'If you say so.'
Either the choirmaster objected to being addressed like a comrade or resented not having had his wellnigh incomparably straightforward name pronounced. His dissatisfaction was plain as he gestured boys out of the stalls row by row. Fergal was among the last to be marched past the amused orchestra, who were within earshot when Brother Cox caught up with him. 'O'Shea,' the choirmaster demanded, and even louder 'Shea.'
'It's Shaw, sir.'
'Never mind that now. You've little enough reason to want anyone knowing who you are when you can't keep your eyes where you're told. Maybe you were dreaming you'll be singing low tomorrow, so let me tell you a boy from this very church will be taking Harty's place. A prize soloist, so don't you go thinking you're the equal of him.'
On the coach he renewed his disapproval. 'I want every boy's eye on me tomorrow from the instant he opens his_ mouth. There'll be no sheets for you to be consulting. After your dinners we'll spend all the time that's needed till every single one of you is letter perfect.'
The choir groaned as much as they dared, and some of the boys who'd heard Fergal being told off glared at him as if he'd brought this further burden on them. The coach wound its way through the narrow Surrey lanes to the school where the choir was suffering a second night. The boys who ordinarily put up with it had gone home for Easter, but the monks they'd got away from had remained, prowling the stony corridors with their hands muffled in their black sleeves while they spied out sinful boys or boys about to sin or capable of thinking of it. The choir had hardly taken refuge in the dormitories when they were summoned to dinner, a plateful each of lumps of stringy mutton that several mounds of almost indistinguishable vegetables applied themselves to hiding. The lucky vegetarians were served the same without the lumps but with the gravy. Some of the resident monks waved loaded forks to encourage their guests to eat, and the oldest monk emitted sounds of what must have passed in his case for pleasure. After the meal, even the prospect of rehearsal came as almost a relief.
Brother Cox made the choir sit on benches in the draughty bare school hall and repeat the stream of nonsense Simon Clay deserved to be cursed for, and then he collected the pages with the words on and mimed trying to lift an invisible object with the palms of his hands to urge the choir to chant the whole thing again, and yet again. He mustn't have believed they could have learned it so perfectly, because he tried requiring each boy to speak it by himself. When it came to Fergal's turn the boy felt as though all the echoes of the repetitions were swooping about inside his head, describing the patterns of the absent music, and he only had to let them become audible through his mouth. 'Nac rofup taif gnicam tuss snid...' He didn't even realize he'd finished until Brother Cox gave him a curt nod.
By the time Brother Cox dismissed the choir they were so exhausted that hardly anyone could be bothered with horseplay in the communal bathroom. As Fergal crawled under the blankets of the hard narrow bed halfway down the dormitory, a long room with dark green glossy walls as naked as its light bulbs, he wondered if anyone else was continuing to hear the echoes of the last rehearsal.
There was only one kind of dream he wanted to have in the intimate warmth of the blankets, but the echoes wouldn't let it begin to take shape. They seemed to gather themselves as he sank into sleep - seemed to focus into just three voices, one to either side of him and one ahead. That in front of him began to lead him forwards while the others were left behind. Soon he was outside time and deep in a dream.
He was trudging towards a mountain range across a white desert that felt more like salt than sand. He'd been in the wilderness, his instincts told him, for three times thirteen days. He was bound for the highest mountain, a peak so lofty that the river which rushed down its glittering sheer slopes appeared to be streaming out of the bright clouds that crowned it. He thought he might never reach the water that would quench his thirst and lead him to the mystery veiled by the shining clouds, but in a breath the dream brought him to the river. It darkened as he drank from it and bathed in it, because he was following it downwards through a cavern he knew was the mountain turned inside out and upside down. Surely it was only in a dream that a river could run to the centre of the world, which would show him the centre of the universe, the revelation he'd journeyed so far and fasted so long to reach. Now, at the end of a descent too prolonged and frightful to remember, he was there, and the blackness was glowing with an illumination only his eyes could see. Around him the walls of the cavern were fretted like jaws piled on jaws, ridged as if the rock might be the skeleton of the world. Ahead was a pool so deep and dark he knew it was no longer water - knew the river was feeding a hole so black it could swallow the universe. A figure was rising from it, robed in rock that flowed like water. Was the universe creating it just as it had created the universe? Its eyes glinted at him, more than twice too many of them, and he struggled to awaken, to avoid seeing more. But he could hear its voices too, and didn't know whether his mind was translating them or trying to fend them off. In its image, he found himself repeating, in its image—
Brother Cox wakened him. 'Get up now. Sluggards, every one of you. Rising bright and early is a praise to God.'
He sounded so enraged that at first, bewildered by appar-endy having dreamed all night, Fergal thought the choirmaster was berating him for the dream. At breakfast, chunks of porridge drowning in salt water, it became clearer why he was infuriated, as the head monk flourished a newspaper at him while trying to placate him. 'I just wanted to be certain you're aware what you and your charges will be involved with, Brother Cox.'
'I'm aware right enough, aware as God can make me.
Aware of how the godless media love to stain the reputations of the saints and anybody with a bit of holiness about them.' Brother Cox said no more until he'd gulped every chunk of his porridge, and then he sprang off the bench. 'If you'll excuse me now, I've a coach driver needs phoning to be sure he presents himself on time.'
After a few moments of staring at the abandoned newspaper Kilfoyle ventured to say 'Sir, can I read it?'
The head monk pursed his thin pale lips. 'Perhaps you should.'
Since Kilfoyle was by no means a speedy reader, when he didn't take long over it Fergal knew he'd given up. The newspaper was passed along the table, making increasingly brief stops, until it arrived in front of Fergal. Of course the article was about Simon Clay - all the stuff Harty's parents had objected to. Fergal was making to pass the paper to O'Hagan when the headline stopped him. Clay's First Symphony: What Kind of Pilgrimage? The question reminded him of his dream, and he read on.
It was mostly information he couldn't have cared less about. Simon Clay had revived the classical church symphony, starting with his Second . . . He'd composed nothing but religious music ... During his lifetime he'd maintained that his first symphony was lost . .. Before he was ordained a priest he'd been a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and the original score had recently been discovered among the papers of a fellow occultist, Peter Grace ... It hadn't previously been identified as Clay's work because he had signed it with his occult name, Indigator Fontis, Seeker of the Source . .. Grace had scrawled a comment on the first page: 'fruit of the secret pilgrimage' . . . One wonders (wrote the critic) whether Clay's subsequent output was a prolonged attempt to repudiate this score and its implications. Yet the issues are less simple than has been stridently suggested by some members of the press. Underlying Clay's determination to outdo his contemporary Scriabin in terms of passion and ecstasy writ large and loud (Fergal no longer knew why he was bothering to read) is a radical attempt, so harmonically daring as almost to engage with atonality, to create a musical structure expressive of the cosmic balance to which the title alludes, a structure to which the sub-audible line of the third movement is crucial. Given that Clay wrote above this line the comment 'Never to be heard'—