Broken Voices (Kindle Single) (3 page)

‘That’s rot,’ I
said, with the loftiness of fourteen to thirteen. ‘Everyone’s voice has to
break sometime, unless you’re a girl. You don’t want to be a girl, do you?’

This was an
attempt at comfort but it seemed only to make Faraday start crying again.

‘Come on,’ I
said. ‘You can’t just blub.’

‘You don’t
understand. I was going to sing the Christmas anthem. There’s a solo, you see,
and it’s usually the head chorister that does it, and the Bishop gives him a
special present afterwards. Some money.’

‘How much?’ I
said.

‘Five pounds.’

I whistled.
‘For a bit of singing? That’s stupid.’

‘No, it’s not.’
Faraday’s voice rose in volume and, suddenly, in pitch. ‘It’s a tradition.
They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. Some old bishop left money in his
will for it. And now Hampson will do it instead.’

‘Don’t talk so
loud. The Rat will hear you.’

‘It’s lovely,
too,’ Faraday whispered.

Lovely was not
a word we used much. ‘What is?’

‘The anthem.
It’s for Christmas Day. It’s called Jubilate Deo, and we only sing it on
Christmas morning.’

Rejoice to God.
Both of us had enough Latin to translate that.

‘All right,’ I
said. ‘It’s beastly to lose five quid. But is it that bad? I mean, it was never
yours in the first place.’

Faraday started
crying again. I was spending Christmas with a cry-baby. I curled myself into a
ball to conserve heat and thought how perfectly miserable everything was. Or
rather how perfectly miserable I was. Boys are selfish little brutes. While I
was wallowing in self-pity, however, my curiosity was still stirring.

‘Look here,’ I
said, ‘I can see it’s a shame your voice is broken and all that. But why are
you like this about it? And why are you here?’

The snuffling
continued. It was getting on my nerves.

‘Why aren’t you
still at the Choir House? Or why didn’t Dr Atkinson send you home to your
people?’

‘My parents are
dead,’ Faraday said, and the waterworks increased in force.

That jolted me
out of my own misery. I knew what it was to miss your parents, you see, and
even I could imagine how infinitely worse it would be if you could never, ever
see them again. Or not until after you died and went to heaven, assuming heaven
was real, which in those days I still considered to be a sporting possibility.

‘So where do
you go in the holidays?’

‘To my
guardian’s in Wales. But this year he’s had to go away. So I was going to stay
with the Atkinsons until he comes back.’

This deepened
the mystery. ‘Then why aren’t you there now?’

‘It’s because
of Hampson Minor. Bloody Hampson.’

‘Yes you said —
he’ll get the five quid because he’s going to sing the anthem, and I suppose
he’s the new head of the choir, too.’

Faraday’s bed
creaked. ‘It’s not that. He had a postal order from his uncle. Ten bob.’

I whistled
softly in the darkness. Not in the same league as the Bishop’s five pounds, but
still pretty decent. I wished my aunt would give me ten shillings sometimes.

‘He was
swanking about it all the time. The postal order and being head of the choir
and the Bishop’s money. He just went on and on and everyone was sucking up to
him. He said he was going to buy a big cake from Fowler’s for everyone. I just
wanted to kick him. You know what he’s like.’

I only knew
Hampson Minor by sight. He was a fat, pink-faced boy with small delicate
features and prominent lips. When he sang, he made his lips into a perfect O.

‘He left the
postal order on the floor. It must have — it was with his exercise book. So I —
I picked it up and put it in my pocket.’

‘You stole it?’

‘No,’ Faraday
wailed. ‘I was just going to keep it for a bit, until he found he had lost it,
and then give it back. To teach him a lesson. That’s all. Honestly.’

I didn’t know
whether he was telling the truth. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.

‘But he told Dr
Atkinson it was gone, and Dr Atkinson made us all empty our pockets and open
our boxes.’ Faraday paused for a long moment. ‘And they found it.’

I didn’t know
what to say. Stealing was a sackable offence at the King’s School.

‘I was going to
give it back. I swear it. I didn’t know he’d tell old Atky straight away. The
rotten sneak.’

‘What will
happen?’ The scale of the offence awed me. ‘Will they chuck you out?’

‘I don’t know.’
Faraday whimpered. ‘I just don’t know. And even if they let me stay, everyone
will know. So that’ll be almost as bad. And then there’s Hampson’s brother. I’d
be in the senior school.’

I was beginning
to take a warped pleasure in having a ringside seat to the tragedy which was
unfolding on such a grand scale. Faraday, the golden boy, had lost his singing
voice, his five pounds and his pre-eminent role as head choirboy: he was now
faced with a hideous pair of alternatives: if he was expelled from school he
faced a lifetime of shame and whatever punishment his guardian cared to mete
out; if he were allowed to stay, his remaining years at the school would be
made a living hell, particularly by Hampton Major, a gorilla of a boy who
played second row forward in the First XV, and who had a well-deserved
reputation for brutality verging on sadism. He was bad enough as a casual
tyrant over anyone smaller than himself. He would be a figure of nightmare if
he chose to persecute you seriously.

‘God,’ I said
as the full horror of Faraday’s situation hit me. ‘You poor bloody kid.’

He was crying
again, softly, continuously, a sort of moaning and sobbing that at last moved
me to pity, and even to a desire to help.

‘Look here,
Rabbit,’ I said. It was the first time I called him by his nickname. ‘Perhaps it won’t
be as bad as you think.’

The crying
stopped. I heard Faraday’s ragged breathing.

A sense of power
filled me. He believed I might be able to help, and that almost made me believe
it too.

‘Listen,’ I
said. ‘We’ll think of something. I promise.’

For every child, I think, there must be
a day when Christmas loses its magic. By ‘magic’ I don’t mean an unquestioning
belief in Father Christmas or a foolish attachment to improbable ideas about
reindeers and chimneys and so on. Nor does the magic I mean reside in the
religious connotations of the day, though of course, for many people, the one
cannot be separated from the other and Christmas is always the birthday of
Jesus. I envy them.

The magic has
more to do with a sense that this is a special day, when nothing is allowed to
go wrong. When you are given presents, good food and a licence to enjoy luxuries
and activities that lie beyond the reach of most of us for 364 days of the
year. When people are kind to each other and there is a sense of holiday.

The illusion is
strongest in infancy, and most of us lose it gradually during childhood. But we
cling to it, we fool ourselves, as long as possible. In the end there has to
come a day when we are forced finally to acknowledge the truth: that Christmas
is a day like any other, potentially neither better nor worse, but actually
almost always worse because it trails in its wake the ghosts of its lost magic.

For me it was
that Christmas at Sacrist’s Lodging: that’s when at last I accepted that a
Christmas Day could be as miserable as any other.

For us it began
when we went downstairs to find Mr Ratcliffe making tea in the kitchen. On the
mat by the back door were the hind legs and tail of a mouse; Mordred had
already celebrated Christmas in his own special way.

We wished each
other happy Christmas. Mr Ratcliffe was wearing an ancient suit, once a uniform
black but now shiny and even green in places, in honour of the day.

He gave us cups
of strong, sweet tea, with very little milk in it.

‘I thought we
would go to Matins and then the Eucharist afterwards,’ he said. ‘I don’t
usually eat before taking communion, if I can avoid it. It seems rude somehow.’

‘What about
Christmas dinner, sir?’ I asked in alarm.

‘Mrs Veal will
have something for you at lunchtime, I’m sure. Don’t worry about that. I’ll
have mine at the Deanery.’ He hesitated, and I guessed that he had remembered
the Dean also entertained to lunch those members of the choir who had not left
immediately after the morning services. ‘We’ll meet again in the evening, I
expect, when you are back from the Veals’.’

Mordred
sauntered into the room and picked up the remains of the mouse. He wandered
into the hall.

‘I’ll let him
outside, shall I?’ Faraday said in a rush.

He dashed after
the cat. I heard him fumbling with the front door with clumsy urgency, as
though trying to escape. I suppose that was what we all wanted — Faraday,
myself and even, perhaps, poor Mr Ratcliffe: to escape.

There was no snow that Christmas.

It was very
cold. The grass around the Cathedral was a hard, sparkling white, and frost
clung to the leafless branches of trees and bushes. The flagged paths were
treacherous — any moisture had turned to ice overnight.

Mr Ratcliffe
strode slowly along, his stick tapping the pavement. ‘Beautiful,’ he said over
his shoulder to Faraday and me, trailing behind him. ‘Quite beautiful.’

The College was
crowded with groups of people making their way to church. On Christmas morning,
the Cathedral had one of its largest congregations of the year, even though the
King’s School wasn’t there to swell its ranks.

We sat in the
presbytery, the rows of seats on either side near the high altar, to the east
of the choir stalls. Above us were the pipes of the organ and the wooden cabin
of the organ loft, clinging like a growth to one bay of the choir aisle.

I don’t
remember much about the services except that they seemed to go on for ever and
that I seriously thought I might faint or even die from hunger. It must have
been hell for poor Faraday to see the choir processing through the chancel
gates, filing in two by two, and peeling off into their stalls in the choir.

Hampson Minor
led them in, with the head boy’s medal resting on his surplice. He looked
larger and pinker than before, as if his promotion had inflated him a little
further than nature had done already. His eyes darted about the chancel. I
guessed he was looking for Faraday. As he turned to lead his file into the
choir stalls, he found us. For a fraction of a second he paused. Beside me,
Faraday stiffened like a threatened animal.

The moment was
gone. The choir flowed smoothly into the stalls and the service began.

I had attended
many services in the Cathedral — the school used it as its chapel — but I had
never been there on Christmas Day. The Bishop was there enthroned, a gaudy,
overstuffed doll with his mitre and crozier. Every seat was full.

I concentrated
on not fainting from starvation; on standing, sitting and kneeling; on mouthing
the hymns in a soundless but visually convincing way, a skill I had perfected
in my first term; and, most of all, on thinking about what Mrs Veal might
provide for our Christmas dinner.

But I did
notice when the choir sang the anthem, the Jubilate Deo. The first part was
sung by Hampson Minor alone: I could see him, his mouth an O of surprise, his
face pinker than ever with the effort. Then, one by one, the rest of the choir
joined in, and then the organ thundered into life and they all made a dreadful
racket until it was time for us to kneel down and pray again.

Faraday leaned
towards me undercover of shuffling as the entire congregation was sinking to
its knees.

‘He muffed it,
the silly ass,’ he muttered. ‘The end of bar sixteen. He couldn’t hold the E
flat.’

For the first
time I saw Faraday smile.

Mrs Veal had bought us Christmas cards,
and I felt guilty that we had not thought to do the same for our hosts. Mr Veal
carved the beef and the ham. We ate late — Mr Veal had plenty to keep him busy
after a service — but Mrs Veal took pity on us and gave us a preliminary
helping of Yorkshire pudding and gravy.

In his capacity
as head verger, Mr Veal was a figure who inspired fear and mockery in equal
parts. Now, however, Faraday and I saw the domestic Veal, his dignity put aside
with his verger’s gown. In private, with a good meal inside him, a glass of
port in one hand and his pipe in the other, he revealed himself as almost
genial. I remember he told us a story about one canon who grew so fat that it
was only with difficulty that he could squeeze into his stall; in the end they
had to make a special chair for him. He laughed so hard that his face became
purple.

The Christmas
dinner was the only time that I saw Faraday looking really happy. The Veals
were kindly people: they gave us food, warmth and a welcome. Perhaps there was
a little Christmas magic after all.

‘A lot of queer
stories about the Cathedral,’ said Mr Veal on his third glass of port. ‘And I
could tell you a few if I had a mind to. Have you heard about the bells?’

‘But there
aren’t any,’ Faraday said. ‘Not in the Cathedral. Only the clock chimes.’

‘Ah. Not now.
But there were bells, once upon a time.’

‘Get along with
you, George,’ said Mrs Veal. ‘Save it for later. I need to clear the table and
these boys need to get back or Mr Ratcliffe will be wondering where they are.’

‘He knows about
it, all right,’ Mr Veal says.

‘Who does,
dear?’

‘Mr Ratcliffe.
He knows about the stories.’

In the evening of Christmas Day, we made
mugs of cocoa together and sat around the fire in the sitting room at the
Sacrist’s Lodging. Like Mr Veal, Mr Ratcliffe had drunk a few glasses of wine
with his dinner and was unusually expansive.

Mordred
condescended to join us. He sat on the chair nearest the fire, head erect, with
his back to us. It was Mordred who started Mr Ratcliffe on ghosts.