16

At breakfast I asked M’Synder how the doctor was feeling, but she only smiled reassuringly and said, ‘I think I’ll let you go and see for yourself.’ In the lane I met Corvin pounding down from the house in his running shorts and a dress shirt with cuffs flapping open.

‘Doctor alright?’ I asked as he shot past.

‘Never better!’ he called over his shoulder, and was gone.

On reaching the house I knocked at the open parlour door, and then peered cautiously round it to find the bed gone and the chairs back in their usual places.

‘Is that you, Mr Browne?’ called his voice from behind me, in a kind of mirrored déjà-entendu of his once calling me from the parlour. ‘I’m in the study. Please do come in.’ He was seated at his desk working as though nothing had happened. The dismembered hulk in the drive and the large, blank boards screwed across one side of the window were the only reminders of the storm.

‘Sorry I was such a miserable Casaubon last week,’ he said, brightly. ‘I’m feeling much better now.’

‘You can climb the stairs already?’ I asked.

‘Ah, no, I’m afraid I was right about stairs — neither of my corroded old knees seems to want to take that particular responsibility. I asked them nicely, but we came to something of a stand-off on the bottom step.’

‘But the bed’s gone,’ I observed.

‘Yes. I issued new instructions. I’ve settled myself into a different room.’ I looked around — there was no bed here.

‘The library?’ I guessed. He gave a short, dry laugh.

‘Oh dear, no — that would be rather antisocial, or perhaps hyper-social, and besides, I couldn’t possibly sleep under Hartley’s gaze.’ I knew what he meant — if my attention had wandered from the Spartan congresses, or the fire had been too warm and my eyelids had begun to hang heavy, it was always the luminous urgency of the portrait that re-engaged my mind’s machinery. ‘No,’ he went on, pointing over his shoulder, ‘the morning room is to be my bedroom now — you know, the one that’s been locked up.’ The mourning room. He looked at me steadily. ‘I don’t think Sam would want to be confined in there anymore.’ He went on looking, and gave a soft smile that did not seem pained at all. ‘I’ve tidied the place up a bit — let him out.’ I relaxed my practised silence and returned the smile.

‘I’m glad,’ I said, and he nodded, the wrinkles of his smiling eyes spreading across that face that was speckled brown like a sound autumn leaf.

‘What is more,’ he went on, slowly, ‘I have found something.’ His gaze dropped to a weird object encircled by his two hands on the desk — it was a magnifying glass in the shape of a giant, bulbous eye with brass lids. This he now began to slide with his fingertips by infinitesimal degrees across a piece of paper, so that swollen whorls of ink rose and fell inside the glass. We both leaned closer.

‘Furey’s letter,’ I said.

‘Indeed,’ he murmured, continuing his painstaking scrutiny. ‘There is some faint scoring on the last page, and the text of Uncle Prune’s thesaurus has leached a mottled sheen of ink onto the paper, making visible the depressions. I hope to take it to a friend in Oxford for closer examination. As you know, torn fragments of paper were found beside Furey’s body.’

‘What is it, then?’ I asked. ‘A last poem?’ He glanced up and smiled again. ‘Is it Dowley, or Furey?’

‘The good priest himself. Short but incontrovertibly genuine, unlike the other supposed “last poems” doing the rounds. Might boost the market value, eh? Would you like me to quote you a line?’

April is the miracle month in England, and I suppose there is a kind of cruelty in miracles. No other month comes close — October’s work has the same bewildering swiftness, but dying is easy. The combe surprised me by its fine excesses wherever I turned. On a windless day the birds could taste as I did that mysterious promise of summer in the air, and oh, how they sang! Birdsong danced in through every window and onward through the ragged gaps in my soul, skipped and chattered and laughed along its derelict corridors, quickened it, bothered it, distracted and jumbled and drowned out its tentative repairs and left a smile of surrender on my face. An old blackbird (the oldest are the true masters) took possession of the cottage roof and poured mindless ecstasy into my waking, while wrens cheered me along the lane with piercing volleys of sound above the gentle, persistent prattling of the dunnocks with whom they shared the hedges.

One such windless afternoon found me sitting in Corvin’s alcove in the now blossom-heavy orchard with a long, lazy kiss of sunlight on my eyelids, a sheaf of letter paper lying idle in one hand, a pen in the other, mesmerised by the drumming of a woodpecker in the nearby grove: a deep, shuddering, unworldly resonance, a drumming through the thin bark of the present, perhaps, into the tree rings of my own past, brief but coming again and again so that I could think of nothing else — could only wait for the next deliciously unenlightening burst, until the world shifted a little, the next delicious burst didn’t come and I opened my eyes.

‘It’s a pity you’ll never the see the gardens in their full glory, in high summer.’ So remarked Corvin later that same afternoon, as we walked together across the lawn. Now that the doctor and M’Synder seemed both to have accepted me as a settled inhabitant of the combe and made no mention of my departure, it was this young pretender, having held me here since his return, directed my steps, steered my very thoughts as once he had steered a mindless hulk of steel, who again exerted his will.

‘Yes, it’s a pity,’ I said casually, concealing a pang of resigned sorrow. Was it decided, after all? Did I not have a say?

‘You’ll just have to imagine it,’ he went on, waving his hand across the budding vista: ‘A foaming wave of delphinia in alien shades of blue; the intoxicating smell of a heap of wet grass roasting in the sun; Arnold in sandals, short trousers and a panama.’

‘Now that last item I can’t imagine,’ I said, laughing.

‘What about the ruddy-faced clown,’ he suggested quickly, ‘seated in the quiet, breezy shade of the treehouse with a laptop computer and a bottle of beer that he’s just retrieved from the cooling waters of the stream?’

‘Alone?’

‘Of course — alone, aloof, having a prospect of the distance only.’ A swift shadow fell across the garden as clouds rolled over the summit of Grey Man, and for a moment Corvin seemed to lose his enviable repose, to shift awkwardly, self-consciously as he squinted at the sky. I was almost reminded of myself. ‘Only his doubts attend,’ he muttered.

Rose went back to school at the end of this, my fifteenth week. Thanks to the blackbird I did not sleep through her departure this time, but joined her for a last coffee in M’Synder’s parlour while she waited for the car.

‘Good luck with your exams,’ I said.

‘Thank you, Mr Browne.’ She folded a white shirt-collar down over her pinstripe jacket and smoothed it with quick fingers.

‘Won’t you call me Sam, just once?’ She looked back at me with her steady child’s gaze, gently pulled outwards at one corner by the scar.

‘Alright. Sam. I’ve drawn a picture for you — a memento.’ I certainly blushed, but didn’t seem to care anymore: I wouldn’t see her again.

‘You shouldn’t have, really —’

‘It didn’t quite come off, I’m afraid,’ she said, turning to M’Synder’s letter-rack, drawing out a small paper and laying it before me on the table. It was a meticulous ink drawing of the view from the little landing window — there was the stream in its thistly meadow, the lane from which Corvin had once raised a gloved hand, the lamp hanging over the steep-sided porch, the bent hawthorn from which the robin had first performed his quiet serenade —

‘What bird is that?’ I asked, in a level voice.

‘It’s a jay,’ she replied, cheerfully. Oh, why spoil it with a jay? I thought. Why? ‘A big, colourful thing,’ she went on. ‘It landed there in the hawthorn while I was drawing and stayed for ages, bobbing its head and looking up at me. It wanted to be in the picture, I think.’

‘Well, thank you very much,’ I said, looking up into those sharp green eyes for one, two heartbeats before the soft clatter of a car summoned her to the door. ‘It will mean a lot to me.’