A Hundred Years of Hands

The Blind Side

There is a side of every cathedral the guidebooks never photograph — the weather side, the north and the west, where the rain comes off the hills and works at the stone for nine hundred years until the saints lose their faces and stand up there blind in their rows; and I have spent my life on that side, in the rain, mending what the world doesn't look at, which is either the saddest way to spend a life or the only one worth the candle, and at eighty-one I have nearly decided which.

It is the middle of October and a hard bright morning, the kind that comes off the Lench with a smell of cold water and rotted leaves and lays a frost on the grass of the close that the sun hasn't the strength to lift before nine. I walk it every day. I have walked it every day for sixty years, give or take the months they had me on my back, and my feet know the cobbles the way a tongue knows a bad tooth — there, and there, the dip by the deanery gate where the ground has settled, the loose one under the limes that I have meant to set straight since before the Queen's silver jubilee. I go slowly now. Not from sorrow, whatever you may think. From wind. There is a thing in my chest these days that catches when I climb, a little grit in the breath, and I know it the way I know a fault running blind through a block on the banker — by the sound it makes when I tap it. Stone-dust does that. It got my father at forty-three and old Crale before seventy and it is taking its sweet time with me, which I count a courtesy, all things considered, after what I gave it.

I stop where I always stop. I can't help it. A man walks toward a thing for sixty years and on the morning he means to walk past it his legs make the turn without him.

The West Front.

They have got the scaffold up at last. It went up over the summer while I wasn't watching, a great white cliff of it, alloy and netting and yellow boards, climbing the full height of the two towers and bridging across between them so that the front of Saint Ediva's stands behind it now like a face behind a fishing net. Underneath, in their tiers, the Company of Heaven. Four hundred of them, the guidebook says, though I have never counted and I doubt the guidebook has either — kings and saints and prophets and the small fierce angels they tucked in the spandrels where the carver could be cheeky, rank on rank of them rising up into the cold, and a good half, on the weather side, with no faces at all. Just stone. A shoulder, a fold of robe cut sharp as the day they laid it, a hand still holding the stump of a crozier — and then, above the collar, nothing. A blank. A smooth grieved oval the rain has rubbed featureless, the way the sea rubs a stone, patient, patient, until Saint Whoever-He-Was stands up there ninety feet in the air with no more face to him than an egg.

They are going to give them new ones. That is what the scaffold is for. A whole campaign of it, years of it, young hands up there cutting new faces for the blind saints out of fresh Cawdale stone, and the thought of it does something to me I won't dress up for you. I carved replacements myself, the last time, in the seventies and again after the cleaning — I know the cold of that stone and the particular meanness of a north wind at a hundred feet, working into the cuff of your glove. I know whose hands were up there before mine, too, because I worked beside their marks for a lifetime. And I am, I find, the only one left who does.

That is not a brag. It is nearer a confession. I am the last man living who worked the saving of the Lantern — the last of the lodge that held this place together through the bad decades, the acid years, the years the great crossing tower took it into its head to come down on us and we wouldn't let it. The others are in the cloister garth now under their own neat stones, and good marks they were, every one. I am what's left. A man at the weather side of his own life, you might say, with the faces wearing off him too.

"Mr. Hale?"

I don't turn straight off. Old men have that liberty.

She comes round into my eye instead — a young woman, slight, in the bright synthetic coat they all wear now, a tablet held flat against her chest the way you'd hold a hymnal, and a lanyard with the diocesan crest on it, which means she belongs here, or is meant to. Dark, quick face. Tired about the eyes in a way I don't like to see on the young; I have worn that look and I know what it costs to get it before thirty. She has a smear of stone-dust dried pale along one knuckle, and I will own that is the thing that stops me telling her to clear off.

"Thomas Hale," she says again, more sure of it now. "I'm Wren. Wren Adeyemi. I'm on the West Front." She tips her chin up at the scaffold, at all those blind saints. "The Clerk said — he said you carved the last replacements. The ones from the seventies, and after the cleaning. He said you're the only person alive who'd know the recent stone from the inside."

"The Clerk," I say, "talks a deal for a man paid to keep a rota."

It doesn't land. She has the grace not to laugh at a thing that isn't funny, which I mark in her favour. She just stands there in the frost with her breath smoking, holding the tablet, looking at me the way you look at a block you've been told is sound and aren't sure of.

"I need you to teach me to read it," she says.

Plain as that. Not would you possibly and not I'd be ever so grateful — none of the soft cloth they wrap a thing in when they want it. Just the want itself, laid on the bench.

"Read it," I say.

"The building. The stone." She shifts the tablet. "I can survey it. I've got it modelled to the millimetre, every block, every loss — I could show you the whole front on here, turn it about, measure the decay to a tenth of a year." A small bitter twist of the mouth at her own machine. "And I can't read a word of it. I don't know why this saint's gone to nothing and the one beside him, same stone, same weather, same nine hundred years, is sharp as Tuesday. I don't know which way the grain runs in a block before I put a chisel to it. I can copy a face. I can't tell what the stone wants." She stops. The cold has got into her voice and she lets it. "You cannot mend what you cannot read. And the people who could read it are —" She doesn't finish. She doesn't need to. She tips her head at the cloister, at all my friends under their grass, and she has the sense to leave it there.

It is a good speech. It is, in fact, very near the only thing anyone has said to me in a twelvemonth that I'd have walked across the close to hear. And that is exactly why I do what I do, which is to start away from her.

Because she does not know what she is asking for. She thinks she is asking for a tutorial. A morning or two of an old man pointing at blocks — that's a delamination, dear, that's the bed running wrong, mind that one's been face-bedded and it'll shed in your lifetime. She thinks the building is a thing you can be shown. She has it modelled to the millimetre and she thinks that is the building. She doesn't know it is sixty years of buried things. She doesn't know that you cannot put your hand flat on that West Front and not feel, under the cold of it, every man who put his hand there before you, and what it cost them, and who they loved, and where they hid it. She is asking me to open a door I have kept shut so long the hinges have grown into the jamb.

"I'm retired," I say, over my shoulder. "Six years. They'll have keener teachers than a deaf old wreck. Ask the Surveyor."

"The Surveyor sent me to the Clerk. The Clerk sent me to you."

"Then you've come to the end of the line, haven't you," I say, and I mean it for the close of it, and I turn up Vicars' Row toward my own door.

She follows me. Of course she follows me. They are like that, the good ones — and she is one of the good ones, God help her, I can see it already in the set of her, the way she takes a thing in her teeth. She doesn't crowd me and she doesn't keep up the asking, which would have lost her. She just comes along a half-step behind, quiet, up the little brick row where the vicars-choral lived three hundred years before they gave the cottages to such of the fabric's old servants as had nowhere else to fall, which is to say to me. My door is the green one with the paint going at the bottom rail. I get my key up — slow, the cold's in the knuckle — and I am two breaths from being shut of her.

And she stops at the window.

I know what's caught her before she says it. There is only the one thing in that window worth a second look, and it is the thing I have not got round to, in fifty-six years, to taking down.

It hangs in the small lower pane on a twist of old lead wire, where it has hung since the day I drove the nail: a single diamond of glass, no bigger than my palm, the deep blue you only got in the old pots, with a vine-leaf painted on it in a brown line so fine and so sure it might have grown there. The morning is straight through it. It throws a little blue lozenge of light onto the sill, onto the dust on the sill, and the dust hangs in the beam the way it does, turning, the way I have watched dust turn in a shaft of cathedral light ten thousand mornings of my life.

"That's a quarry," she says.

I stop with the key in the lock.

"A glass quarry," she says, and there is a different note in her now, surprise gone soft. "A painted one. That's — that's old, that. Fourteenth century?" She leans to it, not touching, hands behind her back, which is the right way and tells me more about her than the lanyard did. "I didn't expect a mason to keep glass."

Quarry. There's a word for you. It means the pit up at Cawdale where they cut the very stone this front is built of, the great grassed-over wound in the hill we have opened and closed and opened again every time the cathedral needed feeding. And it means this — this one small leaded diamond of light in my window. Same word. The pit and the pane. The thing dug heavy out of the dark and the thing that lets the light through. I have had sixty years to think on that and I am not done thinking on it yet.

"A glass-painter gave me that," I hear myself say.

I had not meant to. That is the plain truth of it; I had the key turned and my shoulder to the door and the words were out in the cold air between us before I'd given them leave. A glass-painter gave me that. And it is nothing, it is six words, and it is the most I have said about her aloud to any living soul since the boat went, and something in the saying of it — in standing on my own step with a tired young stranger and hearing my own voice put it into the morning — turns over in me like a key in a lock that has not been tried in years.

The dust goes round in the blue light. Wren says nothing. That, too, is the right thing, and I think she knows it is.

"Fifty-six years ago," I say. "Coming up fifty-seven." And then, because the door is open in me now and I have not the strength this morning to put my shoulder to it again: "She made that. Or her father's hand and her eye, which came to the same in the end. She put more of herself in the leading of one window than most men get into a whole — " I stop. I look at the leaf. The brown line of it, so sure. "Never mind."

But it is too late for never mind. We both hear it.

I get the door open at last and the warm fust of the cottage comes out — coke and old wool and the liniment, the smell of one old man — and I stand half in and half out of it with the key cold in my fist, and Wren Adeyemi stands at my window with the leaf-light on her face, and she asks me again. Gently this time. She has stopped being a conservator with a leaving-date and a model to the millimetre. She is just asking.

"Will you teach me to read it? The stone?"

And I find I have crossed back to the window without deciding to. I put my hand flat on the cold glass over the leaf, over the blue, the way you'd lay a hand on a beast to quiet it, the way I have laid my hand on ten thousand stones to feel for the fault, and the morning comes through the quarry and lights the dust between her face and mine, the light through the dust, light and dust, which are the two things I have spent my whole life standing in.

"I'll do better than teach you the stone," I tell her, and my voice is not quite my own. "I'll teach you to read it the way it was read into me. But you can't read a building" — I take my hand off the glass and the blue lozenge falls back onto the sill where it has fallen every morning of fifty-six years — "until you know whose hands were on it before yours, and that means I'd best start in nineteen fifty-two, at the lodge door, with my father a year in the ground and the dust already in the family."

The Lodge Door

My father came home from no war; he stayed here and let this building kill him slowly instead, a fixer mason with the dust in his lungs by forty and gone by forty-three, and the first thing I ever understood about the cathedral was that it eats its men, and the second thing, which took me sixty years, was that they let it, gladly, and that I would be one of them.

We lived in Coffin Lane, which was its proper name on the rate-book and not a thing children invented, three rooms down the hill from the close where the streets ran narrow and the gutters ran most of the year and the cathedral stood up over the chimney-pots like the moon stands over a yard, too big to be looked at and too near to be ignored. You could not get away from it. It was at the end of every street that ran the right way, and the bells came down into the rooms at all hours whether you wanted them or not, and on a still morning, if the wind came off the Lench, you could smell the river and the lime both, which is the smell of Aldermere and the smell of my whole life, and I will not pretend it is a holy smell. It is wet stone and cold water and a faint sourness off the slaking-pit. I have smelled it in my sleep for seventy years.

My father I remember in pieces, the way you remember a man you loved before you knew you were going to lose him and so never thought to look at him properly. Big hands. A way of holding his thumb against a thing to see if it was true. The white of the dust in the creases of his neck on a Saturday after he had washed and the dust still there, because you do not wash that out, it has gone in. He was a fixer, which is the man who goes up — the banker mason cuts the stone at the bench down in the warm, and the fixer takes it up the scaffold and sets it forty, sixty, a hundred feet in the wind, and beds it true, and it is the fixers the building takes first, partly the falls and mostly the dust, because the dust is worst in the high cramped places where the wind cannot reach to carry it off and a man breathes the same gritted air all day with his face a hand's breadth from the cut. He coughed. That is the plain of it. He coughed for years and we stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing the bells, and then it changed, the way it does, got down lower and wetter, and by the time I was eleven he was not going up any more, he was in the back room in the daylight hours when a working man has no business being in a back room, and the cough had the whole house listening to it though none of us said so.

He was three years dying and then he was a morning. I will not make a scene of it. He went in the spring, with the window open because he wanted the air, and the bells going for something, I forget what, and that is the truth of how the building takes its men — not in one grand fall with the city watching, but a little at a time, in a back room, with the bells going for somebody else.

So then there was my mother.

Nan Hale. She went up the hill and took the only steady work there was within reach of the rooms, which was cleaning in the cathedral that had killed her husband — on her knees in the choir with a bucket, polishing the brasses of men dead five hundred years, dusting the very dust, you might say, that had got into Walter. I never once heard her say a hard word about the place. She was clear about it, mind. She knew exactly what it was. I came in once, a small boy, and found her stopped in the south aisle with her cloth in her hand and her head back, looking up the way I would later be caught looking up, and when she felt me there she did not pretend. "It took your father," she said, plain as telling me the kettle was on, "and it's feeding you. Both of those are true. Don't you go thinking you have to choose which." Then she went back to her brass. She kept us within sight of it because it was the only thing near enough to keep us fed, and she fed us on it, and that is the whole of what I have to say about whether the cathedral is a good thing or a bad one. It is both, and it does not care, and you eat.

I went up to the lodge in the spring of 1952, fifteen years old, with my father a year in the ground and the dust already in the family, on the strength of a dead man's name. That was all I had to take up the hill. Not a skill, not a letter, not a thing in my two hands. A name. Walter Hale's lad. My mother brushed my collar in the doorway and did not come with me, which I understood even then was a kindness and a hardness both, the way most of what she did was, and she said, "Speak when you're spoken to and not before, and if Mr Crale takes you, you mind you do whatever he sets you, however low it is, and you don't ask for better. The asking comes later. The doing comes first." Then she sent me off and shut the door so I would not see her face, or so she would not see mine.

You came at the works from the close side, through a door in the precinct wall that did not look like anything, and then you were in it, and it was another country.

I had grown up under the cathedral and I had never seen the works. Nobody had told me. The yard was stacked man-high with new stone, raw Cawdale off the hills, that pale gold limestone the whole building is made of, gone grey and black with age up on the walls but here in the yard fresh-quarried and the colour of a winter sun, block on block on block with the quarry-faces still rough on them and the boning-marks chalked on. There must have been forty ton of it standing in that yard. The war was not long over and the building had been hurt and the money had come at last to mend it, and every man who could hold a mallet was on, and the noise — I had not thought stone would have a noise. It rang. A dozen bankers under a dozen iron mallets, tink, tink, tink, not together but all at once, a sound like a wood full of metal birds, and under it the rasp of the saws and somewhere a man singing flat and not minding. And the dust. The dust hung in the doorlight in a gold slant, the morning sun coming in low through the big shed doors and the lime-dust drifting up through it slow as smoke, every particle of it lit, and that — God forgive me, that is the kind of thing they put on the postcards now. The truth was plainer. My eyes were already stinging from it and I had not been there three minutes, and I thought, with no poetry in me at all, this is what got into my father, and I was right, and it is getting into me now, these seventy years on, the same gold dust, and the doctor in the town has a long Latin name for it but I call it what the trade calls it. It is the tithe. The building takes a tithe of every man who loves it, and it takes it out of the lungs, and I am paying mine as I tell you this.

But I am getting on ahead of the boy in the yard, which is a fault of old men.

Up the south side the scaffold went the whole height of the transept, larch poles lashed with rope and the boards bouncing, because in 1942 a single incendiary bomb had come down through that roof one night and burned the lead off the timbers and brought the whole south transept ceiling into the building, and ten years on they were still putting it right, stone by stone, the new gold Cawdale going in among the old black, so that the wall was piebald, mended and unmended, like a thing recovering. I did not know any of that then. I knew there was a great hole high up with men in it.

And over all of it, where the four arms of the building cross, the Lantern.

I will try to tell it the way it came to a frightened boy and not the way I know it now. You come in under the crossing and the whole weight of the place gathers and goes up, and where you expect the dark of a tower roof there is instead light — a great octagon of stone lifting clear of the roofs and glazed all round, so that the day comes down into the very middle of the building from above, eighty foot of falling light, and the dust I have told you of drifting up to meet it. It is why they call her the cathedral of light. It is the reason the building has a name at all worth saying. And I stood under it with my cap in my two hands and my neck cricked back and I forgot, entirely, that I had come to ask a man for work.

"You'll be Walter Hale's lad."

He had come up on me without my hearing, which is a thing he could do all his life despite the limp, and the limp is its own story and I will come to it. Josiah Crale. Old then — getting on for sixty-five, I worked out later, though to me he was simply old, the oldest-seeming man I had met, with a face like a quarry-face, all hard planes and the grain showing, and pale eyes in it gone the colour the stone goes after a hundred years. He looked at me a long moment. Longer than the looking needed. I did not understand that look for years — I thought it was him weighing whether I'd be any use, and only long after, when he told me on his deathbed what he owed my father and how he came to owe it, did I understand that the long look was a man seeing a ghost in a boy's face and squaring up to a debt. But that is Chapter the later. Then it was only an old man looking at me too long, and me going hot under it.

"Yes, sir," I said. "Thomas, sir."

He did not say he was sorry about my father. Masons don't, or that kind don't. He said, "Can you push a barrow without tipping it," and I said yes though I'd never pushed one, and he said, "We'll see," and that was the whole of my hiring. No letter, no shaking of hands. He turned and walked off with that dip in his stride and I understood I was to follow, and I followed, into the next sixty years.

He set me to the bottom of everything, as my mother had said he would, and I am glad of it now and was not then. I slaked lime, which is taking the burnt lime and adding the water, and it boils and spits and smokes and will take the skin off you if you're a fool, and I was a fool twice and learned. I wheeled stone from the yard to the bankers and the spoil from the bankers to the heap, barrow after barrow till my arms shook on the handles. I swept the banker shop — and a banker shop makes dust the way a fire makes smoke, it is the whole business of the place, and I swept it morning and night and my hands split across the palms from the broom and the lime both, split and bled and dried and split again, until they grew the skin a mason's hands grow, which is not like other men's skin. I have it yet. You could strike a match on my palm.

And I was ready to hate it. I want that put down honestly. I was an orphaned boy doing a dead man's penance in the place that had killed him, for next to no money, sweeping the very dust that I half knew was a slow sentence, and some nights I went down the hill with my hands wrapped in rag and thought I would not go back up, and went back up. It was the only work near enough to keep my mother and the little ones fed. So I would have hated it, I think, and become one of those men the trade is full of who give it their bodies and never their hearts, except for one afternoon in my first month, when Crale caught me.

I had stopped in the nave with the broom in my hands. I had not meant to. I was crossing with the broom and the sun came down out of the Lantern just then the way it does in the afternoon, and the dust I had raised went up into it, my own sweepings turned to gold in the falling light, and I put my head back and I was gone — lost in it, the height and the light and the stone going up and up past every reasonable place a man builds to — and I stood there dead still in the middle of the nave like the simpleton I was, with the work undone in my hands.

I waited for the cuff. Crale had a way of clouting a daydreaming boy that left your ear ringing for an hour, and I had earned it, and I braced. It did not come. He came and stood beside me. He put his own head back, the old man, and looked up where I was looking, and for a while he said nothing at all, and we two stood there under the Lantern like a pair of fools in the gold and the dust, the master and the lowest barrow-boy in the yard, and not a word.

Then he told me who had raised it, and when. He told it the way another man might tell you the history of his own family, which I came to understand it was. He told me the octagon went up about the year thirteen hundred and forty, after the old square tower over the crossing had fallen in the night and very nearly taken the whole building down with it, and that the men of that age, instead of building the square tower back the same and waiting for it to fall again, had done a madder and a braver thing and thrown up the great glazed octagon you could not believe stood at all, eighty foot of stone and glass balanced over the void on timbers and faith, and that it had stood now six hundred years.

"And here's the thing, boy," he said, "that you want to get hold of, if you're stopping." He did not look at me. He kept his eyes up in the light. "Not one of the men who began this church ever saw it finished. Not one. They laid the first stone of it down there"— he nodded out west, towards the front—"the best part of nine hundred years gone, and the man who laid it was dead and his sons were dead before there was a roof over the choir. They worked their whole lives on a thing they knew, they knew, they would never see done. Every man on this job's been doing it ever since. I'll not see the south transept finished, like enough. You might. You'll start things you'll not see the end of, if you're any good. That's not the pity of the trade." He said it harder. "That's the trade. The whole of it. You take that out and there's nothing left but wages."

It went into me like a chisel goes into a true stone — one tap, and in, and no taking it back out. I was fifteen and I could not have said a word of why. I have spent the rest of my life finding the words, and I am not sure I have them yet.

He let the silence sit. Then he nodded once, up into the Lantern, towards the very top of the vault where the eight ribs come together far up in the falling light and a single carved boss holds the whole weight of it.

"The man who set the keystone of that vault," Crale said, "was an old man when he cut it, and dead before they struck the centring out from under and saw whether it would stand. He never knew if it held. We are standing under his faith, boy, and he never knew our names — and that," he said, "is who you work for. Not the Dean. Not me. Not your wage. Them as comes after."

And I stood there, fifteen and orphaned and afraid, my split hands round a broom and my father a year in the cold ground, and something took hold in me in that gold and dusty light that I have spent the rest of my life unable to set down, and have never once been free of, and would not be free of now if I could.