Broken Voices (Kindle Single) Read online

  By now Mr Ratcliffe was crumbling flake tobacco into the palm of one hand. He fell silent, concentrating on rubbing the strands into a loose, evenly distributed mixture.

  ‘Bells don’t last for ever, you know. Our bells had to be taken down in the eighteenth century. They needed to be recast. This was done, at considerable expense. There was to be a service of dedication when the new ring of bells was rung for the first time. The Dean and Chapter asked Mr Goldsworthy to compose a special anthem to mark the occasion, to be based on Psalm a hundred and fifty. “Praise him in the sound of the trumpet: praise him upon the lute and harp”.’

  Mordred, who had been slumbering on Mr Ratcliffe’s lap, jumped to the ground. He stretched himself out with luxurious abandon on the hearthrug.

  ‘They say that Mr Goldsworthy was an ambitious man,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on. ‘And a troubled one. The Dean had a piece of patronage in his gift, the Deputy Surveyorship of the Fabric, a position that came with an income of two hundred pounds a year for the holder, and entailed no obligations apart from a few ceremonial duties. Mr Goldsworthy thought there was no reason why the post should not go to himself as to the next man. And the Dean gave him to understand that it might well be his, if his new anthem was a particularly fine piece of work that brought renown on the Cathedral. And, no doubt, on the Dean.’

  As Mr Ratcliffe was speaking, Mordred rose to his feet. He stared at the three of us in turn and, to my surprise, came towards me and rubbed his furry body against my legs. I felt the vibration of his purring against my legs. Flattered by his attention, I bent down and stroked him.

  ‘The problem was,’ Mr Ratcliffe continued, ‘Mr Goldsworthy found that for once his inspiration failed him. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. His career was at a crossroads. If he failed in the commission he would earn the Dean’s disfavour. To make matters worse, I believe there was a lady in the case: and Mr Goldsworthy could not afford to marry without a larger income.’

  The cat unsheathed the claws of his right paw and ran them into my calf. I squealed with pain and shock.

  ‘Mordred!’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘I’m so sorry — he can be such an unmannerly animal. Perhaps one of you would put him outside.’

  Mordred frustrated this design by going to ground under the grand piano, sheltered by the wall on one side and a pile of books on the other.

  ‘What did you do then?’ Faraday said. ‘Did he compose the anthem in the end?’

  ‘That’s the strange part of part of it. It is said that he did. He told his friends that he had succeeded at last, and at the very last moment. He said it would be his masterpiece. The newly-cast bells had already been hung in the tower. He found that if he went up into the tower himself, into the ringing chamber with pen and paper, the music came to him as if borne on the wind. But then came disaster.’

  ‘He died?’ I said, half hopefully, half fearfully.

  Mr Ratcliffe held up a hand. ‘Hold your horses, young man. No, the first thing to happen was that cracks were discovered in the tower, when the workmen were hanging the new bells. You see, the west tower was built in the Middle Ages. The tower simply wasn’t designed for a ring of bells. It’s not the weight of them, you know. It’s the vibration they cause when they are rung. The Cathedral Surveyor told the Dean and Chapter that there could be no question of ringing the new ones.’

  ‘Which is why there aren’t any bells now,’ I said.

  ‘Yes — because they could well bring the tower crashing about everyone’s ears. The Surveyor said that the new bells must come down, and the tower had to be strengthened as soon as possible, and braced with iron ties. The Dean raged against this — his reputation, his judgement, was at stake. But he was forced to give way in the end. So there was no longer a need for an anthem to celebrate the new bells, and no longer any purpose on wasting a perfectly good piece of patronage on the Master of the Music.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ Faraday asked. ‘The anthem, I mean.’

  The anthem, I noticed, not the man: the Rabbit’s as mad as a hatter; and I smiled at my own joke.

  Mr Ratcliffe lit his pipe and tossed the match into the fire. ‘No one knows for sure. Perhaps it was never written or perhaps it was destroyed. But the sad part is what happened to Mr Goldsworthy. The story was that he had left the manuscript in the west tower, where he had been working on it. One winter evening, he went up to retrieve it. But he was not aware that the workmen had already begun to remove the new bells from the tower. There are hatches in the floors at the various levels, to allow the bells to be lowered down from the belfry to the floor of the tower. By some mishap, the workmen had left open the hatch at the lowest stage, which is the ringing chamber just above the painted ceiling. There was very little light up there and poor Goldsworthy must have stumbled in the dark.’

  The room was no longer cosy, despite the cups of cocoa and Mr Ratcliffe’s tired, gentle voice. I glanced at him, sitting back in his chair. The old man looked back at me and, for an instant, by some trick of the firelight, I saw Mordred’s eyes staring at me. Amber, flecked with green. But the cat was still lurking under the grand piano.

  ‘He fell?’ Faraday said, his voice awed.

  ‘More than a hundred feet on to the floor of the tower.’ Mr Ratcliffe had returned to normal. ‘The poor fellow must have been killed outright.’

  It occurred to me that five or six hours earlier I must have walked across the very spot where Mr Goldsworthy’s body had lain.

  ‘It was an accident, of course,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘That’s what they decided. There was nothing to show it had been suicide, after all, and a verdict of accidental death meant that he could have a Christian burial.’

  ‘Someone must have looked for the anthem,’ Faraday said.

  I wondered why Rabbit was so concerned about a bit of music. What did it matter, after all, beside the fact of a man’s death? But then I have never been able to understand the value that people place on music. It’s nothing but a series of sounds, sounds without meaning.

  ‘They searched his pockets. It wasn’t there, though they did find a pen and a portable inkwell. They looked among his papers. They looked in the tower, as well. But they didn’t find any trace of it. The anthem had vanished, if it had ever existed.’

  ‘Perhaps it hadn’t,’ I said.

  ‘The lady who was engaged to Mr Goldsworthy had actually seen the manuscript. He had played her some of the melodies. She said it was a thing of a ravishing beauty, that it would draw the heart out of an angel. But I suppose in the circumstances she would be inclined to have a high opinion of the piece.’

  Mr Ratcliffe rose stiffly from his chair and knocked out his pipe. He looked down at us in our chairs.

  ‘It’s long past time for you boys to be in bed.’

  ‘But, sir,’ I protested. ‘What about the ghost?’ I could not help thinking of the person I had glimpsed in the west tower this afternoon. ‘Do people see him? Does he haunt the tower?’

  ‘Poor Goldsworthy?’ Mr Ratcliffe shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know. No, it’s his music that people hear. Or they say they do. Fragments of melody, just a few notes.’ He waved his pipe in the direction of the Cathedral. ‘It’s as if the anthem was broken into many pieces in the fall. And all the notes it contained were thrown up into the air. They are still there. Looking for each other. Trying to come together again.’

  9

  The next day, Saturday, 27 December, was grey and blustery, with showers of rain that attacked from unexpected angles and worked their way through the crevices of one’s clothing to the naked skin beneath.

  I explained my problem about the lost cap to Mr Ratcliffe. He considered the matter gravely and gave it as his opinion that it would not be considered a beatable offence if I were caught outside the College without a school cap during the holidays. If I had any trouble, I was to refer the complainant to himself.

  But I could not go out without a hat. That would not be seemly or indeed good for my heal
th. He lent me one of his own, a battered, shapeless thing of tweed, with a trout fly fixed to the band. It was too large for my head and rested loosely on my ears. But it kept me decent, according to the standards of those days, and it kept me dry. It smelled powerfully of mothballs, with a hint of stale tobacco.

  In the morning, Faraday and I went into the town. He waited outside while I tried my luck with three tobacconists in turn. The first two refused to serve me but in the third, a little shop in an alley between the High Street and Market Street, I struck lucky. The proprietor had left the establishment in the temporary charge of his elderly mother, who was very short-sighted. I put on my gruffest voice when I asked for ten Woodbine cigarettes — unlike Faraday’s, my voice had settled down to a sort of croak after the ups and downs of the previous year. That and Mr Ratcliffe’s hat seemed to allay any suspicions the woman might have had.

  Once outside, I showed Faraday my booty. He reacted with gratifying horror.

  ‘If you’re caught, they’ll chuck you out,’ he whispered.

  ‘What does it matter?’ I said grandly. ‘I don’t care.’

  He glanced at me under the brim of his cap and I felt reproved by the misery in his eyes. By buying cigarettes I was merely toying with the risk of expulsion. It was improbable I would be caught smoking and doubly improbable that I would be expelled for doing it, particularly in the school holidays. But Faraday almost certainly faced expulsion already: and if by any chance he was allowed to stay at school, the alternative he faced was almost worse — years of persecution. In either case I pictured the shame of the stolen postal order pursuing him through his blighted adult life until his miserable death.

  In the meadows between the Cathedral and the river, there stood a steep, heavily wooded hill, which had once formed part of a little castle made of earth and wood. It was as safe as anywhere to smoke. I scrambled up it, with Faraday trailing after me because he had nothing better to do and my company was better than his own.

  At the top was a clearing of rough grass with a rotting summerhouse that stank of foxes. I stood on the remains of the little verandah in front of it and smoked two Woodbines in swift succession. I tried my best to give the impression that I was enjoying an exquisite pleasure but in truth the cigarettes made me feel rather sick.

  Meanwhile Faraday moved restlessly about the clearing. As I was smoking the second cigarette, he came back to my side.

  ‘I say,’ he said. ‘You know the anthem? The one that was lost?’

  I squinted through the smoke at him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would be marvellous if it was found after all this time. Wouldn’t it?’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose so. For choirboys and chaps like that.’

  ‘Just because it hasn’t been found, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’

  My mind filled with a picture of all those lost notes, black blobs with little tails and other attachments, floating in the air like dead leaves in a strong breeze.

  ‘But where?’ I said. ‘I’m sure they looked everywhere.’

  ‘I think it’s in the tower,’ Faraday said. ‘I mean, that’s where he was when he fell. He had his pen and ink with him, remember.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass. They must have searched especially hard up there.’

  ‘But perhaps they didn’t look hard enough. Look — just suppose we looked for it, and we found it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? They’d make an awfully big fuss. I shouldn’t wonder if they put it in the newspapers. And we’d be — well, we’d be sort of heroes, wouldn’t we?’

  He stared expectantly at me, his mouth open, the rabbit teeth displayed.

  My imagination was beginning to stir, even though the idea had come from Faraday. It would make a huge stir at school if we found it. I imagined the news filtering through to my aunt, miraculously restored to full health for the purpose, and even to my parents in India. I imagined their delight, their pride.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘But we can’t get up there.’

  ‘I bet we could find a way. I’ve a plan.’

  I was careful to preserve my dignity by not showing too much enthusiasm. ‘There’d be a beastly stink if they catch us.’

  ‘Not if we find it. They wouldn’t mind what we’d done. They’d wipe the slate clean.’

  I understood at last what Faraday meant, what his motive was. He thought that the lost anthem was his chance of salvation, perhaps his only one. If he found it, it would neutralize the disgrace of the postal order; it would make up for his broken voice and for no longer being head of the choir. The school would come back next term to find him a hero. And I would be a hero, too.

  If he found it.

  I dropped the cigarette butt and ground it into the wet earth with my heel. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘At least it’ll give us something to do.’

  *

  In my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe that Faraday would do anything. It’s easy enough to come up with these schemes but quite another to put them into practice.

  He didn’t mention the idea again for an hour or two. We went to the Veals’ for lunch, our midday dinner. Afterwards I walked up to Angel Farm, followed by the reluctant Faraday, in case Mr Witney had decided on a second day of ratting. But the farmyard was deserted apart from a dog that barked furiously at us and made savage little runs towards us to the limit of its chain.

  ‘Let’s go to the Cathedral,’ he suggested.

  I didn’t say anything but we fell into step together and, as we had done the day before, walked through the long street leading from the green to the west door.

  It was much earlier in the afternoon than it had been on our last visit. The Cathedral, even on this grey day, seemed brighter and more welcoming. I took this as a good omen. We stood in the very centre of the space beneath the west tower and looked up at the painted ceiling.

  More than a hundred feet high, Mr Ratcliffe had said.

  ‘You can’t see the trapdoor,’ Faraday said, clearly disappointed.

  I wondered what a fall from that height would do to a man. Would it compress him, ram his legs into his body and his head into his shoulders?

  ‘What’s the painting of?’ I said.

  Faraday stared upwards. ‘I don’t know. It looks like angels playing harps and things.’

  He went over to a short flight of steps in the thickness of the wall, almost invisible because it was in the shadow of one of the great columns that supported the tower. At the top of the steps was a heavy door. This was where the stairs to the tower began.

  I glanced over my shoulder. No one was in sight. I tried the door. It was locked. We stood and looked at it. The door was made of old, scarred oak with great iron hinges. The lock looked more modern, judging by the size of the keyhole, and smaller than I would have expected.

  There was a clattering behind us as a small party of visitors burst through the west door. One of them had a guide book in hand and was acting as tour leader.

  None of them gave us a second glance but we scurried away like a pair of startled animals.

  10

  I had underestimated Faraday, or perhaps underestimated the power of his desperation. When we went to the Veals’ for tea that evening, Mr Veal was not at home. He had gone to visit an assistant verger who was in hospital after breaking his leg by falling off his bicycle.

  ‘Never liked those bicycles,’ Mrs Veal said. ‘Nasty dangerous things. Against nature.’

  She gave us scrambled eggs and filled us up afterwards with bread and dripping. It’s strange how clearly I remember the food she gave us. I suppose it must be because we were so poorly fed in term time.

  After we had finished, Faraday touched my arm. ‘Take the plates out to her,’ he whispered. ‘Ask her how she makes her eggs like that.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Go on.’ He gave me a little push. ‘Ask her anything you like. Just keep her in the kitchen for a few minutes.’

  I did as he told me,
though it seemed quite wrong that Faraday should be giving me instructions. I didn’t need to ask Mrs Veal about her scrambled eggs. She was already washing up so I dried the plates and cutlery for her, and she asked me about my aunt in hospital and my parents in India. She was a kind woman, kinder than we deserved.

  When I returned to the parlour, Faraday was sitting by the lamp and reading, or pretending to read, the local paper, which Mr Veal had left on the arm of a chair. He looked up as I entered and gave me a small, sly smile.

  We walked back to the Sacrist’s Lodging through the College.

  ‘I’ve got the key,’ he said. ‘It says “West Tower Stair” on it.’

  ‘Won’t Veal notice?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s two other ones there on the same hook. This is one of the spares.’

  We walked in silence for a moment. Faraday was probably right. The verger had finished his inventory of the keys, so he would have no need to look closely at them. Besides, the Cathedral was now locked up for the night.

  I was suddenly struck by such an obvious and insuperable objection that I laughed out loud — partly, I suspect, from relief.

  ‘What is it?’ Faraday said, staring down and looking at me.

  ‘It’s all very well us having the key to the stairs,’ I said. ‘But the Cathedral’s locked up at night. And we can’t go up in daytime. Someone would see us for sure.’

  He gave a snicker of laughter. ‘Don’t worry about that. I can get in the Cathedral whenever I want. We can go tonight.’

  I nearly kicked him. The smug little Rabbit.

  *

  We passed an interminable evening with Mr Ratcliffe, the three us reading by the fire. I was bored. Living with Mr Ratcliffe was turning me into an old man like him, a creature of habit. On the other hand, part of me wanted this time by the fire to last for ever. Part of me wanted to be bored.