The Abbey Empty

The doors were shut and it was dark inside.

Not quite dark. Grey, high, cold, with lamps on stands down the nave like a street at night, and far off at the other end, at the crossing, the white glare of working lights and the sound of hammers.

A woman in a black cassock was waiting for him just inside the west door with a clipboard. Fifty or so, grey hair cut short, reading glasses on a chain.

“Your Majesty. Canon Lyle. I’m the Archbishop’s chaplain.” She did not curtsy; she was in a cassock. “I’m to take you through it. His Grace will rehearse with you on Friday. Today is only the ground.” She held out a sheet of paper. “I thought you might like this.”

It was typed. Single-spaced. Times down the left in a column, and beside each one a line.

10.45 West door. 10.52 Theatre. 10.55 Recognition. 11.10 Oath.

A timetable.

He looked up at her.

“Mrs Ashdown said you read the order of service to your father,” said Canon Lyle, “as though it were a train.” She looked faintly embarrassed. “I’m afraid I have a brother who’s the same about buses.”

---

He walked it first. Alone, the way he would walk it on Saturday, with the plan in his coat pocket and Canon Lyle twenty yards behind with the clipboard, and Castellanos at the west door, where the London officers had told him to stand.

Just inside the door, in the middle of the floor, a black slab with poppies round its edge, red, in a border. He stopped.

“You go round it, sir,” said Canon Lyle, behind him. “Everybody does. Even on the day. The procession divides at the slab and comes together again after.”

The unknown warrior. The British one. Brought home from France in 1920, a year before the Realm’s, and put here in the floor of the abbey where every King and Queen of Great Britain would have to walk round him on the way to be crowned.

He went round it on the left. The poppies in the border were paper, red crêpe with black centres. He thought of the one in his pocket with the green plastic pin.

Then the nave.

It went away from him in the grey light, very high, very straight, the pillars going up on both sides into a roof he could not see, and the lamps on their stands down the middle, and at the end, small, white, the working lights. He did not count his steps. He looked at the plan’s distances instead, in his head, as he passed them. The screen. The quire. The crossing.

Two-thirds of the way up, on the left, the north side, he stopped.

---

A window. Tall and narrow, high up in the wall above the arcade. In the grey of the morning the glass had almost no colour in it; he had to stand and wait for his eyes to find it. A figure in robes, standing, with a sword in one hand and a book in the other, and a dog at its feet, and under it a line of lettering too small and too high to read.

He looked up at it.

“Ernest the Fourth,” said Canon Lyle, quietly, beside him. She had come up without his hearing. “Given by the Royal Air Force Association in 1974. A year after your father’s coronation.”

“Is that a dog?”

“It is meant to be a lion, sir. It has always been considered a failure.” She looked up at it. “The face is thought to be rather a bad likeness as well. Your grandmother is said to have looked at it once and never again.”

Glass. Bad likeness.

He laughed. It went up into the roof of the nave and came back off it, a long way off, and the hammers at the crossing stopped for a moment and went on.

“My father stopped here,” he said. “In 1973. On the way up. Ten seconds. It’s in Mrs Ashdown’s notes with a question mark.”

Canon Lyle looked at him.

“The window wasn’t here in 1973, sir. It was given in 1974.”

He looked at the window. At the dog that was meant to be a lion, and the face that was a bad likeness.

“Then what was here?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at the wall. “The glass before was plain. I think.” She made a note on the clipboard, small. “I’ll find out.”

He stood there a moment longer. Father. Window. Looked up. Saw him. Plain glass, in 1973, and a boy of twenty-six in a crimson robe stopping for ten seconds under it, two-thirds of the way up the nave, on the north side.

He walked on.

---

The theatre was raw wood and scaffolding with men on it. Carpenters in overalls with pencils behind their ears, and a man with a spirit level, and a woman on a stepladder hanging a long strip of crimson cloth along the front edge of a platform six feet high, with steps going up to it on all four sides. In the middle of the platform, wrapped in a dust sheet, something tall that would be the throne.

They stopped when they saw him. All of them. A carpenter with a hammer in his hand stood very still on the scaffolding with the hammer half raised.

“Please don’t stop,” said Frederick.

Nobody moved.

“Go on, Terry,” said Canon Lyle, to the man with the hammer.

Terry went on. The others went on. But more quietly, and every one of them, he could see, was watching him out of the side of an eye, and he went up the steps of the theatre on the west side and stood on the raw boards at the top, by the dust sheet, and looked back down the nave.

A hundred and twenty-three yards. The lamps on their stands. The grey. The west door, very small, and Castellanos a dark shape in it.

“Recognition,” said Canon Lyle, from the foot of the steps. “Four times. West, south, east, north. His Grace asks the people whether they are willing to do homage and service. They answer.”

“What do they answer?”

“God save King George,” said Canon Lyle. “Four times. Very loudly, if it’s done properly. In 1973 the north transept was felt to have been weak.” She consulted her clipboard. “It has been spoken to.”

---

Up the steps beyond the theatre. Twenty yards, by the plan. He did not count.

The sanctuary. The floor was different here: old, very old, patterned in small pieces of coloured stone, red and green and gold and black, laid in circles inside squares, worn, uneven, roped off with a low red rope so that nobody would walk on it.

“The Cosmati pavement,” said Canon Lyle. “Thirteenth century. You’ll walk on it on Saturday. You and the people who have to. Nobody else.”

The altar, with a plain cloth on it. And to one side, facing the altar, the chair.

He had seen pictures of it all his life. In the pictures it looked like a throne. It was not. It was old brown wood, oak, very plain, very scratched, with a tall pointed back and arms worn smooth, and initials carved into the back of it by schoolboys in the eighteenth century, which nobody had ever sanded off. And under the seat, in an open box between the legs, a block of rough pale stone.

“Brought down from Edinburgh on Monday,” said Canon Lyle. “It goes back on Sunday. The Scots are very particular about Sunday.”

He looked at the stone.

“Can I sit in it?”

Canon Lyle looked at him over her glasses.

“It is your chair, sir.”

He sat. It was hard and narrow and uncomfortable and the arms were too low, and it was the most ordinary chair he had ever sat in, and he sat in it with his hands on the worn arms and looked at the altar.

Behind him, there was hammering of a different kind. He turned. Two men were putting up a frame round the chair: tall poles of dark wood, four of them, at the corners, with a crossbar between them at the top, and folded on the floor beside them, a great length of heavy cloth, gold, embroidered.

“The screen,” said Canon Lyle. “For the anointing.” She watched them set the second pole. “On Saturday, when it’s up, nobody will see. Not the congregation. Not the cameras. His Grace, and the Dean, and the four Knights of the Garter who hold the canopy, and you.” A pause. “It’s the one part of the day that’s yours.”

He sat in the chair inside the half-built frame and looked at the altar.

Cold. Then not. Then not alone.

---

At noon Canon Lyle walked him back down the nave.

The carpenters had stopped for lunch and were sitting along the edge of the theatre with sandwiches and flasks, and they did not get up when he passed, because Canon Lyle had asked them not to, and one of them, Terry, raised his flask an inch, the way his father had raised the stick.

Past the window with the dog. Past the place where his father had stopped under plain glass. Round the black slab with its paper poppies.

At the west door Castellanos straightened.

And from behind him, from the far end of the abbey, up beyond the crossing, beyond the theatre, very faint, carrying the whole length of the nave in the cold grey air the way the knocking had carried down the lobby on Charter Hill: a sound on stone.

Tap.

Then nothing.

Tap.

And a voice, a woman’s, Irish, low, counting.

Four.

He stood in the west door with his back to the nave.

“Don’t turn round, sir,” said Canon Lyle, very quietly, beside him. “I was asked to say. By a nurse with a plait. They came in by the north door at a quarter to twelve.” She looked at her clipboard. “She said he said not. Yet.”

Tap.

Five.

He did not turn round. He went out of the west door into the rain, where the cars were, and stood on the wet stone of the forecourt with the rain on his face, and listened through the open door behind him until Castellanos shut it.