Broken Voices (Kindle Single) (4 page)

‘I am afraid
he’s a little stand-offish today. You wouldn’t think it but he doesn’t like being
left alone in the house. We abandoned him for most of the day and now he’s
sulking.’

‘He doesn’t
look as if he’d notice if he was alone or not.’ My scratches still rankled. ‘I
don’t think he likes people.’

‘You may be
right,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, patting his pockets for his oilskin tobacco pouch.
‘But he finds us convenient, and not just for food and warmth. Perhaps we help
to ward off the ghosts.’

‘Ghosts?’
Faraday said. ‘What ghosts?’ In those three words his voice modulated from a
rumble to a squeak.

‘Do you know
any stories about them, sir?’ I said. ‘Will you tell us one?’

‘Mordred used
to see the ghost next door,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, nodding towards the party wall
that divided this part of the Sacrist’s Lodging from the other. ‘Of course he
was just a kitten then, and he didn’t know what to make of it. In fact, that’s
why he lives with me. He kept coming over here to get away from the ghost, and
in the end the Precentor said I might as well keep him.’

‘Have you seen
it, sir?’ I asked. By this stage of my life I had my doubts about the existence
of God but I was more than willing to keep an open mind about ghosts.

‘Yes, several
times over the years.’ Mr Ratcliffe had given up on his pockets. Still talking,
he rose from his chair and eventually discovered the pouch wedged between the
seat and the arm. ‘Of course I didn’t realize it was a ghost at first.’

‘What did it
look like?’ Faraday said.

‘Like a cat.’

‘A cat?’

‘Yes, a little
grey cat. One used to see it in the corner of the big room upstairs occasionally.
Quite harmless. It’s probably still there, for all I know. It comes and goes.’

‘What did it
do?’ I said.

‘Nothing very
much. It just sat there. Sometimes you saw it moving across the room. You
always glimpsed it out of the corner of your eye, if you know what I mean. But
Mordred was different — he saw it directly. He behaved as if it was another
cat, arching his back and so on. But then it simply terrified him, and he
wouldn’t stay in the same house. So he moved here, next door. But it was odd,
really — the grey cat never seemed to notice his existence at all.’

‘Perhaps it
thought Mordred was the ghost,’ Faraday suggested with a giggle. ‘Perhaps he
was trying to pretend Mordred wasn’t there.’

Mr Ratcliffe
struck a match and paused, considering the remark, the flame flickering over
the bowl of the pipe.

‘Anything is
possible, I suppose,’ he said at last, and sucked the flame deep into the pipe.
‘We may haunt ghosts as much as the other way round.’

‘Or they may
not even know we’re there,’ I put in, feeling that Faraday was having too much
of the limelight.

‘Some of the
time they certainly know we’re there.’ The light was dim and Mr Ratcliffe’s
features disintegrated in a cloud of smoke. ‘Or some of them do. That was
certainly the case with the blue lady. She always behaved very cordially to me.
Of course one should not generalize from the particular.’ He must have seen our
expressions for he added hastily, ‘I mean that one ghost who behaves like that
does not necessarily mean that they all do.’

‘Please, sir,’
Faraday said, sounding like a little boy, ‘who is the blue lady?’

‘She is at the
Deanery,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘I used to go there a good deal when I was
younger.’ He glanced at the piano that dominated the room. ‘Not in this Dean’s
time, or even the one before. There was a lady — the Dean’s daughter, as it
happens — who played the violin and wanted an accompanist.’

‘Was she the
blue lady?’ I asked.

‘She was
entirely flesh and blood.’ Mr Ratcliffe gave a little cough. He turned away
from us and blew his nose. ‘But I often went up to the Deanery drawing-room in
those days, and I sometimes met the blue lady on the stairs.’

‘How did you
know she was a ghost, sir? Could she have been someone staying there?’

‘Oh no. She
wore a dress with a hoop under the skirt. Eighteenth century, I imagine.
Besides I encountered her on one occasion when I was with Miss — with the
Dean’s daughter, and she didn’t see her.’

Faraday leaned
forward, his head resting on his hands. ‘What happened, sir? Did she speak? Did
you?’

‘No,’ Mr Ratcliffe
said. ‘We hadn’t been introduced, you see. So I bowed — and she gave a little
curtsey. It was always like that — I must have seen her three or four times.
The last time I glanced back and she was looking up at me. I thought she might
be going to say something. But she didn’t.’

‘Did you ask
the Dean about her?’ I said.

Mr Ratcliffe
shook his head. ‘It would not have been wise. But I did ask his daughter if the
Deanery was said to be haunted, and she said no, but that her mother had been
obliged to dismiss a housemaid who was making up silly stories to frighten the
other servants. Stories about a lady in an old-fashioned dress.’

Faraday’s mouth
had fallen open in amazement. He looked more like a rabbit than ever.

‘It all seems
so pointless, sir,’ I said. ‘The cat, the blue lady.’

‘Why does it
have to have a point?’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘Which is to say, a purpose that we
in our present situation are able to understand. Of course in some cases one
can speculate about that. In other words, there may be a possible factual basis
that might underlie a ghostly phenomenon.’

‘He means there
is a real story to explain the ghost,’ I told Faraday, as much to display my
superior understanding as to enlighten his ignorance.

‘One or two of
our own ghosts come into that category. Take Mr Goldsworthy, for example. On
the other hand, the real story may not explain the ghost — it may be the other
way round: that the ghost is our way of trying to explain something puzzling or
disturbing that actually occurred. Something we somehow create ourselves.’

Mr Ratcliffe
paused. He peered through his pipe smoke at Faraday and me. He had been a
schoolmaster all his life and he knew boys.

‘It is getting
late,’ he said. ‘You two should go to bed.’

‘But, sir,’
Faraday said. ‘What about Mr Goldsworthy?’

Mr Ratcliffe
smiled at him. ‘I’ll tell you about him tomorrow evening.’

‘Oh, sir.’
Faraday sounded about nine years old. I scowled at him, though I was as keen to
hear about Mr Goldsworthy as he was.

We said our
good nights. Mr Ratcliffe stayed by the fire, smoking and reading. I went
outside to use the lavatory while Faraday carried the cups into the kitchen and
stacked them in the sink.

It was colder
than ever outside. The air chilled my throat and tingled in my nose. Above the
black ridge of the Cathedral was the arch of the sky, where the stars gleamed
white and silver and pale blue: they seemed to vibrate with the cold, shivering
in heaven.

Afterwards I
went upstairs. Faraday went outside in his turn. By the time he came upstairs,
I was already in bed and reading my book, a novel called
Beric the Briton
by G.A. Henty. I ignored him while he undressed.
I heard his bedsprings creak as he climbed into bed and the sharp intake of
breath as the cold, slightly damp sheets touched his skin.

I put down my
book and reached up to turn off the gas at the bracket on the wall.

‘I say,’
Faraday said. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘What?’

He was lying on
his side, curled up with his knees nearly at his chin. All I could see of him
was his face. He looked more rabbit-like than ever.

‘Did you hear
it outside? The singing, or whatever it was?’

‘What are you
talking about?’

‘It was when I
came out of the bog,’ he said.

‘Perhaps the
Rat was having a sing-song,’ I said. ‘He got drunk on the Dean’s wine. It was obvious,
the way he was going on this evening.’

‘It wasn’t him,
honestly — it came from outside, from over there.’

Faraday’s hand
emerged from under the covers and pointed to the right of our beds: towards the
College, towards the Cathedral.

‘Someone coming
home from a party,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t like
that.’ He was frowning. ‘It was just four notes, very high-pitched and far
away.’

Very quietly,
Faraday sang them to me: La-la-la-la. The third la was longer than the others.
His voice behaved itself for once, and the notes sounded pure and true. As far
as I could tell.

‘You sure you
didn’t hear it?’

‘Of course I’m
sure. Go to sleep.’

He sang the
notes again, even more quietly. ‘It’s in a major key, I think. Starts on an F
sharp, perhaps?’

‘Shut up, will
you?’

I reached up
and turned off the gas.

‘Whatever it
is,’ he said to the darkness, ‘it’s meant to be happy but it’s going to be a
sad tune.’

I lay awake
listening to the sounds of the night wondering whether Faraday would start
crying again. He hadn’t mentioned the business with the postal order during the
day but it must always have been there, squatting in the forefront of his mind
like a toad and waiting for its moment to spring. His plight made mine seem
trivial by comparison, which I suppose was another reason I didn’t like him
very much.

Faraday’s
breathing slowed and fell into a regular rhythm. I heard Mr Ratcliffe locking
up and coming up the stairs. The Cathedral clock tolled the hours and the
quarters. The clock was in the west tower, not the shorter central tower. It
had a modest chime for such a large church, like a big man with a small, high
voice. We boys called it ‘Little Willy’.

The silence
deepened. Once, as I was dropping off to sleep, I thought I heard again, at the
very edge of my range of hearing, the four high notes that Faraday had sung to
me. La-la-la-la.

For most of Boxing Day, we were left to
our own devices. Mr Ratcliffe went out after breakfast to call on a former
servant at the King’s School who now lived in one of the almshouses attached to
the parish church. He would go directly on from there to have lunch with an old
friend in a village a mile away from the town. He did not expect to be back
until evening.

Time passed
slowly for us. We were in a sort of limbo, neither at home nor at school.
Faraday and I kept together because we had no one else to be with and nothing
else to do.

In the morning
we stayed at the Sacrist’s Lodging, reading under the disdainful gaze of
Mordred. I finished
Beric the Briton
and looked along Mr Ratcliffe’s shelves for
something else to read. Most of his books were about boring things like music
or architecture. There was some poetry, equally boring, and the sort of books
we had at school, like Shakespeare. In the end I had to settle for
Oliver
Twist
.

Faraday
irritated me more than usual. He couldn’t stay still for a moment. He moved
around the room, fiddling with the ornaments and looking at the pictures, most
of which were engravings of old buildings.

He sat down on
the stool and raised the lid of the grand piano.

‘Do you play?’
I said.

‘Yes.’ He
pulled back his cuffs and spread his fingers over the keyboard. A ripple of
notes burst into the room.

Of course he
played the piano, I thought: bloody Faraday could do everything and do it well.

‘God!’ He said
in quite a different voice. ‘It’s awful.’

‘What is?’

‘The piano, of
course. Can’t you hear? It’s awfully out of tune. I bet it’s warped.’

‘Good,’ I said,
returning to page two of
Oliver Twist
. ‘At least that’ll stop you playing it.’

Whether the
piano was in tune or not was all the same to me. I have never understood music
and its power to affect some people so profoundly.

He closed the
lid with a bang.

Faraday and I couldn’t afford to
quarrel, or not for long. We needed each other too much. We went into the town,
though the shops were closed, and walked the long way round to the Veals’ house
beside the Porta.

Mrs Veal
welcomed us like a pair of prodigal sons — she had grown used to us now, I
suppose, and saw us for what we were, a pair of lost children who needed
feeding up. She gave us cold beef and cold ham, and as much mashed potato as we
could cram into ourselves. Then came apple pie, followed by cups of tea so
densely packed with sugar and cream you could almost stand your spoon up in it.

For the first
time we saw Mr Veal in his shirtsleeves. He was in a jovial mood, with a glass
or two of beer beside him. This time was a sort of holiday to him, he
explained. For the Cathedral’s rhythms built up to the great feasts of the
church, like Christmas; but after these climaxes there came lulls. The daily
round of services continued, but on a reduced basis. The choir was on holiday
so the Cathedral was mute. Dr Atkinson had gone away, leaving what little had
to be done in the hands of the deputy organist. Many of the canons had gone out
of residence and even the Dean was visiting his son in London.

Mr Veal had his
own deputies, and he allowed these assistant vergers more responsibility at
these times, and himself more leisure.

‘Mind you,’ he
said, leaning forward and tapping the table for emphasis, ‘You can’t give them
too much responsibility. They’re not ready for it. So I do my rounds, like
always. I keep the keys.’

He nodded
towards the table at the window. There was a big tray on it, and Mr Veal had
laid out on it the keys that usually hung on the back of the cupboard door,
together with a black notebook.

‘Funny how keys
wander,’ he said. ‘I make sure none of them have strayed. Redo the labels and
check them off in my book. You can’t afford to sleep on this job. There’s a lot
goes on here that most folk never realize.’

Neither of us
said anything. It wasn’t just the heaviness of the meal that kept us silent. In
my case, at least, it was also the sense that I had no idea what I was going to
do with the rest of the day. Food was, as always in my schooldays, a temporary
distraction.