the south transept stood an ancient harmonium, played by a woman with long silver hair in a plait, whose face I did not see.

M'Synder recited the creed and the responses in her soft but certain voice, while I kept guiltily quiet until the congregation's hymn, which I began to sing half-heartedly and then rather enjoyed. My immediate impression of the service was that it was something worthwhile: an act of reflection and appreciation that seemed appropriate after a week's work. The countless invocations of a fairytale God were like a string of loose obstacles left stupidly in an otherwise sound path — I stubbed my toes against them, stumbled over them, silently derided them, but kept my feet. It was better than no path at all.

Afterwards, M'Synder said she had to pay a visit to a friend who was now too old to come to church. I took a turn around the little triangular green before returning up the lane, and one ancient stone cottage attracted my notice. It stood at the end of a short terrace of similar dwellings, from which it was set slightly back and separated by a narrow walled gap. I called it a cottage, but what I noticed was that it was really a cottage-and-a-half — a tiny, improbable annex was built against it. This annex, not more than twelve feet wide, had its own low door beside a lovely bow-window, and another tiny window above. All the curtains were closed. I peered at a sign hanging over the door, trying to make out the faded letters in the lamplight: it looked like ‘The Croked Hand'.

My Dales rambles had introduced me to the pleasures of intruding into small country pubs out of season. Often it is a genuine intrusion, into a family meal, a game, a blazing row, and yet legitimised by the timeless tradition of hospitality that the hosts have chosen to uphold as their profession — the intruder is welcomed, accommodated, entertained or left in peace as he desires, as long as he pays his bill of a few pounds. Some of my fondest and loneliest memories are of such intrusions, but I will keep them to myself.

I reached down for the door handle in the shadows, and then jerked back my hand as it met with something unexpected: another hand. The handle was a large brass hand with ice-cold, contorted fingers; I grasped it and tried to turn it; I pushed and pulled it; then with a last glance at the closed curtain I hurried back to the church and along the dark and unsigned lane.

Saturday morning was my first opportunity to explore the surrounding country in daylight. I had thought of going for a walk over the hills, and threw back my curtains to reveal a windy morning with reassuring blue breaks in the scudding clouds. I met Rose on the stairs, already dressed but wet-haired and smelling of scented soap. I mentioned my plan for the day and she casually offered to join me: ‘I know all the paths,' she said.

Just a few yards from the cottage, one such path led between the garden wall and a tiny rill that tumbled down the hillside and passed under the track to join the main stream. The path climbed steeply through a birch wood, where great thick brackets of fungus grinned on the slim, mossy trunks and sinister clusters of red toadstools crowded between the roots. The trees soon thinned and we began to zig and zag up the bracken-covered flank of the rill's little valley. After ten minutes I was warm, for Rose set a keen pace, and I was glad to see a sort of stone seat at the turn of the next switchback, which seemed like a good excuse for a pause.

Already the main track traced a fine, snaking line far below us, and this spot commanded a lofty view over the cottage, half-hidden by trees but betrayed by its little white streamer of smoke, and along the narrow valley towards the house. Arnold's trees — the dark masses of pines and cedars, and the bare, ghostly crowns of the great beeches — were clearly visible in the valley and on the hillside beyond but, surprisingly, Combe Hall itself was out of sight.

‘I thought we'd be able to see the house from here,' I said, as I caught my breath. Rose studied me critically, showing no signs of exertion.