Free Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth Page A

persons in authority had come to investigate. But these had not been the voices of investigators, no light had gone on, the steps were cautious. They were coming up through the church towards him. Now he saw glimmerings of torchlight from beyond the sacristy entrance. The woman uttered a brief, annoyed-sounding exclamation. The man spoke in low tones. The words were indistinct, but they sounded like English.
    Raikes stood motionless against the chapel wall. Were they thieves? Should he challenge them? He had left it rather late. They were inside the sacristy now and seemed to have come to a halt. The beam of their torch behaved erratically for some moments. He heard rustling sounds as of garments and a sort of intermittent murmuring, a swarming, summer sound, strangely inappropriate in that place. Then the man spoke, quietly but quite distinctly. ‘Hold the torch will you, Muriel,’ he said. ‘I’ll clear a space on the table. Otherwise things are going to get broken.’
    The voice was familiar, the reasonable tone, the Midlands accent. Raikes could imagine the visionary widening of the eyes in the torchlight. It was the Tintoretto man, Barfield. ‘A square metre will be ample,’ he heard the voice say.
    ‘We’ll do ourselves an injury one of these days,’ the woman said, ‘clambering about on tables.’ Raikes recognized the crosspatch voice: it was the older assistant.
    There was no escape, no way out except through the sacristy. Raikes attempted to close his mind to what he was hearing and about to hear by tracing the lineaments of the Vivarini Nativity of the Virgin on the wall above him. All that was visible were the areas of white, and these only faintly; the headcloths of the women and the swaddling bands of the baby made a diagonal line from left to right, with the head of the infant almost but not quite in the centre. He tried to remember the faces of the women attendants, distraught with excess of reverence, the dazed-looking bobbin of a baby …
    ‘Muriel,’ came Barfield’s voice again, ‘do you think you could spread yourself a bit? The angle needs to be increased by about five degrees. As things are at present I can’t get in.’
    ‘I’m hanging off the bloody table already,’ Muriel said. ‘Wait a minute … Ooh !’
    ‘That’s better,’ Barfield said. ‘That’s much better. Hooray!’
    ‘Ooh!’ Muriel exclaimed again. ‘Oh, Jerry.’
    ‘Now, you bitch,’ Barfield said with sudden savagery. ‘Now I’ll teach you. Take that. You slut.’
    ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry,’ Muriel moaned. ‘I’m sorry, Jerry.’
    ‘Think I’m a bloody geriatric, do you?’ Barfield said through clenched teeth, and this was quite the most appalling pun Raikes could ever remember hearing. ‘Think I can’t fuck you on a table without doing myself an injury, do you? Take that and that.’ Some object fell with a slight crash to the floor. There was a woeful preliminary groan from Barfield, interrupting his furious abuse. Raikes stood amazed in the darkness. He could hardly believe it even now. There in the sacristy, in the presence of the Virgin and Three Saints above the altar, the marble Pietà behind them, saints Dominic and Benedict on the wall, all the women saints and martyrs in the panels, objects of sacred devotion all round them, Barfield and his assistant were knowing each other carnally, acting out strange roles, different from those of every day, combining tones of rage and pleading.
    It seemed to take a long time for this performance to run its course, sounds to abate, clothing to be readjusted. Barfield, restored to his usual pedantic mildness, made one or two anticlimactic remarks and Muriel answered snappishly. The sound of their steps receded. However, for quite some time longer, Raikes remained where he was, motionless in the dark. It was an effort for him to switch on his torch again. Finally, still clutching the notebook, he crept out of the church and set himself towards