Five Boys (10 page)

On his first day, Aldred was so fearful of overlooking one of his jobs or attending to them out of turn that he wrote them out:

1. Pick up key
   

2. Do the Bible
   

3. Do the numbers
   

4. Pick up Mr. Mercer
   

5. Pump the organ
   

6. Drop Mr. Mercer off
   

and on those first few Sundays he must have pulled out that scrap of paper and consulted it a dozen times or more. These days he could carry out his duties with his eyes closed, but the list had become a sort of talisman. His own handwriting was barely legible, the paper had split along the folds, but if he ever happened to leave home without it he would feel so nervous that he would have to go back and pick it up.

As he stood on the bench in the porch the day after the Focke Wulf went over, with his hand deep in the wall, Aldred felt his usual Sunday morning sense of purpose come upon him. He closed his fist around the key and could feel the church, the village, the whole wide morning being levered into life. Before the war, the bells would already have been ringing high above him as he followed the gravel path around the solid walls of the church. The Reverend Bentley once told him that when the bells came to rest just before the service started and all that was left was that single, mournful toll, it called out,
Come … Come
… to its congregation, and Aldred could easily imagine how all the ropes and wheels in the belfry might somehow winch them in. But the bells hadn’t moved since the day the war broke out—hung like six dead lungs in the chest of the church—and if they tolled at all these days it would be to warn the villagers that the country was being invaded. The bell ringers were far away, fighting the war, and the rest of the village was still indoors, knotting ties and shining shoes. All the same, Aldred couldn’t help but feel that his little routine helped bring about a bit of winching of its own.

When the Reverend Bentley first went through Aldred’s
duties and mentioned his difficulty in turning the pages of the Bible, Aldred not unreasonably envisaged himself up in the pulpit beside the vicar, with his own upholstered stool. Saw himself silently rise to pinch the corner of the page between his fingers and sweep it over when the reverend gave him a nod—even tasted the bitter catarrh of apprehension at the back of his throat as he saw himself going down the aisle, kitted out in his own little surplice and bigbuckled boots, when the reverend explained that all he wanted was the Bible open at the appropriate place before the service started and, if the passage went onto a second page, a wooden ruler marking it, so that he could turn to it without too much fuss.

Upholstered stool, somber surplice and fancy boots all went up in a puff of smoke. Other boys might have been disappointed, but disappointment did not come naturally to Aldred Crouch. He experienced instead what felt like a peculiar interlude in which his thoughts were reordered and his interpretation of the facts rearranged and by the time he got home twenty minutes later, his interview with the Reverend Bentley had been revised to such a degree that his grandma Crouch was soon clapping her hands with glee at the news that her only grandson had apparently just been invested with about as much church clout and clerical say-so as a bishop.

Aldred stopped at the door and lifted the key on its string necklace. He could have tucked it inside his jumper but preferred to wear it out, like a crucifix, even though it tended to bounce around when he was in a hurry and leave small bruises on his chest. He slotted it into the door and felt the old mechanism turn deep inside it. Stepped in and
took a breath of holy air. Then he made his way around the organ, climbed the stairs up to the pulpit, pulled out the note from under the Bible and studied the reverend’s arthritic scrawl.

“Romans 10:6,” it said, and beneath it was a list of numbers: “19, 392, 47, 106, 198.”

Aldred couldn’t remember which bit of the Bible the Romans inhabited, but had an inkling they might be somewhere near the end. So he heaved it open, hoping, as always, that it might miraculously part at the right chapter and, as always, it did not.

Once they started moving, the Bible’s pages soon found their own momentum, buckling and rolling in great papery waves, and as he looked for Romans hiding out among them, with the church all hushed and empty, Aldred thought, not for the first time, that he would quite like to do a little preaching of his own. He imagined the whole village staring up at him, enraptured, with the Reverend Bentley and Mrs. Fog right down at the front as he enlightened them on ancient curses and the drownings in the Bay of Biscay.

Generally speaking, Aldred thought the church was far too wordy. Not just the ones weighing down the Bible and pouring out of the Reverend Bentley. Hymn books and prayer books were stacked shoulder-high by the main door, words were carved into stone tablets along both walls, there was Latin script in the stained-glass windows and framed notices and embroidered quotations at every turn. The moment you set foot in the place you found yourself playing hopscotch on the epitaphs of dead men. And most of the words were too old or worn away to make any sense. If he ever started up his own church Aldred would certainly
make a few changes. Films about London’s famous landmarks and Ancient Egypt would be projected onto bare walls and from time to time Aldred would play a couple of tunes on the organ. But people would be free to come and go as they pleased—could sit and nod off without fear of reprisal. It would be the world’s one and only wordless church.

The Romans finally turned up between the Corinthians and Mary anointing Jesus’ feet, and as the passage continued onto the following page Aldred tucked the ruler right up to the binding and pulled the first page back over it. He let the hymn board down on its pulley, gently laid it on the pulpit floor and fished out the box of numbers from its hideaway at the back of the pulpit and began picking out the ones he needed for that morning’s hymns.

The blocks slid easily along the board’s beaded grooves, chinking against one another like dominoes. But Aldred took care. One tile out of place would have the congregation racing off in one direction and the Reverend Bentley in the other. Some hymns came up with such frequency that Aldred recognized them straightaway and could be halfway through the first verse before he slid the last block into place. Dirges such as “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” (279) and “Raise Up Thine Heart” (563) were particularly popular with the reverend, whereas Aldred preferred the stirring “Onward Christian Soldiers” (432) or “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” (138), which always gave him the willies as the chords shifted under, “Oh hear us when we cry to thee …” before being resolved with “… for those in peril on the sea.”

By the time he’d checked all the numbers and hoisted the hymn board back up the wall, Aldred’s monopoly of the
church was usually broken. Mrs. Heaney would be fussing over one of her flower arrangements and the ushers would be restacking the hymn books for want of something useful to do. But, as Aldred often reminded himself, only
he
had a key on a string necklace and only
he
was allowed to climb the pulpit stairs, and no amount of strutting about on the part of the ushers or evil glances from Mrs. Heaney from the cover of her chrysanthemums would alter the fact that their business was down among the groundlings, while he was practically the junior manager and had the run of the place.

He crept back down the stairs, out through the side door, and made his way through the graveyard. Then leaned against the little gate and picked at its paintwork until Mr. Mercer’s Bath chair came creaking into view. From a distance the Mercers could look a little ramshackle, but as soon as Mrs. Mercer had steered the chair into its berth beside the step, they launched into a routine of the kind of complexity rarely seen outside the Edinburgh Tattoo. Mr. Mercer flipped back his blanket, took up his walking stick and swung both legs out. Mrs. Mercer jammed her foot against a wheel to steady the chair. Then her husband clamped his free hand down on Aldred’s shoulder, took a lungful of air and heaved himself up, with his jacket not far behind.

If Aldred sometimes felt as if he was helping a dead man out of a wicker coffin then it was a resurrection they managed between them every week. Yet in all those Sunday mornings Mrs. Mercer never said a single word to Aldred. It wasn’t something which particularly bothered him. He didn’t imagine the two of them would have had much to say. What bothered him more, as he headed back toward the church with Mr. Mercer’s powerful hand on his shoulder,
was the fact that most boys his age were considerably taller than he was and he couldn’t help wondering if having Mr. Mercer press down on him every Sunday morning wasn’t somehow squashing out of him any growing he’d done in the previous week.

Aldred had learned to adjust his steps to those of the man behind him. The slightest tightening of Mr. Mercer’s fingers on his collarbone told him he was struggling; the merest pressure of his thumb on the muscles above his shoulder blade told him he had a little breath to spare. There were days when Aldred felt sure Mr. Mercer’s hand had smoothed into existence its own shallow cavity. He would be sitting at his desk on a Tuesday or a Wednesday and suddenly feel his hand resting heavily on his shoulder, with Mr. Mercer nowhere to be seen.

The walk to the church was certainly not getting any faster, but Aldred always took great pride in being able to gauge Mr. Mercer’s general well-being by keeping an ear on the rattle in his chest, so when he felt the old man dig his fingers into his clavicle on this particular morning Aldred was first surprised, then disappointed in his own lack of sensitivity.

“Careful,” wheezed Mr. Mercer. “Mind the plums.”

They stopped for a cough by Mr. Wenlock and paused again just before the door. But as soon as they were inside they fairly raced for the organ—a burst of energy, Aldred assumed, intended to show those worshippers already seated just how hale and hearty their organist was. That last dash took its toll, and Mr. Mercer would sometimes slump on his bench for several minutes before sitting up and begin pulling out the stops.

With all the organ’s pipes racked up around him, Mr.
Mercer looked like a man at the gates of a fort. The pipes were the same blue, Aldred often noted, as the robes of Jesus, with enough firepower to sink a battleship. He had thought about taking up organ playing himself, just to get his hands on all those stops and keys—liked the idea of doing that little quickstep over the pedals. What put him off was the prospect of having to learn how to take all the squiggles on the pages of Mr. Mercer’s hymn book and convert them into something his hands could comprehend—a technique Aldred suspected involved the deadly numbering favored by Mrs. Fog.

Aldred left Mr. Mercer and made his way around to his own station at the back of the organ. It was a good deal more dusty and dingy, with none of the polish of the front. He would have quite liked an audience for his pumping and felt that the congregation would have found much to admire. On the other hand, he had his own little den in which to do his thinking and anything else which didn’t make too much noise.

The pump handle stuck out of the back of the organ as if someone had buried an axe in it. Aldred undid its clip, cranked it up and down, heard the bellows shift deep in the woodwork, then sat on his stool to wait for the hanky to dance on its string.

A notice was pinned to the back of the organ, about two feet from his face.

DESTRUCTION OF CHURCHES BY FIRES ORIGINATING IN THE ORGANS

1. The organ is damp, a lamp or stove is placed in it and left to burn all night, with the result of setting it on fire.
   

2. The organist, the blower, the tuner, or a workman making repairs, strikes a match, or lights a spirit taper, or candle, which he leaves burning, with the result of setting the organ on fire.
   

3. The music desk lights are movable brackets which can be placed so that the flames touch woodwork; this is done once, and the whole is set on fire.
   

ECCLESIASTICAL INSURANCE OFFICE

Lim. 11, Norfolk Street, Strand, London wc

Aldred could recite whole chunks of it verbatim, but despite the fact that it had been pinned up long before his investiture and that the paper on which it was printed was now as dry as old parchment, he couldn’t help but take its dire warnings personally.

“Originating” and “Ecclesiastical” were far beyond the realm of his vocabulary and, no matter how many times he turned them over in his head, “spirit taper” and “movable brackets” failed to make any dependable sense. The implication, however, was clear. The organ was primed for conflagration—was a fireman’s nightmare, a tinderbox—and, hearing that Aldred was going to be in its vicinity, a committee had been convened in London and a list of directives drawn up.

So the moment Mr. Mercer tugged on his end of the string and Aldred saw the hanky jump, he began pumping—to fire the opening chords across the bows of the congregation … to keep the airless Mr. Mercer inflated … to keep that great wooden palace of an organ afloat and dragging the audience a beat and a half behind … to build up his muscles and make himself as big as the other boys. But he pumped hardest of all because of those flames which
threatened to flicker into existence in the vast, dry wastes of the organ’s insides. Pumped until he was puffing and panting almost as badly as Mr. Mercer to keep those flames from coming about.
The dampness … the spirit taper … the movable bracket
—three easy ways for an absentminded boy to let an organ catch fire. Three blazing organs, side by side, and every one of them his own fault.

The only bit of the notice which offered him any consolation was the Ecclesiastical Insurance Office’s address. Aldred knew very well that the Strand was right next to the Embankment. From their window the people whose job it was to warn organ pumpers about setting fire to organs would be able to see Cleopatra’s Needle—be able to relax in its shadow on a hot summer’s day. So as Aldred pumped and felt the sweat trickle down his back he kept his eyes fixed on the Strand until Mr. Mercer held down the last chord and he heard the reassuring clunk and clatter of the congregation returning to their seats.