The First of July(5)

Follows the motion of my hand

An iron Centaur we ride the land.





CHAPTER THREE


Benedict Chatto, Gloucester, July 1913


BENEDICT CHATTO SAT IN THE cold gray choir of the cathedral, waiting. He heard the wheeze and subdued hum as the organ bellows were turned on, Theo, his friend and fellow music scholar, thumping in the loft as he finished some mechanical fiddling. Years ago, he and Theo, eight years old and choir schoolboys together, had been alike in character and musical ability. But Theo had become everything he, Benedict, was not. Theo had grown beyond him. Theo burned and shone; he had a gift where Benedict was competent and industrious; Theo was impulsive, Benedict was merely cautious; Theo had ready charm and wit, Benedict was reserved, and worried he was dull.

Suddenly, above him, music: a run of semiquavers in F-sharp and a sheet of indigo blue flared up—the painted pipes seeming to tremble with it. A yellow chord followed by blue again and then orange as Theo adjusted the flute stops. The piece was melodic but with the potential to explode: something was simmering underneath. Benedict smiled: Theo must be certain Dr. B was out of the building. It was Vierne: modern, innovative, and French; everything Dr. Brewer, their tutor, saw himself as holding out against.

When it came to music, Theo spoke of the organ as a kind of machine to be controlled. Ben liked to imagine it as something living. When he was a boy, he had thought of it as an animal at the heart of the cathedral, one that breathed through leathery lungs. The sheer peculiarity and force of the organ still thrilled him; when he played, he felt part of it. But he was never, would never be, as brilliant as Theo, who felt none of these things.

Benedict often thought the cathedral was more like a village than a place of quiet holiness. The bishop, the mostly absent landowner; congregations gossiping and haggling with God; King’s School boys giggling and pushing; the dean rushing about as if there were some structural or theological emergency that only he could resolve, his demeanor proclaiming that he was far too busy to talk. Dr. Brewer, head down, was oblivious to his surroundings, apparently oblivious to God or indeed anything except, intermittently, his organ pupils and, emerging from the bishop’s chilly palace from time to time, Mrs. Bradstock, the bishop’s wife, Lady of the Close. Her clipped conversation was punctuated by tiny writhings of her neck, and at her side and always in her sight the eighteen-year-old Agnes, the bishop’s porcelain doll of a daughter, the village virgin.

“Perfect,” Theo sighed, “pristine,” every time Agnes passed. “Look!” Theo had said as they watched her proceeding across the Close with her mother, throwing them a half-look over her shoulder. “Even her eyelashes are gold. Imagine your hand on her arm, the tiny dimples left when you let it go. Would she bruise, do you think?”

It seemed to Ben that his own part in all this was as the stranger who had lost his way. Yet he still found delight in the cathedral’s euphoric architecture, every inch of its stone decorated or pierced and, in buttresses upon buttresses, the suggestion of a massive failure of nerve. It was as if the builders had fortified it against divine caprice: thunderbolts or fires or high winds. Ben loved the human doubt of it all.

The gulls and pigeons were the bane of the Clerk of Works’ life. Visitors arriving in the Close often took him for a holy man, his brows furrowed like an ascetic, his eyes raised heavenward; but it was the birds and his plans of attack that preoccupied him. The pigeons damaged the stonework and covered it in filth, but the gulls destroyed the very dignity of the Close. They swooped down and assaulted passers-by or those leaving Morning Service. Things had come to a head in a recent St. Kyneburgh Day procession when one of them had fouled the mayor’s ceremonial hat. The mayor not being popular, the news had spread around the local public houses, and in no time at all there was a ditty being sung in the Pelican. Theo had noted down the rudimentary tune and then composed a set of variations on a theme. He was planning to play it at the following year’s service, he said.

“‘Fly, heavenly bird, and drop thy bounteous gifts.’ Do you think that’s a good title?” Theo had asked.

His beaming face was still a schoolboy’s, but it was not Benedict’s approval he was looking for then, because Novello had still been at Gloucester; this was when he had still been plain David Ivor Davies, before he left for Oxford and London and reinvented himself. He was in on the joke, leaning over Theo’s shoulder, adding some marking in pencil.

“We should have caught it,” he said, “and had it stuffed and placed on St. Edward’s shrine for pilgrims to honor.”