The Unburied

by Charles Palliser

  ‘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.

  The labourers, who had taken up a number of the great paving-stones, were young and beardless, but the older man who was supervising them had a piratical appearance with a great black beard and an angry, swaggering manner. But I was more intrigued by a tall old fellow in a black cassock who was watching. He was certainly seventy and very possibly older than the century and, with great pouched bags under his eyes and deep lines around his sunken cheeks, he looked like a man to whom a terrible wrong had been done and who had spent decades brooding upon it. His great height and smooth hairless skull made him resemble some part of the cathedral itself that had come to life or – rather – taken on some small degree of animation. His almost perfectly horizontal mouth was fixed in an expression of disapproval.

  I approached and said to him: ‘Would you be good enough to tell me what they are doing?’

  He shook his head: ‘A deal of mischief, sir.’

  ‘Are you a verger?’

  ‘Head-verger and have been these twenty-five years,’ he answered with melancholy pride, stiffening his back as he spoke. ‘And my father and grandfather before me. And all three of us singing-boys in our time.’

  ‘Really? That’s a remarkable dynasty. And the next generation?’

  His face darkened: ‘My son cares nought for it. It’s a sad thing when your own child turns his back on the thing you’ve given your life to. Do you know what I mean, sir?’

  ‘I can imagine. Though I have no children myself.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that, sir,’ he said earnestly. ‘That must be a sorrow to your wife and yourself, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.’

  ‘I have no wife either.’ I added: ‘I once had a wife. I ... that is to say.’ I broke off.

  ‘Then I’m sorry for that, too. I can’t have much longer on this earth, sir, but it’s a great comfort to me to know that I shall leave three fine grandchildren behind me. Three grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.’

  ‘That is indeed a cause for congratulation. Now will you be good enough to tell me what is going forward here? If you’ve worked here all these years, you must know the building well.’

  ‘I know every corner of her, sir. And it pains me to see them hack her open like this.’

  ‘Why are they doing it?’

  ‘It’s that blessed organ. They’ve built a new console in the transept. You must have noticed that dreadful new-fangled thing that’s more like a traction-engine than an organ. And now they’re laying down the pipes for it.’

  ‘They’re not going to take up all that length of paving, are they?’ I asked, indicating it with my arm.

  ‘They are indeed. They don’t know what they might not be raking up. Nor they don’t care.’

  ‘But what’s wrong with the original console? As far as I recall it’s a beautiful piece of work from the early seventeenth century.’

  ‘That it is, sir. But it wasn’t good enough, it seems. Not for His Nibs who had to play it – and that’s more important than us that hears it, seemingly. Or us that will have to see that Babylonish monstrosity every day of our lives.’

  ‘You are speaking of the organist?’

  He went on without noticing my question: ‘For some of the canons wanted the organ to be big and loud and to be right out here where the congregation could see it and would join in the singing, and them on the other side wanted to keep the old one because it sounds so wel
l with the choir and doesn’t drown out the voices the way this one will.’

  ‘Such disputes between Ritualists and Evangelists have divided every Chapter in the country,’ I said.

  ‘How right you are, sir. We didn’t have none of that when I was a boy. Then you was a good Christian and worshipped in the Cathedral or you was Chapel or a Papist and that’s all there was. Now the Chapel and the Papists is all in the Church and fighting each other about vestments and candles and incense and processions. To my way of thinking, these new ways are all mummery and play-acting and not a respectful way of worshipping the Almighty at all.’

  ‘But now it’s the Low Church canons who are getting their way with the organ?’

  ‘Aye, for he seems to have most of them in his pocket. And so, no matter what it costs or what damage it does, he has to get the organ he wants.’

  I assumed he was still referring to the organist. ‘Didn’t the other canons oppose it?’

  ‘Dr Locard tried but they were too many for him. Just as they seem to be in this new to-do over the school.’

  I knew who Dr Locard was. ‘What is the matter at the school?’ I asked, wondering whether some crisis had arisen there that affected Austin and, if so, whether it could be the clue to why he had suddenly invited me. He had been impulsive and self-indulgent and took little thought for the future and it might have led him into difficulties now as it had in the past.

  The old verger seemed to realize that he was being indiscreet and muttered, ‘They’re going to decide about it at the next Chapter meeting. I don’t know much more than that.’

  ‘When is the next meeting? The canons should consider stopping these works.’

  ‘Thursday morning.’

  ‘That will be too late!’

  I turned and hurried down the stairs and across the Choir to where the men were working.

  ‘Are you the foreman?’ I asked the bearded man.

  He looked at me curiously. ‘I am.’

  The men stopped and listened.

  ‘You can’t put the pipes through there, my good fellow.’

  ‘I can’t, can’t I?’

  I didn’t like his manner at all. ‘You’ll do some serious damage.’

  ‘I do what I’m told,’ he said.

  ‘Wait,’ I began. ‘Allow me to ...’

  ‘I take my orders from Mr Bulmer and Dr Sisterson and nobody else,’ he interrupted me, and then signalled to his men to go back to work. They exchanged grins of amusement at my expense and one of them swung his pickaxe again.

  I returned to the verger. ‘If they have to do it, they should take the pipes round another way where they will do less harm.’

  ‘You’re right. But how do you know that, sir? With respect, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you in here before.’

  ‘I’ve never been. But I’ve made a study of the construction of cathedrals and I’ve read a great deal about this one.’

  ‘Where do you think they should put the pipes, sir?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Could I go up to the organ-loft? The old one? I can see better from up there.’

  ‘You’re very welcome, sir.’

  ‘It will not inconvenience you?’ I asked. ‘You’re not about to lock up?’

  ‘Not the least bit in the world, sir. We usually lock up after Evensong but tonight – and tomorrow night – the men will be working until eight or nine and I’ll have to stay until they’ve finished to secure the transept door behind them. That’s always the last to be locked.’

  ‘Why are they working so late?’

  ‘They need to get it finished for Friday. There’s to be a grand service of re-dedication for the organ in the afternoon and the Bishop himself is going to officiate. That’s why the choir has been practising so late.’

  He picked up the lantern from the tomb and made his way in front of me across the presbytery to a small door just behind the choir-stalls. To my dismay, many of the ancient oaken panels had been removed and some were laid across the door. ‘I won’t go up myself, sir. It’s awkward with my rheumatic joints. Can you squeeze past them panels? They took them off to work on the console.’

  ‘But they are putting them back?’

  ‘Oh yes, thank the good Lord. But they quite blocked that door for a couple of weeks.’

  He handed me the lantern and I climbed the stair and found myself in the organ-loft from which I had a good view of the Choir and Presbytery and could see how potentially damaging was the work that was being done. I could also see a much less dangerous way of doing it.

  Just as I was about to descend, I saw a figure approaching the old verger from the direction of the chancel. It was a small and youngish man whose prematurely bald head was gleaming as it caught the lights.

  When I rejoined the old man a moment or two later I found him talking to the newcomer as they watched the men at work.

  ‘This is Dr Sisterson, the Sacrist,’ the old verger said to me.

  With a friendly smile the young man held out a hand. He gave an impression of extreme domestication and I had the odd fancy that his wife had washed him and wrapped him up like a precious parcel before sending him out. I told him who I was and, since his office gave him responsibility for the building, explained why I was so alarmed by what the workmen were doing.

  ‘I believe you are right,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, Bulmer, the Surveyor of the Fabric, is away for a few days on urgent family business. I myself had reservations about the advisability of this way of effecting the work and suspected that the foreman had misunderstood his instructions.’ With a smile at me he said: ‘You have confirmed my fears.’

  I indicated the alternative route for the pipes which I had spied from the organ-loft. ‘They should go along here and just under this tomb,’ I said, indicating a handsome piece of sculpted bas-relief on a large slab of marble high up on the wall. It dated from the early seventeenth century and portrayed in profile two lines of kneeling figures inlaid in basalt – the men facing the women and each series diminishing in size from adults to children. It was the more prominent for not being flush with the wall but projecting from it by several inches.

  ‘Memorial not tomb,’ Dr Sisterson murmured. ‘The Burgoyne memorial. It has rather an interesting history. I mention it because I have just come from a reception being given by my colleague, Dr Sheldrick, to mark the publication of the first fascicle of his history ...’ He broke off suddenly. ‘I beg your pardon. That cannot possibly be of any interest to you.’

  I shook my head. ‘On the contrary. I am myself a historian.’

  He smiled. ‘Then I understand your concern for preserving the testimony of the past.’

  ‘And the gentleman knows a great deal about these old buildings,’ the head-verger said.

  ‘I’m sure he knows more than I do, Gazzard,’ Dr Sisterson said, with a chuckle. He moved back and stood for a few moments with his head on one side, examining my proposal.

  Then he stepped forward and said to the foreman: ‘I have decided to follow this gentleman’s advice. We will take the pipes through this way.’

  As he was explaining in more detail I saw the bearded man glaring at me over his shoulder, but when Dr Sisterson had made his wishes clear he reluctantly instructed his men on the change.

  Feeling rather pleased with myself, I took leave of my two companions and walked on round the ambulatory – which was as magnificent as I had expected – and then down the other side of the chancel, encountering nobody but a young man in a cassock whom I took to be another verger.

  I went into one of the side-chapels and knelt down. As a child I had been devout. Then I had decided I was a sceptic and at Cambridge I had called myself an atheist. I don’t know if I really was but I do know that a few years later, in the worst crisis of my life, I found I could not pray. The Cathedral had no spiritual meaning for me. It was a beautiful monument to a vast, wonderful mistake. I respected the moralist of Galilee – or whoever had composed his teachings – but I could not be
lieve that he was the son of God.

  Tuesday Night

  As I was passing a house in the Close a few minutes later, I saw on the curtains the shadows cast by the lamps of figures moving about inside the room. That must be where the reception that Dr Sisterson had mentioned was taking place. It occurred to me that Austin had probably been invited, but had had to decline because of my arrival. While I was removing my hat and coat in Austin’s hall, I smelt frying meat. I found my host in the kitchen holding a skillet over the flame with one hand and a glass of wine with the other. There were two opened bottles of claret standing on the little sideboard and I noticed that one of them was only half full.

  ‘Do you cook for yourself often?’ I asked with a smile as he poured me a glass. I was trying to imagine his life here.

  ‘Are you wondering how much practice I’ve had?’ he answered with a laugh. Then with mock solemnity he added: ‘I can reassure you: my emoluments do not permit me to dine out very often. Has your walk given you an appetite?’

  ‘It’s as I feared,’ I said. ‘They’re vandalizing it.’

  ‘They’re only putting down pipes!’ he exclaimed and turned the frying chops over vigorously.

  ‘That’s how it starts. I remember what happened at Chichester a few years ago. They demolished the pulpitum to lay gas-pipes for heating and so weakened the structure that the crossing-tower collapsed.’

  ‘Taking up a few flagstones is hardly going to bring the building down.’

  ‘It’s always risky to disturb the piers and, as the old verger said, they neither know nor care what the consequences of their actions might be.’

  ‘So you met Gazzard? He’s a cheerful old soul, isn’t he? I suspect he’s not really worried about the building. What he’s afraid of is rousing the Cathedral ghost. The vergers are all terrified of it.’

  ‘A building as old as that must have several.’

  ‘This is the most famous and most feared. The Treasurer’s Ghost. William Burgoyne. Did you notice the family memorial?’

  ‘I did, though it was too dark to see it properly.’