The Spire

  He nodded, and went in over the familiar stones. But the great hall had changed like so many other things. There was a fire of logs, there were wax candles everywhere, lighted as for an altar, there was a carpet before the fire and two chairs. The chairs were hardly visible because of the brightness of the candles, and he thought how like the candles were to the glossy patches that sometimes swam before his eyes. Even so, he had not time to inspect the changes thoroughly, for the woman was sitting in the chair on the other side of the fire, with women at her back. She rose, as he came to the edge of the carpet, sank to her knees, took his hand and kissed it, murmuring.

  ‘Reverend Father. Jocelin!’

  But then without any change she got to her feet, and spoke, half-turned to the others.

  ‘There should be hot water, towels, a comb —’

  He stopped her with his hand lifted.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  After the silence and pause, he looked at the other women.

  ‘Let them leave us together.’

  The shadows of women withdrew; and when they had gone she took his hand in hers, pressed gently on it, sat him down in the chair; and on his left side he felt the soft warmth of the fire. He saw how tiny she was, not much larger than a child, for her face was still little above the level of his eyes. She looked past his shoulder.

  ‘Will you send your chaplain away too, nephew?’

  ‘He stays. I’m in his care. And even if it weren’t so, I ought not to be alone with you.’

  At that she laughed outright.

  ‘Thank you for the compliment.’

  But he could not understand her and did not bother to try. She nodded seriously as if she understood this.

  ‘I forgot how provincial you’d be.’

  ‘I?’

  Provincial. Of a province, away from the centre of things, limited in vision and scope.

  ‘It may be so.’

  But there was her face a yard away, to be examined, the blandness only less white and smooth than the pearls that edged her black coif. Her hair would be black beneath it — or had been black. He examined the arched, thin eyebrows, looked into the black balls of her eyes. She began to laugh, but he cut her short querulously.

  ‘Be still, woman!’

  So she stood, smiling and obedient.

  Black dress, full. Pearls also at the throat. Hand — and as if she understood what he wished, she raised it to him — plump and white. Behind the hand, her face — and again, as if she understood what he wished, she put the hand out of sight — face smiling, plump as the hand, only a little this side of fatness. A tiny mouth, nose arched. Eyelids, dark and glistening, painted perhaps, eyelashes long and thick; water now caught among the lower ones.

  ‘My mother’s sister.’

  The smile became a grimace, and the water fell. Nevertheless, her voice sounded light and amused.

  ‘The naughty one.’

  All at once she was moving quickly, and there was a scrap of white stuff in her hand.

  ‘This at least.’

  She leant forward so that he caught a sudden breath of spring and shut his eyes for faintness at it. Through the thronging memories he felt the white stuff touch and smear on his cheeks, felt a hand at his hair. He heard her murmuring again.

  ‘After all, even the —’

  He opened his eyes in the perfume while she was still busy about him. He examined her face from only a few inches away; and now he saw how carefully preserved and tended it was. The smooth skin was netted down by lines too fine to be seen from further off. It was a compromise between too much fat and too little, as could be seen by the deeper lines defended from becoming wrinkles at the corner of each eye and in the bland forehead. It was a face that must defend itself by dancing from expression to expression, lest it should be still, and sag. Only the eyes, the little mouth, the nose, held out — bastions so strong they need not be defended. He felt a remote kind of pity for the face and did not know how to express it, so he muttered instead.

  ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  She let his face alone at last, took the spring away with her across the carpet, turned and sat down facing him.

  ‘Well, nephew?’

  Then he remembered that she had not come to answer a question, but to get something from him. He rubbed the side of his head.

  ‘As for those letters you sent me, and the business of your tomb —’

  She had her hands up and cried out.

  ‘No indeed! Don’t think of them!’

  But he was busy again.

  ‘The decision mayn’t be mine now, though I’m not sure. Father Adam —’

  He raised his voice.

  ‘Father Adam?’

  ‘Reverend Father? I can’t hear you. Must I come closer?’

  What was I going to ask him? Her?

  ‘No matter.’

  The fire was leaping in his eyes.

  ‘Oh no, Jocelin! I came because of you — because of how you are. You must believe it!’

  ‘You worried about me? I, the provincial?’

  ‘Your story’s known in the country. In the world, I might say.’

  ‘There’s a sense in which your body would — forgive me — defile it.’

  Then he heard how quick her temper could be.

  ‘You haven’t defiled it yourself? Those men? The church empty? That stone hammer hanging up there and waiting to strike?’

  He looked into the fire and answered her patiently.

  ‘It’s a hard thing for a woman to understand. I was chosen, you see. After that, I spent my life finding out what the work would be and then doing it. I offered myself. One should be much, much more careful.’

  ‘Chosen?’

  ‘They’ll let you build a tomb there, I’ve no doubt. But whether I would or not — I wonder.’

  ‘Chosen?’

  ‘By God. He does, after all. Then I chose Roger Mason. There was no one else to do it — who could do it. Then all the rest followed.’

  He looked up, startled by her laughter.

  ‘Listen nephew. I chose you. No. Listen, and I’ll tell you something. It wasn’t at Windsor but at a hunting lodge. We were lying on the day bed together —’

  ‘What’s this to do with me?’

  ‘I’d pleased him and he wanted to give me a present, though I had everything in the world I wanted for myself—’

  ‘I won’t hear you.’

  ‘But then I had a thought, for I was happy and therefore generous; and so I answered; “I have a sister and she has a son.”’

  She was smiling again, but ruefully.

  ‘Mind, I’ll admit it wasn’t just generosity. She was so, so pious, so dreary, and she’d always — Well, it was half-generosity, call it that. Because she was like you, in a way, stubborn, insulting —’

  ‘Woman — what did he say?’

  ‘Oh sit down again, Jocelin! You make me nervous, standing there like a great bird hunched in the rain. I wonder if I was triumphing a little?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said: “We shall drop a plum in his mouth,” Just like that. Casually. And then I said, “He’s a novice, I believe, in some monastery or other.” I started to giggle, and he started to roar with laughter and then we were hugging each other and rolling over and over — because you must admit, it was not without its funny side. We were both young, after all. It appealed to us. Jocelin —?’

  He found she was kneeling close to him.

  ‘Jocelin? What does it matter? It’s the quality of living.’

  He answered her hoarsely.

  ‘The things I’ve done.’

  After a while he went on.

  ‘I always reckoned to sacrifice my life to the work; and perhaps this is the unspeakable way of doing it. And after all, there’s the Nail —’

  ‘What nail, nephew? You’re so confused!’

  ‘Our bishop Walter in Rome —’

  ‘I know Rome. And I know bishop Walter.
’

  ‘Well there, you see. What do I matter? Only the thing matters because, because —’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘There’s a level you can’t understand. He nailed it to the sky. I asked him for money, blind fool that I was. He did better.’

  There, he thought. It’s finished. But it was not, for he heard her speak again, in a breathless voice.

  ‘You asked him for money — and he sent you a nail!’

  ‘I said so.’

  ‘Walter!’

  She began to laugh, round after round of laughter that built up high, until it took away her breath, and in the silence he heard the singing of pillars in his ears. It was not that he understood anything or worked out anything by logical steps in his head; but that there was a sickness driving in and a shuddering of the body to his very fingertips. Then the sickness drowned him.

  But he felt her tugging at his hands.

  ‘Jocelin! Jocelin! Nothing matters as much as that!’

  He opened his eyes.

  ‘You must believe, Jocelin!’

  ‘Believe?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. Believe in your — vocation — and in the nail —’

  She had him by the shoulders and was shaking him.

  ‘Listen to me. Listen I said! I wouldn’t have told you if —’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You had a question for me. Think of that, concentrate on that. What was it?’

  He looked into her eyes and saw how frightened she was.

  ‘What is it that —’

  But this was so like a children’s guessing game that he had to finish on a high laugh.

  ‘I remember now. What is it when one’s mind turns to one thing only, and that not the lawful, the ordained thing; but to the unlawful. To brood, and remember half in pleasure, half in a kind of subtle torment —’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘And when they die; for they die, they die; to recreate scenes that never happened to her —’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘To see her in every detail outlined against the air of the uncountry — indeed, to be able to see nothing else — to know that this is a logical part of all that went before —’

  She was whispering, very near him.

  ‘This happened to you?’

  ‘It’s a kind of haunting. All part of the rest.’

  He looked at her earnestly, speaking right into her eyes.

  ‘You’d know of course. Only tell me. That’s all I want. It’s witchcraft isn’t it? It must be witchcraft!’

  But she was withdrawing from him, leaning back, getting up, retreating across the carpet. She left the terrible whisper behind her.

  ‘Yes. Witchcraft. Witchcraft.’

  Then she had gone somewhere and he was left, nodding solemnly to the fire.

  ‘There’s a pattern in it. There’s more to be destroyed. There must be more.’

  He thought of Father Adam in the shadows.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Her feet go down to hell.’

  He put her away from his mind, and she vanished out of his life like a raindrop in a river.

  ‘Confusion everywhere.’

  After a while, Father Adam spoke again.

  ‘You must sleep.’

  ‘I shall never sleep again.’

  ‘Come, Father.’

  ‘I shall sit here and wait. There’s a pattern, and it’s not complete.’

  So he sat, watching the armies of sparks that wandered through the fire. He spoke sometimes, but not to Father Adam.

  ‘Yet it still stands.’

  Then he moaned and rocked himself. Once, much later, he started up and cried out—

  ‘Blasphemy!’

  Hours later, when the fire was nothing but embers, he spoke again.

  ‘There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.’

  Daylight crept through the windows and waned where the candles had guttered out. The last spark of the fire disappeared in the great hall, and the messenger came. It was the man of faith, humming and pointing. Jocelin rose carefully from his chair.

  ‘Have I your permission to go with him, Father?’

  The keeper made a little gesture of disclaim.

  ‘We will go together.’

  So Jocelin bowed his head and kept it bowed, and they went to the west door in the last flutters of disturbed air. There seemed nothing new in the nave, so Jocelin spoke sideways to the dumb man, not wishing to look him in the face.

  ‘Show us, my son.’

  Then the dumb man led them on tiptoe to the south east pillar and showed them where he had chiselled a little hole in the stone, then went away again on tiptoe. Jocelin understood what he had to do. He took the chisel with its burred-over head out of the hole, lifted up an iron probe and thrust it in. It sank in, in, through the stone skin, grated and pierced in among the rubble with which the giants who had been on the earth in those days had filled the heart of the pillar.

  Then all things came together. His spirit threw itself down an interior gulf, down, throw away, offer, destroy utterly, build me in with the rest of them; and as he did this he threw his physical body down too, knees, face, chest, smashing on the stone.

  Then his angel put away the two wings from the cloven hoof and struck him from arse to the head with a whitehot flail. It filled his spine with sick fire and he shrieked because he could not bear it yet knew he would have to. At some point there were clumsy hands that tried to pick him up; but he could not tell them of the flail because of the way his body threw itself round the crossways like a broken snake. So the body shrieked and the hands fought with him and under the heap was Jocelin who knew that at last one good prayer had been answered.

  When the pain ebbed he found they were carrying him back from the place of the sacrifice with careful hands. He lay on an absence of back, and waited. The angel with the flail could only do so much; just as much as the body could accept, whatever the head thought about it. After that there would be nothing in the back at all, no feeling whatsoever.

  They laid him on his bed in the upper room, where he faced the stone ribs of the vaulting. Sometimes the angel left him so that he could think.

  I have given it my back.

  Him.

  Her.

  Thou.

  Sometimes he would whisper fretfully.

  ‘Has it fallen?’

  The clothespeg man would answer him tranquilly.

  ‘Not yet.’

  One day of comparative clarity, he had a thought.

  ‘Was it much damaged?’

  ‘If I lift you to sit up, Father, you can see through the window.’

  This made him turn his head from side to side on the pillow.

  ‘I shall never look at it again.’

  Then he knew, by the diminution of the light, that Father Adam had gone to the window.

  ‘If you gave it a casual glance you would think it unharmed. But the spire leans a little, threatening the cloisters. It’s impacted into the parapet at the top of the tower. There’s a deal of broken stone.’

  For a while he lay still. He muttered.

  ‘The next wind. The next wind.’

  The clothespeg man came near, leaned over him and spoke gently. Near as this, it was possible to see that he had some kind of face.

  ‘You make too much fuss, Father. It’s a great harm, certainly, but you built in faith, however mistaken. That’s a small sin, as sins go. Life itself is a rickety building.’

  Then Jocelin began to turn his head from side to side again.

  ‘What can you know, Father Anonymous? You see the outside of things. You don’t know the tenth of it.’

  As if he stood at Father Adam’s side, rebuking sin, the angel struck again. When Jocelin came to himself, Father Adam was still there, and speaking as if no third one had interrupted them.

  ‘Remember your faith, my son.’

  My faith, tho
ught Jocelin, what faith? But he did not say this to the face above him that one day might come into some sort of focus. Instead he gasped and laughed.

  ‘Would you like to see my faith? It lies there, in the old chest. A little notebook in the left hand corner.’

  He paused for a moment to get his breath then laughed again.

  ‘Take. Read.’

  There was a time of shift and shuffle, creaking of the lid. Then Father Adam spoke from the light of the window.

  ‘Aloud?’

  ‘Aloud.’

  The ink must be brown, he thought. Anselm was still a young man, and Roger Mason no more than a boy. As for her — And I was young, or younger.

  Father Adam scratched his voice into the evening air.

  ‘“One evening when I had already held this position for three years, I was kneeling in my oratory, praying with what little strength I had that the pride of my position should be taken from me. I was young, and I took a monstrous pride in this great house of mine. I was all pride —”’

  ‘Indeed I was.’

  ‘“An infinite charity must have sided with me. I made little movements of aspiration as befitted my capacity. I strove to see the building as a thing, an object standing in my way; and this was easy, since its very walls were visible outside the window —”’

  But Jocelin was turning his head from side to side, again. He thought — what does this explain? Nothing! Nothing!

  Is it nothing?

  ‘“I watched the outline of the roof, the walls, the projecting transepts, the pinnacles standing at intervals along the parapets —”’

  ‘Was it nothing, Father?’

  ‘“I know now why my gaze was so directed. But at the time I knew nothing, only knelt there, until watching had made me indifferent to the thing I watched. Then, my heart moved; say that a feeling rose from my heart. It grew stronger, reached up until at the utmost tip it burst into a living fire —”’

  ‘It’s true — I swear it!’

  ‘“— which passed away, but left me now transfixed. For there, against the sky, I saw the nearest pinnacle; and it was the exact image of my prayer in stone. There was the uprush, the ornamentation of sidethoughts for others, then the rush of the heart, rising, narrowing, piercing — and at the top, still carved in stone, the thing I had felt as a flame of fire.”’