The Chorister at the Abbey (13 page)

23

Many oxen are come about me: fat bulls of Basan close me in on every side.
Psalm 22:12

The same evening, Edwin sat in the box room which Morris Little had used as a study. Morris’s hobbies were scattered arbitrarily around. Local history, family history, genealogy, choral singing. He had a bank of folders and about a dozen books all dealing with local families and heritage.

There was a newish computer but there was a lot of redundant equipment which Edwin thought must have been junked from the shop. He had one of those old fax machines that photocopied on a roll of thin paper.

There were racks of files and a small sample of fiction from an author who wrote robust stuff about Victorian rogues. Edwin picked out a paperback called
The West
Coast Pirate
, and flicked through it while waiting for Norma to come upstairs with the coffee she had promised.
Adventure stories for all ages. Sandy McFay, originally from
Cumbria, writes well-researched rattling good yarns
, he read on the inside sleeve. Very Boy’s Own stuff, the sort of thing that was coming back into fashion. The North Country was good at claiming its own, but he had never heard of this chap. Presumably he never came back these days or he’d be roped into readings and signings and talks. But it explained Morris’s interest.

Norma came in with the coffee.

‘What was Morris’s password?’ Edwin asked.

‘Norbridge – that was his real love.’ Norma smiled a little grimly.

Edwin felt uncomfortable as he went through the process of logging on as if he was Morris. The desktop icons littered the screen.

‘The stuff he was working on is in My Documents. I’ll leave you to look at them.’

‘That’s fine, Norma. I’ll print out all his research stuff and then I’ll tell you what I think.’

He didn’t know where to start, but, trawling through the document files, he soon found a pattern. Morris had written an enormous amount on old Norbridge, but when Edwin keyed in
Norbridge
with
music
a whole new tranche of material appeared. Most of it looked like pretty accessible local information. Norbridge Clogdancers, Norbridge and Area Silver Bands, the History of Norbridge Abbey Chorus, and so on.

There was nothing to confirm Norma’s belief that Morris’s latest research was special. But Edwin remembered Morris’s assertion that there was a local connection with Sir John Stainer, composer of
The Crucifixion.
He typed
Norbridge
,
Stainer
, and
music
into the search engine, and instantly it scrolled on to the screen:
Norbridge and the
Stainer Connection
.

Edwin read it with increasing fascination. Morris quoted at length from the letters of John Stainer to Cecil Quaile Woods, vicar of Fellside from 1860 to 1881. Edwin had never heard of these letters, which astonished him because he knew all about Quaile Woods from a musical point of view. He’d been a pioneering Anglican clergyman and fringe member of the Oxford Movement who’d come up to Cumbria. He’d started like the early Puseyites as an ascetic, and been Father to the depressed ports of the coast which were already past their peak in Irish trade. He set up various missions and charities for the poor. Then at the age of fifty in 1881, he’d suddenly made the odd downward move to the village of Uplands as curate. The church there was much more part of the related, but aesthetic, even indulgent High Church fashion. There Quaile Woods had started to write his psalm chants. He had been praised for them in newspaper and church articles of the time, but most of them were missing, though others had become quite famous.

So if Stainer and Quaile Woods had written to each other regularly that certainly could be the connection which Morris had been going on about so mysteriously. But like a lot of amateurs Morris had failed to annotate his work. Where were the actual documents? The real letters? And the rest of his source material? It was infuriating. Typical Morris!

Edwin jumped up and started to look at all the hard copy Morris had accumulated. While Morris’s computer filing system was predictable, his documents were filed in a totally idiosyncratic way. But the letters between Quaile Woods and Stainer had to exist somewhere unless Morris had invented them. It occurred to Edwin that they might have already been referred to by one of the many other local historians in the area, and that Morris might have been quoting another writer. He remembered that during his own research he had discovered that the Norbridge Local History Society had referred to Quaile Woods in a pamphlet in 1976. They had a website. Edwin Googled them, accessed it and reread the excerpts on the site. There was nothing about Stainer. So where had Morris come across the Stainer connection? Was there more about it in the 1976 pamphlet if you read the whole thing? Did Morris have a copy filed somewhere in this mess?

There was a pile of old material on the top shelf of the bookcase. Morris’s idiosyncratic system nearly eluded Edwin, but at last he found the pamphlet filed not under Q or under N but under P – presumably for pamphlet. And here was the answer. The 1976 pamphlet was based on a much older book which was quoted lavishly, all about Quaile Woods’ sterling character and great achievements, compiled in complex Edwardian style by someone called Henry Whinfell and published just after the First World War.

But Edwin had never heard of this biography. It would have been of limited interest even when it was published, and any copies had long since disappeared.

He was aware that Norma was standing by the door.

‘You’ve been here hours! I knew he was on to something!’ Norma said with satisfaction. ‘That’s why he wanted to meet you and talk to you about it. That’s what I told you!’

‘Me? I thought he just wanted to talk generally.’

‘Oh no, he was planning to meet up with you. He told me the day before he died that he was writing it all for a document to take to the Music Department at the college along with some old papers. He must have meant you. You’re the only person he knows from the Music Department. Didn’t he email you?’

‘If he did, I didn’t get it.’

Norma was looking expectantly at him.

‘Go into his emails. I’m sure he said he’d emailed the college.’

With some reluctance, Edwin reopened Morris’s email account. But Morris had not been planning to meet
him
. To Edwin’s astonishment, he saw that the last email Morris Little had ever written had been sent to Wanda Wisley. And with it was a hefty attachment. It was the same document that Edwin had already accessed:
Norbridge and the Stainer
Connection
. But the covering note, written in Morris’s unmistakable style, read:

Dear Miss
Wisley,
I’ll be able to pop over to the college as arranged this
evening. I’d rather keep our meeting confidential as there are
certain people who are rather up themselves and think they
know everything about our music making in Norbridge.
Quite frankly they tend to take all the credit.

It just so happens that I’ve come across something which
proves my point that our own Cecil Quaile Woods was a
very intriguing man who wasn’t all he seemed. I’d like to
show it to you.

Morris Little

‘Can I print all this stuff out?’ Edwin asked Norma. She nodded. He highlighted the whole of Morris’s correspondence file and pressed the print key. ‘Look,’ he went on, as the printer whirred into action, ‘there’s far more here than I can sort out now. Can I take it with me?’

‘All right.’ But Norma was pleased. Her smile had lost some of its bitter edge. ‘I told you!’ she said, her voice now mellow.

Edwin got away from Norma as quickly as he decently could and drove to the nearest pub. In the car park he sat for a minute to go over his thoughts. His boss Wanda Wisley had a lot of questions to answer, he thought. But had he the nerve to put them to her?

Then his mobile rang. When he saw the number on the screen his heart leapt up and down. It was a number he knew but rarely saw. Yet he had been expecting this call.

‘Hello, Marilyn,’ he said. ‘At last!’

At the same time, Freddie Frabrikant was whistling in the dark as he cycled down from the Bible study course. The thought made him stop in mid-rendition of Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’ in honour of the silver light coming out from behind the black sooty night clouds. He laughed out loud. These weird English phrases! But he wasn’t ‘whistling in the dark’ in the metaphorical sense. Far from it! His life had suddenly come together in this remote rural part of a grey and windswept island.

He’d come to Britain after his own album had done well, but not that well, in Germany. It had been mainly heavy rock but had nodded in the direction of melody with some old-type numbers with an all-female backing group humorously called
Die Jungfrauen
, The Virgins. Maybe that was why, in the Abbey, Freddie had noted that quotation from Psalm 45.

He laughed, remembering the past. A bit of misguided philandering with two of
Die Jungfrauen
who weren’t, had sent Freddie scurrying to Britain. He’d joined an old friend on the British music scene in a band called The Cut. He’d done all the usual things, including working and playing hard, and he met Wanda when he was recording with the band one Saturday night. The takes had gone on and on all afternoon, with the other members of The Cut making endless changes. Freddie had great hearing, and was a technical artist in the studio himself, so he had little patience with the musical fumbling that was going on. Bored, he had started to talk to the attractive but crabby woman in a very short skirt and crazy trainers waiting hunched at the back of the control room.

‘I’m pissed off,’ she’d said suddenly. ‘Shall we leave these dope-heads, and go and find some hard liquor?’

Wanda had been waiting for her boyfriend who was the producer. Swaddled in his headphones and the chords of The Cut, he hadn’t noticed when she and Freddie sneaked out.

Ten minutes later the drummer had asked, ‘Where the fuck’s Freddie?’

They’d realized that Wanda had gone too, and that neither of them was coming back. The two of them got completely ‘arseholed’ in a nearby Soho bar. It was the beginning of Freddie’s relationship with Wanda and the end of his relationship with The Cut.

And they’d rubbed along ever since, especially as at that stage Wanda was hard-nosed, determined to hang on to her new man, and she was earning good money. There were trips to the US for Freddie as he did sessions for various named bands with her encouragement. Wanda worked at the BBC as a studio manager and studied at Birkbeck College part-time, landing an MA and eventually a PhD on how percussion music was therapy for some disturbed young people. Conferences, papers, occasional media inter- views followed. They both did well, with Wanda eventually becoming the presenter of a radio show herself.

But nothing lasts forever. When Wanda told him that her radio series had failed to be recommissioned and that she was applying for a teaching job in some remote province he had never heard of, Freddie secretly thought it would be the end. He’d accompanied her to Norbridge just to mark time, until he decided what to do.

But he loved it! He loved the smattering of New Age culture, the therapists and craftsmen in crumbly old cottages, plus the close-knit – almost defensive – middle class of a small town. The professionals quietly admired him and were rather proud that he’d come to live among them. Their kids were at the college, and the parents would stop him in the town to confide about their own long-lost ambitions to be rock stars.

And the countryside too! He had meant it when he’d said to Wanda one day that he would be interested in moving further out into the country, maybe buying one of these big old farm buildings or failed hotels or abandoned factories, and doing something with it. Of course he wasn’t going to be a farmer or anything like that. This wasn’t a character transplant. He needed a place that was a bit crazy, Gothic maybe, with room for his own studio.

In fact, the derelict convent was just the sort of thing. He stopped his bike and looked over the wall at the drunken stone cross which lurched at an angle in the overgrown garden.

‘Let’s have a look-see,’ Freddie said aloud.

He ignored the big wooden gates, which were jammed shut though they looked as if they would break up at his touch, and vaulted over the disintegrating brick wall, hearing the gravelly sound of dried masonry fragmenting under his big hand as the weight of his body swung across it. He landed with a squelching bump, to the crushing sound of thick vegetation being squashed underfoot. The weeds in the garden were higher and damper than he’d expected. He crept slowly through the wet tangled leaves and stems towards the broken windows. He tried to get high enough to peer in for a few minutes.

And then he listened. For a minute, he thought that his leap had caused the whole of the wall to crumble in a delayed action, slowly and almost rhythmically. He stood stock still, and strained to make out what he was hearing. The sound was like water bumping out of an old faucet, or the consistent thump of falling rocks.

Then he realized that he was hearing something bigger than the collapsing of the brick wall. It was certainly falling, cracking and tumbling in a cascade of drumbeats, but on top of that was a sort of rasping, whooshing noise, inhuman but somehow organic, punctuated by deep groans. He turned around.

The gate was open, but the animals were making for it in such numbers that they were breaking down the wall on either side. He saw monstrous heads rearing and hooves pounding. A herd of panicking bullocks was bearing down towards him, crazed and out of control. They were pounding towards him, eyes rolling.

With an agility which seemed impossible for such a hefty man, Freddie leapt sideways and grabbed the big stone cross, pulling himself up with all his strength. It wasn’t quite enough. His head was level with the hot breath of the terrified herd. The combination of heat and smell was an assault. And then the pain came. The hooves as they rose and fell caught his shins time after time. The agony was unbearable though it was his aching arms which hurt as much as his crushed legs.