Ailinn stopped and told him to be quiet. She could hear music coming from the grandest of the houses. She wanted it to be Bach or Handel but it was only a utility-console ballad wondering where we would be without love.
‘In the shit,’ Kevern said. To himself. He wasn’t going to use language like that to the woman he loved.
She took his arm and moved him on in what, as a devotee of cathedral closes, she knew to be the direction of the main entrance to the cathedral itself. Her early years had been spent in an orphanage that was an adjunct to a monastery. She knew her way around church architecture.
‘The gargoyles have been defaced,’ Kevern noted, looking up. ‘They have no features. No bent noses, no bulging eyes, no pendulous lips.’
‘Years of bad weather,’ Ailinn guessed.
‘Well that’s a kind interpretation. But I bet this is deliberate. They’ve been smoothed over — made to look like nothing and nobody.’
‘Botoxed, you reckon?’
He laughed. ‘Morally Botoxed. Rendered inoffensive.’
‘Still — isn’t that better than the way they looked before?’
‘Maybe. But they might as well not be here in that case. If they aren’t going to remind you of evil, they have no function.’
Ailinn reminded him that their function was to carry water away from the building.
‘I meant spiritual function,’ Kevern said piously.
Inside, the light struggled to pierce the dust of the stained-glass windows. Far apart from each other, two elderly ladies, dressed in black, prayed, one with her face in her hands.
‘There you are,’ Ailinn whispered.
‘I’m not sure they count,’ Kevern whispered back. ‘They look as though they’ve been here for two hundred years.’
‘It can take a long time,’ Ailinn said, ‘for God to answer your prayers.’
‘More time than we have.’
‘But not more time than they have.’
‘And how does he adjudicate between prayers,’ Kevern wondered, ‘when they are savagely opposed? What if these two are praying for the destruction of each other? How can he satisfy the desires of them both?’
‘With difficulty. That’s why it takes him so long.’
‘I take comfort at least,’ Kevern said, ‘in there being so few people making their devotions here. It must mean that the rest of them have what they want.’
‘God help them,’ Ailinn said.
‘God help us all,’ Kevern agreed.
They let their eyes wander absently over the crucifixes and Bible scenes, neither of them willing to make the effort to determine if any of the art was distinguished. They paused before an elaborately carved stone shrine, virtually a throne, built over a small slab, no bigger than a pillow, which announced itself as containing the blessed remains of Little St Alured of Ashbrittle, killed by—.
Kevern took out his glasses to examine the carving. ‘Well whatever else, they were wonderful craftsmen,’ he said. ‘If I could do this with wood. . such lightness, you think you’re looking at flowers. Don’t quote me on this, but I almost fancy I can see the poor little bugger’s soul ascending to heaven on a tracery of stone petals.’
But Ailinn was more interested in deciphering who the poor little bugger was killed by. ‘This hasn’t been worn away by time,’ she said. ‘It’s been scratched out.’
‘Maybe they decided they had the wrong killer.’
‘Then why didn’t they replace the name with that of the right one?’
‘Could still be investigating. The case might be sub judice.’
‘After nine hundred years?’
Kevern conceded it was unlikely. ‘But then justice, like God, grinds slowly. We should put Gutkind on to it.’
Ailinn knew how Kevern’s mind worked. You set it a problem and when it could come up with no answer, it came up with a joke. He had lost interest now in Little St Alured and how he was murdered, and by whom, and why someone or other — an individual with an axe to grind or the depleted might of the church — didn’t want anyone to know. She was the curious one. But in the end she too had to admit there were some things that had to remain a mystery.
They took the darkness of the cathedral out with them on to the street.
‘This place needs cheering up,’ Ailinn said. ‘It needs sunshine.’
‘It needs something. Pilgrims, I reckon. Believers. Some of the old dogmatism. You can’t have a church town without belief and you can’t have belief without intolerance.’
‘And you think that would liven it up?’
‘I do. All this penitential. .’
‘All this penitential what?’
He didn’t have the word. ‘You know. . gargoylelessness. If you want God you’ve got to have the Devil.’
‘I’m for neither,’ Ailinn said.
‘Then this is what you get.’
Glass shatters. They both hear it. She is at one end of the country and he is at another, yet still they hear it. The smashing mania, the shattering of every window in the land. After all the fires, all the beheadings, all the iron hooks and crowbars, the frenzy to kill has not abated. Only now it has become centralised. He is frightened, she less so. She thinks they’ve done their worst already. He thinks there’s always something further they might come up with; he has more admiration for the ingenuity of man; viewing things millennially, he thinks they haven’t even started yet. And look, he could be right. This time the mob wears uniforms, and answers to a higher authority even than God. She reads quietly, waiting for the knock. He hides his head. That is how they sit on the train heading east, looking out at the snow, not exchanging a word, she reading, he hiding his head. The train is not a surprise. They were always going to be put aboard this train. There are some among their fellow passengers for whom the train is a relief now that they are finally on it. In the snow everything will be washed away.
NINE. The Black Market in Memory
i
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, chilled by Ashbrittle’s faded faith, Kevern — half hoping she would say no — suggested they leave and drive to the Necropolis. The Necropolis was his father’s name for the capital.
‘Another of his jokes?’ Ailinn wondered.
‘You could say that, but he might have been in dead earnest.’
‘Well I wouldn’t know,’ Ailinn said, looking straight ahead.
She meant about jokes — since that had been Kevern’s first assessment of her: that she didn’t get them. But she meant about fathers too.
Neither had visited the Necropolis before. Singly, they wouldn’t have dared. It had a bad reputation. Outside the capital people survived the failure of the banks with surprising fortitude; they even took a grim satisfaction in returning to old frugal ways which proved their moral superiority to those who had lived the high life in the capital for so long, washing oysters down with champagne and living in mansions that had their own swimming pools. It was a sweet revenge. In time the Necropolis recovered, to a degree, but its self-esteem, as a great centre of finance and indulgence, had been damaged. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED — or, as his father called it, THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE — for the most part happened there, and while no one was blaming anyone, a sort of slinking seediness replaced the old strutting glamour. In the Necropolis the divorce rates were higher than anywhere else. So were domestic shootings. Men urinated openly in the streets. Women brawled with one another, used the vilest language, got drunk and thought nothing of throwing up where the men had urinated. You could have your pockets picked in broad daylight. Put up too fierce a struggle and you might have your throat cut. Might. It wasn’t a daily occurrence, but people in the country were pleased to report that it wasn’t unheard of.