The Unburied

by Charles Palliser

  ‘So? Do you think I want to spend the rest of my existence in this damned little town? My whole being frets with impatience to get away.’

  ‘But, Austin, you need your salary to live on.’

  ‘Money is the one thing one should never waste time worrying about.’

  I found his attitude astonishing. And yet he had been just as insouciant as an undergraduate, with an attitude that was much more characteristic of those from wealthy families. Austin’s father, however, was even less prosperous than my own. And while my comparative lack of resources had given me an urgent desire to find a secure, interesting and reasonably remunerated post, Austin had never bothered about such matters.

  ‘Do you mean you have money now?’

  He smiled. ‘I haven’t a penny to my name.’ In a gesture of self-mocking surrender that I remembered so well he threw back his head and extended both arms to indicate the room – the threadbare carpet, the ancient rickety furniture. ‘I barely manage to survive on my wages and I have not succeeded in saving anything. If the venom and hostility that are rampant here meant that I left without a reference, then my situation would be abject. But I rather doubt if it will happen.’

  ‘Does Appleton have anything against you?’

  He looked at me in alarm: ‘Appleton? What has it to do with him?’

  ‘He is the Headmaster or High-master, isn’t he?’

  ‘Of the Choir School!’ Austin exclaimed. ‘He is the Headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School!’

  ‘Is that not part of Courtenay’s?’

  ‘Certainly not. The two institutions are entirely separate. We have a High-master.’

  ‘I thought the Choir School was simply a department of the Grammar School.’

  ‘Far from it. The Choir School is the direct responsibility of the Dean and Chapter.’

  ‘Then Courtenay’s is not?’

  He shuddered. ‘What a thought! Because of the meddling of those petty-minded old women, the canons, the educational attainments of the Choir School are beneath contempt. I’m quite offended that you should think I had anything to do with it.’

  ‘I apologize. I had no idea there was such a difference between the two schools.’

  ‘Courtenay’s has ten times as many scholars, for the Choir School educates merely the choristers. Courtenay’s is a great deal better than the Gatehouse. That’s our old name for the Choir School and it’s rather insulting for there has always been considerable ill-feeling between the two schools.’

  ‘I suppose the boys fight.’

  ‘They certainly do. But, unfortunately, such is the ill-feeling between the schools that friendship between masters is frowned upon. I happen to have a good friend at the Choir School – an excellent fellow and I intend that you shall meet him – and the fact that we are chums has occasioned some ill-will in this poisonous little community.’

  ‘That would be hard to believe if I did not know the world of a Cambridge college so well.’

  ‘Where did you pick up this story?’

  I was too embarrassed to admit that I had eavesdropped in a public-bar. Without exactly lying, I said: ‘You remember that I spoke to the old verger last night and he mentioned the school? He said it was to be discussed at the Chapter meeting tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, there is some issue involving the Choir School that is wringing the canonical withers. But it doesn’t affect Courtenay’s. I misunderstood you. There is nothing going on there but the usual schoolmasterly bickering and pettiness.’

  He uttered the words so irritably and then turned away so abruptly that I could see how much I had annoyed him. After a long silence I said: ‘Do you want me here? Am I in the way?’

  He reached across and patted my hand.

  ‘No, no. Don’t go. It’s very important that you are here. That’s how you can help me.’

  I was deeply touched by his words.

  He went on: ‘Just stay here for the next few days.’

  ‘I can’t stay longer than Saturday.’

  ‘Saturday, yes, that’s excellent.’

  ‘I have to reach my niece’s that afternoon, so I can’t stay any longer.’

  ‘Then Saturday it is. That will be quite long enough. I haven’t been a very good host, I’m afraid. I shall endeavour to do better.’ He rose and re-filled my glass. Then he sprawled sideways across his chair in his old manner, gradually sliding down so that eventually his face was framed for me between his feet.

  In the comfortable silence that followed I was reflecting on his rather odd words – ‘Saturday will be quite long enough’ – when he asked: ‘How did your visit to the Library go? Did you find what you were looking for?’

  I laughed. ‘Good heavens, Austin, it’s not going to be as easy as that. But Dr Locard was very helpful.’

  ‘Now there’s a delightful fellow.’

  ‘I found him pleasant enough,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘I’m sure you did. As long as you can be of value to him or advance his career in any way, he’ll be perfectly pleasant. Not charming because he has no charm. Charm would be rather suspect and certainly beneath him.’

  ‘Well he was perfectly all right with me. We talked about the murder of Dean Freeth.’

  ‘That must have been exciting.’

  ‘It was very interesting. Just before I left Cambridge, I found a letter, written in 1663, which casts new light on it and I believe there will be material for a contribution to the Proceedings of the English Historical Society. And one that might cause quite a stir.’

  ‘Then you’d better hurry up and write it or Locard will do it before you do and steal all the glory.’

  ‘I hardly think so, Austin. He has published little but that little is of very high quality and, I understand, has made a very significant contribution to scholarly knowledge of Celtic culture of the early period – an area which is only now receiving attention – by demonstrating the erroneousness of amateurs who have done most of the work until recently. I hardly think such a man would stoop to theft and plagiarism.’

  ‘It’s precisely his ambition that has led him to stake out a claim to a new empire of scholarship, not his love of learning. He is not a scholar but a politician, and you shouldn’t assume he has any desire for your success.’

  ‘On the contrary, he was extremely anxious to help me and he put at my disposal one of his young men – not an awfully impressive individual, I’m sorry to say.’

  He looked at me with sudden interest: ‘You don’t mean that strange creature Quitregard, do you? He’s the most old-womanish gossip in Thurchester and you shouldn’t believe a word he says.’

  ‘No, the other one, Pomerance. He’s not very useful. Or very charming. On the other hand, Quitregard seems to me to be a most pleasant young man. I don’t know why you call him strange. However that may be, I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon searching for the manuscript – without success, I fear.’

  Despite his promise to make more of an effort, Austin seemed to have relapsed into a gloomy silence. ‘Talking of Dr Locard,’ I said, ‘I met his wife this evening.’

  ‘How did that come about?’ he asked perfunctorily.

  ‘It was at Dr Sisterson’s house.’

  ‘Sisterson is a fool but there’s no harm in him.’

  ‘Mrs Locard was charming. And she is like a second mother to those children.’

  ‘Nobody has any ill to say of her,’ Austin said, rather as if regretting it. ‘Except that she can’t leave people’s children alone. She had one that died when it was a baby and afterwards it was found that she could not have any more.’

  ‘How sad!’ I exclaimed. ‘Such a kind, motherly woman. And so beautiful. Really quite ...’

  ‘How did you come to be invited there at this late hour?’

  ‘I fell into conversation with Dr Sisterson.’

  ‘In the Close? You must have been very cold. What possible topic could keep you both warm enough out there?’

  ‘It wasn’t in the
Close. On the way back here from taking dinner at the Dolphin, I saw lights on in the Cathedral and went in and he was there.’

  ‘Surely not. It should have been locked up hours ago.’

  ‘No, the men are working late.’

  ‘Yes, to make ready the organ for Friday. But they always finish by nine at the very latest.’

  ‘Something has happened to cause them to work all night. That was why Dr Sisterson was there.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Suddenly I had his attention.

  ‘Those blundering fools working on the Cathedral have done some serious damage, precisely as I feared. A crack has opened up in the wall of the transept and there’s a terrible stench.’

  He pulled himself back into a more usual position in his chair and stared at me in alarm. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s just possible that the base of a pier has dropped slightly. If the Cathedral was built on water-logged ground there could be marsh-gas trapped down there which is now being released.’

  ‘Will this delay the inauguration of the organ?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask?’

  ‘No,’ I said in bewilderment. ‘Is it important?’

  He slowly shook his head.

  At that moment the great clock of the Cathedral began to sound the hour.

  ‘One o’clock,’ Austin muttered. ‘You should be in bed.’ Then, as if correcting this remark, he said: ‘I’m keeping you from your bed.’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ I said. ‘I have to be at the Library early tomorrow. I will try to leave the house without waking you.’

  ‘No, don’t worry about that,’ he said somewhat distractedly. ‘I have much to do tomorrow. I will be up as early as you. Probably earlier.’

  We shook hands and parted. Within fifteen minutes I was in bed with my book propped open in front of me. I could hear Austin moving about in his room across the landing for, prompted by some vague notion that he might have another nightmare, I had left my door ajar.

  Although my eyes were passing over the page before me, I was not taking anything in. As I reflected on how irritated Austin had been by my curiosity about his affairs, it occurred to me that he had asked me virtually no questions about myself. I had thought at first that it was from a delicate fear of wounding me, but now I understood that he was simply not interested. I had not realized when we were both young how intensely self-absorbed he was, perhaps because I was as wrapped up in myself as he was. But as I had grown older I had increasingly found others more interesting than myself.

  Yet, I suddenly remembered, he had followed me when I had visited the New Deanery to read the inscription. In that case, was he, after all, interested in my doings?

  Between Wednesday and Thursday

  It was close to two o’clock when I blew out the candle and made an effort to sleep. I was in a confused land of shadows and half-understood images when a sound from the landing brought me back to full wakefulness. The old house creaked constantly but this noise had been sharper and louder. I listened hard and heard a soft weight on the stair. Then another. And another. Austin was descending the stairs! Immediately I conceived an image of my friend walking out through his front-door with his eyes wide open but his mind still lost in the world of dreams. I rose and, in the darkness, pulled on some of my clothes and felt my way to the door. I crept across the landing and down the first flight as quietly as I could in order not to wake him, remembering that it can be dangerous to rouse a sleepwalker suddenly. Straining my ears I could detect nothing but the old clock ticking loudly on the landing below me. Then I heard the front-door softly open and close just as I reached the top of the stairs. I hurried down as quickly as the utter darkness permitted, holding onto the handrail of the banister. Once in the hall, I groped my way to the coat-hooks and found my overcoat. Pulling it on I cautiously opened the door and peered round it. There was a wind for the first time in several days and a few scattered flakes of snow were falling – or, rather, blowing about. The fog had dispersed and a faint moon was peering through the streaky clouds by whose pale light I saw a figure moving quickly round the corner of the transept.

  I hurried after him and as I turned the corner myself I was just in time to see him disappear into the mouth of an alleyway between the corner of the Close and the New Deanery. Walking as quickly as the need to keep silent permitted, I entered the lane in pursuit. Unbidden, the memory came to me of following someone in much the same fashion many years ago.

  Austin did not seem to be sleepwalking: he was moving too fast and too purposefully. The alleyway twisted and turned several times so that although he was only a few yards ahead of me, already he was not visible. If he was not sleepwalking then he was not in danger and it occurred to me that I had no right to follow him. But had enough strange things not occurred since my arrival to give me good reason to suppose that he was in some kind of trouble and to justify an action which would otherwise have been dishonourable? I was quickly relieved of my ethical dilemma, however, for when I came out of the alleyway Austin was no longer in sight. The alley debouched into a short row of little cottages and it was possible that he had gone into one of these, or taken one of the lanes that led off the street. I stopped. I could hear nothing. It was as if the whole town was breathing as quietly as a sleeping child. I hurried on. If he had gone into one of the houses I might see a light or hear voices. I hastened down the row but saw and heard nothing. At the end there was another street cutting across it at a right-angle and, as far as I could ascertain given that it was unlit, it was deserted in both directions. I had lost him.

  I was also lost myself. For some minutes I wandered the silent streets in bewilderment. Was this the way I had come? Was this the little alleyway I had taken? It all looked the same in the dark and I might have been wandering around the same few streets for all I knew. But the sharpness of the night air and its clarity after the stifling fog of the last few days were pleasant, and the regular motion of my legs was an appropriate accompaniment to my anxious thoughts. Where could Austin be going at this hour? What business could he have and with whom? Why had he seemed so concerned with the problem that had been found in the Cathedral?

  At last I found the little alley again and returned to the Close. The Cathedral loomed up disconcertingly large ahead of me, gleaming where it caught the moonlight. I thought of how everything around it had crumbled away and been demolished and built over, including even the huge abbey that once surrounded it. The Cathedral’s vastness made the town seem like a capital city and then I reflected that it once was – and remained for a long time – one of the great centres of learning in medieval Europe to which scholars and students came from as far away as Cordoba and Constantinople. I grieved for the lost treasures of the vast library dispersed at the Dissolution and for the lost community of ascetic scholars.

  The story of the murdered Canon Burgoyne came to me unbidden and then images of the death of Dean Freeth as I moved past the cold stones where so much passion had once been felt. Something prompted me to walk past Austin’s house and then make a circuit of the Close. It was in almost complete darkness. There was only a dim oil-lamp at the western end of the nave which should have burnt out by midnight and was just about to be extinguished now.

  The ancient fear of the dark possessed me; the terror that there is evil and that it comes into its own at night. The image of a face that was a grinning skull took hold of me. I could not stop thinking about the story of Burgoyne. I knew that as a historian I should be perfectly rational and accept that the past is gone, yet my avocation makes me keenly aware of the pain and horror suffered by the dead even among the peaceful meadows or back-streets of England, and so allows me to believe that something lingers on rather like a photographic plate on which a second image has been exposed. How do we know what happens to us after death?

  I heard a muffled clinking and realized that the workmen might still be engaged in the Cathedral. The windows were i
ndeed faintly illuminated and shadows were moving upon them. I went back to the door at the end of the south transept and pushed it. It opened and I slipped quietly in. The great stone columns were covered in droplets – as if perspiring, in spite of the cold. Indeed, the whole building seemed to be breathing. It was a vast living creature. I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle as I heard a soft bubbling sound which seemed hideously like a human voice moaning and muttering in pain and despair – even though I knew it was only the wind.

  I walked very quietly towards the chancel where the men were working. Three of them were at their labours and the old verger, Gazzard, was standing watching them with his back to me.

  None of them noticed me standing under the crossing-tower. And then suddenly I felt I was being observed and that made me glance up at the organ-loft. I did so without thinking. It was one of those moments of inattention when mind and body seem to drift apart as if an effort were required to hold them together, when time appears to lose its motion. Or rather, when it later seems like that for such moments can only be captured retrospectively. It was like those many times when I would realize I had read several pages with apparent concentration but without being able to remember a word. At such times I wondered, if my mind were not on my book, where was it?

  And so it was on this occasion. When I glanced up at the organ-loft I suddenly became aware of where I was and had no idea how much time had passed or how I had got to where I found myself. Over the edge of the rail was a pale spot in the darkness and as I watched, it resolved itself into a face which seemed to be gazing straight at me. A cold, white, empty face with eyes that were two pieces of glass – empty and yet they seemed to peer into me. They looked through my soul – or rather my lack of a soul for they found or created an answering emptiness within me. It was the face of a creature not of our world. How long we stared at each other – or rather I stared at him for I cannot be sure that he was looking at me – I have no means of knowing. The face disappeared and I seemed to awake with a shudder and in a cold sweat, and it was at that moment that I reconstructed the sequence of events. I had an idea about who it was that I had seen, but I could not accept it. Everything I knew and believed would be thrown into confusion.