Broken Voices

7

Poor little devil. I was sorry for Rabbit. I wanted to help, as long as doing so wouldn’t inconvenience me too much. The question is: did trying to help make matters worse?

It was starting to rain. In order to get back to the Sacrist’s Lodging as swiftly as possible, I took us back through the Cathedral, which was not only shorter than by going through the College or through the town but also, at that time of day, lessened the chance that we should meet anyone who knew either of us.

My suggestion wasn’t entirely altruistic: if a boy from King’s was found outside the College without his cap, it automatically earned him a beating. It was possible that the rule did not apply in the holidays, but I didn’t want to put it to the test. Besides, I was starving, Mrs Veal’s lunch a distant memory, and the idea of food was powerfully attractive.

Most people in the College used the Cathedral for shortcuts, and so did many townspeople. There were three doors open to the public — the west door under the great tower, the south door, which led through the ruins of the cloisters to the College, and the north door, from which a path led both to the High Street and to the Sacrist’s Lodging. Using the Cathedral also meant you kept dry. It was considered bad form to hurry, however.

We walked through the porch and pushed open the wicket in the west doors. It was dark, much darker, inside the Cathedral than it was outside. The lamps had not yet been lit, apart from one or two at the east end, beyond the choir screen.

The emptiness of the place enfolded us like a shroud. The air was cold and smelled faintly of earth, incense and candles.

Ahead and to the left, in the north aisle, was one of the great stoves, each surmounted by a black crown, that were supposed to keep the building warm. There was a faint but clearly audible chink as the coke shifted in its iron belly.

‘I’m freezing,’ Faraday said.

He walked over to the stove and held his hands to it.

‘Hurry up,’ I said. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Just a minute. I’m so cold.’

I joined him by the stove. If you stood about three inches away from it, you could actually feel the warmth of it on your skin. It wasn’t so much that the stoves weren’t occasionally hot: it was more that the Cathedral was eternally cold.

Faraday glanced at me. ‘There’s blood on your hands,’ he said. ‘And on your sleeve.’ His voice lurched into a croak. ‘It’s everywhere.’

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter. I can wash it off. What’s water for?’

I turned my head to avoid seeing his white face and rabbit teeth. My eyes drifted away. It’s a funny thing about buildings, how they take control of you and guide your eyes along their own lines, towards their own ends. In the Cathedral, the rhythm of columns and arches, diminishing in height as the layers climbed to the roof, made you look upwards and upwards. Towards heaven, the school chaplain once told us in a sermon. Or to the roof. Not that it matters in this case: the point is I looked up into the west tower.

Its west wall rises sheer, a cliff of stone pierced with openings; first the doors. Then there is a great window which doesn’t let in much light because of the stained glass. Then, higher still, bands of Norman arcading run across the inside of the tower. The first set has a walkway that runs behind it. The next one, further up, is blind, its arches and pillars flattened against the tower wall behind. Above that still, 120 feet above the ground, is the painted tower ceiling, above which the tower rises, higher and higher, stage by stage, to the lantern that perches on top.

I knew a little about the internal organization of the tower because sometimes one of the younger masters would take a party of boys up to the top as a treat. You went up a spiral staircase in the south-west corner, crossed the width of the tower by the walkway behind the lower arcade, climbed another set of stairs, and then another, until your legs felt like lead. Finally you came to a little wooden door that led out to the very top of the tower, more than two hundred feet from the ground.

Up there was another world, full of light, where a wind was always blowing. You felt weightless, as if floating in a balloon. Far below were the streets of the town and tiny, fore-shortened people scurrying through the maze of their lives, oblivious of the watchers above. Beyond the town stretched the Fens as far as the eye could see, its flatness dotted with the occasional church tower or tree or house, which served to emphasize their monotony rather than relieve it; and at the circular horizon, the sky and the earth became one in a blue haze; and it no longer mattered which was which.

I had been up to the top of the west tower only once, about six months earlier before the end of the summer term. It had been a bright, clear day. There was a story, the master said, that a day like this you could see almost every church in the diocese from here. I tried to count the churches I could see. But I soon gave up and thought instead about Jesus in the wilderness, and how the devil took him up to a high place and tempted him.

If I had been Jesus, I would have struck a deal with the devil. In return for my soul I wanted not to be at school; I wanted to live at home with my parents; and I wanted to have a dog called Stanley.

I remembered all that as I stood by the stove with my bloody hands. I was still thinking about it when I saw the man. He was walking from left to right, quite slowly, along the walkway behind the lower arcade, perhaps 90 feet above our heads. The light was so poor I couldn’t see him clearly. When he passed behind one of the pillars he seemed to dissolve and then reconstitute himself on the other side.

‘Can you hear it?’ Faraday said.

Irritated, I glanced at him. ‘What?’

‘Those notes.’

‘Shut up, Rabbit.’

I looked back at the arcade. The man wasn’t there anymore. It was conceivable he had put on a bit of speed and reached the archway at the northern end. Or he might have stopped behind a pillar. Or, and perhaps this was most likely of all, he hadn’t been there in the first place. The Cathedral at dusk was full of indistinct shapes that shifted as you tried to look at them.

Faraday nudged me. ‘There it is again.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The four notes I heard last night. Remember?’ He hummed them, and they meant nothing to me. ‘It’s like the start of something.’

‘You’re barmy,’ I said. ‘Come on, I want some toast.’

There was an odd sequel to this a few hours later, when we were having our evening meal at the Veals’.

While we ate, Mr Veal was in the parlour with us. He had begun to relax in our company, as we had in his.

‘This place would fall apart at the seams without the Dean and me,’ he said with obvious satisfaction. ‘Some of these clerical gents would forget who their own mothers were. Heads in the clouds. And your masters aren’t much better.’

I told him about the glorious ratting we had had at Angel Farm.

‘So you missed the rain this afternoon?’ he asked, for the minutiae of the weather’s fluctuations fascinated him, as they did most grown-ups.

‘Just about. It was beginning to spit as we were going back to Mr Ratcliffe’s so we cut up through the Cathedral.’

‘We’ll have worse tonight,’ he said. ‘Mrs Veal feels it in her bones. Her bones are never wrong.’

‘I saw someone up the west tower,’ I said.

‘Up the west tower?’ Mr Veal shook his head. ‘Not at this time of year.’

‘Well, I thought I saw someone.’ I shrugged. ‘But it was already getting dark. I could’ve been wrong.’

‘No one was up there,’ Mr Veal said. ‘There wouldn’t be. You can take it as Gospel, young man. Not without me knowing.’