2

Wednesday was the first fine day for over a week, and the combe shone. The robin was waiting for me outside the cottage, looking rather thin and weathered like Corvin but rejoicing now, escorting me along the lane and singing herald-like from every glistening perch, while for the first time he was answered by the cheerful little car alarms of great tits and the shrill wheezings of finches in the woods. The house lay under its morning pall of shadow, but the sun had already brushed its hand reassuringly over the highest branches of the beech: spring itself was not in the air, but the memory of spring had awakened.

‘We’re going out!’ cried Corvin, striding into the library as I opened a volume of Scottish folksongs. ‘It’s been approved: stamped, sealed, ratified, given the nod.’ He lounged back against the table — another faint family resemblance — and looked up at me expectantly.

‘What on earth are you wearing?’ I asked. ‘You look like a —’ Words failed me.

‘A pantisocratist!’ he beamed, slapping his thigh on the first syllable. ‘Or should that be pantisocrat? I didn’t bring any decent clothes so I’m borrowing some.’ He had chosen to borrow a pair of tweed trousers of a particularly bold weave and close cut, a frilled, high-collared shirt, a buff waistcoat and a cravat — the red face and chaotic hair he already possessed. ‘Anyway, life’s more fun when you dress up for it. Come on!’

The intricate white map was being steadily consumed, burning away to ashes of wet green turf as the shadow of the house retreated, and the air was full of the fresh, damp smell of thaw. A songthrush hopped about excitedly, a fellow searcher-for-treasure showing off her own long-practised method of indiscriminate Brownian motion.

‘I’ve known Arnold since my first term at Oxford,’ said Corvin, leading me slowly around the water garden where rounded panes of ice still floated in the pools and snow lingered on the stone seats and the twisted boughs of the star-tree. ‘Sam and Julie had married a couple of years earlier, and Sam told me his dad was visiting the Bodleian to celebrate his retirement and would like to meet me — we had a strange encounter in the White Horse. He was dressed something like I am now and talked about the narrative of life. Afterwards, I wondered if I’d dreamt it.’

We crossed the grove, where the vanguard of flattened snowdrops were busy picking themselves up while the next battalion, the tight-budded crocus shoots, sounded the advance.

‘Tell me more about Sam,’ I said, as we started up the hillside. ‘If you don’t mind, I mean.’ Corvin frowned for a moment, but he was just deciding where to begin.

‘He took me climbing on Ben Nevis before the wedding, when I was sixteen. The North-East Buttress. I was terrified — of the climb and of Sam too, I suppose, and trying not to show it. He didn’t speak much — just a few words of encouragement when I hesitated. I remember those pale smiling eyes and his quick, effortless handling of the rope on the steeper sections. The sense of joy was infectious — nothing else seemed to matter.

‘Near the top there’s a notorious little step called the Mantrap that forced many early climbers into dangerous retreats, especially in winter — Sam’s grandfather famously climbed it by standing on his partner’s head in nailed boots. Sam made me go up it first, of course — he didn’t believe in easy introductions or making allowances.’

‘In medias res,’ I suggested.

‘Exactly. Funnily enough, I used the same climbing move a few years later when we had a class-alpha fire during exercises in the Gulf, to free a hose caught on a stanchion — the CO was most impressed. But you didn’t ask me about that. Sam. Julie had met Sam in London shortly after she gave up performing and started teaching — he was a junior doctor working long hours in the wards and studying mountain medicine on his days off. Blonde, beautiful, with boundless energy — already a brilliant mountaineer but with no time to escape the city.

‘A few years after they were married — about the time I met Arnold in the White Horse — Julie was appointed head of music at a good school in Derbyshire so they moved north. Sam gave up formal medicine, became a freelance first aid instructor and joined the local mountain rescue team. The following year he and Adam Forester — Rose’s father — climbed what had been called the ‘last great problem’ on Ben Nevis, and named it The Temple. They also pioneered tough, long routes in the Alps and elsewhere.’

Corvin now turned off the main path, and after climbing a few steep steps we found ourselves at the foot of one of the colossal redwoods. He patted its giant hairy root as one might pat a favourite horse.

‘Talking of which, how are you with heights?’ he asked, with a mischievous smile.

‘Getting better,’ I said, thinking of the accursed ladder.

‘Good. Then you won’t want to miss this. Look up there.’ I craned my neck and gave a groan of dismay: I could see a kind of treehouse hidden in the rich foliage. It must have been sixty or eighty feet above the ground.

‘How on earth —’ I murmured.

‘Elevators,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Two of them.’ He led me round the back of the tree, where a series of thick, taut ropes were secured to steel rings bolted to the roots. ‘I reckon you’re a bit heavier than me, so you have the twelve-stone lift, and I’ll have the eight and do a bit of hauling. Sam made all this — it’s quite safe if you use it sensibly.’

Eventually I was persuaded to stand on a wooden platform rather smaller than M’Synder’s writing plank, attach a steel clip to my belt and hold a fixed line while Corvin did likewise and pushed two levers to release the ropes.

‘Now try pulling yourself up,’ he said, grinning, ‘and we’ll see what M’Synder’s cooking has done to you.’ I pulled down on the rope, and to my horror began to rise from the ground as if gravity had given me up. Corvin kept level with me by hauling himself hand over hand, while the ground dropped away and the counterweights — two small bulging sacks — drifted down past us. He assured me the pulleys had a mechanism like that on a seatbelt, which stopped them running too fast. ‘Of course, sometimes the buggers get stuck halfway,’ he added casually, ‘and then the real fun begins.’

The treehouse encircled the mighty trunk, and was enclosed on the west side and furnished with a curving table and matching bench; from the windows one peered through foliage up the hillside towards the Temple of Light, whose pointed prow was from here outlined against the sky. On the east side an open balcony commanded a magnificent view down the combe, but a great shaggy branch obscured the garden and all but the highest windows of the house.

‘This is where I like to come sometimes,’ announced Corvin simply, leaning his hands confidently on the wooden parapet. ‘Sam built it for Julie but she never quite had the head for it.’

‘It does look like he got a bit carried away.’

‘Like Hartley and his temple?’ he said. ‘Or Arnold and the Attic oenochoe — the vase? To surprise by a fine excess — that is expected here.’ He peered down at the bristling chimneys and gables of the house, and the single thin spectre of smoke. ‘You’ve come at rather a sad time, though — it was a magical place ten years ago. There were big, sprawling gatherings at Christmas or Easter or midsummer: guests would come and go as they pleased — Sam and Julie, my parents, the Foresters, Arnold’s eccentric old friends-of-the-family. I would often crash the party with a couple of lucky college friends. We’d stay in those attic rooms’ — he pointed at the little gable windows — ‘which are full of amazing old junk, like the musket balls Sam used for the counterweights. Old Meaulnes the gardener — you’ve heard about him? — would rig up awnings and ancient bunting in the garden, get drunk and recite Baudelaire from the top of a wall, while his son dressed up little Rose as a garden fairy and sent her to spy on us from the bushes. And of course Arnold would preside: the all-seeing Magus, brimming with quiet energy.’

Now his face fell and he looked at me as though deciding whether to go on. ‘Everything changed in May ninety-eight. It was the day before the start of my finals — Julie called me to save me finding out from the newspapers, but I didn’t hear the full story until much later. Adam, Pippa and Rose had been cross-country skiing near Chamonix, and by chance Sam was there too, running a course on mountain rescue. The Foresters were caught in a massive freak avalanche set off by an earth tremor. Sam was on the first helicopter to arrive, only minutes later. He spotted Rose’s red scarf just under the snow and managed to dig her out, unconscious but alive. During his frantic digging he had struck her face with the edge of his shovel, and by the time he finally resuscitated her they were both covered in blood. The bodies of Adam and Pippa were recovered some time later — they were buried much more deeply but only a few yards apart. In those last minutes they wouldn’t have been aware of each other, which could I suppose be considered a small mercy. It’s a death better not imagined.’

He stared out along the thawing combe as I kept my well-practised silence, then turned suddenly and put a slim, calloused hand on my shoulder as he showed me the way down.