The Bellwether Revivals

They heard the caterwaul of sirens, and saw the dust rising underneath the ambulance wheels at the far end of the driveway, and soon the darkening garden was a wash of flashing blue lights. It only seemed real when they told the paramedics where to find the bodies. There was one upstairs on the top floor, they said, another in the organ house, and one more at the foot of the garden—the last one was still breathing, but faintly. They had left him on the riverbank in a nest of flattened rushes, with the cold water lapping against his feet. When the paramedics asked for his name, they said it was Eden. Eden Bellwether.

It had taken too long for the ambulance to arrive. For a while, they’d assembled on the back porch of the rectory, thinking, panicking, staring out at the same old elms and cherry trees they’d stared at a hundred times before, hearing the wind disturb the branches. They all felt responsible for what had happened. They all blamed themselves. And so they argued—about who was
most
to blame, who should feel the guiltiest. The only one who didn’t talk was Oscar. He leaned against the wall, smoking, listening to the rest of them bicker. When he finally spoke, his voice was so calm it silenced them.

‘It’s over now,’ he said, extinguishing his cigarette on the porch-rail. ‘We can’t go back and change it.’

Just a few months ago, they’d been sitting out on the same sapspotted decking behind the rectory, chatting about nothing too important—the rules of badminton, some Alain Resnais film they’d all seen and hated, the saddening obsolescence of the cassette tape—all six of them just winding down, a bruise of clouds spreading darkly across the Grantchester sky. They’d gathered round the same wooden patio table, picking at the citronella candle drippings on the wine bottles, throwing dry wax at the midges. Everything had been different back then—so weightless and loose and easy.

Now they watched the first paramedic working on the riverbank, feeling for Eden’s pulse, strapping an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, feeding in a drip. They heard the murmur of the other medic’s voice coming over the dispatcher: ‘VSA. Purple plus. Over.’

They didn’t go with Eden in the ambulance. They weren’t prepared to follow in their cars. Instead, they went into the organ house to see the other medic wrenching off her latex gloves. She’d placed a green sheet over the body and it was quivering on the breeze. ‘Don’t be going anywhere,’ she warned them. ‘The police are on their way.’

It had been the hottest June day but a cold breeze had been gathering strength all evening, and now it was sweeping across the garden, through the open doors of the buildings. It was blowing into the broken pipes of the old church organ—a weak and tuneless drone that sounded on and off, on and off, with the steadiest of rhythms, like some machine that had found a way to breathe.

Oscar Lowe would later tell police that he couldn’t remember the exact date he first laid eyes on the Bellwethers, though he knew for sure it had been a Wednesday. It was one of those late October evenings in Cambridge when the gun-grey light of the afternoon had faded well before six, and the cobbled avenues of the old town were dark and silent. He had just finished an eight-to-five shift at Cedarbrook, the nursing home on Queen’s Road where he was a care assistant, and his mind was slow and heavy, laden with the details of his workday: the vacant faces of the older residents, the pallor of their tongues as they took their pills, the give of their skin as he lifted them into the bath. All he wanted was to get home, to fall upon his bed and sleep right through until tomorrow, when he would have to wake up and do the same things over again.

By cutting through the grounds of King’s College, he knew he could shave some time off the walk. In the old city, everybody cycled: the students skittered along the narrow lanes with loaded backpacks, the tourists pinballed from college to college on rented wheels. At any time of day, on any given pavement in Cambridge,
someone could be found unlocking a bike from a lamppost and riding off towards the next one. But Oscar preferred the solace of walking.

He crossed Clare Bridge and took the shortcut through the grounds of King’s, hearing the flat echo of his footsteps on the path, still glassy from the afternoon rain. Everywhere was quiet. The clipped lawns seemed unusually blue with the indolent glow of floodlamps, and, somewhere close by, woodsmoke was rising from a cottage chimney, giving the impression of fog. As he went by the face of the college chapel, he tried his best not to look up, knowing exactly how it would make him feel: tiny, irrelevant, godless. But he couldn’t help staring at it—that formidable gothic building with its tall spindles needling the sky and its giant blackened windows. It was the picture postcard on every carousel stand along King’s Parade. He’d always hated it. Up close, in the near darkness, the place only haunted him more. It was not the architecture that troubled him, but the age of the building, the scale of its history; the royalty who’d once communed there, all the serious people whose faces now thickened encyclopaedias.

A service was underway inside. He could already hear the muted thrum of organ music behind the chapel walls, and when he turned into the Front Court, the sound grew louder and sweeter, until he was close enough to make out the fullness of the instrument—a low, hoarse purr. He could almost feel it against his ribs. It was nothing like the over-powering dirges he remembered from school Christmas services, or the blundering renditions of ‘Abide with me’ he’d strained to sing over at his grandparents’ funerals. There was a fragility to this music, as if the organist wasn’t pressing down on the keys but hovering his fingers above them like a puppeteer. Oscar stopped in the entrance just to listen, and saw the sandwich board near the open doorway: ‘Evensong 5:30, Public Welcome.’ Before he knew it, his feet had carried him all the way inside.

Stained-glass windows surrounded him, barely showing their
colours. The vaulted arches of the ceiling seemed to roll out into the distance. At the heart of the building, a wingspan of organ pipes bellowed from a wooden partition, and he could see the sombre congregation waiting in the candlelight on the other side. He found an empty seat and watched the choir filing in. The younger boys stood on the front row in their white gowns, cheerful and distracted; the older boys stood sheepishly behind them, aware of themselves in that teenaged way, fidgeting with their sleeves. When the organ stopped there was a momentary silence, and then the choir began to sing.

Their voices were so synchronised and balanced that Oscar could hardly tell them apart. They surged and retracted with the ease of an ocean, and he felt a rush in his heart as he listened. He was sorry when their hymn ended and the reverend stood to recite the Holy Creed. Across the aisle, people were gamely muttering the prayer, but Oscar stayed quiet, still thinking of the music. By the time he noticed the blonde girl a few spaces along his pew, the congregation had reached ‘… And sitteth on the right hand of God …’ She was mouthing the words grudgingly, the way a bored child recites times tables, and, when she saw that he wasn’t joining in the prayer, gave a slow roll of her eyes, as if to say: ‘Get me out of here.’ The simple profile of her face excited him. He smiled at her but wasn’t sure that she noticed.

Now the reverend was reading from Jeremiah (‘… if thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth …’) and Oscar watched the girl and her encumbered, self-conscious movements. Like him, she didn’t seem to appreciate the strange etiquette of the church. She kneed the hymn book to the floor midway through the sermon, causing the reverend to pause, and while his dreary lesson continued she toyed with the bezel of her watch, until two pale-faced choristers began a new hymn and the organ started up again.

The only time the blonde girl sat still was when the choir was singing. Her chest rose, inflated; her lip quivered. She seemed
awed by the tapestry of their voices, the clarity of their sound, the swelling harmonies that flooded the yawning space above them. Oscar could see her fingers counting out the rhythm on her knee until the final ‘Amen’. The choir sat down and silence—like a deployed parachute—descended in the chapel.

At the end of the service, people filtered out by order of importance: first, the choir and the clergy in a procession of white, then the congregation. Oscar hoped he could follow the girl to the door, get close enough to spark a conversation, but he ended up between a group of men debating the merits of the sermon and a softly spoken French couple consulting their guidebooks for the route home. He lost the sound of her small, scuffing steps behind him as she disappeared into the crowd. Weary tourists moved slowly along the aisles, putting on their jackets and packing away their cameras; young children slept in their fathers’ arms while their mothers baby-wiped their fingers. Oscar couldn’t see the girl anywhere. He put some change on the collection plate as he went out, and the reverend said, ‘Thank you, good evening.’