5

I had now passed the study door in my search of the books beneath the gallery, and commenced work on the long history section opposite the windows. It began, appropriately, with an elegant bilingual folio edition of Herodotus, published in Amsterdam in seventeen sixty-three. On each page the columns of weird, curling Greek and stately, regular Latin were like twin indictments of my ignorance.

Did this magisterial patriarch approve of the thousand volumes ranked beneath him, I asked myself — his burgeoning brood? I was often tempted thus to consider the authors represented by a row of books as personalities which might be of diverse ages but which were nevertheless contemporary, contiguous and mutually acquainted. Their reassuring coexistence on the shelf disguised the careful branches of influence that wound through time and space to hold each volume in its own unique position relative to the others. The illusion was perhaps a consequence of compression — if each glistening curl of ink pressed onto a page was a tiny separate act of compression, then here was their massed accumulation: a vast web of centuries and continents pressed tightly into a matrix of shelves eight feet square. With a simple stretch, lean or stoop of his creaking young body, Samuel Browne could span the orbit of civilisation.

The next book was a stout translation from the thirties which, on its own, I would have considered a rather magnificent volume, but about whose English text a sheepish air seemed to hang. At the contents page a fine black hair nestled along the spine. I had encountered many such fragments of the restless, Heraclitian world, caught inadvertently in the adamantine crystal of compression — hairs, crumbs, a plane seed carried on a late summer breeze, a flattened midge with a faint brown stain of literary blood — trapped in the wrong domain until some gallant future reader might release them back to the swept floor of their native reality.

It was to the sudden music of Bach yet again — a cantata this time: oboe and voices in a regal dance — that the doctor released me for the evening. Or did not quite release me, since he asked me to join him for a glass of wine in the parlour where he had lit a roaring blaze.

He lit no lamps and we took our seats in the flickering orange glow of burning pine, which threw our magnified, wavering shadows onto the great glistening landscapes behind us (mine onto Hope and his onto Despair — surely accidental) and softly picked out the plasterwork relief far above. Taboni’s homage to truth loomed over us in deep shadow, its subject now a faint but defiant ghost of her former radiant self, a suggestion, a promise of beauty in a window on which night had fallen.

The bottle of wine, having been warmed on the hearth ‘to remind it of sunburnt mirth and the warm south,’ stood between us on a little table with a peculiar silver object which as I sat down I identified as the glinting, scaly likeness of a giant walnut shell. The doctor grasped the lid, lifted it with a flourish and peered inside.

‘Roasted almonds!’ he murmured. ‘My favourite. M’Synder never disappoints. She and I exhausted the chocolate pennies last week.’ He leaned back with a satisfied sigh, holding an almond between his finger and thumb.

‘This morning I gave you the image of Arnold Comberbache aged seven,’ he began, ‘listening from his bed in this house to his father’s words spoken gravely by his mother, who holds a postcard at the lamp with a steady, long-fingered hand. But I have no corresponding image of you, Mr Browne, and I am curious. Give me one now — an image of your past.’

Overcoming an instinctive flinch of defensiveness, I followed his example and plucked an image from the harmless reaches of childhood. I told him that after my first day at infant school the teacher had declaimed sternly to my mother, ‘This child can read and write, but it cannot hold a pencil!’ This was merely a symptom, I explained (to the doctor, I mean), of my failure to grasp the fundamental chirality or handedness of the written word: at best I began each line with my left hand and then switched to my right, but often I inadvertently wrote from right to left in mirror-text, or placed correct characters in reverse order, or reverse characters in correct order, or employed some combination of all these eccentricities. The first time I wrote my name, I called myself Mazenworb — a name by which my sister still calls me. ‘The symmetry of the temple reminded me of my own unhanded infancy,’ I said, ‘before I was broken in to the chiral world.’

‘But of course the temple is handed in one sense,’ remarked the doctor, ‘just as a symmetrical keyhole belies the handed lock within. Indeed I suspect celestial motion is one source of our handedness. But tell me more about yourself.’

I told him that my father was an architect, a quiet, inventive man who had suffered frequent lacunae of unemployment; that my mother was currently a technician at an independent girls’ school; that my confident elder sister and I had attended a good grammar school, and that my nervous younger brother had deliberately failed his Eleven Plus to avoid separation from a friend, but was now vice-captain of the Cambridge University chess team.

The doctor, slowly crunching almonds and nodding attentively, seemed pleased by this feeble sketch and wanted more. In my stumbling way I told him a little about my student years: how university, for all its failings, had dazzled me with possibilities of a better, richer life — intellectual, aesthetic, sensual — when I was too timid and ignorant to seize them. Crawling before a footmark’d stair — the words of one of my more imaginative friends at the time. Then just when I felt I had built of myself someone worthy of participation in its mysteries, the university had examined me like a sceptical GP, given me a piece of paper declaring me fit to work, and sent me back to London to earn a living. ‘I feel I’m still waiting for the new term to start, but it never will.’

‘It could,’ said the doctor. ‘But perhaps, like me, you feel no allegiance to any particular field.’ I nodded. ‘My solution,’ he went on, ‘has been to build my own university: the venerable Combe College. I am its student, tutor and examiner all at once. I am its hopeless buffoon and its most brilliant scholar; its enthusiastic novice and its half-senile veteran; I am also, unfortunately, its bursar. M’Synder makes a fine catering manager, young Meaulnes is adequate as clerk of works, and you, for now, are its archivist.

‘The quality of its library compensates for the deficiencies of its teaching. The profound problem of indolence is neatly solved by placing all potential distractions on the syllabus: if the student wishes to lay aside his main task — perhaps I didn’t tell you I’m writing a book, a biography of an unexceptional man named Linley — if he wishes instead to spend a morning hunting orchids in the meadow or an afternoon spreading old photographs across the dining table, or perhaps a single uninterrupted hour in Bach’s paradise, he does so freely on the understanding that he will be rigorously examined on that topic.’

‘But are you always such a rigorous examiner of yourself ?’ I asked, puzzled by the concept. Was it so easy to be one’s own tutor?

‘If in doubt,’ he replied, lowering his voice to a reverential whisper, ‘the examiner can refer a paper to the external moderators.’

‘And who are they?’

‘Hartley the Elder and his wife Sarah, ably assisted by my parents.’ Then he added, in a murmur like embers shifting, ‘and, of course, my wife.’

I said nothing, and after a moment’s silence he sat up suddenly, began refilling our glasses and said, ‘I had forgotten that you are such a young man. I was expecting someone much older. I suppose you are barely thirty.’ I told him my age and he slapped his knees in wonder. ‘Well, well,’ he added, with a sigh. ‘At your age, I — ’ he paused, resting his head against the chair-back and gazing up towards the shadowy painting ‘ — I was still living the first of my three lives — I mean, the life before I met Margaret.’

‘I saw her memorial stone,’ I said, ‘up at the temple.’

‘Yes. All the moderators are there: that is their court of arbitration.’ Then he turned his pained smile to me and said, apologetically, ‘Perhaps by engineering your isolation here — your confinement — I just wanted to make sure of a sympathetic companion: dilated like an eye in the dark.’

‘You weren’t the engineer,’ I replied, smiling nervously. ‘I had my own godforsaken combe in London, though quite different to yours.’ The doctor gazed at me thoughtfully, tipping his glass this way and that, as though weighing its contents.

‘It was cancer, of course,’ he said, turning back to the fire. ‘Ovarian cancer: that miraculous originator of new life exacting its price. We shared twenty years together, and now I have lived twenty more without her — twenty-one, it is now. Three lives.’

‘Where did you meet?’ I asked.

‘She was a patient, I am ashamed to say,’ he replied, distractedly. ‘Nineteen sixty-four.’ He told me the city in which he had been practising — it was where I had changed trains on my journey from London. ‘One meets a lot of people, of course, just when they are down on their luck: when their true characters are laid bare. I liked that. Margaret was only in for hayfever, though.’ Even as he answered I could tell that his thoughts dwelled on the end of those twenty years, not their beginning, and now he broke off.

‘We had plenty of time to say our farewells,’ he said at length, quietly as though to himself. ‘We were loving and wise. At the end — the very end, we thought — she reached a kind of resignation, a state of beauty. But she did not die then: death is not obedient to our wishes or considerate of justice. She died a week later, in pain, confusion and fear.

‘I carry those two last memories of her like pails on a yoke — I have no power to choose between them. Sometimes the first predominates, and I can be happy even as her absence echoes through the house. At other times the second haunts me and I am miserable.’

I just nodded — as I wrote before, I have never been bereaved. But I did think of Sarah’s quick heels on the station steps, and my own contradictory memories.