17

One morning I crossed the bridge to find an intrepid van parked in the drive. The portly stonemason stood nearby talking to Meaulnes while the doctor looked on from his wheelchair. They were evidently concluding their discussions about the repairs, and now as I watched the mason lifted a heavy parcel from the van and handed it to the giant gardener, who hefted it up under one arm and loped away to his yard.

‘What are you working on?’ asked the doctor shortly afterwards, as he crutched himself steadily towards me down the long green carpet of the library. The soft thud and creak reminded me of voiceless, one-legged Harry in The Croked Hand. The borrowed man’s credit was still good, by the way — his would not be the first to run out, after all.

‘Gibbon.’ I was nearing the end of the eleventh volume.

‘Balls to Gibbon!’ he snapped, making me jump. This was, I thought, an unfortunate phrase to aim at the poor historian, who had medical troubles in that region. ‘I have a name to breathe some life back into you,’ he continued, standing over me with the crutches as though he might prod me with one. ‘Shakespeare. A most reliable guide to history. And have another for no extra charge: Dostoevsky!’ I told him I had read Crime and Punishment at school. ‘Then this week you will read Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov,’ he shot back. ‘Both are compulsory texts at Combe College.’

Parallelograms of afternoon sunlight draped themselves over us while a gentle breeze wafted from a single open pane. The doctor lowered himself carefully into a chair and laid down the crutches, and we had the last of those talks he had promised on my first morning at the combe.

‘Perhaps you think this conflict between reason and superstition a touch outdated?’ he suggested as we again discussed the inherited creed. ‘‘‘Hartley and his Enlightenment pals raised the standard,” you might say, “and the other side died a slow death: reason won.” Well, it is true that superstition and religious dogma (I choose my words carefully) have been relegated to the level of eccentricities — to which, incidentally, all men are surely entitled. Why, I know a well-intentioned retired GP who is obsessed with one composer to the exclusion of all others, even parades him around inside his own name! Ridiculous! But to return to the point, what use have the victors made of their conquest? You agree, I hope, that a daily grind of materialism sprinkled with sentimentality is not enough.’

‘Yes, I agree.’

‘For me — for us — truth is the sole, simple absolute. All the other so-called virtues and vices are mere cartoons of human behaviour — change your point of observation, look at them side-on, and they change shape or disappear. And I don’t mean some mystical conception of truth, of course — just the plain truth. Like —’ he seemed to cast about for an example, then fixed his eye on me. ‘Did you ever cheat on your wife?’ I bristled, but the answer was easy.

‘No.’ His rejoinder was swift.

‘Did you ever have the opportunity to do so?’ He held my gaze as I flickered a cursory torch-beam back into memory and glimpsed again those cosy Friday nights at home.

‘Not really.’

‘Truth begets truth, you see? Doesn’t it feel good?’ It didn’t.

I plunged into Karamazov as instructed, and was still riding it like a magnificent, foaming wave when Juliet arrived unexpectedly, on Friday. My eyes were drawn away for a moment from the spell of the narrative and followed her as she came to stand at the library window, half-turned away from me and towards the white, bright, cloudy afternoon sky, cradling the favourite coffee mug, one knee drawn forward to rest on the sill, the heel lifted. I wish I could have drawn her then. Sometimes my whole life seems to be a diary of such wishes. Where do they come from, and what are they for?

‘I was just telling Arnold and Corvin about my coming to a new understanding with a teacher-friend at the school,’ she said, blowing gently into the mug. ‘I’m afraid they were rather shocked. But Arnold was the one preaching about paths not yet passed by — do you remember?’ I nodded. ‘Well, I liked the look of this path, so I’ve taken it. The rest remains to be seen.’ I hesitated for a few seconds, letting the adjustment settle before replying.

‘I’m really glad to hear it,’ I said, remembering that horrible moment in the garden when a raw January wind was blowing hair across her face. ‘I hope he’ll make you happy.’

‘He’s a divorcee, of course,’ she said, ‘but I suppose we all make mistakes.’

On Saturday the air was warm. Corvin and Meaulnes were busy in the glasshouse all morning, while the doctor, Juliet and I sat at a round table on the corner of the terrace reading and talking. The doctor rambled away happily about the past — he explained, for instance, that his father had been a pioneer of crampons on Scottish mountains before the war, when the British climbing establishment considered them instruments of Satan. ‘He used to call them his pins and needles,’ he told us fondly, ‘because that’s what you got from the tight leather binding. When he was cut dead by the president of the SMC at its annual dinner he called after him cheerfully, “And I thought you only cut steps!” Ah, he was proud of that. Now everyone wears them, of course.’

Later he hobbled inside to rest. Corvin appeared with a tray of gardening tools and sat cross-legged in the sun sharpening them, humming to the rhythm of the whetstone while Meaulnes watered the ranks of budding tulips along the side of the lawn.

‘What is that tune?’ I asked suddenly. ‘I keep hearing it.’ Corvin’s slender brows dropped into a playful frown.

‘That? I think I picked it up from Meaulnes. Old chap,’ he called, twisting round, ‘what’s that tune you’re always warbling at?’ The gardener bunched his lips and gave a rendition for us on the spot, in a delicate, trilling tone of which even the old blackbird might have been proud.

‘That one?’ he said. ‘It came from mon père. He used to sing, you remember, but I cannot. L’amour est mort — these were the words, I think.’ Corvin’s frown deepened.

‘My love is dead,’ said Juliet to her open book, and we all turned to her. ‘Gone to his death bed, all under the sallow tree.’ She looked up and gave a sad little smile, then got up without another word and wandered away across the lawn.

‘What is that?’ I had heard it, or read it, before.

‘It’s the refrain from Furey’s famous roundelay,’ murmured Corvin, thoughtfully. ‘Arnold once told me that Sarah Louise had set it to music, and sung it at Hartley’s funeral, but the tune was lost. You don’t think — where did your father get that song, old chap?’

Meaulnes shrugged. ‘Not from France, I think. Maybe from the old caretaker of Madame Stella? Who knows?’ He returned to his watering, whistling softly.

‘What is a roundelay anyway?’ I asked.

‘Just a song with a repeated refrain,’ said Corvin. ‘I rather fancy it represents the interplay between life and literature’ — then his hazel-brown eyes lit up — ‘but is life the verse, and literature the repeating refrain, or is it the other way round?’ I thought for a moment.

‘I suppose that depends on whether you believe more in the possibilities of life or those of literature in making sense of it.’

‘Exactly! Men of action and men of words. Isn’t it grand? A motif for a book, surely, or part of a book.’ He looked around for Juliet, and then saw her sitting motionless on a bench in the cedar’s dark shadow. ‘L’amour est mort, indeed,’ he murmured. ‘Love is dead — a characteristically elegant mistranslation by a Frenchman. But love, it seems, is not dead after all.’

Juliet left the combe the next day, promising to return at the midsummer that I would never see.