The Unburied Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the chancel I noticed lights in the furthest corner. There were more shouts and then the musical ring of spades on stone, all of which the vast building seemed to receive and slowly absorb as it had absorbed the joys and the anguish of men and women for nearly eight hundred years. I turned the corner of the stalls and found three men working – or, rather, two working and one directing them – their breath visible in the light of two lanterns one of which was standing on the floor while another was perched insolently on a bishop’s tomb.
    The labourers, who had taken up a number of the great paving-stones, were young and beardless, but the older man who was supervising them had a piratical appearance with a great black beard and an angry, swaggering manner. But I was more intrigued by a tall old fellow in a black cassock who was watching. He was certainly seventy and very possibly older than the century and, with great pouched bags under his eyes and deep lines around his sunken cheeks, he looked like a man to whom a terrible wrong had been done and who had spent decades brooding upon it. His great height and smooth hairless skull made him resemble some part of the cathedral itself that had come to life or – rather – taken on some small degree of animation. His almost perfectly horizontal mouth was fixed in an expression of disapproval.
    I approached and said to him: ‘Would you be good enough to tell me what they are doing?’
    He shook his head: ‘A deal of mischief, sir.’
    ‘Are you a verger?’
    ‘Head-verger and have been these twenty-five years,’ he answered with melancholy pride, stiffening his back as he spoke. ‘And my father and grandfather before me. And all three of us singing-boys in our time.’
    ‘Really? That’s a remarkable dynasty. And the next generation?’
    His face darkened: ‘My son cares nought for it. It’s a sad thing when your own child turns his back on the thing you’ve given your life to. Do you know what I mean, sir?’
    ‘I can imagine. Though I have no children myself.’
    ‘I’m very sorry to hear that, sir,’ he said earnestly. ‘That must be a sorrow to your wife and yourself, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.’
    ‘I have no wife either.’ I added: ‘I once had a wife. I ... that is to say.’ I broke off.
    ‘Then I’m sorry for that, too. I can’t have much longer on this earth, sir, but it’s a great comfort to me to know that I shall leave three fine grandchildren behind me. Three grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.’
    ‘That is indeed a cause for congratulation. Now will you be good enough to tell me what is going forward here? If you’ve worked here all these years, you must know the building well.’
    ‘I know every corner of her, sir. And it pains me to see them hack her open like this.’
    ‘Why are they doing it?’
    ‘It’s that blessed organ. They’ve built a new console in the transept. You must have noticed that dreadful new-fangled thing that’s more like a traction-engine than an organ. And now they’re laying down the pipes for it.’
    ‘They’re not going to take up all that length of paving, are they?’ I asked, indicating it with my arm.
    ‘They are indeed. They don’t know what they might not be raking up. Nor they don’t care.’
    ‘But what’s wrong with the original console? As far as I recall it’s a beautiful piece of work from the early seventeenth century.’
    ‘That it is, sir. But it wasn’t good enough, it seems. Not for His Nibs who had to play it – and that’s more important than us that hears it, seemingly. Or us that will have to see that Babylonish monstrosity every day of our lives.’
    ‘You are speaking of the organist?’
    He went on without noticing my question: ‘For some of the canons wanted the organ to be big and loud and to be right out here where the congregation could see it and would join in the singing, and them on the other side wanted to keep the old one because it