Angels in the Architecture

by Sue Fitzmaurice

  When his eldest sons returned, Gamel knew Dem would have told them of their ‘good fortune’ as they would no doubt view the arrangement. But he didn’t care for their adventure. He had shooed his younger boys away and stood just as he had when he’d listened a few minutes ago to the Friar’s young emissary.

  ‘Yer to go t’Lincoln, to cathedral, to work.’ He told in a loud and dismissive tone. ‘Friar’s bid ya’ go ‘n’ tha’s as it’ll be. So ya’ can gor now,’ looking round to challenge any alternative expectation, and seeing some of the elation subside. ‘Nothin’ for i’. You won’ be needin’ anythin’, so bes’ ya’ star’ out. So orf ya’ gor then.’ He didn’t so much look at his sons now as his eyes lit on parts of them and the air around them.

  The boys stared open-mouthed and unbelieving at their father, stupefied by this apparent urgency with which they were to take their leave of their family and their home. The news from Lincoln, of death and the Cathedral, had passed by them in their anticipation of an adventure, but now some more unrest returned with this abrupt announcement. They glanced to their mother who’d stood again, also manifestly taken unaware by the suddenness of her husband’s dismissal of three sons from their home, desperate to seize hold of them now, desperate to wonder aloud to her husband. She had no reason to fear him but still she would not challenge him. No righteous woman would.

  ‘Per’aps . .. . ,’ Gree braved, the excitement gone out of him. He was assuming he and his brothers would collect a few meagre things, some bread and water for their journey.

  ‘Ye’ll go now!’ boomed Gamel, the ground threatening to shake anew.

  And with this different kind of an earth-shattering announcement, time stopped for this one peasant family. It was not a comfortable moment in time, but oddly, it was the juncture of the Warriners’ greatest unity, and even concord. The anguish they felt – all except Thomas – at their powerlessness, at their parting, at the boundary-slicing necessity of their father’s temperament, inflated around each of them as a bubble, a blister of blackness, until each dark orb collided with the next and the family existed momentarily inside their own tiny, isolated planet of suffering. And with this, each one – father, mother, and sons – acknowledged what he owed the other, a sad litany of duty, loyalty, respect and love, and above all of unquestioned submission to providence. Momentarily they were whole, a unique and intimate grouping of humans who depended on each other. In that space, all the forces, pressures, potential and Energy of their lives, that pushed and pulled them, that dictated their direction, their orientation, and their bias, all these forces now dwelt momentarily and forcefully in the space they occupied together, and each of them felt its invisible density.

  The material of them united with the emotional of them, and there was no gap between these, uniting all the forces of all the particles that moved their bodies and moved their spirits, creating a unity none understood.

  As this act of Nature failed to be defined, so too were the Warriners’ unable to keep alive their meagre nexus. As the grief of their attachment threatened one simple man beyond his endurance, he turned his back to his sons, rupturing the unified darkness that held them. He walked to his wife and the idiot child and bid the woman gather him up and go inside, and then he followed her and whipped a sack curtain across behind them. Not a look. Not a reassurance. They were riven, as the split of an axe, as an army breached in two and destined for a certainty of death.

  Shock wave upon shock wave settled on each boy’s being and registered on their faces, the more on young Thurston, just fourteen and only recently allowed to take the Monday cart ride to Torksey’s market with his elder brothers. A moment ago the three had come running from the fields whooping and yelling, bounding walls and stiles, full of questions for their elder brother who’d once already voyaged to the massive walled port at Lincoln. That frenzy stuck in their throats now like a delirium, confused and knocked over.

  Geoffrey put his hand to his younger brother’s shoulder and steered him away.

  ‘Bu’ we can’t, Gree. Iz madness. Wo’ ’bout Ma? We can’t gor without a kiss. Gree? Gree?’ he pleaded.

  ‘This is the way ’tis with him. We have t’go now. It’s what’s needed,’ pleading back at his brother, but commandingly.

  Thurston’s tortured face beseeched his eldest brother even though he allowed himself to be tugged gently away to the road.

  How could they be going? How could they be going like this? How was it so?

  Although Geoffrey’s eyes were cast down to the ground, he kept his firm embrace about his young brother’s shoulders. What they had come to rely on was no longer. In its place was a new reliance, on himself and his authority and power to keep intact and unassailed this small company of youths. This new exigency seared into him and he knew that some position as this had been ordained and fixed in his birthright, and he assumed it now as a load, with all the obligation and guilt that implied. He no longer had a father or mother. He eschewed their place in the narrow vista of his world view, erasing them as if from a sketch.

  ‘C’mon, Dem. There’s a long walk to take. There’s hope I s’pose we’ll sleep over friary tonight ‘n’ take to cathedral tomorra’.’

  ‘We’ve no water anythin’ to sup on way, Gree.’ Dem’s fear and surprise was still apparent in his voice and face.

  ‘Nothin’ for it, Dem, as to keep movin’ now. We’ll manage.’ He could see his brothers already finding purchase for their souls with their eldest brother’s reassurance.

  ‘D’ya think this is doin’ of dead swan, Gree? Is anybody’d say t’were, all earth rumblin’s and what-no’. ‘S’got be some’t in i’, don’ ya think, Gree?’ ‘S’no’ roight we’re a-goin’ off loi’ this, is i’? ‘S loik i’s forever an’ no way art’iv i’. Whoi, Gree, whoi?’

  But Gree couldn’t explain to his brother, even if he’d had words to do it. He felt that some shadowy force unknown had crashed into their lives and turned things on their end. He had only one training in his life, only one way to respond, which was to go as directed and without query, because query anyway did not draw much breath in their world.

  As the boys traipsed on to the thin road, turning towards the town, Geoffrey took his arm from his brother’s shoulder and trod on, walking between his brothers, ready to place a reassuring arm about them again if there was need. It was for certain there would be.

  Inside their small house, Gamel Warriner had sat down in a large chair by his hearth and stayed there staring into the ashes. He had few choices with which he could assert control of his own life and had been forced to exercise one of those now, or so he thought best, to make clear quickly and definitively the way things were to be. If a direction and rule were to be set, then best he have a part in it and make it his own. That at least would secure him some place of certainty and strength in his own existence.

  Alice sat Thomas inside a padded wooden enclosure, away from his father. She’d had her husband and sons build this to keep Thomas in when she didn’t feel she could always watch him. He was happy here, as though the close walls of its surrounds gave him a particular warmth and security. Old cloth was knotted around wooden slats to prevent Thomas from harming himself when he came to bang his head repeatedly as he did some evenings. Was he tired at the end of the day to make him hurt himself, or was it the noise of so many that somehow provoked him? Alice didn’t know, but she wouldn’t have him bruised, nor would she tie him up to prevent it either, as some had told her she should.

  She searched her small house, its divisions and its corners, for any menial task to which she could apply herself with force and dedication, if just to slow a pain capable of slicing her in pieces from overtaking her ability to act or speak, not least since to speak, to speak up, was not a right available to her. Spying a long brush, she began an earnest motion to and fro that may ultimately have promised to clear the floor clean away, and she remained at this activity till the dust and the day’s heat forced her back out to the air out
side, where only a short time since her reality had been less dark than she found it now.

  When laughter came from a small way away to her ears, a slim and tenuous ray of light briefly showed itself in her soul before fluttering away as if a mirage all along. But her three younger boys appearing – Alard, David, and Michael – did though take her thoughts away from her eldest boys, all but dead to her as she knew they may soon be, as she meted out chores and left the telling of their brothers’ going from them for at least a while longer, till she could bear it even just slightly more.

  It was in this way that she survived the loss now of eight children. For it wasn’t just the three boys just gone that anguished her want to live in joy, but the five infants long gone now redoubled their memories to her. And her living boys just departed all became babes again, and Alice wondered where these many wee darlings had gone. The pain in her chest caused her to hunch her shoulders a little to cope, but she paid her heartbreak little mind since there was no point to do so and cause it to be an obstacle in an already harsh life. It was a large burden, but then burdens were God’s and life’s way. She would bear it; she was strong enough to do so, and not let their faces sneak into her mind’s eye or the memories of their laughter to her ears. If her heart broke … well, it was her soul that mattered more. Without her thinking so much though, Alice’s being began to focus more upon her youngest child.

  Her husband’s way was to rise up each day from the corner where he slept, work himself and his younger boys in the fields and garden – herding, hoeing, mending, and building, till these younger boys too knew that their position was changed and they were now men.

  Thomas though, unaffected by the storm that had blown through his family, held even less attention from his parents or brothers than usual. There was no reason to notice whether he had suffered or changed in any way following the tempest, and so, ergo, no one did.

  A little while later, Thomas sat with his mother outside as she sewed and repaired some much-worn garments. Alice put her attention to her finger work to keep all else from her mind. Thomas picked up his stones and held them in his hands, feeling their roughness or smoothness in his palms. He wondered what they would like to do this day. He thought he would prefer to do as they wished. A most insistent but narrow beam of light, barely a whisper, reached out a cobweb-delicate tendril into Thomas’s tiny realm, and with this merest suggestion Thomas touched upon a message of hope. He recognised anew the reflection of another just like himself, and from this he understood how to become more like himself than he already was. It was like an equation of the light, multiplying itself to create a mirror image and then adding light upon light through different layers of being to create a new reality, which was always there anyway if one was able to see it, and Thomas was.

  Alice looked down at her son on the ground by her feet and noticed that instead of his usual straight-as-an-arrow line, Thomas had arranged a group of pebbles in a nose-to-nose perfect circle. For just a moment this struck Alice as something a little bit magical, and a new hope wafted briefly through her heart.

  And what is happening in your small piece of heaven and earth, my son?

  Thomas looked up at the reflection he’d noticed – his new friend – and blinked in the sunlight. They were playing a game now, he and the light, and each would try to be the first, but helping each other to be first also. Thomas was very pleased with the new game.

  Is there more that you know, my love, than we would think? Perhaps there is more that you can be, for your father and brothers.

  ‘Thomas?’ Alice cooed quietly to her son. ‘Thomas?’

  Thomas looked around to his mother and smiled, and it seemed to Alice that she was most fortunate to have such a sweet child and she thought she would pay more attention than usual to his soul.

  What do you peer out at through that mop of curly hair, Thomas? Are there Angels about you? Caring for you? I do hope so, my lovely. I do hope so.

  Alice sat down on the dusty ground beside her son, putting her arm around him. Thomas looked back at the space in the light just above him, and Alice stared with him, asking that if God were nearby, to watch over this one of her children. And some other presence warmed her, and a little thread weaved a small part of her broken heart together.

  Thank you, Lord..

  6

  Those who have passed on through death,

  have a sphere of their own. It is not removed from ours;

  but it is sanctified from time and place.

  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844–1921)

  Timothy Watson was not the child his parents imagined, nor indeed anyone. He was really very different.

  He was also lucky. He did not have to feel pain in his life, and the love that was his particular birthright helped him connect to the world of Light, and to a world of detailed imagery that other people did not see. This was not so uncommon for children that were born as Tim was, although Tim had particular assets and friends that even others like him did not. Being able to see the light and the space between things and the patterns in the spaces – these, many could see. Tim’s light spoke to him, and further, the rock in his life, which was his father, unwittingly strengthened his confidence in who Tim was and what he may be capable of.

  Not only did Tim receive light but sometimes when he became white enough with the light himself, he was able to reflect it back at his surroundings, like a pure white wall that reflected light but did not absorb it. Tim as yet had no comprehension of this ability, but in this way he could change things in his surroundings – little things that no one noticed, like making people happy. Tim could do that in the same way the light made him happy. People around him would think themselves delighted because he was a joyful soul and something beautiful and innocent to watch and even to feel blessed by. They would go away feeling they had made a special connection with a poor wee boy who had not much life to expect for himself, and they would condescend to imagine they had provided some mature, charitable, and useful support to his poor parents. They satisfied themselves they were not so cruel as others or ignorant, but knowing all the while – not so deep within themselves – that they could not have coped with a child such as this. Indeed, that they would have been embarrassed if people knew they had a child like Tim. And all the while they believed it was they who brought some light into the child’s day, not the opposite.

  They also thought that inside little Timmy’s head there was nothing much at all.

  ‘Jesus, Pete. You’re here all bloody day! It’s not that hard to fold the fucking washing, is it?! It’s not like I can come through the door and not notice this bloody great mountain, y’know. Does it not bother you? Can you not see it?’

  Pete was hammered into unavoidable silence.

  ‘Oh, fuck it! I suppose I’ll just do it my bloody self then!’

  Searching hopelessly for an opportunity to redeem not himself but the situation – since he was of the view that the presence of a mountain of unfolded washing did not warrant a barrage of this proportion – Pete sought to create some opportunity for Alicia to retreat from her attack position and recreate some common ground between them.

  At this point though they succeeded only in widening their no-man’s-land as Alicia inwardly fumed at what she took as Pete’s refusal to rise to any admission of accountability with regard to washing – or any fundamental of housework – and Pete remained silent, bereft in fact of possible solutions or ameliorative response.

  Alicia had arrived home a minute before. Jillie had come out from the living room where she was playing with Tim, and hugged and greeted her mother before returning to her play. Proceeding into their large kitchen and family space at the rear of the house, Alicia found Pete studying the evening newspaper with both the radio and the television news going. Pete was pleased to see his wife. He’d felt a momentary joy even at the sound of the front door opening, but as he tracked Alicia’s journey up the hallway, bit by bit he felt that sense recede, first with the rapid intern
al judgement of the quality of Alicia’s response to Jillie, then the fact that she did not call out her arrival, which would have been usual. By the time the washing pile monologue was launched he found himself contemplating some murky descent that had been sailing into his consciousness increasingly regularly.

  ‘Aargh!’ cried Alicia, part-way into her mountain rescue. ‘I’m having a bath,’ and she stormed out.

  Pete folded his paper, considered the most germane alternatives, and rose to set about preparing a meal. He retrieved fresh vegetables from the refrigerator and set a pot of rice to boil, taking also a cardboard wine cask from the fridge and pouring two glasses of Chateau something-or-other.

  When Alicia returned shortly after to sit at a kitchen bar stool, Pete took this as the extent of any attempt she was going to make to reconnect, and simultaneously congratulated himself on his ability to let sleeping dogs lie.

  ‘How was your day?’ he asked.

  Alicia looked down into her wine glass and twiddled the stem.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. All right, I suppose. I’m fucking bored. The fun stuff’s all happening elsewhere, without me.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Pete, continuing with dinner-making.

  Alicia sipped more than a sip from her glass and returned it to the bench with a that-hit-the-spot sigh. She looked up at Pete.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Pete smiled back briefly. ‘So tell me more.’

  ‘Well, the French experiments are exciting, but no one in the department could care less. Except Dryden that is. Maybe. He’s probably only trying to be nice. Humouring me like a good H-O-D should I suppose.’

  ‘Tell me about the experiments,’ asked Pete.

  ‘You wouldn’t be interested,’ said Alicia.