The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral

by Robert Westall

  To be fair to him, I don’t think he wanted a row that morning. He was miserable with the rain and the idleness, and just wanted to be left alone to brood. But I laced straight into him, in front of his lads, about the state of that stone round the gargoyle. He took it for a long time, just saying yes and no, and then he said finally,

  ‘You got your work schedule?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Renovate the weather-vane an’ weathercock. Cut out and replace substandard stone blocks in the steeple.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go and do it then? And mind your own business, boyo.’ His voice always got very Welsh when he got mad.

  ‘That stone’s . . .’

  ‘What do you know about stone? You’re only a flipping steeplejack. We even have to saw your stone blocks for you. Jack of all trades and master of none.’

  ‘You try hanging from a rope-sling two hundred feet up . . .’

  His lads were gathering round us in a circle. Pretty hostile circle too. Always stick together, masons . . . it could’ve got pretty nasty, if the phone extension in the mason’s yard hadn’t rung just then. Very proud of their new telephones, the cathedral. Maybe they’re hoping the Almighty will give them a bell one day . . .

  ‘For you,’ said Taffy, shoving it towards my ear so hard he almost brained me.

  It was Billy. ‘Your missus said you’d gone down to the cathedral . . .’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve been on the phone to me Uncle Jim. About when he last replaced the stone around that gargoyle.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be workin’!’

  ‘Done all the jobs you gave me. Didn’t take an hour. Well, do you want to know what he said, or don’t you?’

  ‘Go on, then!’

  ‘Said he replaced that stone in 1971.’

  ‘Twenty years ago? For heck’s sake, what stone did he use? Stuff from his rockery at home?’

  ‘Best Kerridge. He said he chose the best very careful; because the last lot had rotted since 1951.’

  ‘Bloody hell. What else did he say?’

  ‘Only that there was a nasty smell while they was working. Even the wind didn’t seem to blow it away. There was lots of jokes about farting an’ dead rats . . . funny thing for him to remember, after all that time . . .’

  ‘Right, thanks.’ I tried to think of more jobs for him to be getting on with, but my mind wasn’t on it, so I hung up, afore I made a fool of myself in front of all them masons, who were starting to snigger among themselves.

  I turned back to Taffy Evans. ‘Replaced in 1971 and 1951 afore that.’ He knew what I’d been talking about.

  ‘So what?’ he said. ‘Our business. Why are you gettin’ your knickers in a twist?’ That got another snigger. I felt like hitting him. But I just said, ‘What happens to the old job-books?’ I knew they kept records of what work they had to do, when it was done, and when it was signed off.

  ‘We hand them on to the museum. Go and bother her for a change . . .’

  I went, to further sniggers. I knew where the new museum was, in the cloisters, because our Kevin had been there with his class from school. He’d said the lady in charge was very nice and friendly.

  They’d spent a lot of money in the cloisters, to attract what tourists came to Muncaster. A restaurant where they served home-made soup and home-baked scones, and the museum, which is really a lot of high-security glass cases in pitch-darkness, only lit by little spotlights shining on the cathedral’s silver and gold. Not what I call a museum; I like to see what I’m doing, not blundering around in the dark. It was so dark I had bother finding the curator, and I had to explain what I wanted in the dark, without being able to see her face. I felt a proper fool.

  But she was a nice woman, like our Kevin had said. She took me into her office, where there was still some daylight, and bent and produced a pile of old job-books from the bottom of a cupboard, and let me use her desk to look at them. It took me three hours, because every fiddling job they do is entered up, even repairing the Dean’s front doorstep. But I got on the trail of what I wanted in the end, by jumping back every twenty years or so.

  That stonework had been repaired every twenty years, roughly, going back to when the first job-book started in 1846 . . .

  But what made me really twitch were the delays, also recorded.

  ‘Work held up by broken pulley . . .’

  ‘Scaffolding blew down in high wind on 17/3/32 . . .’

  ‘A. Smith taken to hospital . . .’

  Every time, it seemed, it was that sort of job.

  The Curator kept popping in, to see how I was getting on, the way they do. And she must have spotted my mood. As I said, she was a nice woman, sympathetic. Hair done up tight in a bun, but her blue eyes behind her spectacles were full of concern. I wondered why no one had married her.

  ‘Something’s worrying you, Mr Clarke?’

  ‘Something funny about the south-west tower . . .’ I said, feeling uncomfortable, not wanting to sound a fool.

  ‘Now there is something odd about the south-west tower. I should be able to remember but . . .’ She twisted her smooth high forehead into a terrible frown. I wished she wouldn’t do that; the creases might get permanent, and she was only quite young . . .

  Then the office door opened again. Her face cleared.

  ‘Here’s the Reverend Morris. He’s bound to know.’ Her voice implied that the Reverend Morris was God, or something very similar.

  I went all tight, inside. I’d heard of the Reverend Morris. One of the bishop’s two chaplains. The Reverend Morris, who was always getting himself into the local paper, more often than Paddy Ferguson the town drunk. The Reverend Morris who believed in brighter services, like dancing in the aisles and waving your hands in the air, and people in the congregation babbling gibberish in the middle of the sermon, and asking people if they were saved. One of them. There seem to be more and more of them, every month that passes.

  ‘Mr Clarke, isn’t it? How can I help you, Mr Clarke?’ He put a large heavy pudgy hand on my shoulder, like he owned me. He sounded like he knew more about me than I knew about myself. I had to stop myself giving a wriggle to shake his hand off. I can’t stand fellers touching me who I hardly know, though I don’t mind women doing it.

  ‘I’m making enquiries about the south-west tower,’ I said, stiffly as a policeman in a magistrate’s court.

  ‘Ah, yes, the south-west tower. Very interesting, the south-west tower.’ He was instantly certain he knew all about the bloody thing, like he would always pretend he knew everything about everything. ‘Let’s take a little walk, Mr Clarke. Far better if you see it with your own eyes.’

  And he bore me off towards the door, hand still on my shoulder. I felt I was under some sort of holy arrest. He marched me all the way through the cloisters, across both transepts and out into the rain of the cathedral green, still with his hand lovingly on my shoulder.

  ‘Are you a Christian, Mr Clarke?’ I’d known the question wouldn’t be long in coming. He asks everybody, they tell me, before he’s hardly been introduced. Now I don’t know what I am really. When I look at our Kevin laughing, or at our cat playing with its tail, I wonder if there is a God, because they’re both grand things, and somebody must’ve made them. On the other hand, I read all the terrible things in the papers and I think that if there is a God, he must have lost interest and pushed off to mend some different universe.

  I suppose my mind’s open, really. But the way this feller went on, with his warm over-familiar squishy ways, you just wanted to build as big a wall as possible between him and you, as quick as possible.

  So I said, ‘No, I’m a militant atheist.’

  At least his hand dropped off my shoulder, pronto. He said, in a hurt voice,

  ‘It seems odd, a militant atheist working on the House of God.’

  ‘What’s it matter, providing the rain’s kept out? We do a first-class job . . .’

>   ‘Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure. Anyway, here we have it, the south-west tower. Look at it closely, Mr Clarke; then look at the north-west tower. Really closely. Don’t you notice something? Something different?’

  Now if there’s one thing I can’t stand, even more than blokes who put their hand on your shoulder, or blokes who dance in the aisle, it’s blokes who play guessy-games with you, in gloaty but-surely-you-can-see-it voices. It makes me feel about an inch high, it makes my head whirl so I can’t notice anything. Which is the effect that they want, I suppose.

  ‘Look the same to me,’ I said. I wanted to hit him.

  ‘Look again, really closely.’

  Gritting my teeth, I made myself look really closely. Finally I said, sure it had nothing to do with it,

  ‘The window arches are more pointed on the north-west tower.’

  ‘Got it in one, Mr Clarke. Got it in one.’

  The patronizing sod.

  ‘And what does that mean, Mr Clarke?’

  ‘Buggered if I know,’ I said. That made him flinch, I can tell you. But it seemed to get through even his elephantine hide that he wasn’t doing himself any good.

  ‘It means the south-west tower was built nearly three hundred years after the north-west. The Normans built both towers up to roof-top level, and then they ran out of money and stopped – it happened all over the country.’

  ‘Over-ambitious,’ I said. ‘Like the Channel Tunnel rail-link.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. They built with faith, to the glory of God. They knew God would supply the money to finish them, in His own good time.’

  ‘Three hundred years,’ I said. ‘I hope none of the masons starved to death.’

  ‘Oh, no. They would go on to other work, elsewhere. They went from place to place . . .’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I was making a joke.’

  He gave me a funny look. He might know about dancing in the aisles, but he couldn’t recognize a joke when he heard one. I’ve heard since those Characteristic Fundamentalists are all the same. No real sense of humour.

  ‘Then they finished the north-west tower in 1257, but they had to wait till 1538 for the other one . . .’

  ‘Why was that?’

  That had him; he hadn’t a clue. I wondered if he’d cover up with a flood of that speaking-in-tongues gibberish they do. But he just said,

  ‘I don’t know, but I will find out. That’s what they taught us to say in the Army, when I was an officer-cadet, you know.’ He said, ‘Good day to you, Mr Clarke,’ and stalked away. He had a big bottom and it wobbled under the tails of his sports coat as he walked. I can’t stand men with big wobbly bottoms. I wondered how much it would wobble when he was dancing in the aisles. I was glad he was only in charge of God, and not the Army’s nuclear artillery.

  I spent a bit of time hanging around the cathedral green, looking up at that tower. I felt a bit better. It wasn’t just me, then. There was something funny about the thing, something nobody wanted to talk about. Maybe my dream was just a warning that there was something wrong with the tower: some steeplejack’s instinct that I couldn’t plumb. Something in the stone. Then I went home to have a shower and put my feet up, and help our Kevin with his homework on the home life of the hedgehog.

  The next day was fine-ish, just a bit of drizzle, and we went back to work. I was glad of the drizzle. It meant we didn’t take our lunch-break on top of the tower; we had it in a caff in town. I didn’t fancy eating my sarnies with that thing for company, even though I hadn’t had any more bad dreams.

  I spent the day in a rope-cradle, which was let down from the tip of the steeple. First, in the morning, I marked the rotten blocks of stone in the steeple with yellow chalk. There weren’t a lot of them, and they were just suffering from ordinary weathering. It wouldn’t be a long job, thank God. Then, in the afternoon, I began cutting them away with a chisel. Knocked most of the stone out with a point, then smoothed the bottom of the hole with a claw-chisel, ready to take the cement that would hold the new block in place. I measured each block, so that the masons could cut me new ones with their stone-saw. No two blocks were quite the same size; no two seemed to be carved by the same man. The steeple was a patchwork of men’s hands, five hundred years old. Some blocks were Victorian or later, cut with the stone-saw. But a lot were earlier, Georgian, medieval. The marks every mason had made with his chisel were different, like fingerprints; no mason has the same style exactly, and the claw-marks on a lot of them were still quite clear, in spite of the weathering. Here was a steady bloke, getting on neat and workmanlike with his job. Here was a real flashy show-off, every claw-mark beautifully lined up, a perfectionist. Here was some poor apprentice, claw-marks going sloppy; all over the place, then suddenly smartening up. Probably the master mason caught him day-dreaming and gave him a good clout over the ear. Funny how real the work of men’s hands is; I felt very close to them; journeymen, apprentices, gaffer. I thought you lot could tell me a thing or two about what happened wi’ that gargoyle, if you were still around. One of you buggers knows. Or more than one . . .

  There was a yell from up top, on the platform. Billy.

  ‘Joe, I’m outa fags. OK to nip across to the shop?’

  Bloody Billy out of fags again. Not content with raining empty packets and even lighted dog-ends down on top of me, he would run out of fags.

  Something warned me not to let him go from up top, while I was dangling there. If anything went wrong . . .

  On the other hand, the shop was just across the cathedral green. Five minutes there, five minutes back (Billy was young and fitter than me), and he was unbearable without his fags, got real ratty. And the sky was clear by then. What could go wrong?

  ‘OK.’

  I heard his feet go clanging down the ladder on the far side of the spire, and went on cutting out the rotten block of stone. Then I finished, cleared out the drippings and dust in a tiny shower, and went to move on to the next block.

  The rope would not move in my hands.

  Somewhere up top, something had seized up; maybe the rope had come off a pulley.

  I hung, quite helpless. Ten feet from the top platform; ninety feet from the parapet below, two hundred feet to the ground . . .

  Nothing to worry about, of course. As long as the ropes held. As long as there wasn’t some sharp metallic edge up there, chewing away at one of them.

  Billy wouldn’t be long. Once he was back, it would be easy enough. Take it easy, I told myself. Take a break. Enjoy the view.

  After several looks at the view, I glanced at my watch. The beggar had been gone nearly twenty minutes; there was no sign of him crossing the green, prominent in his spotless white T-shirt and faded denims. Christ, I’d give him what for when he came back. But there was no need to panic . . .

  When half an hour had passed, my bum began to ache, from sitting so terribly still in the cradle. When you’re moving about you don’t notice the way it cuts into you. Where the hell had he got to . . . ?

  Clouds coming up from the west. Big nasty clouds. Be half an hour before they got here, but when they did, we were going to get very wet; there were scarves of dark rain hanging under the clouds already.

  It must be ten years since anything as stupid as this had happened to me.

  That bloody gargoyle; the list of accidents on the south-west tower I’d read up in the old job-books yesterday . . .

  I looked down at the gargoyle, and it looked back at me.

  I felt like a mouse in the paw of a cat. And a mouse that was going to get thoroughly pissed on. Or worse.

  It wasn’t the height that was bugging me; it was the having to sit still. I began trying to work out crazy ways of getting back up to the platform, or down to the parapet. Crazy, crazy ways that broke all the rules . . . hand over hand up the ropes . . . crazy, crazy. But the having to sit there was driving me crazy. People watching me from the ground. But if I shouted, my voice wouldn’t carry. If I waved, they would merely wave back. The clouds
’ shadow fell across the spire. I could almost hear the rain coming, the air was magnifying every sound to four times its normal volume . . .

  It suddenly struck me that something serious might have happened to Billy; he might have been knocked down in the street by a car, coming out of the shop. He was a bit of a dreamer, a bit dozy at ground level, though never when he was high up.

  And if he got knocked down, taken to hospital, killed even, they wouldn’t know who he was or where he’d come from. He’d carry no ID, just money. I could dangle here for the rest of the day, till it got dark. Barbara wouldn’t even start to worry about me till it got dark. And even then the last place they’d think of looking for me was up the spire . . . I could still be here in the morning, helpless, soaked and soaked again. And that was if the bloody rope that was holding me didn’t give way . . . by the morning, I’d be a raving nut-case and a physical wreck into the bargain.

  You understand, I still wasn’t scared of heights; that was the last thing I was scared of. But to be helpless. I seriously began considering getting myself out of that sling, and shinning up the ropes hand over hand. The platform was only ten feet above me; I’d make it easily. It was very tempting.

  Unless something else went wrong. Like the blocked pulley coming loose when I was half-way up; or the rope giving way with the extra heaves I would be putting on it. I thought again about the accidents in the old job-books. Maybe they weren’t really accidents either.

  Perhaps the gargoyle, the tower, was really trying to . . . ? No, I said, no. I’ll not budge from this sling, if it kills me. I unfastened the rope and then tied it extra tight.

  The next ten minutes were the longest of my life. And then there was a clanging on the ladder; Billy was back, and I felt a right idiot for my fears.