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.
PART 2
TEMPLES
Dear Sam,
What I write in this letter will come as a shock to you, so please brace yourself. We have been happy together but it was nevertheless a mistake for us to marry. Happiness is not enough. We did not bring out the best in each other. We were happy even as we diminished.
Imagine you are drawing a picture, and you identify some irredeemable mistake in your composition. As soon as you are sure of your mistake, you must start again on a blank sheet. I am sure, and so debating it with you would only cause more pain to us both. I really do mean to start again, so it is better you don’t know where I am. I will arrange the formalities of our separation.
We are still young. We have time. I wish you the best. Go and live a better life without me.
Sarah
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 cloth
es 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 ass
istant, 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.
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