Broken Voices

6

For most of Boxing Day, we were left to our own devices. Mr Ratcliffe went out after breakfast to call on a former servant at the King’s School who now lived in one of the almshouses attached to the parish church. He would go directly on from there to have lunch with an old friend in a village a mile away from the town. He did not expect to be back until evening.

Time passed slowly for us. We were in a sort of limbo, neither at home nor at school. Faraday and I kept together because we had no one else to be with and nothing else to do.

In the morning we stayed at the Sacrist’s Lodging, reading under the disdainful gaze of Mordred. I finished Beric the Briton and looked along Mr Ratcliffe’s shelves for something else to read. Most of his books were about boring things like music or architecture. There was some poetry, equally boring, and the sort of books we had at school, like Shakespeare. In the end I had to settle for Oliver Twist.

Faraday irritated me more than usual. He couldn’t stay still for a moment. He moved around the room, fiddling with the ornaments and looking at the pictures, most of which were engravings of old buildings.

He sat down on the stool and raised the lid of the grand piano.

‘Do you play?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He pulled back his cuffs and spread his fingers over the keyboard. A ripple of notes burst into the room.

Of course he played the piano, I thought: bloody Faraday could do everything and do it well.

‘God!’ He said in quite a different voice. ‘It’s awful.’

‘What is?’

‘The piano, of course. Can’t you hear? It’s awfully out of tune. I bet it’s warped.’

‘Good,’ I said, returning to page two of Oliver Twist. ‘At least that’ll stop you playing it.’

Whether the piano was in tune or not was all the same to me. I have never understood music and its power to affect some people so profoundly.

He closed the lid with a bang.

Faraday and I couldn’t afford to quarrel, or not for long. We needed each other too much. We went into the town, though the shops were closed, and walked the long way round to the Veals’ house beside the Porta.

Mrs Veal welcomed us like a pair of prodigal sons — she had grown used to us now, I suppose, and saw us for what we were, a pair of lost children who needed feeding up. She gave us cold beef and cold ham, and as much mashed potato as we could cram into ourselves. Then came apple pie, followed by cups of tea so densely packed with sugar and cream you could almost stand your spoon up in it.

For the first time we saw Mr Veal in his shirtsleeves. He was in a jovial mood, with a glass or two of beer beside him. This time was a sort of holiday to him, he explained. For the Cathedral’s rhythms built up to the great feasts of the church, like Christmas; but after these climaxes there came lulls. The daily round of services continued, but on a reduced basis. The choir was on holiday so the Cathedral was mute. Dr Atkinson had gone away, leaving what little had to be done in the hands of the deputy organist. Many of the canons had gone out of residence and even the Dean was visiting his son in London.

Mr Veal had his own deputies, and he allowed these assistant vergers more responsibility at these times, and himself more leisure.

‘Mind you,’ he said, leaning forward and tapping the table for emphasis, ‘You can’t give them too much responsibility. They’re not ready for it. So I do my rounds, like always. I keep the keys.’

He nodded towards the table at the window. There was a big tray on it, and Mr Veal had laid out on it the keys that usually hung on the back of the cupboard door, together with a black notebook.

‘Funny how keys wander,’ he said. ‘I make sure none of them have strayed. Redo the labels and check them off in my book. You can’t afford to sleep on this job. There’s a lot goes on here that most folk never realize.’

Neither of us said anything. It wasn’t just the heaviness of the meal that kept us silent. In my case, at least, it was also the sense that I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of the day. Food was, as always in my schooldays, a temporary distraction.

Perhaps Mr Veal sensed something of this. ‘There’s ratting up at Mr Witney’s.’

I looked up. ‘In his big barn?’

‘Yes — all afternoon till the light goes.’

‘We could go,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t mind, would he?’

‘More the merrier. More than enough rats to go round.’

‘Ratting?’ Faraday said. ‘I’ve never done that.’

‘It’s ripping fun,’ I said.

‘There are some sticks in my shed if you want them,’ Mr Veal said. ‘Always best to take your own. You want one the right weight, don’t you?’

Faraday was reluctant but he wasn’t proof against my enthusiasm and Mr Veal’s gentle encouragement. We found a couple of sticks and walked through the Porta. Angel Farm was across the green, beyond the theological college.

‘Do we — do we actually hit them? The rats, I mean?’

‘Of course we do.’ I whacked the grass with my stick. ‘But you have to be quick. Or the dogs get them first.’

‘You’ve been ratting before?’

‘Loads of times.’ I had been ratting only once, in fact, with the vicar’s son at home. ‘It’s awfully good sport — you’ll see.’

We turned into the muddy drove to the farm. They had already started — I could hear the shouting and the excited barking. To tell the truth, I was a little nervous.

‘Better put your cap in your pocket,’ I said, taking mine off. ‘You might lose it otherwise.’

My real reason was that our caps advertised the fact that we were King’s School boys. The school was not universally popular in the town, and there was no point in courting trouble. Not that I was seriously worried. Mr Witney was a tenant of the Dean and Chapter, and the school subleased their playing field from him; he would keep an eye out for us.

Men and boys were milling around the yard. The barn doors were open, revealing a space large enough to take a laden wagon. Dogs were everywhere, small ones mainly, terriers and the like.

‘That’s like mine at home,’ I said, pointing at a mongrel with a lot of spaniel in him. ‘He’s awfully bright — understands almost everything I say.’

This was a lie, as I did not have a dog. But I had pretended I had one for years. My aunt wouldn’t let me have a real dog. It would bring mud into the house and, besides, who would look after it in term time? So I had a dog in my mind instead. The precise breed varied (he was often a mongrel) but his name was always Stanley, after a dog my father had owned when he was a boy. The dog’s other permanent attributes included his almost human intelligence and his unswerving loyalty to me.

Mr Witney was concentrating his operations both inside and outside the barn. The building was very old, perhaps mediaeval in origin, and constructed of soft, crumbling sandstone. The target areas lay along the base of one of the immensely thick gable walls, both inside and out. Two or three men on each side were attacking the ground with spades, iron rods and pickaxes, breaking up the compacted earth. A score or so men and boys gathered around the diggers, all of them armed with sticks. Dogs of all shapes and sizes scurried about everyone’s legs, tails high in excitement.

Faraday and I sidled into the outskirts of the larger crowd, the one outside the barn. Nobody seemed to notice us. They were all staring at the diggers. Some of the dogs, careless of danger, were diving into the loosened soil and burrowing like maniacs with their front paws.

One of the dogs was already so far into the ground that only his hind legs and tail were visible. Suddenly he pulled himself out of a hole with a wriggling rat clamped between his jaws. He shook his prey in the air, and two other dogs instantly converged on him. One of them leapt up and grabbed the rat by its head. A tug of war ensued, each animal trying to wrest the rat from the other until the rat resolved the matter by dividing itself into two unequal parts.

I heard a sound beside me and glanced at Faraday. His face had gone white, the fleeing blood leaving a cluster of freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose and his cheeks.

‘Come on,’ I cried. ‘It’s—’

Another rat broke cover and darted to and fro among the sticks and stamping feet and snarling dogs. It saw an opening and shot towards the open field beyond. It was making for the gap between Faraday and me. People were shouting. I swung the stick down and felt the jar as it hit the ground, the impact running up my hands and arms.

‘Well hit, young ‘un!’ shouted Mr Witney. ‘That’s the way.’

I looked down and saw to my surprise a little mass of bloodied fur, still squirming feebly.

‘Oh God,’ Faraday said.

A sort of frenzy seized me, a bloodlust. I ran berserk among the men and boys and the dogs and the rats. I held my stick in both hands and pounded it down, again and again. One of the dogs attached itself to me. How many rats did I kill or help to kill that day? Half a dozen, perhaps more?

Mr Witney put a stop to the ratting only when the light was beginning to fade.

It felt as if we had only been at the farm for five minutes but it must have been at least an hour and a half. The dog rubbed itself against my leg. It was a mangy little animal, a mongrel, with a piece of rope for a collar and a half-healed wound on its side.

‘Well done, lad,’ Mr Witney said. ‘So you learn more than Latin and Greek at that school of yours.’

I bent down and scratched the dog between his ears. ‘Good boy, Stanley,’ I murmured. ‘Good boy.’ Just for a moment I was blindingly happy, dizzy with joy.

Faraday nudged my arm. ‘Can we go back now? Please?’

I looked at his pale face and his big teeth, ghostly in the fading light, and all at once the joy evaporated.

‘There’s blood on you,’ he said. ‘There’s blood everywhere.’

He was right. My hands were streaked with blood, some of it from the dog’s muzzle and some of it from my stick. The corpses of rats lay everywhere, some complete, some in fragments. The dogs’ interest in them diminished sharply once they stopped moving.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Please.’

I glanced over my shoulder, hoping for a wave from Mr Witney or a nod of farewell from one of my comrades in the battle. But no one was looking at me. No one paid any attention when we left the yard and walked down the muddy lane towards the green.

For a few moments, for an hour even, I had been part of a group; I had played a useful part; I had been, in some small way, valued for what I did. That was all gone. Now I came to my senses and discovered that part of my collar had come adrift from my shirt and the tip of it was nudging my left ear. My overcoat was splashed with mud and cowpats, as well as blood. I had lost my cap. And I was alone once more with Faraday.

‘They were talking about me,’ he said in a voice that wobbled. ‘Mr Nicholls was there. He knows.’

‘Who’s Nicholls?’

‘He is a lay clerk. A tenor.’ For a moment there was a hint of superiority in Faraday’s voice. ‘Not very good, though he thinks he is.’

The lay clerks were the basses and the tenors of the Cathedral choir. They were grown-ups. Many of them had been at the choir school when they were young, and they still lived in the town.

‘What does it matter if he recognized you?’

‘You don’t understand.’ Faraday was always accusing me of that, and quite rightly. ‘Mr Nicholls was pointing me out and whispering about me. They know.’

‘I expect it was about your voice breaking and not being in the choir any more.’

‘No. You should have seen their faces. They’d heard about… about the other thing.’

He meant the postal order. If Mr Nicholls knew about it, the story could no longer be confined to the Choir School and a handful of trusted outsiders like Mr Ratcliffe. It would be all over the place in a day or two, in the College and in the town.

‘I can’t bear it,’ Faraday said.

I glanced at him and saw a tear rolling down his cheek.

‘We’ll go back to the Rat’s now,’ I said. ‘We can make tea. If there’s bread, perhaps we can have toast. He’s got a toasting fork in the fireplace.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, blowing his nose. ‘Thank you.’