The Unburied (3 page)

Austin poured me a glass of madeira-wine from a decanter which stood on a side-table. As he handed it to me, the smell of the place suddenly struck me – thick, heavy, intimate. Holding the glass, I drew breath with difficulty through my nostrils. I shut my eyes and thought of the Cathedral so near, of bones and flesh rotting beneath the stones, of what might be beneath this house which was in the shadow of the great building. The smell was sweet, obscene, like a rotting corpse pressing down upon me, holding me in a clammy, slippery embrace and suddenly I believed I was going to be violently ill. I managed to sip a little of the wine and somehow to turn my thoughts elsewhere and the moment passed. I looked up and saw that Austin was watching me curiously and I forced a smile and then we toasted each other and my arrival.

What could we talk about after so long? It seemed absurd to engage in the trivial chatter of mere acquaintances – the weather, the journey, the proximity of the house to the Cathedral and the various amenities and inconveniences thereof. Yet that is what we did. And all the while, I was scrutinizing him and wondering how the passage of time had changed him. And I supposed he was looking at me with the same questions. Could we fall back into the boyish intercourse that we had enjoyed or, much more to be hoped, could we find a new mature note of friendship? Or would we flail uneasily between the old and now inappropriate manner and a new realization that we had little in common?

‘How good it is to see you,’ I said when there was a pause.

He smiled at me and his smile stayed even as he lifted his glass to his mouth and drank.

I felt I was smiling idiotically back at him. Simply for something to say, I blurted out: ‘How long it must be since we last saw each other!’ As soon as the words were uttered I wished them recalled. How strange that when one has resolved not to speak of a particular subject it should be the very first thing one brings up.

As if the remark awakened no memories, he put down his glass and made a show of counting on his fingers. ‘Twenty years.’

‘Longer. Twenty-two. Nearly twenty-two.’

He shook his head with a smile.

I hadn’t intended to raise the subject at all, but now that I had, I wanted us to remember it correctly. Then I would say no more about it. ‘You came to the station at Great Yarmouth to see me off. To see us off. I have always remembered my last sight of you on the platform as the train drew out.’

He gazed at me as if with nothing more than polite curiosity. ‘How strange. My recollection is that you and I returned to London alone.’

‘Absolutely not. I can see you standing there and waving goodbye. The date was July the twenty-eighth and it was twenty-two years ago come the summer.’

‘You must be right. You’re the one who knows about the past.’

‘It’s very hard to know the truth about the past, Austin. But the events of that summer are, I assure you, engraved upon my memory.’

I had spoken with more emotion than I had intended. As I drank, the glass clattered against my teeth. I was suddenly terrified that he would utter one of the two names that were never to be mentioned between us. I lowered the glass, trying to keep my hand steady.

‘We won’t argue about it. It isn’t worth it.’ Then he smiled and said: ‘But now to the future. You can stay until Saturday?’

‘With pleasure. But I will have to leave early in the morning since it is Christmas Eve and I am expected at my niece’s in the afternoon.’

‘And that is where?’

‘Exeter, as I mentioned in my letter.’

‘Yes, of course. Well, that is agreed. We will meet in the evenings, but I’m afraid I shall be working during the day.’

‘And I have things to do myself that will keep me occupied most of the day.’

‘So you wrote. I hope this wretched cold and fog won’t hamper your work too much.’

I smiled. It was an odd thing to say, but Austin had always had an elfin sense of humour. I had written to him only a few days earlier to ask if it would be convenient if I were to alter our arrangement and come at such short notice and he had replied that he would be delighted. What had prompted me to bring forward the visit was this. When I had received the invitation from Austin, I had remembered that my College Library had the uncatalogued papers of an antiquarian called Pepperdine who, I recalled, had visited the town shortly after the Restoration, and so I had decided to look at them. While doing so, I had come across a letter which – as I had explained to Austin – suggested that a long-standing scholarly controversy relating to my beloved Alfredian period might be resolved by the discovery of a certain document in the Library of the Dean and Chapter. I was so anxious to begin my researches that I had changed my plans and decided to visit Austin on my way to Exeter rather than on the journey back in the new year.

‘After your long journey,’ he went on, ‘I thought you’d like to stay in tonight, and I’ll cook our supper.’

‘As you did in the old days,’ I exclaimed. ‘Do you not recall? When we lodged in Sidney Street, we used to take turns to grill chops?’

Memories flooded back and I found myself quite misty-eyed.

Austin nodded.

‘Do you remember your “chops St Lawrence” as you called them? Burnt to a crisp like the poor saint? You called your dinners an
auto-da-fé
for you said more faith was required to eat them than the wretched victims of the Inquisition ever needed.’

He smiled but it seemed to be at my own nostalgia rather than at the memories I was evoking. ‘I have lamb-cutlets and capers ready. I have had enough practice in the intervening years to be able to promise no acts of martyrdom in the eating of them.’

It was odd to think of Austin keeping house for himself. I remembered how slovenly he had been – crumbs always scattered on the floor of his rooms in college, his clothes thrown over a chair, cups and plates rarely washed. The room I was in now was not very much tidier than that.

‘I will show you your room,’ Austin said. ‘I expect you will want to wash while I am cooking.’

‘Do I have time to look at the Cathedral? I need to stretch my legs after a long day on the train.’

‘Supper will not be ready for about half an hour.’

‘Won’t the Cathedral be locked by now?’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Good. I’m looking forward to seeing the ambulatory.’

Austin appeared surprised, even startled. ‘I thought you had never been here before?’

‘But my dear fellow, I know the Cathedral intimately from written accounts and illustrations. It has one of the finest ambulatories in England.’

‘Has it?’ he asked absently.

‘It is altogether a remarkable building, and almost completely intact.’ Remembering what I had seen as I arrived and how uninformatively the cab-driver had answered my question, I asked: ‘But is work being done on it now?’

He smiled. ‘Oh, you’ve brought up the great issue that has divided the town more bitterly than anything in its history.’

‘At least since the Siege.’ I laughed. ‘Don’t forget that.’

‘They are indeed working on it, which is why you’ll be able to get in so late.’

‘What is being done? Not some of that so-called restoration work?’

‘They are merely working on the organ.’

‘Even so, that can do considerable damage.’

‘Hardly likely. And it will immensely improve the organ. They are introducing steam-power to blow it and carrying the action down from the old console to a new gallery.’

I could not help shaking my head in dismay. ‘Quite unnecessary. It will sound no better.’

‘On the contrary. It is also being tuned to equal temperament and extensively improved. At present it has a short compass and no clarion or Cremona.’

I was surprised by his expertise, although I remembered that he sang and had some skill on the flute. ‘I didn’t know you played the organ?’

‘I don’t,’ he said sharply. ‘I have been told so by those who understand these things.’

‘Once you start to interfere with an old building you never know where it will end. The introduction of steam-power for ecclesiastical organs in the last thirty years has led to extensive demolition.’

‘Well,’ Austin said with that odd smile I now recalled which always seemed intended only for himself, ‘if they find work that needs to be done to keep the building practical for modern-day needs, they must do it. It’s not a mummy to be preserved in a glass case in a museum.’ I was about to reply when he sprang up: ‘I must show you to your room.’

He had always been quick and active – ready to leap to his feet and hurry out of the house on some hare-brained idea. And his mind was just as quick – though perhaps a little too hasty and easily bored. Mine was possibly a little slower but much more tenacious and prepared to burrow deeper into things – perhaps precisely because it did not grasp them as readily as Austin’s. So it was not surprising that I, not he, had become the scholar although he had shown great brilliance in his field of study.

And so now he seized my bag and hurried out of the room leaving me to follow him. In the hall, he snatched up a candlestick and lit it from the mantle, explaining that there was gas laid only on the ground floor. Then he bounded up the stairs while I laboured after him in near-darkness. He waited for me on the half-landing, where a grandfather clock barely left room for both of us. We climbed the last few stairs and he pushed open a door and showed me the cosy little room at the back which he used as his study. The larger room at the front was his drawing-room – as he expressed it with a self-mocking smile.

We climbed the next flight of the queer old stairs where bare dusty boards replaced the threadbare carpet lower down. Austin showed me into the front-bedroom, saying: ‘I hope you won’t be troubled by the blessed bells.’

‘I’m used to them,’ I said. ‘I should be, after more than thirty years.’ With the ceiling slanting down over half of it, the little room was like a ship’s cabin – an effect enhanced by the sloping floors and tiny window.

He left me to unpack and wash. The room seemed not to have been used for some time and smelt musty. I opened the little casement window and the rasping, smoky air blew in. The Cathedral loomed up out of the fog giving the illusion of being in motion as the mist swirled about it. There was no sound from the Close. I shut the window against the cold. The small looking-glass above the wash-stand was clouded and even when I had rubbed at it with my handkerchief, the image remained shadowy. Beside the stand lay a leather dressing-case with the initials ‘A. F.’ which I remembered from our college days. It looked hardly any older than when I had last seen it. As I unpacked my bag and washed, I reflected on how Austin had changed. He had always had a theatrical side but it seemed to me that it was accentuated now – almost as if for a purpose. I wondered once again if he had invited me in order to make amends for what had happened twenty-two years ago and asked myself how I could convey to him, without our having to rake over the past, that I did not blame him for what had occurred.

When I came down ten minutes later I went into the kitchen and found Austin chopping onions. He looked me up and down with a mysterious smile and after a few seconds he said: ‘Where’s my gift?’

‘How foolish of me. I took it out of my bag and put it on the bed in order to remember it. I’ll go up and get it.’

‘Fetch it later. Go to the Cathedral now. Supper will be ready in twenty minutes.’

I did as he suggested. When I was out in the Close a moment or two later I saw a couple of people hurrying away from the doorway in the south transept which was almost opposite Austin’s house. Evensong had presumably just finished. I entered, letting the heavy door swing shut behind me before I raised my eyes and looked ahead, anxious to savour the excitement I always felt when I entered an ancient edifice that was new to me.

As if they had been waiting for my entrance, the unaccompanied voices of the choir suddenly rose – the pure trebles of the boys soaring above the deeper tones of the men in an image of harmony between idealism and reality. The voices were muted and I had no idea where the choristers were. I was surprised to find them singing so late.

The great building was almost dark and it was cold – colder, it seemed, than the Close. There was the smell of stale incense and I remembered that the Dean was of the High Church tendency. Keeping my gaze lowered, I advanced across the flagstones which were so worn down in the centre that I fancied I was walking across a series of shallow soup-bowls. When I reached the centre I turned and raised my head so that the vast length of the nave suddenly fell away in front of me with the thick columns rising like a stone grove whose trunks gradually turned like branches into the delicate tracery of the roof. Far away the great sheets of uneven glass of the rose-window at the western end, like a dark lake under a clouded moon, caught the gleams of the gas-lights. The few lamps only threw into relief the vastness of the soaring arches. When I had gorged my sight, I leant my head back and looked up at the vault high above me. I smelt fresh wood and I thought of how, seven hundred and fifty years ago, the heavy beams and huge blocks of stone were lifted through that space a hundred and twenty feet into the air. How strange to think of this ancient building as once having been startlingly new, rising shockingly above the low roofs of the town. How miraculous that so much had survived the civil wars of Henry VI’s reign, the demolition of the Abbey in the Dissolution and the bombardment during the Siege of 1643.

The voices died away and there was silence. I turned and my gaze fell on an utter monstrosity: a huge and hideous new organ-gallery thrusting itself forward in the transept. With its gleaming pipes, polished ivory and shining ebony it resembled nothing so much as a huge cuckoo-clock from some feverish nightmare.

And now another outrage: I became aware of harsh raised voices whose source, in that echoing, muffled space, it was impossible to discern. When I had ascended the steps of the chancel I noticed lights in the furthest corner. There were more shouts and then the musical ring of spades on stone, all of which the vast building seemed to receive and slowly absorb as it had absorbed the joys and the anguish of men and women for nearly eight hundred years. I turned the corner of the stalls and found three men working – or, rather, two working and one directing them – their breath visible in the light of two lanterns one of which was standing on the floor while another was perched insolently on a bishop’s tomb.