Sandlands Page 4

  Jack had made a careful study of the signboards in the ringing chamber, and the peals documented there as having been rung at St Peter’s over the past century or more had all taken place on a Thursday. She had consulted an old almanac she found in Leiston town library, one day after school. A Course of Kent Treble Bob Major, 27th September 1894: that was a Thursday. The man on the tenor that day was one Geo. Woolnough, great-grandfather of the present tower captain. A Peal of Grandsire Triples, 22nd June 1911, Sounded in Celebration of the Coronation of His Majesty King George V: also a Thursday, though it seemed a piece of luck that the coronation should fall on St Peter’s practice night. Jack’s favourite of all was a notice near the cobwebbed ladder that led up to the bell loft, the lettering hand-painted, black on peeling white. It recorded only a simple Course of Plain Bob Major, conducted one Thursday in April 1986, but the ringers’ names that night included that of Jack Deeks, 4th.

  Babysitter, neighbour and teller of bedtime tales: it was partly in his honour that she had shed Jacqueline or Jacqui in favour of Jack at the age of nine, along with pigtails and all things pink. On Thursdays after he’d gone and Mum had tucked in the covers, still in her starchy blue tunic and smelling of antibacterial gel, Jack used to lie cocooned and wait for the bells to start, flowering in the darkness like distant bursting fireworks. She learned to tease from the merging resonance the individual chimes, and she hugged close the sound of the number four bell, knowing who it was that made it speak.

  When Jack senior hung up his rope, it made sense for Jack junior to take it over, replacing him on the fourth. Linguis hominum loquar et angelorum read the legend encircling the bell’s waist – with the tongues of men and of angels – and, around the shoulder, Jacobus Guernerus me fecit. So it truly was, as she always thought of it, Jack’s bell.

  They weren’t up to adding a new peal to the display boards these days, not even a plain hunt. Danny and Liam from school had both begun at the same time as Jack in a mini drafting spree. There’d been some attrition among the core of older ringers, with old Jack’s retirement following hard on that of Mrs Cattermole when she had her first hip done, and the death of old Harry Housego, who’d been pulling the treble since his return from a German prison camp in 1946. The three raw fifteen-year-old recruits were knocked into shape by Willie Woolnough and the other old stagers, Walter Gosling and Olive Fisk, and they’d all kept with it for the three years since. But they still stuck to rounds or a few call changes, less now on account of the young novices than of Walter’s lumbago.

  Jack was the first one there tonight, and opened up. She had a key: iron, black and weighty, hand forged by the village farrier. It was hardly a thing you could get cut in Timpson’s. There were only four in all – the rector had one, and Willie of course, and the spare was kept by the Air Vice-Marshal at the Yews – but this one had been old Jack’s and she was allowed to keep it. Through grooves worn smooth by centuries, it slid to unlock the low-arched corner door of heavy oak that led up a flight of spiral stairs to the ringing chamber. She’d barely let herself up there and switched on the lights than there was a huffing on the stone staircase and Olive Fisk appeared.

  ‘Still hot out.’ The collar of Olive’s apricot nylon blouse was damply tight. She wore the same fitted skirt and stout shoes in July as in January; no wonder her face powder looked streaky.

  ‘Baking,’ agreed Jack, although the air was always cool within the encasing stonework of the tower. She moved to unloop the nearest bellrope from its hook up on the wall.

  More footsteps on the stairs, and two voices, baritone and bass, announced the arrival of Walter and Willie. Soon all the ropes were unhooked, uncoiled and in position. They didn’t bother to ring the bells down between times at St Peter’s, but left them set against their stays. It wasn’t as if anyone ever came up here except the ringers, and it saved the time and trouble of ringing them up. It was a pretty impressive ring of six for a small parish church. The tenor, Walter Gosling’s bell, weighed in at a stately twenty-two hundredweight. Jack’s fourth was a big bell, too: nearly sixteen hundredweight but, beautifully balanced, she handled like a dream. Close to and in motion, they were a startling sight. Old Jack had once taken her up the ladder to the bell loft to watch them swing in their massive wooden frame, the great oak timbers creaking and shifting with the swish and swoop of metal. Crazily clamorous she had found them, even through her earplugs, flinging their sound wide open-mouthed, like raucous laughter or the bellowing of pain.

  Now, while they waited for the two boys, the captain nodded towards Jack’s rope. ‘Turn her over,’ he said, ‘and hurry along those dally-dawdlers.’

  The measured, tolling note sounded out from high above them, beyond the wooden roof and the empty stretch of tower beyond, distant and detached, its timing strangely disconnected from the rise and fall of her sally. Jack found her rhythm easily, feeling the movement of her bell, taking her up almost to the balance on each pull and holding up just a fraction on the handstroke as Willie had taught her.

  Unsmiling, he nodded his approval. ‘And stand.’

  1649, according to the inscription, was the year when that first Jack or Jacob Warrener had cast the fourth, making her the oldest of St Peter’s bells. That meant she was made not in the foundry in Bury St Edmunds nor yet at Whitechapel as her younger sisters were but, according to local belief, in a meadow adjoining the churchyard, which still bore the name of Bellpit Field. The field had been old Jack’s, like the bell, and he’d told her many times the tale of the casting; the best of his bedtime stories had not come out of books. The digging of the pit and the gathering of straw and brushwood for the fire; the clay and horse dung shaped to cover the core and outer cope, then baked to form the mould and laid within the pit; the heating of copper and tin to a liquid red-gold, a sparking lava flow of fire as it tipped to fill the mould: every detail of old Jack’s account felt so fresh and first-hand, it was hard not to think that he’d been there. Like the bell, he had been born here in the village – not in the hospital in Ipswich like Jack herself, as she thought all babies were supposed to be. She sometimes imagined him hauled like the bell from the depths of Bellpit Field, coughing the sandy soil from his infant lungs.

  Jack had done the Civil War this year for A-level History, and was struck by the bell’s date. Odd to think that while the King stood trial for his life at Westminster Hall, craftsmen in a Suffolk field went calmly on with their appointed task, making bells to call the impervious faithful of the fledgling Commonwealth to prayer. Strange how – give or take a few witches – things must have gone on much the same. Jack’s bell, she supposed, would have rung for the execution and again for the Restoration, as for the changing Christian seasons, the births and marriages and deaths of the parish, the old year and the new, for more than three centuries since.

  The field was no longer old Jack’s as it had once been, along with Silly Hill and all the land beyond the church and down towards Stone Common, but had been sold as a lot to the Bradcocks, who worked it with their farm at Campsea Ashe. He’d been forced to retire from both bellrope and farming, first by arthritis in his shoulder and then by something more invasive and deeper in. After more than three years now he’d admit it was his kidneys, but still never called it cancer.

  It was three minutes past seven when Danny came jogging up the stairs and almost five past when Liam eventually appeared, his apology shrivelling under Willie’s glittery stare.

  ‘Right.’ The tower captain moved to his rope, and they all followed suit. ‘We’ll start in rounds, and let’s have no lumping. Make it good and even for his nibs.’

  His nibs was Air Vice-Marshal Fitzpatrick, the church’s nearest neighbour at the Yews, and who owned Church Cottage too. No campanologist himself, he was still a fierce critic of the art.

  Jack eased her bell up to the balance. The fourth was set very shallow, and it only took a nudge to free headstock and stay from the wooden slider.

  ‘Look to,’ said Willie. ‘Tr
eble’s going – she’s gone.’

  It was quite good, tonight. Liam, who had a tendency to let his number three bell get on top of Jack’s, kept things tolerably even, and by the final few rounds, before Willie told them, ‘That’s all,’ and signalled for them to set, their spacing was pretty well perfect.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said – high praise indeed from Willie Woolnough.

  Old Jack had kept a dairy herd but never a dog, so he brought in the cows for milking with his Land Rover. Never a collie, that is. He had only old Fern, a spaniel and a stickler for demarcation: a flusher of pheasant, not a rounder-up of stock. She bestrode the passenger seat with front paws on the dashboard and watched operations with the fervent pleasure of a sports fan. When Jack was small, the old man had let her steer the Land Rover, cresting the ancient ridges and furrows like a galleon in full sail. Perched on his bony lap, her legs in any case too short to reach the pedals, she threw the wheel now left now right to head off any beast which broke from the pack, stiff-gaited, a parody of stupid, roll-eyed terror.

  There was no money these days in dairying, according to Mr Bradcock, unless on an industrial scale. After four human generations and many more bovine ones, the Deeks herd had been broken up and sent for auction, while Bellpit Field was ploughed and put to barley.

  ‘People still want beer,’ Mr Bradcock said.

  There was no Deeks to take over in any case. Old Jack had had no children of his own, which Mum always said was a crying shame. His wife, Mary, had contracted an infection delivering their only, stillborn, child. ‘I turned the bell for the babe, and for Mary eight days later,’ he’d once told her, like a line from an old, sad story.

  She’d always liked the sad ones best. ‘Tell me about the town that drowned,’ she would demand, and he’d stroke the hair from her forehead with the ball of his scratchy farmer’s thumb and relate the tale of Dunwich that was swallowed by the sea, with its eight submerged churches, and the ghostly bells that rang out still on foggy nights to warn away sailors, keeping them off the treacherous ruins that would have ripped a hull.

  Tonight, after tea and before bell practice, she’d gone to visit him. All her life he’d lived next door, helping out when he was needed and later being helped out in his turn; until last winter, that is, when he left Mum’s neighbourly care and became instead her professional charge as deputy manager of the Lilacs Residential Nursing Home. Illness had reduced him, working loose the flesh from his bones beneath skin that took on the greyish sheen of greasy chip paper. Jack couldn’t look at the pale, stretched triangle at his throat or the pucker of his forearm where the tube went in, but focused instead, when they were open, on the rheumy eyes which had kept their spark, or on his hands, still warm and capable and unmistakably old Jack’s.

  The little room this evening felt overfull of heated, antiseptic air. For a while now he’d been sleeping more and more in the daytime. She used to hope he’d be awake when she came to see him, but recently the space between the two states was becoming blurred, along with his perception. Still, she could sit by his bedside and talk him into sleep, as once he’d sat by hers and done the same.

  ‘It’s ringing night tonight,’ she told him, uncertain if he knew it was a Thursday. ‘Danny’s done his wrist in. It’s only a sprain, but it’s quite puffed up.’ Danny kept goal for the village football team. ‘It’s in a sling, so it seems he won’t be ringing for a while. He said he’d come and watch, though, anyway. For moral support.’ She grinned to herself. ‘Or something.’ Danny and Liam liked to hit the bar at the Ship after bellringing, especially on these warm summer nights, and sometimes Walter did too.

  Old Jack swallowed, his throat working, and the closed lids flickered.

  ‘We’ll just ring the back five, I expect,’ said Jack. That way, the fourth became the third. She leant to press his hand, where it lay square and heavy on the turned-down sheet. ‘I like it when I’m in the middle – the third of five, you know. It feels more... symmetrical, somehow.’

  Mothers talked to infants in their buggies, didn’t they? She’d seen them in the aisles at the Co-op in Wickham Market, regaling their babies with the price of frozen peas. One end of life and the other. Was this the same, or was it different? If old Jack could hear her, at least he understood.

  One more set of changes, and they’d call it a night, said Willie. ‘I’ll just hunt the treble down to the bottom and back again. Watch your striking spaces, everyone, and let’s make those changes nice and clean. Straight past me on the next handstroke when I give you the word.’

  It went like clockwork. Liam didn’t ring fleet at all for once, and the team seemed to move in perfect partnership, as well-oiled as the wheels and bearings up aloft. Danny sat on the ladder and beat time in the air with his uninjured hand while the captain brought the second from its place at treble past each other bell in turn, and back up to the top to resume rounds. Walter sent the tenor swinging deep, so deep that the lighter bells were almost at the balance, and they rang like that for maybe a minute more, in stately, even rounds, handstroke and backstroke, their sallies chasing one another round the circle in metronomic order.

  ‘That’s all,’ said Willie, with a frown of quiet satisfaction. ‘And stand.’

  Second and third came up to the balance, and gently over on to their stays. Jack applied the slightest of extra pressure to her rope: the smallest tweak was all it needed, and she’d follow them up to set. Olive and Walter behind her were already readying to finish. Suddenly something wasn’t right. The fourth, though normally the most well-mannered of bells, seemed to give a jerk, the rope to twist between her fingers. As she gave the extra tug to bring her to the set, Jack’s bell didn’t stop but continued to swing, sixteen hundredweight of metal borne on by its own momentum. Up above her in the bell frame, stay hit slider with a buck and a leap, the ripping of bolts and the splintering of timber, and all at once the sally was wrenched from her grasp, sending the bellrope rearing and careering, lassoing out wildly amid the circle of ringers.

  Hands raised to cover her face, Jack stepped backwards, the instinct saving her from the lethal whip of the rope. The other ringers, having set their own bells, had already stepped away, summoned from stupefaction by Willie Woolnough shouting, ‘Get back – back, all of you,’ as he made a grab for the rope’s lashing tail.

  Jack felt sick, with a tightening of fear that was more than the delayed awareness of danger averted. Sweat sprang between her breasts and in the creases of her elbows, and tears rose from nowhere, making her blind. Her heart flailed wild and loose inside her chest. With a lurch she fled for the stairs, stumbling and tumbling down the narrow spiral, taking the worn stone steps two, three at a time, hardly knowing how she didn’t fall, only that she had to escape from the savage clang of the bell above her in the loft. Then she was down in the church, feet grateful for the flat stone flags of the nave, and making for the south porch door, turning the great iron ring with a shaking hand, and letting the heavy felted oak swing closed with a clatter behind her. And out – out into the churchyard and the still hot night, and she was running now, running for home.

  Up ahead, through the wash of tears, she saw her mother’s torch come swaying towards her over Bellpit Field, while behind her in the tower the fourth bell, old Jack’s bell, brought back to control now by the tower captain’s expert hand, fell into a steady rhythm – the slow, implacable rhythm of the funeral knell.

  The Watcher of Souls

  The third cup of tea at breakfast was the mistake. The daily walk was a promise that Rebecca had made herself, along with more fresh fruit and learning to text the grandchildren, following the latest all-clear. Straight after breakfast was a perfect time for walking – unless you’d sat a little longer over the Telegraph crossword and squeezed a third cup out of the teapot.

  It was bad enough having to spend a penny in the open, but surely nobody could manage it if they were being watched. Rebecca certainly couldn’t, in any case. She was a good way from the ro
ad – ten minutes or so into the woods – and she’d found a quiet spot that was screened from the footpath by a belt of elder and hawthorn. It was too warm for tights, and her old cotton twill skirt was certainly easier than trousers. But she just couldn’t rid herself of the sense of an onlooker. The feeling that someone was watching.

  Someone – or, as it turned out, something. She wasn’t sure how she became aware of it because she was certain it hadn’t moved, and in spite of its paleness it blended well enough into the background hatching of twigs and leaves and sunlight. Maybe the same way she knew it was there watching her in the first place: there was something about its stillness that drew the eye, once you were still yourself.

  It was a barn owl. Rebecca was no great ornithologist, but everybody could recognise a barn owl. It was so distinctive, with the flat, white plane of its heart-shaped face above shoulders speckled grey and fawn, and those wide, unblinking black eyes. Glistening, mineral eyes, as round and glassy wet as the pebbles they used to find on the beach at Aldeburgh that Janet always hoped were real jet. But if the eyes were hard, the hooked beak nestled protectively inwards among the pillowing down and the bird bore an overall countenance of calm – an air if not of benevolence, precisely, then at least of quiet, unthreatening vigilance. What nonsense, though, Rebecca chided herself, to be attributing to the creature these human feelings, these human characteristics. It was only a bird, after all.