‘OK?’ he whispered, as they neared the place.
‘Mm-mm.’
She had been disappointed to hear that the concert was not to take place in the school itself. She would have liked to see Daddy’s place of work; to have entered the classrooms with their wooden desks, smelt the chalk and the polish; heard the echo of their footsteps against the wooden floors. Later, she was allowed those things. But this event was to take place in the nearby chapel, with the St Oswald’s choristers, and her father conducting, which she understood to mean guiding, somehow; showing the singers the way.
It was a cold, damp evening that smelt of smoke. From the road came the sounds of cars and bicycle bells and people talking, muffled almost to nothing in the foggy air. In spite of her winter coat she was cold; her thin-soled shoes squelching against the gravel path, and droplets of moisture in her hair. Fog makes the outside feel smaller, somehow; just as the wind expands the world, making the trees rustle and soar. That evening Emily felt very small, squashed down almost to nothing by the dead air. From time to time someone passed her — she felt the swish of a lady’s dress, or it might have been a Master’s gown — and heard a snatch of conversation before they were once more swept away.
‘Won’t it be crowded, Patrick? Emily doesn’t like crowds.’ That was Catherine again, her voice tight as the bodice of Emily’s best party dress, which was pretty (and pink) and which had been brought from storage for one last outing before she outgrew it completely.
‘It’s fine. You’ve got front-row seats.’
As a matter of fact Emily didn’t mind crowds. It was the noise she didn’t like: those flat and blurry voices that confused everything and turned everything around. She took hold of her father’s hand, rather tightly, and squeezed. A single pump meant I love you. A double-pump, I love you, too. Another of their small secrets, like the fact that she could almost span an octave if she bounced her hand over the keys, and play the lead line of Für Elise while her father played the chords.
It was cool inside the chapel. Emily’s family didn’t attend church — though their neighbour, Mrs Brannigan, did — and she had been inside St Mary’s once, just to hear the echo. St Oswald’s Chapel sounded like that; their steps slap-slapped on the hard, smooth floor, and all the sounds in the place seemed to go up, like people climbing an echoey staircase and talking as they went.
Daddy told her later that it was because the ceiling was so high, but at the time she imagined that the choir would be sitting above her, like angels. There was a scent, too; something like Feather’s patchouli, but stronger and smokier.
‘That’s incense,’ said her father. ‘They burn it in the sanctuary.’
Sanctuary. He’d explained that word. A place to go where you can be safe. Incense and Clan tobacco and angels’ voices. Sanctuary.
There was movement all around them now. People were talking, but in lower voices than usual, as if they were afraid of the echoes. As Daddy went to join the choristers and Catherine described the organ and pews and windows for her, Emily heard wishwishwish from all around the hall, then a series of settling-down noises, then a hush as the choir began to sing.
It was as if something had broken open inside her. This, and not the piece of clay, is Emily’s first memory: sitting in St Oswald’s Chapel with the tears running down her face and into her smiling mouth, and the music, the lovely music, surging all around her.
Oh, it was not the first time that she had ever heard music; but the homely rinkety-plink of their old piano, or the tinny transistors of the kitchen radio, could not convey more than a particle of this. She had no name for what she could hear, no terms with which to describe this new experience. It was, quite simply, an awakening.
Later her mother tried to embellish the tale, as if it needed embellishment. She herself had never really enjoyed religious music — Christmas carols least of all, with their simple tunes and mawkish lyrics. Something by Mozart would have been much more suitable, with its implication of like calling to like, though the legend has a dozen variations — from Mozart to Mahler and even to the inevitable Berlioz — as if the complexity of the music had any bearing on the sounds themselves, or the sensations they evoked.
In fact the piece was nothing more than a four-part a cappella version of an old Christmas carol.
But there is something unique about boys’ voices; a tremulous quality, not entirely comfortable, perpetually on the brink of losing pitch. It is a sound that combines an almost inhuman sweetness of tone with a raw edge that is nearly painful.
She listened in silence for the first few bars, unsure of what she was hearing. Then the voices rose again:
And on the second snow the voices grazed that note, the high F sharp that had always been a point of mysterious pressure in her, and Emily began to cry. Not from sorrow or even from emotion; it was simply a reflex, like that cramping of the tastebuds after eating something very sour, or the gasp of fresh chilli against the back of the throat.
Snow on snow, snow on snow they sang, and everything in her responded. She shivered; she smiled; she turned her face to the invisible roof and opened her mouth like a baby bird, half-expecting to feel the sounds like snowflakes falling on her tongue. For almost a minute Emily sat trembling on the edge of her seat, and every now and then the boys’ voices would rise to that strange F sharp, that magical ice-cream-headache note, and the tears would spill once more from her eyes. Her lower lip tingled; her fingers were numb. She felt as if she were touching God —
‘Emily, what is it?’
She could not reply. Only the sounds mattered.
‘Emily!’
Every note seemed to cut into her in some delicious way; every chord a miracle of texture and shape. More tears fell.
‘Something’s wrong.’ Catherine’s voice came from a great distance. ‘Feather, please. I’m taking her home.’ Emily felt her starting to move; tugging at her coat, which she had been using as a cushion. ‘Get up, sweetheart, we shouldn’t have come.’
Was that satisfaction in her voice? Her hand on Emily’s forehead was feverish and clammy. ‘She’s burning up. Feather, give me a hand—’
‘No!’ whispered Emily.
‘Emily, darling, you’re upset.’
‘Please—’ But now her mother was picking her up; Catherine’s arms were around her. She caught a fleeting smell of turpentine behind the expensive perfume. Desperately she searched for something, some magic, to make her mother stop: something that would convey the urgency, the imperative to stay, to listen . . .