It was colder than ever outside. The air chilled my throat and tingled in my nose. Above the black ridge of the Cathedral was the arch of the sky, where the stars gleamed white and silver and pale blue: they seemed to vibrate with the cold, shivering in heaven.
Afterwards I went upstairs. Faraday went outside in his turn. By the time he came upstairs, I was already in bed and reading my book, a novel called Beric the Briton by G.A. Henty. I ignored him while he undressed. I heard his bedsprings creak as he climbed into bed and the sharp intake of breath as the cold, slightly damp sheets touched his skin.
I put down my book and reached up to turn off the gas at the bracket on the wall.
‘I say,’ Faraday said. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘What?’
He was lying on his side, curled up with his knees nearly at his chin. All I could see of him was his face. He looked more rabbit-like than ever.
‘Did you hear it outside? The singing, or whatever it was?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It was when I came out of the bog,’ he said.
‘Perhaps the Rat was having a sing-song,’ I said. ‘He got drunk on the Dean’s wine. It was obvious, the way he was going on this evening.’
‘It wasn’t him, honestly — it came from outside, from over there.’
Faraday’s hand emerged from under the covers and pointed to the right of our beds: towards the College, towards the Cathedral.
‘Someone coming home from a party,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t like that.’ He was frowning. ‘It was just four notes, very high-pitched and far away.’
Very quietly, Faraday sang them to me: La-la-la-la. The third la was longer than the others. His voice behaved itself for once, and the notes sounded pure and true. As far as I could tell.
‘You sure you didn’t hear it?’
‘Of course I’m sure. Go to sleep.’
He sang the notes again, even more quietly. ‘It’s in a major key, I think. Starts on an F sharp, perhaps?’
‘Shut up, will you?’
I reached up and turned off the gas.
‘Whatever it is,’ he said to the darkness, ‘it’s meant to be happy but it’s going to be a sad tune.’
I lay awake listening to the sounds of the night wondering whether Faraday would start crying again. He hadn’t mentioned the business with the postal order during the day but it must always have been there, squatting in the forefront of his mind like a toad and waiting for its moment to spring. His plight made mine seem trivial by comparison, which I suppose was another reason I didn’t like him very much.
Faraday’s breathing slowed and fell into a regular rhythm. I heard Mr Ratcliffe locking up and coming up the stairs. The Cathedral clock tolled the hours and the quarters. The clock was in the west tower, not the shorter central tower. It had a modest chime for such a large church, like a big man with a small, high voice. We boys called it ‘Little Willy’.
The silence deepened. Once, as I was dropping off to sleep, I thought I heard again, at the very edge of my range of hearing, the four high notes that Faraday had sung to me. La-la-la-la.
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.’