Copyright © 2012 by Benjamin Wood
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wood, Benjamin, 1981–
The Bellwether revivals / Benjamin Wood.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-8933-6
I. Title.
PR6123.O64B45 2012 823’.92 C2011-904427-7
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
DSM-IV TR Diagnostic Criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder reprinted with the permission from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision, copyright © 2000, the American Psychiatric Association
Extract from Johann Mattheson: Spectator in Music by Beekman C. Cannon, copyright © 1947, reprinted with permission from Yale University Press
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v3.1
FOR MY MOTHER
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prelude: June 2003
First Days
One: Incidental Music
Two: Empires of the Passions
Three: A Reversible Lack of Awareness
Four: The Harmony of What Exists
Five: Fantasies of Unlimited Power
Six: The Rightful Order of Things
Seven: Dead Reckoning
Last Days
Eight: The Remote Possibilities
Nine: Near Allied
Ten: Wives of the Above
Eleven: The Treatment of Our Mutual Friend
Twelve: Her Ideal Life
Thirteen: Ibidem
Fourteen: Elephants
Fifteen: A Light Went Off in the Organ House
Sixteen: Waiting
Seventeen: New Wrongs
Eighteen: The Ordering of Material Affairs
Nineteen: The Visits
Twenty: Caterwaul
Days to Come
Twenty-one: Testimony
Delusions of Hope
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
PRELUDE
June 2003
They heard the caterwaul of sirens, and saw the dust rising underneath the ambulance wheels at the far end of the driveway, and soon the darkening garden was a wash of flashing blue lights. It only seemed real when they told the paramedics where to find the bodies. There was one upstairs on the top floor, they said, another in the organ house, and one more at the foot of the garden—the last one was still breathing, but faintly. They had left him on the riverbank in a nest of flattened rushes, with the cold water lapping against his feet. When the paramedics asked for his name, they said it was Eden. Eden Bellwether.
It had taken too long for the ambulance to arrive. For a while, they’d assembled on the back porch of the rectory, thinking, panicking, staring out at the same old elms and cherry trees they’d stared at a hundred times before, hearing the wind disturb the branches. They all felt responsible for what had happened. They all blamed themselves. And so they argued—about who was most to blame, who should feel the guiltiest. The only one who didn’t talk was Oscar. He leaned against the wall, smoking, listening to the rest of them bicker. When he finally spoke, his voice was so calm it silenced them.
‘It’s over now,’ he said, extinguishing his cigarette on the porch-rail. ‘We can’t go back and change it.’
Just a few months ago, they’d been sitting out on the same sapspotted decking behind the rectory, chatting about nothing too important—the rules of badminton, some Alain Resnais film they’d all seen and hated, the saddening obsolescence of the cassette tape—all six of them just winding down, a bruise of clouds spreading darkly across the Grantchester sky. They’d gathered round the same wooden patio table, picking at the citronella candle drippings on the wine bottles, throwing dry wax at the midges. Everything had been different back then—so weightless and loose and easy.
Now they watched the first paramedic working on the riverbank, feeling for Eden’s pulse, strapping an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, feeding in a drip. They heard the murmur of the other medic’s voice coming over the dispatcher: ‘VSA. Purple plus. Over.’
They didn’t go with Eden in the ambulance. They weren’t prepared to follow in their cars. Instead, they went into the organ house to see the other medic wrenching off her latex gloves. She’d placed a green sheet over the body and it was quivering on the breeze. ‘Don’t be going anywhere,’ she warned them. ‘The police are on their way.’
It had been the hottest June day but a cold breeze had been gathering strength all evening, and now it was sweeping across the garden, through the open doors of the buildings. It was blowing into the broken pipes of the old church organ—a weak and tuneless drone that sounded on and off, on and off, with the steadiest of rhythms, like some machine that had found a way to breathe.
FIRST DAYS
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
—Sir Francis Bacon
ONE
Incidental Music
Oscar Lowe would later tell police that he couldn’t remember the exact date he first laid eyes on the Bellwethers, though he knew for sure it had been a Wednesday. It was one of those late October evenings in Cambridge when the gun-grey light of the afternoon had faded well before six, and the cobbled avenues of the old town were dark and silent. He had just finished an eight-to-five shift at Cedarbrook, the nursing home on Queen’s Road where he was a care assistant, and his mind was slow and heavy, laden with the details of his workday: the vacant faces of the older residents, the pallor of their tongues as they took their pills, the give of their skin as he lifted them into the bath. All he wanted was to get home, to fall upon his bed and sleep right through until tomorrow, when he would have to wake up and do the same things over again.
By cutting through the grounds of King’s College, he knew he could shave some time off the walk. In the old city, everybody cycled: the students skittered along the narrow lanes with loaded backpacks, the tourists pinballed from college to college on rented wheels. At any time of day, on any given pavement in Cambridge, someone could be found unlocking a bike from a lamppost and riding off towards the next one. But Oscar preferred the solace of walking.
He crossed Clare Bridge and took the shortcut through the grounds of King’s, hearing the flat echo of his footsteps on the path, still glassy from the afternoon rain. Everywhere was quiet. The clipped lawns seemed unusually blue with the indolent glow of floodlamps, and, somewhere close by, woodsmoke was rising from a cottage chimney, giving the impression of fog. As he went by the face of the college chapel, he tried his best not to look up, knowing exactly how it would make him feel: tiny, irrelevant, godless. But he couldn’t help staring at it—that formidable gothic building with its tall spindles nee
dling the sky and its giant blackened windows. It was the picture postcard on every carousel stand along King’s Parade. He’d always hated it. Up close, in the near darkness, the place only haunted him more. It was not the architecture that troubled him, but the age of the building, the scale of its history; the royalty who’d once communed there, all the serious people whose faces now thickened encyclopaedias.
A service was underway inside. He could already hear the muted thrum of organ music behind the chapel walls, and when he turned into the Front Court, the sound grew louder and sweeter, until he was close enough to make out the fullness of the instrument—a low, hoarse purr. He could almost feel it against his ribs. It was nothing like the over-powering dirges he remembered from school Christmas services, or the blundering renditions of ‘Abide with me’ he’d strained to sing over at his grandparents’ funerals. There was a fragility to this music, as if the organist wasn’t pressing down on the keys but hovering his fingers above them like a puppeteer. Oscar stopped in the entrance just to listen, and saw the sandwich board near the open doorway: ‘Evensong 5:30, Public Welcome.’ Before he knew it, his feet had carried him all the way inside.
Stained-glass windows surrounded him, barely showing their colours. The vaulted arches of the ceiling seemed to roll out into the distance. At the heart of the building, a wingspan of organ pipes bellowed from a wooden partition, and he could see the sombre congregation waiting in the candlelight on the other side. He found an empty seat and watched the choir filing in. The younger boys stood on the front row in their white gowns, cheerful and distracted; the older boys stood sheepishly behind them, aware of themselves in that teenaged way, fidgeting with their sleeves. When the organ stopped there was a momentary silence, and then the choir began to sing.
Their voices were so synchronised and balanced that Oscar could hardly tell them apart. They surged and retracted with the ease of an ocean, and he felt a rush in his heart as he listened. He was sorry when their hymn ended and the reverend stood to recite the Holy Creed. Across the aisle, people were gamely muttering the prayer, but Oscar stayed quiet, still thinking of the music. By the time he noticed the blonde girl a few spaces along his pew, the congregation had reached ‘… And sitteth on the right hand of God …’ She was mouthing the words grudgingly, the way a bored child recites times tables, and, when she saw that he wasn’t joining in the prayer, gave a slow roll of her eyes, as if to say: ‘Get me out of here.’ The simple profile of her face excited him. He smiled at her but wasn’t sure that she noticed.
Now the reverend was reading from Jeremiah (‘… if thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth …’) and Oscar watched the girl and her encumbered, self-conscious movements. Like him, she didn’t seem to appreciate the strange etiquette of the church. She kneed the hymn book to the floor midway through the sermon, causing the reverend to pause, and while his dreary lesson continued she toyed with the bezel of her watch, until two pale-faced choristers began a new hymn and the organ started up again.
The only time the blonde girl sat still was when the choir was singing. Her chest rose, inflated; her lip quivered. She seemed awed by the tapestry of their voices, the clarity of their sound, the swelling harmonies that flooded the yawning space above them. Oscar could see her fingers counting out the rhythm on her knee until the final ‘Amen’. The choir sat down and silence—like a deployed parachute—descended in the chapel.
At the end of the service, people filtered out by order of importance: first, the choir and the clergy in a procession of white, then the congregation. Oscar hoped he could follow the girl to the door, get close enough to spark a conversation, but he ended up between a group of men debating the merits of the sermon and a softly spoken French couple consulting their guidebooks for the route home. He lost the sound of her small, scuffing steps behind him as she disappeared into the crowd. Weary tourists moved slowly along the aisles, putting on their jackets and packing away their cameras; young children slept in their fathers’ arms while their mothers baby-wiped their fingers. Oscar couldn’t see the girl anywhere. He put some change on the collection plate as he went out, and the reverend said, ‘Thank you, good evening.’
In the vestibule, the air seemed colder, sharper. Darkness had settled fully over the city and Oscar could feel that familiar, constricting tiredness returning to his shoulders. He turned his collar to the night. It was then, as the crowd dispersed in front of him, that he saw her in the shadows, leaning against the grey stones of the chapel.
She was reading an old paperback, tilting the pages into the second-hand light of the vestibule with one hand, and cradling a clove cigarette between the fingers of the other. Her reading glasses were too big for her face—square with rounded corners, like large projector slides. After a moment, she glanced up from her book and smiled.
‘One thing I know about church,’ she said, ‘is to learn where the exits are. It’s like being on a plane. Have to get out in an emergency.’ Her accent was genteel, proper, the stuff of elocution lessons; but there was also something uncertain about the way she spoke, as if she was trying hard to rough up the edges of her sentences (she had dropped the ‘g’ of ‘being’ and it sounded strange).
‘I’ll try to remember that for next time,’ Oscar said.
‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll be coming back in a hurry. Too much Jeremiah, not enough choir. Am I right?’
He shrugged. ‘Something like that.’
‘Well, I can hardly blame you. They were almost perfect tonight, weren’t they? The choir, I mean.’ She offered him her cigarette pack and he shook his head. ‘Sometimes the beaters aren’t concentrating and their timing suffers, but tonight they were really with it.’
‘Yeah, I thought so too.’
As Oscar stepped closer, she studied him with a quick motion of her eyes. He wondered if she would see the same things in his face that he saw in the bathroom mirror every morning—those straight, innocuous features that might just pass for handsome, the beginner-slope nose that water streamed down when it rained, that narrow jaw he’d inherited from his mother. He hoped that she could see past his workclothes: the faded leather jacket he wore over his nursing uniform, and the trainers he’d put through the washing machine so many times they were clean but somehow grey.
‘Are you sure you don’t want a cigarette? I hate smoking on my own, it’s so depressing.’ She lifted the paperback and examined its cover. ‘What about Descartes? We could smoke him. There’s enough material here to roll a good cheroot.’ She snapped the book shut before he could answer. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Descartes would be a bit dry, wouldn’t he? Much too heavy on the stomach …’ There was a moment of silence. She drew on her clove again. ‘So do you have a name?’
‘Oscar,’ he said.
‘Os-car. That’s nice.’ She spoke his name out into the night, pondering it, as if she could see it scrolling across the sky, on a banner pulled by an aeroplane. ‘Well, Oscar, don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but church doesn’t really seem like your scene. I was watching you in there—you didn’t know a bloody word of any of the hymns.’
‘Was it that obvious?’
‘Oh, it’s not a bad thing. I’m not exactly St Francis of Assisi myself.’
‘To be honest, I just sort of stumbled in. Something about the music, the sound of the organ. I can’t quite explain it.’
‘That’s my excuse, too.’ She breathed out another whorl from the side of her mouth. ‘My brother’s the organ scholar. That was him playing tonight. I’m just a tag-along.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. It’s not the kind of thing I’d bother to lie about.’
‘Well, he plays that thing better than anyone I’ve ever heard. You can tell him from me.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t need any more positive reinforcement,’ she said, laughing at the thought. ‘His head’s going to swell up like a bloody zeppelin when I tell him you only came inside for the music. He’ll take al
l the credit for that. I love my brother dearly, but I’m afraid the humility gene passed him by.’
Oscar smiled. He could see the Gatehouse beyond her shoulder, yellowed by the desklamps in the porters’ lodge, and she was almost outlined by the glow. ‘I suppose you’re a postgrad,’ she said, flitting her eyes towards him again. ‘I can tell postgrads from fifty paces. You’re all baggy leather and comfortable shoes.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘Alright, okay then—a post-doc. My radar’s off.’
‘I’m not any kind of student,’ he said.
‘You mean, you don’t go here at all?’ It was as if she’d never met anyone from beyond the hallowed grounds. ‘But you look so—’
‘So what?’
‘Serious.’
He didn’t know if this was a compliment or an accusation.
‘I mean, you’re practically a fully fledged member of society already,’ she went on. ‘I bet you pay taxes and everything. How old are you?’ She raised her cigarette to her mouth, left it waiting at her lips. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s rude to ask that question, but you can’t be much older than I am. Sometimes I can’t imagine what else there is to do here besides study.’
‘I’m twenty,’ he said.
‘See, I knew you weren’t much older.’
She was not the sort of girl Oscar had grown up around: the mouthy teens who talked inanely on the back rows of buses and blocked the smoggy corridors of nightclubs on weekends, whose drunken kisses he’d experienced with cold disappointment on dark, windless recs. She had pedigree—that much was clear from her voice—and he liked the way she looked at him, curious not judgemental. There was depth to her, he could tell. A kind of unashamed intelligence.
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