The Bell Tower Read online

  There were only a few photos in the envelopes and they did not tell Maeve anything she did not already know. Some of them showed her parents looking happy and with their arms round one another, and Maeve put out a tentative finger to trace the smiling faces, and with her other hand curled her fingers, as if she was expecting to feel her mother or her father clasp her hand. Stupid, of course.

  There was a small beaded evening bag, which her mother had sometimes used for dressed-up parties. Inside were a handkerchief and a comb. Maeve pressed the handkerchief to her cheek, smelling the scent her mother had used, which was called Intimate. There were a few pieces of jewellery – one was a narrow string of corals, which Maeve thought her mother had been wearing the night of the car crash. She let the bright, hard beads fall between her fingers, thinking she would never want to wear it herself, but that she would keep it. There were some cufflinks of her father’s, as well, and the leather strap of his watch. This was starting to be dreadfully sad and she was beginning to wish she had not looked.

  She was about to close the box and go back downstairs when she saw a small oblong of something that had slipped into a corner. A cassette. Maeve lifted it out. The plastic cover was scratched, but the tape itself looked all right. There was no label of any kind, and Maeve thought it was not a pre-recorded cassette – her parents had liked music, all kinds of music, and they had had a lot of cassettes which they played. But this was the kind of cassette that people bought as a blank, so they could record their own music.

  She sat on the floor holding the cassette for a very long time then, moving slowly and quietly so that Aunt Eifa would not hear her, she took it along to her own bedroom. Music did not form any part of life at Cliff House, but Maeve had a small cassette player and radio and there was a slightly battered piano in a small downstairs room, which Aunt Eifa said had belonged to her grandmother or her great-grandmother, she was not sure which. She thought music a waste of time, though, and she was apt to stomp around the room loudly and intrusively if Maeve played any of her cassettes. She did not like the radio, either – nothing but a lot of caterwauling noise, she said – so Maeve only played her cassettes and her radio in her bedroom, keeping the volume low.

  She waited until Aunt Eifa went on one of the long walks she took at least twice a week, then she shut herself in her bedroom and took out the cassette from her parents’ box. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the tape for a long time. There was probably nothing of any interest to hear. But supposing there was one of those messages people recorded to be played after they were dead? Maeve did not know if she wanted to hear that, but then she thought she could not bear to wonder about it and not know what it was.

  Before she could change her mind, she slotted the tape into the player and pressed the Play button firmly.

  FOUR

  At first there was only the whirring of the tape, then, startlingly and clearly, her mother’s voice, blurred with laughter, said, ‘I’ll only do it if you promise not to laugh and put me off.’

  It brought Maeve’s mother back so vividly that for a moment she thought she could not listen to any more. But her mother sounded happy, and Maeve would like to have this previously unknown, happy memory of her, so she left the tape running.

  Then her father’s voice came. He said, ‘I can’t promise I won’t laugh. But I’m going to record you singing. You can take it to your lunch party tomorrow and play it to the twinset-and-pearls brigade. It’ll liven them up a bit.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that kind of music, Rufus. I think it’s sad music.’

  ‘Then we’ll jazz it up. Let me see it properly … Good God, what language is it, for pity’s sake? It looks like best-quality gibberish.’

  ‘Or Elvish,’ said Maeve’s mother, and she suddenly sounded perfectly clear and sober. ‘Like Lord of the Rings.’

  ‘It looks more like Lord of the Flies,’ said Maeve’s father. ‘And they’re spattered all over the paper as if they’ve been swatted.’

  ‘It’s not spattered flies, it’s just very old,’ said Maeve’s mother. ‘It’s called “Thaisa’s Song” – it says so on the score. But it’s no use you trying to join in, because you won’t be able to pronounce a quarter of the words, especially not in your current condition. How on earth much have you had to drink this evening?’

  ‘How on earth much have you, if it comes to that?’

  ‘I haven’t been counting, but let’s have another one before we start.’

  There was a pause, filled with rustlings and chinkings of glass. Maeve understood her parents had been a bit drunk and giggly, which would have been embarrassing if she had been there at the time, but was not, somehow, embarrassing now.

  Then her mother’s voice said, ‘All right, I’m ready. Are you going to try picking out the notes on the piano?’

  ‘Yes, it looks simple enough – I ought to be able to sight-read it.’ There was the sound of old, brittle paper being rustled.

  ‘Switch the Record thing on,’ said Maeve’s mother.

  ‘I have. It’s been running for the last five minutes. Stop pissing around and get on with it.’

  There was another of the pauses, then the singing began. And at once Maeve, sitting cross-legged on her bed, felt as if she had been plunged into black, icy water.

  Her mother had had a good voice – she had taught Maeve songs from her own childhood, and they used to sing them together. She often sang to the radio or records as well. But today her voice on the cassette sounded different. It was almost as if something outside of her was trying to break through and make itself heard.

  Maeve’s father was picking out the tune on the piano – a note, a chord at a time. He was quite a keen pianist, although Maeve sometimes thought he was not very good. He was not very good now; he had said the music looked simple enough to sight-read, but he kept stumbling and missing the notes so that it sounded as if the music was splintering. Then quite suddenly he seemed to understand it, and to play more confidently.

  The music made Maeve think of freezing winter mornings when the frost traced patterns on the windows and your fingers burned from the cold if you forgot your gloves. Despite that, it was the most beautiful music she had ever heard.

  She understood what her father had meant when he called the words gibberish, because they did not form any pattern she recognized. They were certainly in a foreign language, although she had no idea what it was. She had just started French at school, but this was not French. The words were like thin glinting silver, coiled tightly on a spool, unwinding because the music was forcing them to unwind. But her mother seemed at home with them, and as Maeve listened, she began to feel at home with them as well. In an extraordinary way, they were familiar – she even thought that if she tried hard enough she might be able to grasp that coiled silver string, and understand what the song was about …

  And then something deep within her mind did grasp it – not all at once, but in frayed fragments, a shred at a time, and the shreds and the fragments tumbled around in her brain like the coloured shards of a kaleidoscope. At first they did not make any sense. Then the colours fell down into their right places and she knew what the words were.

  Who is this, knocks on my tomb?

  Asks where and what I am,

  Who is this who calls to me?

  I cannot see nor hear.

  I cannot see, I cannot hear

  Who knocks upon my tomb.

  I cannot speak, I cannot reach

  The one stands by my tomb.

  Maeve was starting to feel pleased at having understood this – so pleased that it was almost blotting out the dreadful sadness at hearing her parents’ voices again – when something happened that drove all pleasure and all grief out, and left a cold, clamping fear.

  There were two voices on the recording. One was her mother’s, singing in that high, unfamiliar way, but there was a second voice: a voice that was thin and distant, and that struggled to form the words or understand the tune, so t
hat it was just a half-beat behind. Was that because this second singer could not see or hear – could only sense that someone knocked upon his – her? – tomb? But there was no one else in the room with her parents – that had been obvious.

  Then her mother stopped singing, and the tape whirred for another few seconds. Maeve’s father said, a bit uncertainly, ‘It’s a dreary old dirge, whatever the words mean. I didn’t think you’d be able to pronounce any of it, but you did.’

  ‘Did you understand any of it?’

  ‘No. Did you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Maeve’s mother, slowly, and Maeve knew at once that her mother had understood it all, just as she had understood it herself, but that she did not want to say so.

  Her father said, ‘Where on earth did you find it?’

  ‘I told you. It was in that box of stuff from Cliff House. That weird cousin I’ve got down there – Eifa Eynon. I helped her clear out an attic when I went down there last summer – and getting into the house was a miracle in itself, because she hardly ever lets anyone in. Don’t you remember? There was a fusty old box that had been my grandmother’s, or maybe even my great-grandmother’s. Somebody ages back, anyway. There was some marvellous old jewellery, and Eifa said I could have it and welcome, because she never wore jewellery. So I brought it home. And there, inside an old jewel case, was this music. “Thaisa’s Song”. Only—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to let the lunch crowd hear it, after all.’ She paused, and Maeve knew again that her mother had understood the words but was not going to tell her father. Then she said, ‘I think what I’ll do, I’ll listen to it again in the car on the way there, and decide if it’s really too dreary.’ There was the sound of the piano lid being closed.

  The next day Maeve’s mother went happily off to her lunch, taking the recording with her to play as she drove.

  ‘Enjoy yourself,’ said Maeve’s father.

  But Maeve’s mother never reached the lunch. On the way there her car crashed and she was killed outright in a tangle of crushed metal. Maeve’s father had to do something called ‘identifying the body’, and he came back to the house grey-faced and shaking and old. There was a bad moment when Maeve did not recognize him – she thought he was somebody else, because her father could not look old and grey and as if everything inside him had been cut out and thrown away.

  Two weeks later, still apparently stunned with grief and shock, he was found dead in his bed, an empty bottle of antidepressant pills on the bedside table, together with an empty bottle of whisky. Several of his wife’s belongings were scattered over the bed. Among them were a cassette and a sheet of music.

  The coroner said it was impossible to know if Maeve’s father had accidentally taken too many of the pills that had been prescribed to help him through the bereavement, or if it had been deliberate. He could not, though, believe that a good family man would commit suicide, leaving a small daughter alone in the world. His verdict, therefore, was Accidental Death.

  People said it was all appallingly tragic, unbelievable, a devastating loss to the nine-year-old Maeve, the poor mite. But what a mercy there had turned out to be a cousin in Dorset – somebody on the child’s mother’s side – who could take her.

  Maeve never told Aunt Eifa about ‘Thaisa’s Song’ – about how her mother had found the music in Cliff House and recorded it, or how Maeve herself had found the cassette and played it. She did not tell anyone about it, because she wanted to keep it for herself. It was a link to her parents – it was their voices on the tape. The strange thing, though, was that she found she did not want to play it again – not for a very long time; perhaps not ever.

  She had been at Cliff House for five months, and she was starting to become interested in school things. She was particularly interested in a project in the art class.

  ‘You’re all going to make a montage this term,’ the art teacher said. ‘It can be on any theme you like, but try to use lots of different things – different textures, scraps of fabric, photographs, pressed flowers, newspaper cuttings. Make it interesting and vivid, and unusual, and we’ll have an end-of-term display of the best ones.’

  At first Maeve could not think what to do for the montage, and Aunt Eifa was not very helpful; she thought projects and montages were nonsense. In her day people had been taught to read and write and do sums and that had been good enough. Maeve tried not to think that her mother would have been interested in the project, and made suggestions for it.

  But gradually she started to think that there was something in Rede Abbas that might make a really good project – something she could photograph and find out about. Something no one else might think about using.

  The ancient bell tower on the cliff ledge. The dark, ugly tower, from which the long-ago monks had tolled an immense bronze bell to call everyone to prayer.

  It had once been part of a long-ago monastery – somebody had come to school to give a talk about it – and Maeve had been interested in the story of the monks who had lived in a small house on the cliffside until the cliff began to crumble from the constant pounding of the sea. The monks had abandoned the place then, they had silenced the bell and made themselves a safer home a mile or so inland, but even after hundreds of years, a few fragments of that first monastery remained – there were traces of the walls. And there was the old bell tower.

  Maeve could see that stretch of the cliff from her bedroom. On some mornings she could see the tower jutting up from its shelf of rock like a decaying black stump, but there were other days when it was surrounded by sea mist, and evenings when the dusk hid it, so that it vanished altogether. Her mother would have spun stories about it – she would have said it was one of the darkly enchanted towers in fairy stories; somewhere that was not always there.

  Her father, wanting to interest his daughter in poetry, had read to her Robert Browning’s dark, menacing poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. He said she was too young to appreciate it entirely, but he would read it anyway and some of it might stick.

  Maeve had not understood very much of it, and she had shuddered over the lines about the hoary cripple with the malicious eye, waylaying travellers with his skull-like laugh, but she had loved listening to Dad reading it to her and explaining parts of it.

  When she came to live with Aunt Eifa and saw the bell tower for the first time, fragments of the poem came back to her. Of how no footprint had ever led into or out of it … How it was a squat turret, blind as a fool’s heart, and how the soil around it broke into substances like boils … Rede Abbas’s tower was not Childe Roland’s, Maeve knew that, but she thought it must be very like it. And making it the subject of her school project would be making a memory of her father, just as the cassette recording was a memory of her mother.

  She waited until Saturday afternoon when Aunt Eifa was busy in the garden, then put on her coat and fetched the camera her parents had given her on her last birthday. It had its own case with a strap and Maeve hung it around her neck and set off.

  Here was the path that wound past the old graveyard and then down to the cliff. She had never gone this far along the path before, and it was a bit scary, because it was like the darkling path Childe Roland had taken. She went past the graveyard, not looking in at the lopsided graves today. The path dipped steeply here because of the sea’s erosion, so she had to walk carefully. There were warning signs, telling people to be watchful, and sections of railings had been put on the seaward side to stop people falling over the cliff’s edge.

  At any moment she would see the tower. She recognized the curve in the path she could see from her bedroom window, and the stunted tree that was like a signpost pointing the way to the sea. Then she rounded the curve, and there it was below the path, stark and black against the cliffs, mist clinging to its wizened walls. Even from up here it looked remote and unreal, as if it might have been spun from black cobwebs. Maeve reminded herself that it was only a pile of black s
tones, with openings left at the top where the monks’ bell had clanged out.

  But it might still be Childe Roland’s Tower. It might be other things, as well. They were currently reading and discussing The Hobbit in English at school, and Maeve could see that Rede Abbas’s bell tower might easily be one of Mordor’s black turrets. It might stand directly over the entrance to the goblin tunnels, or be the disguised portal to the black dungeons.

  She went down the path that brought the seaward side of the tower into line. She had never seen the tower from this angle before, and for the first time she saw there was something that neither Mordor’s spires nor Childe Roland’s ogre-ridden lair had. A stone figure had been fastened to the tower, or carved into one of its walls – a jutting-out figure like the horrid, leering faces you sometimes saw on the edges of old buildings and even churches. But those were usually just faces, and this was a complete figure, a bit bigger than life-size. It was worn and weathered, but it was easy to see it was meant to be a woman. The face was pitted and the head was flung back as if defying the sea. Blind stone eyes stared out to the grey wastes of the English Channel.

  This was something Maeve had not known about and she repressed a shiver. People in Rede Abbas said the tower was not as high as it had originally been, because the crumbling cliff was causing it to sink, a little each year. Parts of the foundations had already been washed away, and one day the whole thing would break away from the cliff and tumble into the sea as the old monastery had done.

  She could see the high-tide marks. They came halfway up the tower, which meant the sea would wash into the tower itself, and the stone figure would be under water for several hours. The stone eyes would stare into the green underwater world, and fish would swim in and out of the empty eye-sockets when the tide was in.