It took Ern some three-quarters of an hour, bowling along at a fair pace, before he came on Ludgate Street over the Thames’ far side and the approach to the West Front of the cathedral. In this time he’d thought about all sorts of things, about the slaves set free out in America, some of them branded by their masters as though cattle, he’d been told, and of black men and poor people in general. Marx the socialist and his First International had been about more than a year already, but the workers still weren’t any better off as far as anyone could tell. Perhaps things would be better now that Palmerston was dying, as it was Lord Palmerston who’d held back the reforms, but to be frank Ern wasn’t holding out much hope on that one. For a while he’d cheered himself with thoughts of Anne and how she’d let him have her on the blade-grooved kitchen table while his mam was out, sat on its edge without her drawers on and her feet around his back, so that the memory put him on the bone under his trousers and his flannels, hurrying through the downpour over Blackfriars Bridge. He’d thought about Crimea and his luck at coming home without a scratch, and then of Mother Seacole who he’d heard about when he was out there, which returned him to the matter of the blacks.
It was the children that concerned him, born as slaves on a plantation and not brought there as grown men or women, some of them being set free just now across the sea, young lads of ten or twelve who’d never known another life and would be flummoxed as for what to do. Did they brand kids as well, Ern wondered, and at what age if they did? Wishing he hadn’t thought of this and banishing the awful and unwanted picture of young John or Thursa brought beneath the glowing iron he mounted Ludgate Street with the majestic hymn-made-solid of St. Paul’s inflating as he neared it, swelling up beyond the slope’s low brow.
As often as he’d seen it, Ern had never ceased to be amazed that such a beautiful and perfect thing could ever come to be amongst the sprawl of dirty closes, inns and tapering corridors, amongst the prostitutes and the pornographers. Across the puddle-silvered slabs it rose with its two towers like hands flung up in a Hosanna to the churning heavens, grimmer than when Ern had left for work despite the way the day had lightened naturally as it wore on since then. The broad cathedral steps with raindrops dancing on them swept down in two flights calling to mind the tucks around a trailing surplice hem, where over that the six pairs of white Doric columns holding up the portico dropped down in billowed folds, unlaundered in the city’s bonfire pall. The spires that flanked the wide façade to either side, two hundred feet or more in height, had what seemed all of London’s pigeons crowded on their ledges under dripping overhangs of stonework, sheltering against the weather.
Huddling amongst the birds as if they had themselves just flown down from unfriendly skies to roost in the cathedral eaves were stone apostles, with St. Paul himself perched on the portico’s high ridge and gathering his sculpted robes up round him to prevent them trailing in the grime and wet. At the far right of the most southern tower sat a disciple, Ern had no idea which one, who had his head tipped back and seemed to watch the tower’s clock intently, waiting for his shift to finish so that he could flap off home down Cheapside through the drizzle, back to Aldgate and the East. Climbing the soaked and slippery steps with fresh spots drumming on his hat-brim, Ernest had to chuckle at the irreligious notion of the statues intermittently producing liquid marble stools, Saints’-droppings that embittered parish workers would be paid to scrape away. Taking a last peer at the boiling mass of bruised cloud overhead before he slipped between the leftmost pillars and towards the north aisle entrance, he concluded that the rain was getting worse if anything, and that today he would undoubtedly be better off indoors. Stamping his boots and shaking off his sodden jacket as he crossed the threshold into the cathedral he heard the first muffled drum-roll of approaching thunder off at the horizon’s rim, confirming his suspicion.
In comparison to the October torrent pouring down outside, St. Paul’s was warm and Ern felt briefly guilty at the thought of Anne and their two children drawn up shivering to the deficient fire back home in East Street. Ernest walked along the North Aisle under the suspicious frowns of passing clergy towards the construction and activity at its far end, only remembering to snatch his sopping bonnet off at the last minute and to carry it before him humbly in both hands. With every ringing step he felt the vistas and the hidden volumes of the stupefying edifice unfolding up above him and upon all sides, as he veered from the north aisle’s curved recesses on his left and passed between the building’s great supporting columns to the nave.
Framed by St. Paul’s huge piers there in the central transept space beneath the dome milled labourers like Ern himself, their scruffy coats and britches a dull autumn palette of dust greys and browns, shabby against the richness of the paintings hung around them, the composure of the monuments and statues. Some of them were lads Ern knew of old, which was the way he’d come by this appreciated stint of paid work in the first place, with a word put in to them as were contracted for the cleaning and restoring. Men were scrubbing with soft cloths at lavishly-carved choir-stalls bossed with grapes and roses at the far end of the quire, while in the spandrels between arches underneath the railed hoop of the Whispering Gallery above were other fellows, giving the mosaic prophets and four Gospel-makers something of a wash and brush-up. Most of the endeavour though, it seemed to Ern, was centred on the mechanism overshadowing the nearly hundred-foot-wide area immediately below the yawning dome. It was perhaps the most ingenious thing that Ern had ever seen.
Hanging from the top centre of the dome, fixed to the crowning lantern’s underside at what Ern guessed must be the strongest point of the vast structure, itself with a tonnage in the tens of thousands, was a plumb-straight central spindle more then twenty storeys high that had on one side an assemblage nearly as tall made of poles and planks, while on the other side what had to have been London’s largest sandbag hung from a gigantic crossbeam as a counterweight. The sack sagged from a hawser on the left, while to Ern’s right the heavy rope-hung framework that it balanced out was shaped like an enormous pie-slice with its narrow end towards the centre where it joined securely with the upright central axis. This impressive scaffolding contained a roughly quarter-circle wedge of flooring that could be winched up and down by pulleys at its corners, so as to reach surfaces that needed work at any level of the dome. The mast-like central pivot was hung almost to the decorative solar compass in the middle of the transept floor, with what looked like a smaller version of a horizontal mill-wheel at its bottom by which means the whole creaking arrangement could be manually rotated to attend each vaulted quadrant in its turn. The pulley-hoisted platform in the midst of its supporting struts and girders was where Ern would be employed for the remainder of the day, all being well.
A fat pearl cylinder of failing daylight coloured by the worsening storm outside dropped from the windows of the Whispering Gallery to the cathedral’s flooring down below, dust lifted by the bustling industry caught up as a suspension in its filmy shaft. The soft illumination filtering from overhead rendered the workmen with a Conté crayon warmth and grain as they bent diligently to their various enterprises. Ern stood almost mesmerised admiring this effect when to the right ahead of him, out of the south aisle and its stairs from the triforium gallery above there came a striding, rotund figure that he recognised, who called to him by name.