Broken Voices (Kindle Single) (10 page)

Mr Ratcliffe, I
presume, was buried, and his house was given to strangers. I don’t know what
happened to Mordred.

In one way,
everything turned out well — at least for me. I didn’t have to go back to
school. The vicar and his family were kind; and all my Christmas presents were
waiting for me there.

Better still,
when my aunt came home and I moved back to live with her, she decided I could
have a puppy. I called him Rusty, not Stanley. For a month or two I had lessons
with the vicar for four mornings a week. Then my aunt sent me as a dayboy to
the grammar school in the nearest town. I was quite happy there, once I had
grown used to it, though I never made any close friends.

So you might
say that in the end I had everything I wanted. But somehow it turned out to be
not quite what I wanted after all.

I never went back. What would have been
the point? My parents came home a year later. When we met again, they didn’t
talk about what happened and nor did I, though once, years later, my mother
made some reference to my stay at the vicarage — ‘after you were ill.’

But I wasn’t
ill. It was Faraday who was ill, not me.

I never saw
Faraday again, though there was a time in the 1920s when I wished I could have
talked to him about all this: he would have been the one person who might have
understood, who might have known more. But Faraday went missing in action at
the Third Battle of Ypres in September 1917. His body was never found.

I am quite
aware that everything that happened that night is explicable in a perfectly
straightforward way. Two silly schoolboys went into the Cathedral by night for
a prank and climbed part of the way up the west tower before compounding their
folly by plunging themselves into darkness. The elderly gentleman whose
hospitality they had abused came to rescue them. He was not in the best of
health. Climbing the tower stairs in a state of acute anxiety brought on a
heart attack, which led him to fall — though the doctor was not able to tell
whether it was the heart attack or the fall that actually killed him. The
younger boy was running a fever at the time, which may have been some excuse
for his irresponsible behaviour. But there was no excuse for the behaviour of
the older boy.

All this is
true. But it leaves out so much. We went up the west tower because of the story
of Mr Goldsworthy: because of his anthem for the bells that were never rung,
and because of his dying fall from the ringing chamber.

La-la-la-la. We
went up the tower because of lost notes that only Faraday heard.

Was Mordred in
the Cathedral that night? Was it he who brushed against me on the tower stairs
and left the south porch when I did? Did Faraday see something when we were
climbing the stairs and, later, just before Mr Ratcliffe had his seizure? After
the ratting at Angel Farm, did I really glimpse a man in the arcade passageway
when we came through the Cathedral?

Finally, can I
trust my own memory?

La-la-la-la.

Lost notes and
broken melodies. Sometimes, when I wake up suddenly, I am full of happiness. I
know that I have heard in a dream I can no longer remember those notes that
Faraday heard and tried to sing to me in his cracked voice. But I don’t
understand music. And I never remember my dreams.