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be transcribed back into speech. They had recommended that every window should be boarded up. Lomeli had vetoed the proposal. The lack of daylight and the claustrophobia would have been intolerable.
    He politely waved away Mandorff’s offer of help, pushed himself up from the chair and ventured further into the chapel. The freshly laid carpet smelled sweet, like barley in a threshing room. The workmen stood aside to let him pass; the Secretary of the College and the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations followed him. He could still hardly believe it was happening, that he was in charge. It was like a dream.
    ‘You know,’ he said, raising his voice to make himself heard above the noise of an electric drill, ‘when I was a boy in ’58 – when I was still at the seminary in Genoa, in fact – and then again in ’63, before I was even ordained, I used to love looking at the pictures of those Conclaves. They had artists’ impressions in all the newspapers. I remember how the cardinals used to sit in canopied thrones around the walls during the voting. And when the election was over, one by one they’d pull a lever to collapse their canopies, apart from the cardinal who’d been chosen. Can you imagine that? Old Cardinal Roncalli, who never dreamed of even becoming a cardinal, let alone Pope? And Montini, who was so hated by the old guard there wasactually a shouting match in the Sistine Chapel during the voting? Imagine them sitting here in their thrones, and the men who had only a few minutes before been their equals queuing up to bow before them!’
    He was aware of O’Malley and Mandorff listening politely. He reproached himself. He was talking like an old man. Nevertheless, the memories moved him. The thrones had been abandoned in 1965 after the Second Vatican Council, like so much else of the Church’s old traditions. These days the College of Cardinals was felt to be too large and too multinational for such Renaissance flummery. Still, there was a part of Lomeli that rather hankered after Renaissance flummery, and privately he thought the late Pope had occasionally gone too far in his endless harping on about simplicity and humility. An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.
    He stepped over the electric cables and stood beneath
The Last Judgement
with his hands on his hips. He contemplated the mess. Shavings, sawdust, crates, cartons, strips of underlay. Particles of timber and fabric swirling in the shafts of light. Hammering. Sawing. Drilling. He felt suddenly appalled.
    Chaos. Unholy chaos. Like a building site. And in the Sistine Chapel!
    This time he had to shout over the racket. ‘I assume we
are
going to finish in time?’
    ‘They’ll work through the night if they have to,’ O’Malley said. ‘It will be fine, Eminence, it always is.’ He shrugged. ‘Italy, you know.’
    ‘Ah yes, Italy! Indeed.’ Lomeli stepped down from the altar. To the left was a door, and beyond it the small sacristy known as the Room of Tears. This was where the new Pope would go immediately after his election to be robed. It was a curious little chamber,with a low vaulted ceiling and plain whitewashed walls, almost like a dungeon, crammed with furniture – a table, three chairs, a couch, and the throne that would be carried out for the new pontiff to sit on and receive the obeisance of the cardinal-electors. In the centre was a metal clothes rail on which hung three white papal cassocks wrapped in cellophane – small, medium and large – along with three rochets and three mozzettas. A dozen boxes contained various sizes of papal shoes. Lomeli took out a pair. They were stuffed with tissue paper. He turned them over in his hands. They were slip-ons, made of plain red Morocco leather. He raised them to his nose and sniffed. ‘One prepares for every eventuality, but one never knows. For example, Pope John the Twenty-third was too large to fit into the