The Sinful Stones Page 5

  They were passing a place where an unfinished passage led outwards from the cloister wall. Crouched under the barrel­ vault, amid a powdery detritus of stone-chippings, a man in a blue-green habit was measuring a roughly squared boulder against a gap in the wall he was building. At Brother Hope’s call he stood up and walked towards them, stopping under the cloister arch to make a deep oriental bow, palms together. Brother Hope answered in kind.

  “Order a boiled egg for the guest, Bruce,” he said. “Then find Sister D. and send her to the Tower Room.”

  “Whose egg?” said Bruce in a dull voice.

  “Make it Reet’s. She trod on a mighty big snake last night.”

  Brother Hope spoke with a salesman’s cheeriness, but Bruce raised his eyes in solemn horror. When the glance would normally have looked level at Pibble it flickered away. Bruce dropped his tools with a clatter and darted off.

  “Tuesdays we have oatcakes,” said Brother Hope, “seeing it’s the third day of Creation. But if breakfast’s your chief meal …”

  “I’ll be quite happy with oatcakes,” said Pibble hurriedly. “I’d much rather not take someone else’s …”

  “Don’t you fret about that,” said Brother Hope, smiling as a father might at a child’s ineffective charities. “Reet won’t be eating to-day, not after last night.”

  Hell, thought Pibble. Poor miserable girl. He felt a spasm of that raging nausea which cruelty-to-children cases always sucked up inside him. But a protest now … He stared at the fallen tools to distract his own fury. They too had been sadly mistreated: the mallet was no more than a small log, its bark worn smooth at the narrower end by Bruce’s grip, and the other end a splintered mess. The cold chisel was a real tool, but a great bite was missing from its cutting edge. With implements like that, building the Eternal City would need eternity.

  Brother Hope clucked for his attention, led him round the next corner and opened a door.

  “Come in,” he said. “Breakfast, it’s just us Virtues.”

  Pibble had expected to be taken to the Refectory where he had supped, but this was a small room, a white-washed barrel vault without ornament or detail. The air smelt pleasingly of mint. An old deal table, as from a farmhouse kitchen, ran down the middle. Some jugs and two big platters of oatcakes stood on it, and round it waited, standing, a dozen people in brown habits. Two were women. All, as the latecomers entered, made the same oriental bow. Before Pibble finished his gawky reply a stout little man rushed at him, hand outstretched in welcome.

  “I’m Servitude,” he said, smiling primly beneath a tiny rectangle of moustache, “We didn’t meet last night, so you must come and sit between me and Providence. Here. Ready, Providence.”

  The prodigiously bearded figure on Pibble’s other side raised both arms towards the vault. A huge authority flooded the room.

  “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,” he said. His voice was light and easy, but he sounded as though he meant it. Pibble found himself automatically joining in the response.

  “A broken and contrite heart, Oh God, wilt thou not despise.”

  That had been a favourite text at Mother’s Tabernacle. Odd how all crank religions tend to shore their theologies up with the same baulks of Bible.

  “He’s having Reet’s egg,” said Brother Hope from the other side of the table.

  “First-class notion,” said Brother Servitude. “Water, Super­intendent? Charity tells us she trod on a snake last night.”

  “Sure did,” said Brother Hope.

  “Tsk, tsk,” said Brother Servitude. “I won’t introduce you all round, Superintendent, as you’ll only get muddled. It takes training to distinguish between one virtue and another in the bad light of the world, eh? We had an emergency Council last night, or you would have got to know us better in the Refectory.”

  “Brother Hope looked after me very well,” said Pibble. “I’ve been asking him about the plans for this building. Somehow I’d never envisaged the New Jerusalem being material, as material as granite.”

  “Ah,” said Brother Servitude eagerly, “that’s a very interesting point, to which there is an equally interesting answer. The Papists aren’t the only folk who can split a fine hair, you know. Now, when Adam created matter …”

  “I’d forgotten about that,” said Pibble, late on his cue. Brother Servitude had paused for an interjection of surprise, but Pibble, unnerved by the total silence with which all the other Virtues were following what must be a familiar argument, had muffed his line.

  “Oh yes,” said Brother Servitude. “The old churches have been hushing it up for a long time. Ah, here’s your egg—don’t let it get cold. But if you look in Genesis you’ll find there are perfectly clear accounts of two creations, one in Chapter One and one in Chapter Two. And they have different Creators, the first referred to in the Authorised Version as ‘God’ and the second as ‘the Lord God’, which was the best poor King James’s bishops could do to differentiate between two totally different Hebrew words. Now, in Chapter One, verse twenty-eight, God created man in His own image, male and female created He them. Pass the salt, Providence—I’m afraid we don’t get very fresh eggs on the island, Superintendent. None of that nonsense about using ribs to make Eve, you see. That comes later. But in Chapter Two, verse six and seven, we are told first that a mist went up from the earth and then that the Lord God formed man of the dust on the ground. Now that’s as clear as daylight once you’ve spotted it. First of all man was created as a spirit—what else can God’s ‘own image’ mean? Then somebody else made man out of a material substance. They didn’t have the philosophical abstracts that we have to express their ideas, of course, but what they meant by the mist was the spiritual fall of Adam—he no longer saw clearly, you understand? And that dust business is the creation of matter. It keeps happening.”

  “Continuous creation, you mean?” said Pibble, because it seemed his cue to flip a few words into the strange silence.

  “Ha ha! Very good!” said Brother Servitude. “I can see you’ve been reading your Fred Hoyle. No, no, no, though. We’re dealing with metaphysics, not astrophysics. It’s the material fall of Adam that keeps happening. Something similar has occurred on every planet which Father Bountiful has visited to date!”

  “It can’t be coincidence,” said Pibble.

  “Ah!” said Brother Servitude, “You hear that, Providence? He has the root of the matter in him!”

  The monk on Pibble’s other side turned his head. Something, a smile perhaps, stirred the forest darkness of his beard, but Pibble could see nothing except an improbable pair of eyes, pale as a single malt whisky, glowing. The strong gaze held his own for a moment, then Brother Providence returned to his oatcake. Pibble shivered slightly, feeling that he’d been visited from another planet, or perhaps another life.

  “As you say,” said Brother Servitude, “it can’t be coincidence. There must be some larger plan, of which all this is merely a part.”

  “How many planets has Father Bountiful visited?” asked Pibble.

  “Twenty-seven to date,” said Brother Servitude.

  “Twenty-eight as of March twelve,” said a Brother from the other side of the table. He had bruise-blue jowls and spoke with a heavy northern accent.

  “You got a postcard last night?” said Brother Servitude excitedly.

  “We did. It came on the helicopter with the Superintendent, but I couldn’t read it in Council with Hope and Charity not there. How about now, Providence?”

  “I don’t see why not, Brother Courage.”

  Brother Courage drew from the folds of his habit a bright postcard, whose picture showed peasants engaged in some traditional dance against a background of high peaks.

  “He’s still in Nepal,” he said.

  “Mathematically the slopes of Everest are the ideal spot for planet-transference,” whispered Brother Servitude
in Pibble’s ear.

  Brother Courage dropped his voice to a priestly register but faded to modify his vowels. “‘Fourth Planet of Gamma Scorpionis,’” he read, “‘Wish you were here. Planet entirely covered with water. Mile-high tides. Dominant race intelligent cuttlefish. Spiritual pattern as before. B. Hackenstadt.’ I’ll pin a photo-copy on the board, of course.”

  “Well,” said Brother Servitude, breaking with a gratified sigh into the long, glassy silence which followed, “twenty-eight planets may not seem to you a very large statistical sample, amid the plethora of galaxies. But even were the choice between falling and not falling a simple either/or choice, uncomplicated by further options, twenty-eight planets in succession, without a single variant, represents odds in the neighbourhood of, let me see, a thousand million to one. Oatcake?”

  “Thank you,” said Pibble, anxious to rub the nastiness of near-bad egg out of his mouth. “You were going to tell me why it is proper for the New Jerusalem to be built of ordinary material stone.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Brother Servitude. “I’m afraid I got carried away. I don’t often get the chance to talk to somebody from the outside world of your intelligence, Superintendent.”

  Pibble, luckily, had his mouth full of oatcake, so was in no danger of being visibly aware of the slight chill of warning that breathed through the room. The oatcake was no more appetising than the egg; while the brethren were avoiding his eye he took the chance to slip it into his sleeve, and thence into the pouch at his waist. It was difficult to imagine how a reference to his own mild intelligence should disturb this holy, if manuscript-purloining, gathering, but Brother Servitude choked elaborately on a crumb and took a long swig at his mug before he gabbled on.

  “The point is this: any Fall must be from a higher to a lower plane, for what else can the word mean? That is to say from a more real to a less real plane. We are all Platonists now, ha ha. So the things of our material world are in truth less solid, less substantial, than the things of that spiritual world. The more solid they seem to us, the more evanescent they will seem to the inhabitants of that world—lighter, more translucent, more exotic. This …” and he slapped the sturdy deal with his open palm “. . . would be rarer than topaz to them. You see?”

  “I think so,” said Pibble. “The ninth foundation was topaz, wasn’t it?”

  “Will be,” corrected Brother Servitude. “But more important to our argument, the street of the City is described as “as it were, transparent glass”. Or in my words, translucent.”

  “The thing that astonished me,” said Pibble, “is that you’ve found time to build so much. I’d have thought you’d have an effort merely to subsist on an island like this.”

  Brother Providence’s pleasant voice answered him from his other side.

  “Wrong, I’m afraid, Superintendent. That was the error into which the mediaeval monastic communities fell”

  “The physical error,” interpolated Brother Servitude.

  “Of course,” said Brother Providence. “We who are sealed have been spared their spiritual errors. But the monks, Superintendent, all made the same mistake. They built their cloisters and chapels and dormitories, and they gardened and they prayed. But once they had completed their buildings they found themselves with time to spare. So they gradually complicated their simple discipline and made it more and more luxurious. They grew nectarines. They praised their God in the invention of delicate sauces for carp. They decorated their manuscripts with images from the world they had theoretically renounced. Whereas we, a community whose discipline is to live with the utmost frugality we can achieve, we can concentrate on building. We have time to build for eternity.”

  “You make it sound very, well, appealing,” said Pibble, studiously balancing doubt against enthusiasm.

  This time the stir that ran through the room was different, like the tremor which runs through the spectators at a chess tournament when what had looked like a routine draw comes alive with a move that has not been fully analysed. Only Brother Providence seemed unaware of the change.

  “If you are interested,” he said, “I will show you over the Community later this morning. You may care to take a stroll round the island until I’ve finished my chores.”

  “I went for a walk in the middle of the night,” said Pibble. “I met the biggest dog I’ve ever seen.”

  The Virtues, as if Brother Providence’s mention of chores had been a signal, had clattered up from their benches and were beginning to troop out of the drab vault; but Sister Charity paused in the door, a smile suddenly flowering on the desert of her face.

  “You met Brother Love?” she said. “Isn’t he clever?”

  “Clever’s the word,” said Brother Hope flatly. He took Sister Charity by the elbow and, without any apparent hustling, flicked her out of the room as deftly as a housewife flicks her husband’s half-darned pyjamas under a cushion when the lady from Oxfam walks in unexpected. The brown habits swirled out of the door and Pibble was left alone with Brother Providence. This, he now knew, was the master of the Community, at least in Father Bountiful’s absence. If the Virtues were collectively responsible for stealing Sir Francis’s manuscript, here was the Top Villain.

  “I suppose you are used to this,” said Pibble carefully. “Everybody who comes here must be fascinated by what you are doing.”

  The strange eyes watched him speculatively. The big head nodded in silence.

  “I expect you find Sir Francis’s presence a great attraction,” said Pibble. It was difficult to gush without gabbling.

  “A great responsibility,” said Brother Providence.

  “You mean you have to look after his affairs for him, and so on?”

  Brother Providence looked hard at Pibble and ran his hand in silence down his beard.

  “Consider,” he said at last. “Here is this great soul, so near to going out, yet finding it so hard to throw the necessary number. And who knows what snake may not lie between him and the ultimate square?”

  The eyes had lost their remoteness; below their surface it seemed as if something was glowing like a blown ember.

  The beard, by concealing mouth and chin, made you concentrate on the eyes—an effect the opposite of that achieved by mid-winter sunglass-wearers. To rescue himself from incipient hypnosis Pibble studied the nose, an apparently boneless promontory so patterned by tiny veins that, but for the oatcake-and-water regimen of the island, he would have cast Brother Providence as a claret-and-snipe man.

  “I’m glad Sir Francis sent for me,” he said, “though it seemed an interruption at the time. People as old as that can be very demanding.”

  “The newest stones are the softest,” said Brother Providence. “They are naturally easiest to carve. It is the old, hard, weathered ones which are most rewarding. Shall we meet outside your cell in an hour’s time, say?”

  “Fine,” said Pibble.

  “Just one other matter. Normally, the helicopter only flies on Tuesdays and Fridays, but if you wish to go and have finished your business with Brother Simplicity, I can arrange for you to be taken over.”

  “Please don’t. Sir Francis has a short attention span, and I’m trying to remember things which happened nearly fifty years ago, when I was a child. So we don’t get a lot done at each meeting. I could go and come back, if that’s what you want, but I’d much prefer to stay. Much.”

  Overdoing it? To judge by the bearded monk’s I-told-you-so nod, no. Standing, Brother Providence looked less large than he had sitting down, but no less imposing. His big face had implied a Friar Tuck torso; and indeed though his habit’s folds now fell past no obesities, his stance suggested that his frame had once been used to supporting a greater weight.

  “May I go anywhere I like?” said Pibble.

  “Of course.”

  “What I meant is that you must have one or two slightly, um, unstable characters
in the Community, so I expect you have rules about things like the helicopter and the cliffs. I wouldn’t like to break them.”

  “The world you are used to—we call it Babylon—must be somewhat more melodramatic than ours, Superintendent. You have been shown where the guests” toilets are?”

  “Yes thank you,” said Pibble.

  They walked out of the room to find the vault of cloisters reverberating with a strange rhythmic grunting but Brother Providence seemed to notice it no more than the ceaseless mewling of the gulls. He nodded and strode off over the uneven paving. Pibble walked more carefully in the other direction, and found the source of the noise round the next corner. Eight people in blue-green habits were hauling at ropes tied to a huge rough-squared boulder. It trundled on small logs, whose curve was too abrupt for them to roll easily up the variations between flagstone and flagstone. All eight initiates grunted at each heave on the trace-ropes, and muttered to themselves between heaves. As Pibble stood aside to allow the toiling cortege to pass him he discerned that the mutterings were the same words repeated over and over: “The stones are my brothers. The stones are my brothers.” There was just time to repeat the formula twice between heaves. None of the six men and two women who were pulling at the ropes, nor the beldame who scuttled between back and front of the boulder setting new rollers in position, even looked at him. But at least here was a tiny mystery solved: the path to the harbour was so smooth because it had been rolled smooth.

  Bruce was back at his job, now making a soft paffing noise as he broke up lumps of cement from a sack which seemed to have stood a while in the damp. Bruce hit the lumps with his mallet and some broke up into the proper fine dust, but others just became collections of grey crumbs, no more adhesive than pebbles on the beach.

  “That doesn’t look as if it had much strength in it,” said Pibble.

  “The dust is my brother,” said Bruce, raising pious eyes.

  Once again, before they could meet Pibble’s, they jinked sideways, and this time Pibble understood the evasion, having seen it so often. There are more criminals than detectives in London—many more; besides, the thieves are anonymous, the thief-takers­ known. So Pibble was used to being recognised by apparent strangers in crowded streets, or cafeterias, or on station platforms, and the sign of recognition would be just that sideways jink of the eyes. Pibble smiled and walked on. This man, Bruce, with his El Greco visage, ought to be placeable. A common crook on this holy island, and looking more like a saint than most of the inmates. St Bruce?